Chuckle #502 | March 13th, 2013
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I don’t often dwell on the negatives of dog ownership
because my dog is clever enough to distract me from his many behavioral flaws with unconditional, slobbery love.
And, because my dog ‘completes me’, I
cut him some slack - sometimes a lot more than my
husband gets.
That doesn’t mean I love my husband any less than my dog, I
just love them differently.
Men are often sent to the ‘dog house’ when they
misbehave. I just don’t get that. My dog’s house, if he had one, would be a
palace, and being sent to it would be no punishment at all. I’d be more likely to send a ‘bad’ husband to
the cobweb-infested crawl space or to the terrifying storage area under our porch,
where I would never, ever confine my wonderful dog.
Despite playing second fiddle to the dog for the past 8
years, my husband has been won over. He
now agrees that owning a dog is one of life’s truly great experiences. But he and I still have one Flintstones-sized
bone of contention – poop.
Some disagreements just can’t be swept under the rug.
Unlike my husband, I quickly came to terms with the fact
that my yard had become a dog toilet.
My kids play volleyball and I barbeque for friends in this toilet. I try not to think about it. Some experiences are better left repressed,
like oddly affectionate great uncles and your first French kiss.
A Zen state of excrement denial is pretty easy to maintain
during winter. The poops freeze, no one
goes outside, and the backyard can be safely ignored until the first thaw. This year I got lucky because Nemo dumped 14
inches of snow into my backyard, effectively burying the dog guano for thirty
extra, totally liberating days.
Out of sight and out of mind, the buried poops peacefully festered
to their hearts' content. Life was
good. Then the snow began to melt,
slowly unveiling my dirty little secret to the world. My backyard wasn’t just a stool cesspool, it was a Superfund
site.
I immediately applied for the EPA’s priority clean-up list
in hopes of qualifying for federally assisted remediation. Even a small grant would help with the decontamination. Those ‘Doggy Doo NOT!’ scooper services are
not cheap.
I was doing everything in my power to fix the problem, short
of scooping it myself.
While I waited in vain for a response from the government, my
husband accused me of using shady ‘delay tactics’. He was anxious to start working on the lawn
so he could retain his ‘lawn of the year’ title, a neighborhood honor that’s
been shamelessly self-awarded for the past 15 years. My husband complained that the poop situation
was preventing him from achieving total lawn dominance. Not
that anyone on our street seems to notice that they're engaged in a battle to the
death for best-looking grass.
So if he cares so very much, why can’t my husband clean-up
some poops himself? That’s an excellent question.
Nine years ago we came to an amicable (and, I’m told, legally
binding) agreement that ‘poops’ would be my job, and rodents, tech support,
plumbing, wiring, audio visual issues and everything
else, his job. This puppy pre-nup
seemed like a pretty sweet deal at the time, so I took it. But I was so in love back then (with the
puppy) that I failed to put a renegotiation clause in the contract (much like
the Yankees with A-Rod), and as a result, we are both full of regret.
Me and the Yankees, that is.
My husband’s feeling pretty smug.
Sometimes it’s hard to look objectively past your rose-colored
glasses and into the future when you are clutching an adorable puppy to your
chest. I’d have signed anything. In fact, I should probably go back and make
sure that my husband didn’t attach a few unrelated riders, like lifetime foot
massages, mandatory Victoria's Secret nights, or worse.
So that’s why
I pick up the poop and my husband doesn’t.
My lawyer says I’m contractually obligated.
The long overdue, much disputed winter clean-up yielded 160
individual ‘deposits’ in various states of decomposition. That’s a record, by the way. Some of them were just too far gone to scrape
off the grass, so I left them. I assured
my husband that those half dissolved poops would eventually percolate down into
the soil and fertilize the lawn.
He’s not buying it, clever man.
I may have been tricked into a lifetime of ‘fecal
responsibility’, but looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t marry a
fool. My husband might have won this
round, but I won the consolation prize:
The dog likes me best.
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