It's a dog's life

           Maggie’s got a rough life and today was more trying than most.  She’s been thinking about writing her own blog, but without opposable thumbs, the words all run together and no one can make any sense of what she’s trying to say.  Good thing for all of us.
           Good thing for me.  I hate rhyming stuff.  I HATE rhyming poetry.  And if I had to listen to everyone say “Hey, does your dog have a blog?” all day, I’d lose my grip on my thin tether to reality.

A typical day for Maggie starts about 5 am.  That’s when the house is the quietest and when the people who go to work super early haven’t left yet, the drunks have managed to make it home, and the people who work night shifts aren’t off yet.  Which is of course why Maggie barks.  Why bark when no one can hear you?  A good bark at 5 am can wake up the neighbors when the windows are open in the summer and is guaranteed to make me jump out of a deep sleep with my heart pounding so fast that there’s no chance of getting back to sleep.

After a bark or two, she relaxes and sighs and waits.  She’s still curled up in a ball in her crate when I lift the latch on the cage and let her out.

She blinks at me a few times and yawns as if I’ve woken her up and as if she’d been prepared to sleep until my alarm goes off.  She stretches out her legs on her way to her chair, where she promptly goes back to sleep. 

I end up standing there in the middle of the living room, in my pjs, wide awake.

Maggie opens one eye and looks at me.  I think she rolls that eye before she closes it again, but it’s too dark in the living room to be sure.  After all, she just plans to wait until I fall asleep on the couch before she gets up again.  Frustrated that I haven’t remained at her beck and call, she sticks a cold nose on my face to wake me up so I can take her outside.

Patiently (ha) she waits for me to layer on the winter coats and the boots.  Some people can just open a back door and let their dogs out.  I have to at the very least walk through the cold sunroom to the door. When I open the door of the sunroom to the outside, Maggie leaps through it.  In the snow, she bounces around and tosses her tennis ball around—oh no!  I lost my ball!  OH LOOKIE!!  I FOUND IT!!  IT WAS RIGHT HERE…IN THE SNOW.  LOOK..IT’S LOST…I FOUND IT…OH NO IT’S GONE AGAIN.  Without the snow, we chase rabbits and squirrels out of the fenced in “territory.”  Sometimes we bark.  I’d worry about waking up the neighbors the one of them has this little West Highland Terrier who just yaps non-stop all night long.  Maggie understands that West Highland Terrier’s are annoying and should be considered food. for Rottweilers.
Back inside, after taking care of business and looking out the gate to make sure no one is on the street,  Maggie next has to bother herself with making sure her water is fresh.  No self respecting dog would drink stale water that’s been sitting in a bowl all night!

So I change the water and clean the bowl.

What? the rottie’s big brown eyes ask me.  No ice cubes? You expect me to start the day with water that doesn’t have a couple of ice cubes rattling around in there?

I’m almost happy to be off to work where the demands aren’t so great.

Maggie spends the day in a crate.  You’d think that’d be upsetting.  It’s not.  She has another bowl of fresh water in there, a few bones, a blanket to chew on and rip to shreds until it gets replaced, and the radio.  She used to have the television to watch and she would watch Fox News all day, but we got a new high definition television and Nancy Pelosi in HD has ruined Maggie’s indoctrination to the conservative nation.  So now it’s just the radio and the rest of the comforts of home.  I wish I could have left my exhusband in a crate while he was not working all those years.  Then at least the house would have stayed clean.

Maggie hangs out until a little after 5 pm, barking at the strange noises perhaps catching a mailman off guard.  Once I found a pile of mail fluttering around on the porch..  Maggie has her moments, but mostly, she's living the life of a middle aged, unemployed stoner.

At 5 she pretends to be happy to see me.   It’s really quite an effort.  Especially since she’s so weak and that food bowl is empty.  And when it’s filled, well, that’s when the good smells are in the kitchen and why the hell would she eat dog food?

She lies on the kitchen floor watching intently in case something falls and she’s forced to rush up and grab it before I slip on it and hurt myself.  She’s VERY fast.  No 5 second rule here.  Besides, she's saving my life by knocking me over into the stir fry.

Sometimes the doorbell rings.  The idiots who do that understand very quickly that we DO NOT stand on the porch.  We stand back on the drive way.  Twenty feet back.  If we’re trying to sell something, well, perhaps next time there will be no doorbell ringing here.  All white flashing teeth and barking:  hell, people hardly ever notice the docked tail whipping back and forth with the entire back end.

We go for a walk—after my dinner, before hers.
We watch some TV and we chew the crap out of a rawhide bone.  Ripping dead, dried up cows into little pieces of gooey rawhide that sticks in the shag carpet adds traction if Maggie decides to chase the cat.  And it’s satisfying for her when I step on them after they’re dried back up and sharp and I scream.  She prefers animal planet, but she’ll tolerate travel shows, NCIS and House.  Sometimes she’ll even let me watch what I want to watch.

Every night we head to the computer room.  She’s got a big pillow here.  When she isn’t ripping apart bones and hide, she’s dictating what I should write on my blog.  It’s exhausting.  Which is why, now, at the end, she’s sleep on my feet (or she’s chewed them off, I no longer feel them) and I am through with tonight’s blog.  I’ve worked like a dog to get it done.