Thursday, December 08, 2005

Soggy Toliet Paper, And A Missing Sock

I try to take my shower in the morning after all the people have been taken wherever they need to go, and all the animals (at least the little ones) are asleep. Some days this works out, and some days it doesn't.

Today, Sadie was asleep when I started my shower, but apparently the sound of the water woke her up. Either that, or it was "puppy sixth sense." At any rate, I had been in the shower maybe 20 seconds when she started barking. She was on the bed in the spare room, and sometimes she forgets that she knows how to get off the bed, so she barks until someone comes to rescue her. Because I was soaking wet with shampoo in my hair, I ignored her, figuring she'd remember how to get down eventually. Ignoring a puppy is never a really good idea. The barking stopped, which prompted me to peek around the shower curtain.

Yes, Sadie figured out how to get off the bed. She also discovered toliet paper.

I looked out just in time to see her tail disappear into the hallway, followed by a long strand of the white stuff. Fortunately the toliet paper is on a movable stand, not attached to the wall (a result of 7+ years of having no bathroom walls, but that's another blog entry). I was able to reach the stand, so I broke off the toliet paper and turned it around so she couldn't get more. This didn't really serve any purpose, except to lessen the amount of toliet paper I would later need to pick up off the floor, since my wet hands completely saturated the roll and it was no good anymore anyway.

Without the toliet paper to play tug-of-war with, Sadie decided to amuse herself by redistributing the pile of dirty clothes I had left on the bathroom floor. I know, I know, I should have put them down the laundry chute before I got into the shower. It's probably good I didn't, though, because who knows what she would have discovered if the clothes weren't there to attract her attention.

I used to watch Sadie's older sister when she was a puppy, too. My mother was working all day then, not just mornings, so sometimes I would need to go out and leave the dogs alone. One day, my daughter came home from school to a house full of Q-tips. You know how dogs will get something in their mouth and just shake it? We figured that's probably what Daisy did with the Q-tips. From the bathroom, to the hallway, to the living room...

Anyway, after I got out of the shower this morning, I combined the usual "puddle" hunt with a clothes hunt (It's always a wise idea to do a puddle hunt if the puppy's been out of your sight for more than a minute). I didn't find any puddles, other than the one under the toliet paper stand. I found my jeans in the hallway, and my shirt and one sock in kitchen. My underwear was in the living room, behind the love seat but in plain sight of the front door. It's a really good thing I found the underwear before my daughter came home, since she sometimes brings a friend, and at fourteen her reaction to finding her mother's underwear on the living room floor would probably not be quite as good-natured as her reaction to a trail of Q-tips.

One sock is still missing.

The year Daisy discovered Q-tips, we wrapped up a box of them and gave them to her for Christmas (at my mother's house, not mine. My daughter may have been good-natured about it, but that didn't mean she wanted to clean them up again). I guess this year we'll be giving Sadie a roll of toliet paper. Maybe we'll give Daisy some more Q-tips, too. It really was fun to watch (at someone else's house).

Posted by The Gradual Gardener :: 1:24 PM :: 3 Comments:

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