Sound & Fury

Quarantine Day: 10,963 @ Chez Shasta’s Isolation Bunker. It has not been a peaceful week.

I had to fix my toilet again. “Again?!?” my sister would say. “You have more toilet problems than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

I KNOW. Over the years, I’ve fixed just about everything to do with a toilet save replacing one altogether.

Early one morning this week I was in the guest bathroom giving my foster dog Owen his thrice-weekly medicated bath. Bathing turns some dogs into a near-feral state. There weren’t enough hands attached to my body to handle this dog and his thrashing and splashing and lunging and plunging, so after a particularly athletic maneuver, Owen flung himself out of the tub in a desperate bid for freedom, and I ended up ass over teakettle crashing onto the toilet seat, which, with a loud CRACK!, slid off the bowl. (My butt was too big to land in the bowl, and that’s the only time I’m going to be glad that was the case.)

So I made an essential trip to Home Depot to buy some toilet seat fixin’s and get after it. There’s not really any moral to this story, except my prowess at fixing toilets is a matter of personal pride. Doesn’t mean I want to fix yours, though.

Winston had a dental procedure this week, and the vet’s instructions were to withhold food and water the morning of the appointment. Oh my. Have you ever refused to feed a dog that DEMANDS it? I’ve never seen nor heard such a commotion in my house (except perhaps Owen’s efforts to break free of the bath). The barking, the howling, the whining, whimpering and whirling in confusion. At 5 am. For an hour. All by one little 14-pound packet of fun named Winston. He finally settled down into a pout just in time to go to the vet’s, where I daresay they really gave him something to pout about.

Speaking of commotion, Trixie has found her soulmate in my foster dog Owen. Both like to patrol the fence line and accost anything that flickers between the wood slats. A leaf, a piece of trash, a nice old lady out for a walk get both of them into a froth, and it’s Go Time. Up and down, back and forth they race each other, barking their fool heads off. The good thing is, Trixie is older and gives up pretty quickly, peeling off to go sit in the shade until the next round, but Owen gets into a #cantstopwontstop barking loop, and the only resolution is to catch him and bring him in for a time out in his crate. Where he howls and whines for 15 minutes until I scream from the other room, “STFU, Owen!”, which surprisingly, does the trick.

And then there’s the rubber chicken. A few years ago, my sister gave Alfie a rubber chicken toy. He never really took to it, but Owen has. That chicken is squeaking all day. Every time I hide it (it’s a game now), he finds it and the chicken dies all over again.

So that’s been my week. Not too exciting, except when I step on the rubber chicken in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom, which startles Owen awake and launches another round of “STFU, Owen!”