I'm in Trouble Again - and So's the Dog!

What did I do?

I decided to be honest and speak my mind. The second part was where things went wrong.I live with my lovely wife, just the two of us for the first time in our lives in a carriage house apartment in Puyallup, Washington in the midst of a cottonwood swamp with ducks, deer and a plague of angry squirrels. The dog loves it. The wife's got a little cabin fever going. She's decided that she therefore needs to clean every square inch of the house at least once or twice a day. Okay that's an exageration. It's twice or three times a week, but every day she sets these impossible goals for herself.

Her health is poor, but she has a terrible fear that she's going to not be able to clean her house anymore and she has the great misfortune of living with two impossibly filthy creatures - me and the dog! It gets a little hot in the afternoon when she realizes she's in pain and her daily cleaning goals have not been met.

Daisy (right) with the amorous Sheltie who
runs loose in the neighborhood and follows
us on our walk hoping to get lucky
(not likely since Daisy's trip to the vet).

So the dog and I go for a walk with some of the neighborhood strays (Left), because it's just better not to hang around and say stupid things like, "Why don't you sit down and rest for awhile?" To a clean freak such a suggestion is insulting.  And you NEVER insult a clean freak in the midst of her freaking.

When we got back I washed the dog down before I went back to work. My Sweet Baboo has a basket full of towels and washcloths by the kitchen door. My job is to wash every crevice of the dog's feet, legs and to remove all dirt from the dog's fir. Finally, I have to wash her butt with warm soapy water. The love of my life, when she's in a manic cleaning phase is pretty certain that I do not do these things adequately because I apparently do not care about the cleanliness of the house.

So I missed a patch of dirt on the dog's belly when we came in and she carried it into the bedroom and left a smudge on the carpet beside the bed when she laid down. I thus confirmed Mrs. King's low opinion of my attitude toward cleanliness. I scrubbed up the spot, vacuumed everywhere the dog had been and apologized, pointing out, quite correctly, that I did not skip the dirty spot on purpose.

Daisy and I are now sitting in the corner thinking about what we have done.

© 2014 by Tom King