The Dogs Broke My Wife

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Every now and again my wife gets caught in a loop where she find something (usually herself) so goddamn funny that she devolves into hysterics for minutes at a time, laughing at pretty much nothing. 

I took this video a while back when the dogs were being a pair of complete assholes and it launched Emily into what can only be described as a physical manifestation of  a person who "literally can't even".

Maybe it's just me, but I just find these fits of hysteria infectious. Whenever I need a laugh throughout my day I get out my phone and play this video and it never fails to put me in a good mood.

I'll just leave this here in the event that it can brighten up someone else's day just a little.

If that made your day even an infinitesimal amount better, I'm glad that I shared it. If you know of somebody else who might need something to make them laugh at something dumb for a few minutes in an otherwise crummy day send this to them too. Or send them a video of yourself breakdancing while wearing one of those inflatable t-rex suits. Or go to their house and give them an atomic high five. Or do literally anything to make you or someone else just a little less full of rage and disappointment at the world.

 

P.S: I feel like I should apologize for the fact that I shot the video in portrait mode. I wasn't raised by wolves, I know better then that.

Night of 1000 Dog Farts: Part 2

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This is the second part to Night of 1000 Dog Farts: Part 1.

When last we joined our intrepid hero, he was elbow deep in dog excrement and begrudgingly playing a game of 'find the feces' in the living room.

The foster dog, Riley, had escaped from her crate using a combination of dog ninjitsu/ Nightcrawler style teleportation and eaten her entire body weight in Olive's special fish diet chow. She then shat on every surface in the house until I came home and found her.

Upon booting both Riley and Olive out of the house I had just completed my search for all of the dog messes. 45 minutes, 2/3 of a bottle of Resolve and an entire roll of paper towels later I believed I had found all the Lincoln logs there were to be found so I let the dogs back into the house.

Using one of the 621413057129371823957 plastic grocery bags that my wife compulsively hoards in our kitchen drawers, I gathered up all of the paper towels and other disjecta membra from my cleaning spree and took them out to the garbage can. A process which takes roughly 12 seconds to complete.

 
 

I considered writing a warning before continuing on to the next bit of the story but I figure if you've made it this far, you're in to the end. Strap in, it's about to get gross up in here.

When I came back in from depositing the trash outside, I discovered that like a poo seeking missile, Olive had located a giant dog poo I had missed near a lamp in the den and was in the process of devouring it like some sort of a lumpy brown afternoon snack.

I tried to stop her from polishing off the poo by yelling at her to get away from it while I rushed over, to no avail.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As thoroughly disgusting as this was, it was merely a brief glimpse of the horrors that would soon begin.

You may recall from Part 1 that I mentioned Olive is on a fish based diet because of a food allergy to poultry. An innocuous detail at the time, but I did say that it would prove to be important later.

Later being about an hour after the last of the cleanup and the poo eating took place. That's when the farts started.

At first it was just Riley. Her system was not prepared for Olives's special fish diet at all, so the fact that she had ingested a weeks worth of completely foreign chow over the course of an hour meant there was a battle raging in her intestines. The gurgling coming from that dog's stomach was audible from across the room and within minutes of the first warning signs, a full scale olfactory assault began.  

 
 

As everyone knows there are all kinds of different farts; regular farts, silent but deadly farts, church farts, meat farts, jogging farts and so on. Usually though only human farts get their own special titles, typically our canine friends have their malodorous emissions relegated to the blanket category of "Dog Farts."

The putrid expulsion of gas that started coming out of that dog was far and away too vile and reprehensible to share a classification with something so innocuous and hilarious as a dog fart. These were not the type of farts that smell for a second and then fade away into a fond memory memory of Fido tooting himself awake. No, these were the kind that settled in the air and lingered like a heavy, deadly fog. They clung to the furniture and burned the eyes. There was  no escape from it.

Ever smelled something so bad it coated your tongue and you could taste it for the rest of the day? It was like that. The smell was so bad it was basically like being suffocated  by a hitman wielding a rag soaked in liquefied rotten eggs that somebody pulled off of a river corpse.

 
 

As if it weren't toxic enough, about twenty minutes into Riley's intestinal emission torture Olive started farting as well. That giant goddamn turd I couldn't stop her from eating had apparently created some sort of bowel movement Trojan horse situation and carried whatever biological warfare was taking place inside of one dog over to the other.   

 
 

The Symphony of death farts was like a woodwind ensemble comprised entirely of anuses playing instruments making a mockery of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

It literally stunk up the entire first floor our our house. When Emily came home from work a few hours later, entering at the opposite side of the house from where the dogs were she said, and I quote "As soon as I walked in the door it was like getting punched in the face by a wall of farts"

Whatever interior distress these two dogs were going through was apparently not planning on resolving itself in any sort of timely fashion. A continual stream of stomach gurgling and dog farts carried on well into the night making the entire house smell vaguely of rancid meat and death.

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By around 11:45 we were ready to go to bed, so upstairs we all went, two furry butts crop dusting the entire house on their way to the bedroom where we put them in the large crate that had their beds in it. The only problem was that what had been a neigh unbearable stench when there was a large open space for it to dissipate over became equivalent to tear gas when confined within the bedroom.

Besides not being able to breath or sleep, it was getting to the point where the stink was so foul and the two dogs looked so bloated, we were worried they might fart themselves to death. Emily called one of the vets she works with at  about 12:00 AM to explain the situation and ask what we could do about it.

The answer? Go to the store and buy an anti-gas medicine. Those pills where the commercial is various people looking really uncomfortable while watching a sports game, going on a picnic or having a job interview as tuba music plays in the background? Those.

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Apparently its cool to feed those to dogs in case you were wondering. 

So good news and bad news. Good news is we can give the dogs some of these fart pills and it should stem the tide of their murder poots. Bad news is I have to go out to Walmart past midnight on a Tuesday to purchase said fart pills.

Going to Walmart after midnight on a weeknight in order to purchase fart medicine is probably on my top list of things I never, ever want to do. Right behind fighting a wolverine with my bare hands and having Donald Trump lightly brush his cotton-candy-made-out-of-urine hair against my face.

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First of all, the Walmart crowd can be rough at any time of the day but nobody goes to Walmart at midnight on a weekday for any normal reason. I was not looking forward to the parade of sweat pant wearing zombies buying-thirty five cans of wet cat food and a pair of Dora the Explorer child's rain boots I was about to be exposed to.

Second, the thought of having to go into a store and look a cashier in the face while I buy fart medicine is mortifying enough. The fact that I have to do it at midnight makes me want to light myself on fire.

To make matters even worse, for some reason my wife decided she needed cranberry juice since I was going out anyway.

This is my nightmare. It's going on 1 a.m on a Wednesday, I've waded through a sea of super high people looking for industrial sized Doritos, and probable murder-molesters to get my items and am now standing in front of a cashier who's pissed because not only does she have to work the bullshit 1 a.m shift, now she actually has to deal with somebody because here I come with my fart medicine and cranberry juice.

 
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In my head it's like I've walked up to this stranger and announced I've got a case of the butt rumbles so severe that I had to leave my house at ONE IN THE GODDAMN MORNING to get medicine for it.

"How d'yo do ma'am? Just here to pick up some fart medicine in a desperate attempt to stem the explosive propulsion of methane that has been and may currently be firing out of my back end. Also, all this farting has made me thirsty and I've got a real hankering for some cranberry juice." 

Horrified at my predicament, I desperately needed to figure out a way to naturally slip it into the conversation that the medicine was for my dogs, not myself.

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It went poorly. I'm not even sure what I said, but there isn't really a normal way to just drop in that you are buying fart medicine at 1 a.m. for some dogs completely unsolicited. 

I'm pretty sure I just convinced her more that the fart medicine was for me because of my weird excuse dropping, but she didn't say anything so I just got out of there as fast as possible.

In the end the fart medicine took care of the dog farts and everyone was able to get some sleep. But the house smelled for like two days afterwards.

Also, the cranberry juice was good.

The end.

People Who Take Their Dog to See Santa Are A-holes.

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There are many Holiday traditions that I simply don't understand. One such tradition is taking your dogs to go have their picture taken with Santa Claus.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against Mall Santas or anything like that. When you are a kid, going to the mall to see the ACTUAL Santa Claus and tell him what you want for Christmas is a completely awesome experience. (I of course am the exception as I distinctly remember being pant-crappingly terrified of going anywhere near Mall Santa as a child. Apparently my general dislike of strangers even included Father Christmas himself).

I love the Idea of taking kids to see Santa when they are young. It's an experience parents can treasure, it creates a memorable moment for the kid, and its all around a good bonding experience for everyone involved.

You know who gives exactly zero fucks about Santa Claus though? Your dog.

Our furry family pets have no concept of Christmas, Santa, or generally anything besides wanting to eat food, nap and lick their own butthole. In fact,  in my experience they are downright against the idea of being taken to a strange place to be plopped on a chair with a large, scary bearded stranger, and then screeched at by their owners and yet another stranger with a camera trying to get them to look in the right direction.

The entire ordeal seems generally confusing and upsetting for them. The exercise of taking the dog to see Santa is clearly entirely for the benefit of the owner without consideration for how dog feels about it.

In fact, here is a short list of things I've comprised that you can do for your dog that they will appreciate more than being taken to see Santa:

  • Give them a dog treat
  • Take them for a nice walk
  • Throw a ball or a stick with them for a while
  • Literally just do nothing and leave them alone to do whatever it is they are already doing
  • Take them for a ride in the car (to a place where they aren't going to be manhandled by a festive stranger)
  • Give them a nice belly rub

Further, here is a list of things you can do with your dog that they may not appreciate necessarily, but will cause them less displeasure and confusion than being trundled off for a strange and uncomfortable holiday experience.

  • Read a complete Shakespeare play to them start to finish
  • Register them to be a wedding officiant on a shady internet site
  • Show them a series of artistic photographs of Cantaloupes
  • Make them a fake ID
  • Pretend you are a character on Cheers and shout "Norm!" at them every time they enter a room before returning to whatever you were doing.

When it comes down to it, I just don't get the appeal of dragging a creature who has no concept of Christmas to take a picture with Santa Claus, an experience which is clearly not enjoyable for them, purely for the sake of my own gratification.

Or at least that's what I thought about it before this:

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My wife decided she wanted to take the dogs to see Santa. I articulately and clearly explained why I disagreed with the practice. I then packed the car up with two dogs and a pair of Christmas hats at 8.am on a Sunday because as it turns out I do not get a vote and therefore can shove it.

Now, I still believe all of the things I said above are true, but goddamn if watching that man in his fake beard struggle to hold my two dogs still long enough for the photographer to snap a picture as they flailed their little asses off trying to get away from him was not the best thing I've ever seen.

They hated it. They hated Santa from the top of his red hat to the tips of his pleather faux-boot shoe covers. They hated the stupid Christmas hats we put on them and they hated the noise of everyone trying to coax them to look at the camera. They are pretty well trained dogs, we constantly get compliments in public abut how well behaved they are but they were simply not having one bit of Santa.

Now, while my dogs hated this, I on the other hand could barely stand I was laughing so hard while trying to convince the photographer to take the picture when Olive  was a blur of kicking feet and Griff was halfway off the chair making a break for it while Santa desperately held on to his back legs.

In the desperate confusion of writhing dogs and flopping elastic-bound Christmas hats the photographer actually managed to snap the above picture in the .5 seconds the two of them were holding still and looking in the same direction. Personally I'd have much preferred this years Christmas card to be a picture of them being maniacs, but you can't win 'em all.

If you take your dog to see Santa Claus you, like me, are totally an A-hole. You know what though? I'm alright with that because someday those  four-legged little mongrels aren't going to be around anymore and you'll always have a hilarious memory and a potentially epic photo to remember them by.

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Happy Holidays, A-holes.

The Night of 1000 Dog Farts: Part 1

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We have two dogs in our household. Olive is almost two years old, and we've had her since she was a puppy.

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She is incredibly smart. In fact, she is rather too smart for her own good. Her intellect borders on that of an evil genius for a dog. She also has a particular food allergy to poultry so she has to be on a special fish based dog chow. That might seem like a random and superfluous detail, but it will be important later.  

Once Olive was out of the worst of her puppy phase we decided it would good for us to get a second dog.Eventually that led us to our second dog Griff. Griff is a good boy, but Griff is very stupid. He is also not in this story so I don't know why I'm even mentioning him.

Prior to officially finding a permanent second dog of our own we had been doing some fostering. It was important to Emily, and I liked reaping the benefits of having a second dog (mainly that Olive had a playmate to burn off her excess energy with so that she wasn't such a terror) without the financial responsibility of owning them ourselves. We searched around to find a foster program that we liked and started taking in dogs while they were waiting to find a home.

One of the first dogs we took in was named Riley.

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Riley, like Olive was a shepherd mixed with something small. She was about 30lbs to Olive's 40 and pretty close in size. Riley also happened to share another particularly troublesome characteristic with Olive. A very high intellect for a dog.

In addition to the other traits I have already described, both Riley and Olive shared one other characteristic. An insatiable, manic drive to obtain and consume every edible substance known to dog-kind.

I could start an entire website dedicated to stories about the times Olive has broken out of or into places and devoured an entire cake- I won't as every story would end with "Then she ate the entire cake and looked like a bowling ball with feet" which would get boring after the first or second time.

Due to the fact that we had two evil geniuses in the house, hell bent at all costs to obtain and devour anything the could possibly lay their furry little mitts on, we had to take a series of security measures to prevent them from escaping whenever we left the house.

Olive is typically kept in the living room downstairs whenever we leave the house. She has a couch near the window in there that she likes to lay on. We barricade the two doorways into that room with baby gates (We started with one and now have four due to continued escape endeavors).

The baby gate dog jail is typically enough to contain Olive. Riley, we kept in the den inside a large dog crate. Due to the combination of an uncanny and diabolical ability to  escape from this crate, and Emily's paranoia about dogs breaking their neck trying to squeeze out of cages with these types of doors we latched it and had to resort to putting a combination lock on the door just to try and keep her in there.

 
 

Emily's job is one where she will work a 14 hour day, but only works about three days a week. On days when she is at work, I am typically left to my own devices from the time I get out of work until she arrives home that night.

On one such occasion during Riley's stay with us I went to the gym in the late afternoon, securing both dogs in their designated areas before leaving. I went to the gym, worked out, and came home. All in all I was probably out of the house for two hours.

Upon returning I was greeted by two things: The first was Riley, happily coming to see me at the door.

 
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This confused me, as Riley was not supposed to be greeting me at the door-Riley was supposed to be padlocked inside a crate in the other room. 

The second thing was the sight of our house transformed into a desolate wasteland of dog poo. 

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Imagine a barren expanse of endless depressing landscape as far as the eye can see. Nothing but bombed out buildings and ruin in all directions. Imagine that you are standing at the center of this hellscape as the crumbling remains of society decay around you, leaving you to question if it would not be better if you had never existed at all, so that you would never have had to suffer the misery of the sight before your very eyes.

 
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Now imagine that, plus everything is covered in dog shits. 

 
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There were no fewer than eight full sized dog poos and urine puddles scattered throughout the first two floors of the house. I truly and honestly do not understand how a single 30lb dog crapped that much, that many times in such a short period of time.

I went into the den to see if I had forgotten to properly secure Riley in the crate, and on my life I swear to you that when I went in there and looked, the door to the crate was still closed and latched and the padlock was still on there. 

That dog somehow got out of a closed, latched and padlocked crate without opening the door. To this day I frankly just don't know how she did it. I can only presume that she has the ability to teleport.

 
 
 
 

I went into the kitchen next and discovered the source of all the pooing. Riley had gotten onto the counter, pulled down her bag of chow along with Olives special fish food and apparently proceeded to undertake a continuous chain of eating and crapping for the entirety of the time I was out of the house.

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I picked up the chow and went to let Olive out of captivity from the other room. I put them both outside so that they wouldn't be in the way while I cleaned up the mess, and because I didn't trust that Riley was finished evacuating the foods she had eaten.

It took me a solid 45 minutes to locate and clean up all of the messes scattered throughout both the downstairs and upstairs of the house. What struck me the entire time was that instead of the messes becoming sloppy or Riley having thrown anything up she seriously appeared to have eaten, processed and crapped out a weeks worth of food over the course of two hours. 

Science may never unravel the mysteries of that dog's digestive system.

Little did I know at this point that the nightmare was just beginning....