Where Oh Where Has The Food Lady Gone

Nowhere, that’s where.  I have too many damn dogs to be able to afford to go anywhere!

Haha.  I stole your freedom and ABSORBED IT INTO MY SOUL.

F*cking Ender.

I am on “staycation” this week, having un-entwined myself from my all-encompassing job for 9 glorious days.  Except for like 6 texts from staff and a brief visit to work yesterday (gah).  It’s hard to be the boss of everything sometimes.  Although I am not the boss of this:

This itty bitty she-demon is the bossiest thing on the planet (except the Sadist )!  Meal time?  Demands food with ear-splitting shrieks.  Nail clipping time?  CHOMP THE FOOD LADY!  HARD!  Am I trying to enjoy popcorn and a movie?  Loooooong whiny sounds that are approximately 20 seconds in duration.  Poke her with your socked foot to get her to shut up?  CHOMP THE FOOD LADY!  HARD!  Gemma is bad ass.  I think she scared the “terminal cancer” right out of her body, as it’s been nearly a year since I brought her home to “make her comfortable for a few weeks, feed her a cheeseburger and send her to Heaven.”

I am fairly confident that Heaven is not where she is headed.

It’s true that the smaller the dog, the bigger the attitude.  Take, for example, this:

Cute right?  (Heart melty, kick yourself in the teeth dreamy, head over heels in love with smushable adorableness, try to adopt her over my cold dead body and I’ll haunt you with everything I got, if you prefer).

But also, The Devil.

Bring it, bitches.

She’ll take on all comers with fight left over to kill one of my slippers. With gusto.  She’s absolutely hilarious!  She wants to Kill All The Things, but not in the terrier way where a black and white dog *coughWINTERcough* kills your baby chicken that was stupid enough to squeeze through the fence, but in that I DECLARE THIS SOCK MINE IN THE NAME OF TINYDOG AND I WILL SHAKE THE LIFE OUT OF IT IF I PLEASE kind of way.  Last year I made a flirt pole out of a lunge whip and a holey roller ball and none of my dogs maintained any kind of sustained interest in it for more than a couple of minutes.  They all just eyeballed the lunge line up to my hand, worked out I was f*cking with them, and were all “if you don’t want us to actually have it, we won’t bother chasing it then.”  Stupid Einsteins, my pack of dogs.

But Fae made the flirt pole her bitch.  She’ll run that thing down to the ends of the earth and when she catches it, it’s on!  She growls and snarls and tugs and whips her head from side to side so hard I think her brains are going to fling out of her ears and go splat! against the fence.  She’s HILARIOUS.

(On like night three of her being with me, she busted out of her crate in the night (the door is broken, she’s not The Hulk!) and climbed up into bed with me, and that’s where I found her in the morning, with her chin resting between my neck and shoulder while she spooned my back, snoring gently into my ear.  *swoon*  And yes, this is where she has slept ever since.  Shut up.)

I tried to get photos of her playing with the flirt pole, but my zoom lens is all but useless at this point, refusing to focus and just generally undermining my attempts to photograph anything.  I’m getting about 1 out of 10 shots in focus, and that seems to be mainly luck.  It’s utterly useless in anything other than the bright sun too.  So it’s a little more challenging to get blog fodder for you all these grey wintery days.  The majority of my photos are only turning out if my subject happens to be standing still.

And posing gracefully, a la me?

Stupid zoom lens makes me crazy.

A la Dexter.

Makes me crazier when I hear/read stuff like “you don’t need expensive equipment to get amazing photos.”  Don’t believe it.  Photographers don’t drop thousands of dollars on gear because they have all this extra money they don’t know what to spend on.  Bah.  The zoom lens I wish to replace mine with is $2200.00.  Screw you, Canon!!!!

So until I figure out a complicated scheme to bilk some old person out of their fortune, I’ll have to just keep grumbling on with my lip dick telephoto lens and hoping to land a shot now and then.

Do I hear a baby chicken begging to be eaten?  But only with my left ear, because my right one is listening for the Food Lady who is going to kick ten kinds of holy hell out of me for eating a baby chicken.  I’d better just really still and pose for the camera.

Or better yet, appease the huffing and puffing Two Legger by posing with food on my schnoz.

I am NOT posing with food on my face.  And f*ck you very much for suggesting it.

Ah TWooie, my little ray of sunshine.

He and his slightly less FAT brother Wootie are going to be 9 years old next week(ish).  Nine!  I have been prattling on about my dogs for almost nine freaking’ years!  How are you all not tired of listening to me yet?

And Miss Piper, the Ageless, is going to be 12 around the same time.  12.  Gah.

I thought *I* was the ageless dog?

Well you are, Tweed.  Although gravity seems to be winning the war against your mouth there.

He is doing remarkably well for a 14.5 year old dog, I think.  I’m not entirely certain, as I have never before owned a 14.5 year old dog before.  But he still plays ball every day, even if he has to kind of put on the brakes a bit prematurely, as otherwise he is prone to running right past it, because he can’t stop or corner like he used to.  His eyesight is still fantastic and he can still hear me most of the time.  For a while I thought he was practicing ‘selective deafness’ – you know, that privilege of ornery children and the very aged – but it seems that he can hear me most of the time just fine.  Sometimes, maybe in certain registers, or where there is lots of extraneous noise, or if he is concentrating on something else and/or sleepy, he seems to miss what I am saying … but for the most part, you wouldn’t ever guess he was going on 15.  He hasn’t even greyed at all.  The only real difference I have noticed is that at paw wiping time, he can’t seem to coordinate standing on three legs if I lift up a back foot.  He’s okay with the front ones, but if I lift up a hind paw the whole back end just seems to give up and decide to sit down, often to the surprise and irritation of the front end.  His back end is still strong, it just doesn’t always talk to his brain apparently.

But hey, at least he’s GOT a brain.  Just sayin’.

Just kiddin’.  When it comes to paw wiping time (can you tell that wiping muddy feet is a consuming part of my life right now?  I only wipe 44 paws at least three times a day, so go ahead, call me obsessive compulsive!) he is brilliant.  He lifts them for me, without being asked, in order of paws needing wiping.  How wicked smart is my Big Black Beast?  Of course, he also hugs my REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR every morning whilst I am blow drying my hair, but I hear genius is also quirky.

It’s Day Three of Staycation 2014 and I am going to go laze around and do nothing for a while. Maybe admire my dogs some more.  I am sure your dogs are cool and everything, but Spring has 3 extra legs and a spare tail, and Winter is shaped like one of those bi-articulated transit vehicles, so ….