Hot Dog That I Did NOT Relish: Example # 3,415 Why A Bored Dog Is A Naughty Dog

 “If you live with dogs, you’ll never run out of things to write about.”

― Sharon Delarose

Those soft baby blues…

 Booker, Booker, Booker. Those soft blue eyes of yours tend to deceive me all too often. There was the infamous time you dug up the entire box of newly planted flowers. You didn’t even try to look embarrassed about it. “!@#$% Chipmunk,” you implied with an enthusiastic wag of your tail.

!@#$ chipmunk, you said.

There was also the time you ate the new leather throw pillow I put on the window seat. Pillows, chew toys. They are one and the same to you, and I should have known that. However, since the pillow did not have a squeaky toy inside, you should have had a clue that you were munching down on something you shouldn’t have been munching on.

Today you got me once again. Because it is blisteringly hot outside, and because you are still sporting half of your winter coat (you get all squirmy when I try to brush you), I let you come into the air-conditioned sunroom. Poor baby, I thought, you need a respite from the heat. You immediately spread out and fell asleep. Or so I thought.

Sometime later I came into the sunroom to check on you. There you were, giving me your best Husky smile. Um, Booker, that is a dead give-away that you have been naughty. I looked around, and sure enough, you’d been busy.

My black bag, the one I take to art fairs with all my pens, tags, tape, and so on, was tossed about the room.

–A zipper pull had been gnawed off, and those teeth marks looked suspiciously like yours.

–All the pens—all the pens—lay scattered across the floor…some gutted of their ink tube, some disassembled in artistic ways.

–My product tags, moist with saliva, were mangled and dispersed to an assortment of nooks and crannies.

–A tape dispenser had a pull of tape lolling like a wet tongue, and was covered in your aforementioned dog hair.

I looked at you, and you looked at me. You wagged your tail, and I wagged my finger. Those baby blues held a maddening mixture of innocence and guilt. I saw a black bag; you saw an opportunity for objects with a “good mouth feel.” Sigh.

I hear tomorrow will be even hotter. Booker will come inside once again. He will pretend to sleep, and I will pretend to get mad. It’s our dance and the best part of my day.