To Pee or Not To Pee

It’s a busy and rather maddening week at the Grey Zone, three days before Christmas and the very next day after ‘Poop Madness.’ Here’s Dillo, a big brute who I’ve nicknamed Bruiser for obvious reasons.

Mega-Dillo with “the Sausage on Sticks” Barley

He’s 90 pounds of pure yellow Labrador. At 18-months old, he isn’t satisfied to just sit at the back door, peering in, calmly waiting to come back in like the other nine dogs do. No, he has to fling his big-ass body at the door and his monster paws scratch at the screen time and time again. I get it, I guess. They know I’m in the kitchen fixing their dinners, but still…

I opened the door and immediately saw the consequences of that body slam: a tipped over three-legged wicker plant stand, large broken chunks of the beautiful white planter that my mom made in ceramics, strewn through mounds of dirt all over the deck carpet. Sigh. “Really, Dillo? Was that necessary?”

Aye, shit! Well, the dogs will just have to wait a little while longer for their dinners until I clean up this mess. I stomp through the house and out to the garage, cussing the whole way, and get the dust-pan. I picked up all the broken ceramic pieces, pushed dirt onto the dust-pan, dumped most of it into the spider plant (a good thing, really, as it was actually shy a little dirt). Then I was left with one hell of a mess being that the green carpet has suddenly turned a dark brown blend of dirt and grit.  Back to the garage I go to retrieve the leaf-blower. But because I have so much crap in there I can’t squeeze my big ass between the truck and the mountain of God-knows-what that has grown out from the sides of the garage walls. So I have to open the stupid garage door to wedge in from another path. Finally, after a few more F-bombs have dropped, with blower in hand, I traipse back out to the deck and start ‘er up, watching the dirt, dead leaves and dust debris blow across the deck out to the yard.

All of the sudden I hear a crazy racket inside. I had forgotten that Cleo, the cute little       Lab/Collie mix,

Cleo

turns into Cujo the minute any loud motorized machine starts up. So much so that when her parents clean their house, say, for a dinner party, they bring Cleo over to stay with me because they can’t vacuum with her in the house. So she’s going ape-shit inside and getting all the other dogs wound and riled up, and still she continues to rage even after I turn the blower off.  “Cleo, you maniac, STOP!”  Geez!

So now that my own Cujo-transformation has passed and the dogs have so patiently waited for their dinner, finally I am setting down their food bowls.  After they finish– within a minute or less, that is– I go around and collect up all their bowls for washing and drying, thinking how nice it’s going to feel to get into a nice hot shower and soak my poor swollen ankle in a frothy foot soak of ‘Soothing Lavender’ in one of those hideous pink hospital wash basins I brought home after my last foot surgery.

I come out of the kitchen and literally SCREAMED when I saw that “somebody” had peed on my recliner! “LUCA! GODDAMMIT! I KNOW IT WAS YOU! Get over here and get your band on!”

Luca

I told him he was going back on the bad-boy band for the rest of the holidays. And here I was so proud that he FINALLY, after months of living here, came off his belly-band probation. Sigh.

I start the cleansing process, wiping up and sanitizing the floor first and then mixing a bucket of white vinegar and water to begin the laborious task of removing every bit of urine from the microfiber suede. Twenty minutes later, I’m done. NOW I can take my shower.

I walk into my bedroom, starting to take my clothes off even before I get to the master bath, but a wet spot on the dog bed catches my attention. I see a pear-sized wet spot with little dots of drips. “What the hell?” Inspecting the dog bed, I’m then stopped dead in my tracks as I see the puddle of pee next to my bed. Not only was there a full-bladder-volume swamp of urine but it had spread to my FOAM leg-wedge! The whole end of the foam wedge was soaking up this river of pee.

“Jesus-H-Christ! Are you fucking kidding me?! C’mon!” I yank up the wedge and run it into the shower, of course dripping pee along the way. I hosed it down and headed back out to the kitchen for yet another roll of paper towels, the Clorox and another bucket of vinegar and water.

By this time I’m hurting so bad. My ankle, swollen and feeling like it’s breaking, my lower back and sacroiliac joints causing so much agonizing pain that I’m literally walking hunched over, unable to stand up straight. With my pee-cleaning arsenal I start the task of wiping up and sanitizing yet another bladder spill. Leaning on the bed for support, “ouching” in pain, I just started to cry. Verging on a sob I said aloud, “One of these days I’m not going to be able to do this job anymore.”

“Now, can I take my shower already or is somebody else going to pee before I get there?”

©Michele Truhlik, Dec2012, 2014