Bad Dog!

We interrupt the collection of your fun "small world" stories to bring you this breaking news: Polie is a Bad Dog!

If anyone tells you that getting a second dog is easy, walk away. They are lying to you. "You already have a dog, it won't be that much work. At most, double the work, but also double the fun." Ha! Adding a second dog to your household will exponentially increase your workload and your pet-related expenses. Trust me.

After setting up the solar ovens for some cooking today, I turned to go back in the house. After two steps, I felt something wet slap me in the calf. (I'm wearing nice, cool shorts today.) I looked down and there was dog poop on my other shoe and on my calf.

"Well, SHIT!" I thought to myself, "Damn dog pooped in the path instead of the tree well."

I stood there for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out what to do. There was a pancake of soft dog poop on my shoe, nothing to scrape it off with right there. And there was poop on my leg. Finally I squished my shoes in the loose dirt - loose because some certain bad dog runs crazy circles in the yard regularly - to try to keep the poop from coming off as I walked. Then I headed over to the hose. After taking off my shoes, gingerly, I walked sock-footed over the sharp gravel to get clean-up supplies from the house.

With sandals on, poop still on my leg, a bag, paper towel, plastic glove, and outside scrubby brush, I returned to the poopy shoes. Yes, plural. There was poop on the back of the second shoe where it'd been flung up along with the poop on my leg. I dampened the paper towel and cleaned my leg. Ewww.

I was lucky enough to find a flat rock that worked well as a scraper and got the first layer of poop off the shoe. Rinsing with the hose didn't do much.

Soft, sticky poop.

I wrinkled my nose and and wiped at the shoe with the dirty paper towel. Not much help. I had to use the scrub brush - carefully, to avoid flinging poop all over the place - to loosen the mess. After rinsing and scrubbing for a while, it was obvious that detail work was still needed. I found a twig with a sharp end to scrape through each and every groove in the bottom of the shoe heel. It was disgusting, but finally I could see progress. It took more scrubbing and a lot of rinsing for the shoe to eventually pass the sniff test.

The worst part of all this was the flies. Yesterday while I was doing some laundry by hand outside, they were really annoying. But today, they were on me like flies on ... well, you know.

The shoes are drying and Polie looks contrite, but I still feel the need to wash my leg again.