Ruby, having carried her new Ball to her newly inherited Dog Bed, which is covered with her newly laundered plush Dog Blanket, has figured out that if she can induce the Human to throw Ball onto the fabric bed, it will not roll away down the hall and disappear inside a closet or another room. So, hevvin help us, we have a new Game. Arghh! 😀
Ruby has already learned, amazingly, to throw the ball, and at times she even seems to have some control over where it goes. She being a dog, though, her attention span is somewhat limited where things that are not Food are concerned, and so…well…it’s hard to estimate the significance of this. But it’s interesting. And all of that notwithstanding, she being a corgi, it’s very cute indeed.
The Funny Farm is largely disinfected, after a day of spreading Clorox all over the floors. This chore, I’d intended to do a couple of days ago, right after poor little Cassie was dispatched to her maker. But I haven’t had the energy to do it. In the first place, I was exhausted. In the second, I’d put my back out and pulled a rib muscle lifting Cassie on and off the bed and out into the yard and back into the house. So that hurt quite a bit even before my little fall, which surely did not help things. Though I wanted to get to work on assassinating microbes, yesterday I was past moving.
While Cassie was ailing, I found myself on hands and knees four, five, six times a day cleaning up dog pee and dog shit. Poor old dog was too sick and too confused to get herself outside, or to figure out where and when to do it. Even though we had pee mats down all over the house, and even though she would stagger over to whatever mat suited her fancy, often she would miss. A mound would land on a tile instead of on a paper sponge; a puddle would slop over the side of the plastic edging and, by capillary action, seep about a half-mile under the mat.
Mercifully, she favored a limited number of sites for these activities.
Even though of course I cleaned up each event with plenty of Simple Green as it happened, come Saturday morning I still thought…ick!
So today was the day to scrub up each 4×6-foot site — six of them, in six different rooms — with plenty of Clorox. This, I’ve learned, kills off a wealth of microbes, including (interestingly enough) MRSA staph. You can actually bathe in the stuff — well, in a dilute solution of it — to kill off staphylococci. And, I can attest, it works.
The various loos, then, are madly disinfected. Tomorrow it will be on to mopping up all the rooms, halls, and whatnot with Simple Green, which surely will smell a lot less obnoxious than Clorox does.
Meanwhile…goddammit. I’m exhausted, hurt from top to bottom, and want nothing more than to go to bed…and guess what?
New Year’s and the Fourth of July do not suffice for our brainless local revelers. The neighbors have hauled out their store of fireworks and, as we scribble, are banging them off in all directions. Ruby is losing her doggy mind, yapping her doggy head off, on high alert. The human is madly pissed. And so, I suppose, none of us in all directions will be getting much sleep tonight.
Happy Martin Luther King Day. Jeez.
