In honor of Winnie getting fixed today, I give you this. I’m making her the “star” of today’s blog in exchange for her ovaries. Fair exchange I say.

This could totally be Winifred the Wonder Pup if the star of the video was all black.

Only Winnie would have chewed up the shoe and pulled the rubber buttons out of the remote first.

I love birdboxstudios.

Does anyone else feel like the need to bribe their pets in order to steralize them? Who makes your favorite cartoon? Tell us the brave tale of taking your own pet to the vet.

Every single night the wild rumpus begins about 10 o’clock.

I’ve gotten the children to bed so the bickering and sassing and back talk has ceased. It’s peaceful.

I can write on my current WIP or this blog. I can watch anything on television I want without anyone whining about it. You’d think, as such described, I’d be in bliss.

But I’m not.

We can blame Roscoe the Idiot Dog and Winifred the Wonder Pup. It is that exact hour when they decide to have a world-class romp in a cage match.

Two dogs enter, One dog exits.

The wrestlemania event involves a great deal of chasing each other around the giant circle – livingroom past the kitchen around the family room past the laundry room back by the kitchen and into the living room again, bashing into walls and furniture all along the way. Where I happen to be trying to watch and write.

To punctuate the wrestling there must also be copious amounts of howling, yapping and growling.

It doesn’t matter how many times I hiss at them, chuck the remote in their direction, whap the coffee table with a wadded up newspaper to get their attention or poke at them when they run by. They stop when they’re damn good and ready.

It’s beyond irritating.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “You’re a fool. Put the dogs outside.” You, dear reader, are very naive. They’ll just do the same thing in the back yard and then I’d have annoyed neighbors.

Honestly, unless you’ve heard it for yourself, you simply can not believe the sound of a hound dog baying. I’m certain I’ve told you before the noise is so loud and vibrates so significantly that it makes my doorbell ring which then makes the Idiot Dog turn and bay at the front door like a moron. It’s a vicious cycle.

I also bt you think all that caterwauling would wake up the slumbering children. Nope. I think a Sherman tank could roll through here and they would sleep through it. It doesn’t even wake up My Honey.

All it does is irritate the living crap out of me.

And the big cat. He’s fairly annoyed much of the time anyway. That cat and I may be soul mates.

They gave out the Medals of Freedom last week. The recipients were quite varied – everyone from John Glenn to Bob Dylan. This made me wonder what exactly you had to do to qualify for a Medal of Freedom.

“The Medal of Freedom is presented to people who have made meritorious contributions to the national interests of the United States, to world peace or to other significant endeavors.”

You don’t even have to be alive to win. That will help my case since we all know real genius is often not recognized until after the artist is dead.

So I totally get why Bob Dylan got one. You can love him or hate him but you can’t deny his contributions to music.

John Glenn – duh – the first man to orbit Earth. I think Mr. Glenn should get any award he’s nominated for – at least as far as his space exploits are concerned.

Madeleine Albright – the first woman Secretary of State – a personal hero of mine.

Juliette Gordon Low – the founder of the commie pinko organization, The Girl Scouts.

Gordon Hirabayashi – he fought against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This was only a few of the recipients and, as you can see, there was quite a range of achievements.

I propose that next year I be nominated for my “significant endeavors” in sarcasm. Or absurdism. Or beating a dead horse with that panda kidnapping business. I think I have made meritorious contributions in the subject of glaring.

I’m not sure how busy you all are right now, so I’ve put a link in for the procedures to nominate me. Follow here. I think the most difficult part will be the “Narrative Description of Contributions or Achievements”. You know, just cut and paste some of my blog posts. That should work. The part about “Citations” might also be hard. If you guys do this as a group then you can all give each other citations.

I’m not sure how many of these nominations they get every year so make sure you send it in with all the postage required and use a nice bond paper. You can get it by the sheet fairly cheap if you have your nomination printed at Kinkos. And Mr. Obama is pretty busy so use a larger font, like maybe a 12 pt  Times New Roman cause you don’t want him to toss it aside just because it’s too hard to read.

It may be a little daunting, but just think how fulfilling it will be for you to know you actually helped someone you know win the prestigious Medal of Freedom.

We had a game plan for today.

All day Saturday we cleaned the house. We steam cleaned the carpets, dusted all the weird places and used the vacuum attachments. It was exhausting.

Months ago, I had purchased new curtains for the living room. Unfortunately, My Honey hadn’t been especially happy with my choice so I put them up in one window for him to get used to. Just as I knew they would, the curtains grew on him. they are really quite lovely. Both my mother and Mother-in-law loved them.

So we went to the store to pick up the panels for the other window.  Guess what. They don’t sell those curtains anymore. – not in the store and not online. I even tried to find them on clearance. No dice. So now I have to start completely over. Shortly, I shall be strangling him. Just so you wonder why I won’t be talking about him much in the future.

So like I said, we had a plan for today. We were going to lay around on the couch, watch bad television, and nap the day away. Doesn’t that sound lovely. Of course it does. It’s like a dream come true.

That’s how you can be 100% sure that it won’t happen.

Yumm-a-roonie

We did start out with red velvet pancakes. That totally rocked.

Then we decided to rip out some carpet. Commence eye rolling.

It didn’t sound like that awful of a job at first. Rip out some carpet, roll it up  and tote it out to the side of the house. It really needed to be done so I readily agreed. And then I realized that involved moving all the furniture which wouldn’t be such a big job except that one of the biggest pieces is my china cabinet. The Bandit counted and I have 162 glasses in there.

Only one tea-cup was broken, by The Bandit, incidentally, only it was one of the ones hand-painted by my grandmother. Ah well. I consider only one casualty a success.

Then My Honey said, “Since the furniture is all moved, we should really paint.”

Well, it desperately needed to be done.  I looked longingly at the couch and sighed.

I chose Cathedral Vanilla or something like that at Lowes. One thing I’d like to know is when did paint become so ever-loving expensive? And masking tape? Good lord, the blue masking tape was 9.97 for one roll, together with the paint I was out $67. When did they start making paint out of gold?

The instant I got home with the paint, Sassy and the Bandit were all over it.

“When can we paint? How ’bout now? Now? Can we paint now? I wanna roller. Can I use the roller? Can I now? Now?

My Honey and I finally caved and gave them each a paint brush and pointed them towards the base boards.

For future reference, I heartily recommend you find ANYTHING else for a seven-year old to do besides help paint. His father and I might be complete idiots for even considering it. Shortly there after the boy was fired and sent to take a bath. There are only so many times you can say, “Only up and down!”, “Not on the wood!” and “Dude, no!”

Then, Miss Sassy wanted to know how much she was being paid to do this job.

Holy crap! If I’d thought of it, I could have paid them both NOT to help. That would have been the best twenty bucks I’d ever spent.

And would have taken half the time.