Ineffectual, to the Nth Degree

You know your life has taken a turn for the ineffectual when you can’t even properly handle puppy poop.

Last year for my birthday I gave myself a new puppy in what has turned out to be a terrifically successful effort to hit the snooze bar on my biological clock. There is, honestly, almost nothing cuter in the world than a puppy. Baby pandas, maybe. Kittens are a tie. Human babies? Somewhere in the middle of the pack along with infant elephants and piglets.

The thing about puppies, though, is that what they really are is a bundle of bad habits and unwelcome biological processes wrapped up in a warm and wiggly fur coat. Bennet is no different. (Yes, I have a female dog named Bennet. Yes, I named her for one of Jane Austen’s characters. Yes, I realize Bennet sounds like a boy’s name. This is an animal that has eaten or attempted to eat all of the following: spiny balls off a maple tree, poop, cheese wrappers, and a condom she found on the street. She likes her name.) Besides the various stinky, leaky, messy, pukey, and all around mischievous things she has done—she’s also been one puppy disease after another. I have thought, more than once, of changing her name to Vector.

A few weeks ago, little Vector’s typical digestion habits went all kerflooey. To make a long and messy story short, I wound up at the all night emergency vet (also known as The Saddest Place Ever) with my little beast, fully expecting them to tell me she had Parvo and that I shouldn’t have bothered to get attached. Fortunately, what she had turned out to be Puppyzuma’s revenge, a tummy bug that was like 1000 times easier to treat than, you know, my carpets.

So, now the beastie is all better. She’s beginning to resemble a goat, all legs and ears and stubborn, and it was time to take a follow up, um, sample to the vet to make sure that whatever nastiness she had is now cured so she can continue to get bigger and put on weight so that she can eventually rule the damned world.

To make a short story long, it got lost. The office wasn’t officially open, but the front door was, so I did just what the woman told me to do and set it down inside. I put it behind the desk, on the floor, because to my mind that was the least disgusting place to place a bag containing a puppy turd. That’s all great and good and everything, but now the puppy poo has gone missing, and I now have to go by there again tomorrow with a new sample. Ick, already. Ick, I say.

Who—I ask you, who—loses poop? Me. That’s who.

*****

One might think that in light of President Retread’s recent speech I would have something more important about which to write. One would be wrong. I didn’t watch it.

Why you ask? Because I’m 30, and I pay my own bills, and you can’t make me.
I am going to find and read the transcript because, unfortunately, his idiotic blathering is important. HOWEVER, I felt I couldn’t spare the brain cells to actually listen to the man talk. I didn’t feel like getting drunk last night, and really, that’s the only way I can sit through more than 5 minutes. I watched all of last year’s SotU, for which I rewarded myself with tequila, and I wasn’t doing it last night.

Every time I hear his voice, it makes me want to eat my own hair. His idiotic rambling will be much more palatable in written form. At least I won’t have to listen to his phony aw-shucks-down-home-one-of-the-little-people accent, complete with “ums” and “huhs.”