Clean Rugs and Dog Dirt

Wife's dog had been a little under the weather lately. He's been having some stomach trouble, and thank God he's a small dog or that house would have been a terrible mess.

Now, apparently dogs are like the rest of us. Whether we're taking our 'morning constitutional', offloading the giant beef burrito we ate for lunch the day before, or just sitting down to get some serious reading done while losing a little weight at the same time, we're looking for a comfortable spot. Warm and comfy.

In other words, a cold seat is bad for 'business', if you know what I mean.

I think you do.

Well, dogs seem to be the same way, in that respect. Whether it's the squats or the trots, this little dog seems to need the warmth and softness of a nice rug, like in the dining room or living room, rather than the cold hard (very easy to clean!) linoleum kitchen floor. This rule seems to apply whether the food is heading North or South on him, and what with this little stomach thing there has been stuff soaking into those rugs all week long that has come out of either end of that little dog.

Ah, I thought, these rugs smell like the Great Outdoors... in the backyard of a slaughterhouse with a backed up septic system...


So I borrowed a rug cleaning machine from my mother and dragged it over to the house. I spent an afternoon running that thing over those rugs again and again - the directions say to keep going until the machine is pulling clean water back out of the rug.


I got close.


So it smelled much better in the house, terrific in fact, fresh, clean and lovely. I brought the machine back to mom, happy as a pig in a poke with a job well done.

...and the next day I walked in the front door to find a splotch of something Dog yakked up on the living room rug. The nice clean living room rug. I wiped up the mess, trying to deep-clean with nothing more than a sponge and some paper towels. Then I went to have a talk with Dog.

"See? The kitchen floor is good... linoleum is your friend..."

The little @#$% sat there and watched me as I got down on the kitchen floor and patted it. Stroked it. I praised it to the heavens trying to get him to see that this was the place to go if he couldn't get outside.

He watched me patiently, with his head tilted to the side in that cutely quizzical way all dogs have, and then he darted in to bark at my face while it was down there at his level and pranced away, convinced that I wanted to play.

You know how everyone in the world, whether they have a dog or not, complains about dog breath? How it's  been universally accepted as a standard to which all other bad breath is to be measured?

Coating the dog breath smell in a fresh coating of dog vomit smell does not help. Unless the aim of the breath was to render 200 lbs of bald guy unconscious on the kitchen floor faster than a double-shot of NyQuil PM...

Talk to you later!