An apology for the coming rant: all my high-minded blog ideas have gone out the door with our idiot dog, who just ate a pen. A Pilot Precise V5 rolling ball pen, to be precise, my wife’s favorite kind. A nice plastic tube just filled with juicy, runny, colorful ink. In this case, midnight blue.
I’d left the incorrigible canine unattended for 20 minutes while taking Samuel to school. I returned to hear an all-too-familiar crunching sound, and met a mutt with a blue mouth and blue paws, standing in the middle of a blue polka-dotted carpet. He was not cute and it was not funny. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never.
I mentioned that the cursed cur was in the middle of the floor. Not in an obscure corner or behind the sofa. Not in a place that could conceivably become the new location for a chair, but right in the middle, in front of the TV, six inches from the partially gnawed rawhide bone we had bought him so he’d have something legitimate to chew on.
I spent a good hour of blog-writing, paper-grading, class-preparing time on my hands and knees, but the floor is still not pretty. An entire can of carpet cleaner is gone, and most of a roll of paper towels. After 20 minutes, I noticed a red color mixing with the blue and realized that I’d scrubbed several layers of skin from the outside of my left thumb. I learned that blood can be just as hard to clean up as ink, and felt a bit like the Cat in the Hat, whose pink bathtub ring just got bigger with every effort to clean it up. Unfortunately, I couldn’t call up Thing One and Thing Two to help me blast the spots.
I may have to call a professional carpet cleaner. The spots probably won’t disappear completely until we replace the carpet.
I’d rather replace the dog.
A stick would do nicely.
Want to trade?
Professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and the Contributing Editor and Curriculum Writer at Good Faith Media.
