New Year's Resolution: Pick Up Dog Shit

I have been a dog owner for a year and a half now. I have been a two-dog owner for the last 11 weeks.

I have never picked up dog poop in my own yard.

Stop! Now before you go getting all judgy judgy on me, I'd like to point out that during the time when we only had Coconut, there were only very small turds scattered around the yard, and most of them were sucked up by the lawn mower, and I don't think that anyone other than me has ever stepped in a pile while back there.

If you're still in the mood to judge, judge this: I bought this contraption

this morning, and then spent an hour walking the yard like a grid and scooping up every last solitary frozen piece of dog shit. I even scraped up the smashed-in ones!

I filled two entire large plastic grocery bags, and honestly, I was surprised by the weight of them! I had to fight the urge to bring the bags into my house and put them on the scale!

Which, oddly, brings me to this:

Alex's worst insults for people always tend to have "bag" tagged onto the end. Dickbag, Assbag, the ever popular Douchebag... you get the point. I asked him about this once, and he said that calling someone a bag of something is even harsher than calling them just that one undesirable thing.

I never really thought about it again until today. A shitbag is WAY worse than one single shit.

Dog Cookies and People Cookies

When I reached up to get a dog cookie from the bag on the top of the fridge, I was not expecting said bag to be empty. I haven't given treats for peepees in awhile, since both dogs tend to fixate on the treats and not actually go to the bathroom. So when I did find that there were no cookies in the bag, my first thought went to Alex. Is he using them to secretly trick the dogs into liking him better? Then I thought, oh, they are sitting on an open box of trash bags. Maybe last time I took one, I didn't close the bag all the way, and they tumbled out into the box...

Alas, that is when I stood on my tippy toes to check the box, and came across the unfortunate view of mouse poop. Lots of it. Allllll on top of the garage fridge.

I think we all know where the cookies went now, don't we?

When I called my dad to shriek about the whole situation (Alex is working and didn't answer his cell), he gave me several options, as follows:

1. Sticky pads... but then you might have to deal with finding a live one stuck to it.
2. Trap... with the same drawback as above, unless you get a humane trap, in which case you have to find a place to let the mouse go where it won't just return to your house.
3. Poison... which "eats them from the inside out," (ugh) causing them to look for water, which will be outside, which will mean they are not in your house.
4. Keep putting food in the garage. This will not get them out of the garage, but it will keep them out of your house, since they won't need to search for food elsewhere.

He then continued to run through a number of scenarios in which: the baby mouse was able to return to the nest (that he imagines to be under my deck) toting an entire Milk Bone and filled with pride; the father mouse carries back one under each arm, which is difficult, but he has responsibilities to provide for his family, so he trudges along; one thousand mice make a sort of assembly line from under my deck to the top of my fridge, passing along one at a time until the entire bag is empty.

I am dreading the whole capturing process, because Alex is a Girly Man, and it is almost certain that he will refuse to take care of any kind of creature, dead or alive. You may not believe me (though I imagine if you know Alex, you will), but he actually makes me kill the bugs and empty fuzzy leftovers into the garbage desposal. I assure you that dealing with the mice will be the same.

*****

Not that you want to read about mice and then read about cookies, so sorry about this. You can come back later to read this part if you want.

When I laid eyes on this recipe for Crispy Salted Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies, I knew I'd have to make them. However, the recipe calls for flaked sea salt. This is not easy to find. I have found fine, crystallized sea salt. I have found flavored sea salt. I have found sea salt grinders. I have not been able to find it flaked, except online. And if you think $8-10 + shipping is a lot for salt, when you will only use two to three flakes per cookie, I would tend to agree with you.

A Crispy (Unsalted) Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookie sounds delicious, too. So, I decided to go ahead and make them anyway, sans flaked sea salt. (Are you tired of me saying, "sea salt," yet? Sea salt. SEA SALT! SEASALTSEASALTSEASALT!!!!!)

Anyway, they aren't that good. Kind of plain, honestly. And I don't know that the FSS (you're welcome) would have saved them. I mean, the people on that site raved about these cookies, so maybe it would have... Maybe that was just what these cookies needed to pull them out of Blahland and into MmMmMM!land. But now that I've had them this way, it's out of my system, and I'm not so anxious to try it again.

Trick or Treat

The whole Fainting at the Secret Restaurant thing left a bunch of people asking me if I am pregnant. I'm not sure why... I've never heard of pregnant women going around fainting all over the place, but that's the first question everyone had anyway, so I guess I'm just out of the loop. Anyway, then there was this whole slip-up where I missed a couple days of the Pill, and so I took the missed ones all in one day along with the one I was supposed to take (not the right thing to do), and that messed up my period, and then I started thinking, Holy shit, what if I really AM pregnant?! But I'm not, so we can all relieve a big sigh of relief there!

Anyway, cheers to Alex for not freaking out when I informed him of the possibility. I mean, he was freaked out, but he didn't freak out. If you can see the difference.

Also, Marley wants to say hi.


I'm not sure why her eyes look all freaky in this picture... I think they don't if you click to enlarge, if you're interested.

I don't remember Coconut being this clumsy and awkward. Maybe because she was never going to get that big, her limbs were more in proportion? Marley has long legs and big paws and she leaps around all the time slamming into walls and furniture and falling so that all four legs are sprawled out. I can't get her to learn "down" because she gets so excited about food that every time I try to lower the treat to the ground, she stands up and jumps around instead of her butt sliding backwards. She doesn't respond to sound aversion like Coconut does, so the whole Shake-a-Can-of-Pennies thing doesn't do anything more than scare the dog who isn't doing anything wrong. She doesn't love the spray bottle, but again, as soon as I take it out, Coconut runs away, tail between the legs, and hides behind a chair. Something else that Coconut is, and Marley is not: a complete sissy.