Suzy Says

Of all the problems I anticipated having while Mom’s dog was our non-paying holiday guest, the one that really is one is not one I even imagined (and how’s that for a convoluted sentence?).

I knew the endless walking in the endless rain would be an endless pain in the ass, and so it was. I knew that picking up dog poo from the rain-soaked street would also not be my favorite activity ever. I expected that the whiny loser who lives downstairs from us would bitch about her presence (he did; I apologized). I expected that she would scare passers-by and/or get into it with other dogs, and that also happened, though not to a lawsuit extent.

I was mostly worried that she would harass and even hurt our cats, not because she’s bad or mean, but because she is woefully untrained. I discovered that Mom’s approach to dogs is pretty much the same as it was to her kids: either yelling at you or hugging you, for no known reason and no possible prediction of which you’ll get. So you end up with someone who is, uh, challenging to live with (just ask John).

Taking all this into account, we decided that the best thing was to shut the cats in the bedroom while we were at work, giving the guests free reign. They all seemed to be getting along pretty well on the weekends when we were there to observe and police if necessary, so we decided to leave the bedroom door open while we were out for a couple of hours on New Year’s Day.

Big, as Ah-nuld would say, mistake.

We got home to discover the afore-mentioned and completely unanticipated problem. All cats were present and accounted for and unchewed, but the dog had chewed a big hole in the custom-made fabric blind in the bedroom, the one we had to get after the whiny loser downstairs “trimmed” the tree outside said bedroom window so that no fewer than seven windows had a stunning and unobstructed view into our bedroom. I’m shameless, but not that shameless, so we got one of those blinds that lower from the top, preserving our modesty while allowing us to enjoy what remained of the tree.

But now, there’s a huge peephole in the blind, which will have to be replaced ASAP. To be fair, we were aware that the dog had a penchant for blind-chewing, given that she had chewed the metal blinds in the living room the first week she was here. But those came with the apartment and I’m less worried about people looking into our living room than our bedroom, oddly enough. I figured I could just sell the twisted living room blinds on eBay as a sculpture by a hot young Southern California artist (which is sort of true) and see how much I could get for them.

Suzy’s new mantra: only ten days left. Only ten days left.