Love

I was in my office mindlessly flipping cards in an online card game. In the background there was a noise that I was only marginally conscious of. Thump, thump, thump, scratch, scratch. I continued on until my little dog Bette came bursting into the room like her ass was on fire, a tattered length of toilet paper trailing behind her. If she could say "Wheee!!!", I'm sure that's what I'd have heard. Bette was having a romping good time. In the bathroom the roll of toilet paper had been shredded and the little rug in front of the bathtub was scrunched up into a big ball. After picking up all the bits and pieces of tissue and straightening out the rug, I picked all the wet toilet paper shreds out of Bette's beard. You have to like dogs to put up with this shit. You have to really like them to allow yourself to be relegated to only eight inches of mattress in your king sized bed. It's love when you pick up your dog's shit from the neighbor's yards (most of the time) and dutifully replace peed on puppy pads twice a day.

Yesterday we took Chandler and Bette to the vet for their annual checkup and shots. The doctor gave me a long list of shots that they needed, and suggested a few more that I had never heard of. When it was all done and over with, when both dogs had been stuck and  probed, I got the bill. All I can say is, holy shit! That's a lot of money. Mark researched dog shots after the fact and found out that there is a discount vet service in our town that could have given our dogs all the necessary shots for a fraction of the four hundred and twenty five dollars we  paid. Like I said, I love those little fur-balls, but I'd love them even more at fifty dollars per dog, per year.