Meet Turbo

You know, I just got one person in this house potty-trained, and I found myself feeling a little empty inside. I was up all night fretting about how much less time I was able to spend physically toting another being's poop about. Really, I just felt I couldn't go on unless I found an additional creature whose poop I needed to personally handle on a daily basis. Meet Turbo:

Um, yeah, that's my fuggin' basset hound.

I should start at the beginning. The beginning was in approximately 1995 when I came into possession of a cardboard coin-type thing about the size of a 50 cent piece with a picture of a basset hound on it. It said the name "Jeb" underneath it. At that moment, I decided that a) I should start calling my high school boyfriend "Jeb," which I did for several years, and b) I wanted a basset hound.

As time marched on and I met Big K, we did what young lovebirds do and started talking about the trips we'd take (check), the well-muscled children we'd have (check), and the dog we'd have (freshly inked check). He agreed he was down with the hound. And he agreed with my choice of ironic dog name, Turbo. (It was either a lazy-faced hound named Turbo or some wee dog named Jumbo. Those were the only options in my dog plans.)

Now, after the well-muscled children came along, my desire to become a dog owner dampened considerably. As you might imagine. It would be fair to say that in recent years I'd rather have been shot than become a dog owner. And really, friends, I'm going to tell you something. I don't really love dogs. I am definitely a cat person. I like to look at dogs, I like to talk to dogs on the street, I like to claim I know the names of various dogs when I'm really just making it up, but I do not love dogs. We had a really jumpy one when I was a little kid and I think it sort of warped me. And really, I don't like filth or stink and dogs seem inextricably tied to those two items of business. I'm a cat person. I just am. But the idea of a Turbo...some day a Turbo...that was my one potential dog plan. I've been friends with a local basset hound named Otis for a few years now (I don't even know his owners' names, but I socialize with the dog quite a lot when I'm out prowling around The Woods with my double stroller). Otis sort of kept the dream alive for me. The far-fetched dream of Turbo.

All right. So fast forward to a few weeks ago, when we had some friends over for dinner one random Sunday. Out of the blue, they said to us, "Do you want a dog?" And we, resoundingly and in unison, replied that we'd rather take a taser to the naughty bits than get a dog. But then I said, "Unless he's a basset hound." And our friends said, "He is a basset hound." And I said to Big K, "We could name him Turbo." And our friends said, "HIS NAME IS TURBO." Then I started freaking out and Big K got out the taser and shot himself in the beans and then said, "Well, we'll have to think about it." Any crack in Big K's steely exterior, such as that statement, is basically akin to jumping up and down in acquiescence.

We (I) then spent a few weeks having panic attacks about whether or not this was the right decision, blah, blah, blah. I talked to the owner, got my questions answered, etc. Basically, the dog had been in an outdoor kennel 24 hours a day since puppyhood without nearly enough attention. He barked a fair amount and the neighbor got pissed. (And I heard a rumor that the owner's girlfriend has an unexpected 3rd bun in the oven and that may have been that straw that broke her personal barking dog ownership back.) The dog has been climbed upon by the family's two kids, roughly the same age as ours, and is very jovial about the whole business. He's a real nice dog. And that was about it.

So we made a date to meet the dog at a ballpark where his owner (Fuzzy is his name, because of course I got a dog from a guy named Fuzzy) plays ball. We walked up. I saw the dog. I crumpled onto the ground and began seizing, because I knew I was screwed. And then the Pig ambled over and made friends, best friends, with Turbo. At one point, Turbo sauntered over to a picnic table, put his paws on the bench, stood up, and casually sniffed at a spectator's hot dog. Pig followed Turbo, pulled up on the bench, put his hand upon Turbo's paw, and then the two of them mutually sniffed the hot dog. And that pretty much sealed the deal. Pig needed a dog. It was just so obvious to us. A boy needs a dog.

So last night we picked him up. We brought him home, had him pee in the yard, hosed him off, and hauled him in the house. The cats gave a hearty "WTF?" but were reasonable, and that idiot Growler was nose-to-nose with Turbs within about 7 minutes. Big Chuck remains the most pissed, occasionally hissing but improving steadily, and Joey is less pissed than I thought she'd be. All in all, Turbo was the most frightened about their meeting. He hid from them. I wanted to mention that he is a fairly large dog and should not be afraid of some mere felines, but instead I just acted casual. I didn't want to give him a complex right off the bat.

My sister has been around a bit, and she decided to spend the night here to help ease the transition. She is a raging dog-hater whose boyfriend has declared he will be getting a chocolate lab (her least favorite dog), but that she can name it if that helps ease her "reservations" about dog ownership. She plans to name it "Resentment" and call it "Rezzie" for short, and has mentioned antifreeze poisoning on more than one occasion. However, within 5 minutes she was snuggling with Turbo and spouting off nuggets of canine wisdom like she's the fuggin' dog whisperer. I'm not kidding. I was doing my standard overthinking, "What do I do when X happens?" and Hode was just very calmly responding like some kind of expert dog behaviorist. She also referenced getting a she-hound and naming it "Turbinato Sugar." Hode is just like that.

So this morning, the kids got up, and we brought them downstairs and Phook came in the living room and excitedly said, "Turbo's here!" And then the Pig went batshit with glee and reunited with his hotdog-sniffing buddy. It went beautifully. And this damned hound apparently remembered being potty-trained as a puppy, because he has had no accidents and seems rather inclined to just drop his deuces and mark his territory out of doors. He likes to go outside and take walks at a spritely little canter, and has yet to do anything dickheaded. I think he's a gem.

Of course, he stinks like hell and my house is already covered in fur. There is also occasional drool and I don't know what else excreting from him. He's a hound. And he's in my living room. Stinking. And I'm pretty sure I am okay with that. Which is weird. I really like saying, "Look, there's my hound." Or, "Hey, there's a hound over there!" And other sentences that include the word hound. Apparently I took advantage of this new vocal tic enough today to pass it onto my daughter in less than one business day, because as I was taking pictures of him this afternoon, she came over to my camera and said, "Let me see the hound!" and then when I showed her the photo display she said, "Dere's the hound." So, yeah, Phook's even onboard with hound references, which is nice.

So, my biggest concern at this point is leaving him. I don't think he'll wreck shop in the house or have pottying troubles, but I am a bit worried about him getting scared and barking. He is following me very closely at all times and I can tell he's just nervous and has been left alone too much. So I'm not sure how he'll do when I leave him. If you have any recommendations on getting a dog used to being left home alone when he's not inclined to enjoy it, please let me know. I need houndvice.

Now, let's enjoy some houndcam. First, let's look at Big K enjoying the hound last night. I must admit that second only to Pig's enjoyment of the hound is Big K's enjoyment. Big K had dogs growing up and seems very at ease with the creatures. And frankly, Big K deals with an immense amount of stress and pressure, always but particularly since his promotion. It is extraordinarily difficult for him to relax and get into a mode where he can shrug off the work shit and just enjoy things, and seeing him with the hound makes me think that perhaps Turbo might have the power to unleash a more carefree Big K, which is something I am always praying for, for everyone's sake. I captured a moment of it here I think:

And here we have Mr. Pig walking about in the presence of his new hound in this morning's sun. Did you folks catch the verb there? Yeah, my Pigster has mastered bipedery. Check it out:

But really, why would you take casual laps around your hound if you could dive over the top of your hound?

And when that tires you out, you can use your hound for a chaise lounge and just do a little chillaxing and thumb-sucking before you gray out for your morning nap:

And here we have a quick shot of Growler the tool meeting the hound (you have to look hard to see the hound in this photo):

And, finally, since I didn't get a great Phook v. Hound shot, let's just enjoy a cute one of her yelling like her crazy mother:

So there you have it. We have a hound. His name is Turbo. He is smelly and lovely. Just as with the Pig (also smelly and lovely), I spent so much time freaking out about how he could possibly fit into our already full home, but now that he's here I realize there had been an empty spot all along. Aw, Turby, welcome home.

Check out my new spaceship!

Yo, yo, yo, yo....check this out!!! I got something new. Something brand new. Something brand new and awesome. Something...life changing. No, no, no, I didn't let some random dude with tattooing aspirations cut loose on my forehead after I got a little crazy with the jello shots. No, friends. But something almost as wild, reckless, and off the chain. Yeah, I got a new washer and dryer.

Wait, what? Did I just hear the collective steam hiss out of my readership, after I made it sound like something cool had happened and then it turned out to be something really lame..the very epitome of lameness...an announcement regarding the appliance I use to launder Big K's jockey shorts? Well, let me tell you, ya suckers. THIS IS COOL.

Let's discuss.

First off, I have a pretty huge appliance boner. For example, my sister got me an immersion blender for my birthday last year, and that was pretty much the most awesome thing she could have come up with. For fun, let's just enjoy a picture of her putting the little lady to use while looking a bit like a psycho, since I happen to have one on hand:

Okay, so, appliances. I just like shiny things with buttons that enhance my already raging domesticity. In the small appliance department, I've got to admit that I have some pretty pimped out equipment. I've asked for KitchenAid mixer attachments pretty much every holiday for about 6 years, and it's working pretty well because I think the lady who enters product registration card information for them is probably able to enter my data from memory. (Granted, I don't have the attachment that allows you to link your own sausage, but since Hode insists she wants to get into charcuterie and I do have a birthday coming up, it will probably happen.) But anyhow, the major appliances, not so much. We have an okay fridge which we bought solely because it was short enough to fit under a weird cabinet in our house. We have an okay electric stove that came with the house. We have no dishwasher other than the sad, shriveled stumps at the end of my arms. (Go ahead and process that for a minute, ye fellow members of the sippy cup fan club. Shit.) And then there was our washer and dryer.

Okay, so we bought the washer and dryer from my parents several years ago when they went to a stackable set. They had had the set for several years themselves. Run-of-the-mill top loading washer with 3 water temperature settings - worked fine and I conned some dude out of $75 for it today after Big K and I wheeled the thing out into the front yard on Phook's wagon with hand-penned signage that included the elegant phrase "inquire within." (We thought that was hilarious.) But the dryer. Oh shit, the dryer. The dryer started going to hell 45 minutes after we hooked it up. We already once paid way too much money to have the motor replaced, and for the 2 years since then, excepting the first 2 weeks after the repairman left, it's taken an hour and a half to dry a load of clothes. And that's a good day - she's a temperamental old broad. I don't remember when the moisture sensor thing in it even worked...only the time dry has been operational for a good long time. And then a few months ago it started shrieking when I started it up. My dad came over and diagnosed it with something I've since blacked out, I paid a little money for a part he replaced for me, and then it was back to its standard lackadaisical--albeit quiet--performance. When it started screeching again a couple weeks ago, I got out a baseball bat and went all Office Space on that thing. (PC LOAD LETTER.) No, I didn't really do that. I just kept adding another hour onto that load of towels in the hopes that they'd dry before they developed black mold.

But then Big K came home, and I got out a hacksaw and started to dismember myself in front of him, and I said, "Every minute you delay in authorizing me to drop an obscene amount of money on new laundry appliances, I get a little closer to not being able to wash the mountain of dishes you create every day." And he said, "Go ahead, honey." Or something like that. It was actually a more peaceful transaction than that but I'm sure it included some unnecessary threats on my part, since that's how I roll. If I can invoke a reference to a sharp object and my eye, it's going to happen. But, yeah.

So I went online and read a shitload of reviews and found a vendor offering 18 months no interest financing and I pulled the trigger and spent roughly the equivalent of the national deficit on a new washer and dryer. Because you know I was getting a high efficiency washer while I was at it. Just like that. I bought a hundred trillion dollars worth of laundering technology while sitting in the very chair I'm blogging at you from right now. How modern of me. (My mother was horrified.)

I'm tempted to launch into a very long-winded justification of this purchase right now. For some reason I feel like I'm financially accountable to the internet, but upon further reflection, that's kind of dumb. We're gonna save an assload by not running a dryer around the clock and not dumping an entire lake into the laundry tub 14 times per day. We can afford the payment. And that's good enough for me, so it'd better be good enough for you. And really, I have a huge appliance boner (did I mention that?), so money was no object.

I'm gonna tell you what I got, dudes. The Electrolux. Dudes. Dudes. Dudes. I mean, the name sounds kinda fancy so it's gotta be, right? I mean, Kelly Ripa zooming around looking distressingly fit while hawking the shit on tv...I couldn't go wrong. In all seriousness, I have never read such glowing product reviews as this stuff got. It was all e-tears and gushing love poems and just utter blathering nonsense. So I was into it. Now, I didn't get the tippity top of the line and I didn't get the pedestals to raise them up to a more convenient height (only because we were about an inch shy of enough height because of a shelf) and I didn't spring for the kelly green (only because it wouldn't match my current kitchen/laundry area or my half-baked plans for my future dream kitchen/laundry). But still. This shit is F-A-N-C-Y.

And let me tell you, I deal with lot of human leakage. You know, your standard daily leakage. Someone is sick leakage. And "let's go to the hospital" leakage. Pretty much everyone that lives here poops on themselves on occasion. Really, I need the fancy. But dudes, I also wanted the fancy. And now the fancy is in my ghetto unfabulous laundry room. Here, the Pig will show you:

Dude, the stuff chimes to life at the touch of a button and a little screen says "Welcome" to me. That's the most sophisticated message I receive all day sometimes. There are all sorts of laundering options available to deal with my family's leaked-upon clothing. There's even a "sanitize" option that like boils the shit or something when somebody gets into some tainted potato salad and spends a couple days wrecking gastrointestinal shop. I can customize this and personalize that and pause the cycle and add garments and lock the controls so little naughty people can't go accidentally launching my spaceship. It squirts like a teaspoon of water on the clothes and then spins them until they're practically as dry as my pathetic dishpan hands and then it kindly notifies me that the magic has happened with a friendly little chime that takes the sting right out of the fact that I am doing a chore. And there are little greenie options within the greenmobile such as the ability to lower the water temp a couple degrees for each cycle or add an extra spin to reduce drying time and a lot of other ways to help me do penance for the fact that my former dryer is the reason behind every single sunburn that the human race has suffered for the past 5 years. And then the dryer has magical tools and is also really nice to me and--get this--includes a stationary drying rack. So what I am telling you is that rather than setting a sweater out on a towel for my ill-mannered cats to bathe themselves upon for 3 days (decidedly undoing the fact that I laundered the stupid thing in the first place), I will be setting my sweater on a rack in my spaceship and gingerly removing it shortly thereafter, only to find it dry, intact, and unsullied. Dude.

I don't know. Maybe you people have demanding jobs that pay you money. Or lives. Or interests other than the removal of spit-up stains. That being the case, you're reading this post and finding that you now have definitive proof that aliens have invaded and are living amongst humans on Earth. (Perhaps those spaceship references aren't just my clever wit.) But at this juncture, friends, I have to tell you that the unending hell of being a laundress is just a hugeass part of my life, my day, my labor. I do so much laundry and I do not like it. So now that the Electrolux has landed, I feel like a social worker who hates paperwork and just got a secretary. (Oddly, that scenario also recently played out in the K House.) I guess what I'm saying is that this is a big deal and I'm really excited. The night they arrived, I sat on the floor in front of the washer and just allowed myself to enter a pleasing trance as I watched that laundry spin. I received total consciousness of the homemaker variety. This is the stuff dreams are made of.

Can you people even imagine how I would react if I ever got a dishwasher?

The sort of thing that happens here

I've been meaning to mention this, but I'm just getting around to it now. Sorry. (Not that you knew I was holding out on you, but whatever.) So one day a couple weeks ago, Phook started to seriously dismantle our toy room. (It was ages ago, in fact, in that Phook is wearing a dipe in this shot and Phook, let me remind you all with a very large smile on my face, no longer wears dipes.) Anyhow, it's not that she doesn't wreck shop in there when playing on a regular basis, but this was different. She was purposefully removing every single toy from the shiteous old bookcases where a good portion of her toys normally roost, and chucking them into a pile. I believe I was assisting Pig with his breakfasting when I head the cacophony. I looked in the room and saw this scene:

(Don't you find the label on the storage basket in the lower lefthand corner absurdly appropriate?) So anyhow, I looked in there, I saw that a hurricane had occurred. I told her it was a nice mess and that she'd have to pick it up at some point, and then I went back to attending to the Pig. Big K was showering for work or something when this went down, so when he became available I told him there was some amusement for him to check out in the toy room. He did. He looked in just in time to witness absolute hilarity. Phook reached into the mountain of plastic shite that no child should ever be able to amass in a mere 32 months of life and pulled out the item she was apparently desperate to find. She grabbed it, looked up at Big K, and very casually but with no shortage of surprise, declared, "Oh, here's pink bahnkie!"

Maybe you had to be there. Probably. But dudes, it was hilarious. As if pink bahnkie had been hiding behind the Happy Meal My Little Pony toy she hasn't touched in 7 months. As if pink bahnkie had been hiding underneath a miniature Elmo Easter basket. As if pink bahnkie had been anywhere other than attached to her body as it always is. She declared with sincerity that she found what it was she had been looking for...apparently a difficult task given that she had to clear two complete bookcases stuffed with toys in order to complete it. Funny shiz.

So this mess persisted for awhile that day, and I decided we should just embrace the disorder and play in it. At one point mid-morning, I threw Pig in the pile. I also threw some Cheerios in the pile to keep the Pig extra happy. (And you should already know about how Cheerios function in my home.) So Pig was rabble-rousing about in a heap of brightly colored objects that were busy giving him lead poisoning when I noticed something looked funny about his foot. Specifically, he had grown a sixth toe. Not one to have a problem with innocuous physical deformities (I've always wanted a tail, you know), I was kind of excited. But as it turned out, the sixth toe he had miraculously sprouted turned out to be a Cheerio. You can see how I might have been confused:

Now I laughed really hard about this. I made a scene, actually. I got Phook in on the game and we all had a hearty chuckle at Pig's sixth toe. Really, this is the kind of shit that keeps me going some days. Phook definitely knew that the Cheerio-toe had pleased me. The reason I know this with absolute certainty is that approximately 7 hours after the initial amusement broke out, she came out into the kitchen to show me something "weewy funny." It was this:

How awesome is that? Very awesome, if you ask me.

Those kids, man. They're some kind of rad.

Okay, so I'm feeling vaguely self-conscious about this post, like you are all going to read it and think, "Woman, what are you on? That is not remotely funny." Well, I have an answer for that question too. Valium, friends, valium. I know, I know. But I've sucked helium out of the valium balloon or valium out of the helium balloon and the result is this post.

I should explain. Friends, my neck is freaking destroyed with muscle strain right now. I have a history of intermittent (and sometimes crippling) neck pain stemming from the car accident I had years ago that also blew up my low back. So I've had a few severe flare-ups since I started toting around a really robust baby. I'm mid-flare right now. I believe the word is actually conflagration. To make a long story short(er), I have long had a prescription for a muscle relaxer, but it puts me in a coma, so I can only take it at night...and even then I wake up the next day feeling like a trucker who has been on the interstate fudging his log books for 2 days. So I called my doctor today in a state of desperation - you know, not being able to turn my head at all in either direction and causing my husband to stay home from work to wipe butts because the task was beyond my capabilities - and she called back and prescribed valium, saying it is sometimes used to treat muscle spasms and that some people have less drowsiness with it than with my regular prescription. I was directed to take half a pill of the smallest dose they make. I did. An hour later, you could have landed an aircraft on my garage roof and I would have casually asked the passengers if they liked my geraniums after they deplaned. Granted, I didn't want to pass out, which was nice. But I did find that I was not exactly cogent. I can see why people enjoy taking valium when they do not enjoy what is really going on around them.

So that's where I'm at. I have no range of motion in my neck, I'm somewhat stoned, and I'm really excited about the new issue of Newsweek I just received, since its cover seems to indicate that it includes information that might help me solve the mystery of Oprah, which is perhaps the most burning question in my life. Also, the Pig is freestyle standing and I predict that his first step will occur on Thursday. I'll keep you posted.

XO,
Big W