Oh, you dirty dog.

I've just cleaned up an amazing amount of poop and vomit from a fairly small dog. Lucy Ricardo apparently has the canine flu. Here's the scenario. I was upstairs in the bathroom getting ready to shower when I noticed something darkish on the Persian (from the Iranian WalMart no doubt) rug in the hallway. Closer inspection revealed a somewhat gelatinous anal discharge. haha Which I promptly proceeded to clean and also to track onto two more rugs and the bathroom floor. Three times I thought I had my feet, shoes, and all flooring cleaned, only to find more -- which I promptly further distributed. Oh my! Then just as I was putting all the rags into a plastic bag for the garbage, Lucy vomited a HUGE pile in the laundry room. So I got that cleaned up and thought I was done at last. (You know, don't you, that I wasn't?) Oh good grief! Twice more I stepped in further, as yet undiscovered little piles of poop, back on the original rug. It IS very concealing of stains, which would normally be a good thing. I finally (I fervently hope) got it all cleaned upstairs, then came down and called my friend Jan to tell her the sad saga. We hung up and I got the computer to sit and blog and found ANOTHER vomit pile downstairs. Good grief. That dog is a factory on overtime. Anyway, I am now starting to feel a bit sympathetic.

Of course this reminds me of hilarious stories from childhood. Well, semi-hilarious even from this distance. No one ever vomited on the floor at home. EVER. You had to have a wastebasket or something to puke in by you at all times that there was the slightest possibility of retching. No matter how sick you were, you knew it was your duty to let loose only in approved locations. By order of my mother. She would get so sick cleaning up vomit that we had to call my dad to come home and clean up if the dog -- the only member of the household allowed to vomit on the floor -- had been sick. It was so bad that my mom would make my brother and myself sick, too. I think we would have been willing to clean up, but my mom would make these grimaces and pretty soon, we had to call my dad.

Then there is the memory of my dad saying, "Oh, you dirty dog." He would say this without much emotion, sort of in a low monotone. He'd say it to anything he was working on that didn't cooperate like he thought it should. So screws, lightbulbs, tools, etc. would elicit it. I think he did it instead of really swearing in front of us kids. "Oh, you dirty dog. You dirty, dirty dog." Haha It was such a 1950s behavior. My brother and I would often hang around when he was doing something, if he would tolerate it. He'd use us to fetch whatever he needed. We learned "needlenose pliers" early. That must have been one of his favorites. I can't remember how he described the other things so that we could find them because we didn't know their names.  I think he probably said the pliers "look sort of like scissors" and the screwdriver was "flat on the end with a yellow handle."

Then, as it is with my memories, it goes on from there to a time we were all in the Leslies' playhouse and there was something wrong with the ceiling light fixture. I think it was Jean Leslie -- she was pretty adventurous -- who got up on a ladder to stick something into the socket. I remember someone gave her a hammer I think, while stating that wood wasn't a conductor. Oh, the things I learned and the unorthodox ways I learned them.