Dogs Preferred Snacks

About a year ago, I was leaving work and my boss saw the row of pens lined up in the pocket of my book bag.

“That’s a lot of pens,” she said.

“You never know when you’ll need one,” I said. They are my preferred weapon, after all.

I’ve written about my pen fetish before, but it seems River and Grace also like pens, which has caused my supply to dwindle. It seems that even if I catch them in the act, the pen will not survive. It’s just a mere crunch of the jaw and another pen bites the dust.

The other day, I was out picking up poop from the yard (sorry if you don’t like poop stories, but this is a column about dogs, after all). I found a poop with little bits of blue foam in it. I couldn’t figure out what that was, or where it came from. Until I realized all my slippers had lost their insoles. It seems Grace and River like insoles, too.

Bear, our first Great Pyrenees, had a love of paper. We discovered this when a small post-it note pad disappeared. A couple days later there was little bits of yellow paper in the poop in the yard.

A few days after discovering post-it note-decorated poop, Bruce was looking for a dollar bill he’d left on the end table.

I looked at Bear. “Maybe Bear…” I said, letting the sentence drop away.

“I’ll go look for it in the yard,” Bruce said.

“You’re not going to fish a dollar out of his poop,” I said, knowing that, of course, he would.

“It’s a whole dollar,” he said.

“I’m not touching it,” I said.

Bear must have swallowed if fairly whole because Bruce found the dollar in only two pieces. He washed them off, hung them up to dry, and took them in a Ziploc bag to the bank to turn in for a new dollar.

“What did you tell the teller?” I asked.

“I told her I ran it through the wash machine.”

It’s a sign that the man is much cheaper than I am. I wouldn’t have done that for less than $20.00.

Today is April 28^th. It’s been a year since River came to live with us. Here’s what he looked like then.

What an innocent sweetheart.