Everyone Knows It's Wendy

Ever see two locomotives heading toward each other with great speed, and you just know they're going to spectacularly ram into each other with a crash bam pow? That's kind of how tonight's story goes.

Coming from one direction, we have a dog. I have a dog. His name is Milo. Most of you know him. He's adorable, isn't he?

There's this word, though, this word that's been the basis of a running argument Mr M and I have had going for about four months. It pertains to Milo. The word is "sissy."

Mr M calls Milo a sissy. He mainly does this because Milo is, by my estimation, I mean, I wasn't there when he was born, 8 or 9 months old now, and he still doesn't lift his leg to pee. To this I say, I'm not at all embarrassed about it, and neither is Milo. He goes outside and squats like a little girl dog right there in front of God and everybody. It only seems to embarrass Mr M. I've read that dogs who are neutered 6 months and younger may never learn to lift their legs, and that's fine by me.

Apparently Milo is also a sissy because he's a mama's boy. He sits with me, he sits on me, he follows every step I make throughout the house. He doesn't want me to go outside without him. And to this I say, nuts. Not nuts as in it's not true, but nuts as in I'm his person. I'm the person who rescued him from the pound, brought him home, who feeds him and loves him and gives him treats. I ride him around in the car and sing the Milo Song to him. Of course he's a mama's boy, a mama's all he's got!

And of course, Milo will not stand up to Mr M's Alice the cat. He lets Alice walk all over him. He lays down and wags his tail and she curls up in a ball and makes noises not unlike Linda Blair in "The Exorcist," and then she pounces and he walks around wondering why she doesn't see how wonderful he is. And to this I say that although I wish Milo would, just once, bite Alice the cat's entire face off, I know he's such a good-natured dog he'd never do that. He loves everyone. He doesn't growl, snurl up his nose, or even give anyone the cold shoulder.

And so Mr M says Milo is a sissy and I say he's the perfect example of the red-blooded American mutt.

OK. Now in the other direction we have heading, well, a really long story.

Does anyone here remember Walter? Walter appeared in my life a little over three years ago. If you want the whole gruesome story you can read it here (11/10/06), but for reference, Walter was the mouse who showed up in my house, scared the peewater out of me, and sent me into one of those homeownership stories that are just me all over, the day I captured Walter in a no-kill mousetrap and had to drive him somewhere to set him free. A bit of a trying time, that was.

This morning I was getting ready for work. I had to be at work a little early, which for me means on time, and I was right on schedule and feeling quite chipper about it. All that was left for me to do was slap enough makeup on my face to be presentable, and it was off to the grind.

My makeup table is in my spare bedroom, AKA The Beast, the room where I keep everything I don't have any other place for. And now, I'll be perfectly honest here. It gets really messy from time to time, and since right before Christmas it's been a caution. There's barely a place to walk.

And Milo loves this. He loves going into The Beast with me to mill around and sniff, nose at boxes and plastic bags, and see what's there to discover.

And sometimes he'll get out of my eyeline and I'll call to him to come back to me, and he will, and we'll play with a toy or something while I'm making my face presentable, but when he ambled off this morning and I called to him, he didn't come. Instead, he started to whine. Not excitedly, either. Kind of like crying.

I turned to look at him and see if he was stuck or if his leash was wrapped around something and he couldn't move. And when I did, I noticed that as he was crying, he was looking up at the window. And there was an item of some sort between the closed blinds and the window that was making him cry.

Now, I could fib here and make things more interesting, but I won't. Because I have to admit that a mouse was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that little spot at the window. In a way. I kept looking, Milo kept crying, nose right up to the blinds, and after a minute I thought, "I wonder if a mouse has climbed onto my window ledge and died."

And still, I was hoping. I was hoping, oh, I don't know, that a missing glove had materialized there, or my window got a black spot on it suddenly. Anything. I went ahead and finished up the face thing, then warily approached the window. I gingerly lifted one slat of the blinds and saw fur. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

A box. I needed a box. It shouldn't be too horrible, find a box, nudge the corpse into it, and find a disposal place. I looked around and found a shoe box. I gingerly lifted another slat the in the blinds.

And that mouse started running!

Of course, I did what I do at these times. I jumped up and down and screamed. The mouse ran the length of the window ledge and hopped onto the top of my vacuum cleaner and sat. I realized that my shoe box had a hole on each side for easy carrying, so I figured that wasn't really what I needed now that my mouse wasn't a corpse anymore, so I started looking for something else. I was stuck. All that crap in The Beast, and not one thing approaching an airtight container. I turned back around to look at my new boarder, and - it was gone.

So I still have a mouse in the The Beast, or who knows where, actually.

But here's the thing.

While all this was going on, the lifting of blinds, the running of the mouse, the frantic searching for a box, the jumping and screaming, Milo - brave, valiant Milo - was standing behind me, head sticking around behind my leg, whining.

Crash bam pow indeed.

So maybe I do have a sissy dog, and now I also have a mouse. I've named her Wendy. I've decided she's Walter's younger sister and she came looking for him, not realizing he'd been released to greener pastures (beside an abandoned grocery store) three years ago. I've left her a note telling her where I took him, but I have a strange feeling I'm going to be taking her there myself. Soon.

I do still have one of those no-kill mousetraps left, and I guess I'll have to set it up again tonight. I really don't want to deal with it. In fact, the only thing I want to deal with less is having Wendy in my house.

Or having a sissy dog.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Well, the Olympics are winding down, but we still have one more set of medals to give out for acroing. So, tell us why Mr M's car is still in the garage.
- Bronze Medal goes to Michelle (the dishy), with her "Really kaputt? Figures. Ugly guzzler."
- Silver Medal goes to LilyG, with her "Radiator kept fucking up gasoline." (Although her Ralph Kramden one was one word away from the one I personally thought up.)
- And the Gold Medal, endorsement deal with Betland, and face on a box of Wheaties goes to Kellie (with an ie), with her "Rabbit Klepto Filtched Upper Grate."
- Thanks to al who played, you've all done very well!
- Let's all stand and enjoy the anthem from Kellieland.