Mopping and mopping and mopping.
2006-07-05, 5:32 p.m.

My little tiny sweet baby dog Piper has a new nickname. We do tend to give our dogs lots and lots of nicknames because (1) we like the chaos, and (2) they don�t answer to anything, anyway.

Piper�s new nickname is Squirt. Erm, you may wonder how she got that name. Do you remember a few months ago, when I had to take her in to the vet to get her anal glands expressed because she kept having �anal incidents�? Use big finger quotes when you read that to yourself: < finger quotes > anal incident < / finger quotes >

Well, she had the mother of all anal incidents on Monday night. She was standing in the entryway with me, and Lil Guy was bounding up the front steps with Mrs. Beans close on his heels. Piper was barking at them, and as LG and Beans got closer, I realized that something in Piper�s brain was not firing correctly, because she was barking a very scared � TERRIFIED � bark. Like we were under attack from a very scary teenage boy and his dog.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and she ran, toenails skidding on the slippery floor, wiped out, hit the cabinets in the dining room, barking all the while, and finally realized that these were her family members coming into the house. But it was too late. I remember briefly thinking to myself �How did Piper splash muddy puddle water on the walls?� before I realized what had happened. It was the smell that clued me in.

It culminated in me having to wipe down walls with Clorox wipes, and Lil Guy mopping and mopping and mopping the entryway and part of the dining room. So, uh, I guess we were needing to take Piper back to the vet to get her glands taken care of, but it seems that they are likely empty now.

If I didn�t feel so sorry for her, I would be completely CONSUMED with disgust. But honestly, poor little thing. How terrified must she have been to squirt a foul liquid from her butt? Very, that�s how. Stupid, too, yes. There�s that. But also sad and poor and terrified. And foul.

We had another adventure in power outage last night. We got home about 10:00 in the midst of a hunormous thunderstorm, and the power was out. So no problem, I called the utility folks, and we all just went to bed. I slept angelically for several hours, secure in the knowledge that our utility provider would hook us back up.

Yeah. Well, after I woke up and GOT A CLUE, and spent the rest of the night not sleeping, I got up at 6:00, called the power folks again, and said �What the fuck?� They said that THEIR system shows that our lights were back on, and I replied that MY system begged to differ. Turn out, our house is at the very end of a line. So when the power folks think they have our neighborhood taken care of, the grid is back on, they can�t really tell whether or not our house is restored or not. We�re at the end of a line with a transformer in our yard, and for the utility company to take care of us, one of them has to drive down our road, go to our house, find the pole out there, and check on that breaker thing that flips down when lightning strikes.

I am going to try to get them to give me one of those long pole things that they use to push the breaker back up where it belongs, but I�m not getting my hopes up.

Our power was out for at least 12 hours. We know about the 12 hours, and we don�t know how long it was off before we got home. I have a nagging feeling that I�m going home to a refrigerator full of half-rotten food.

Combine that lovely odor with the lingering smell of dog butt squirt, and the heat from having no A/C for 12 hours, and our house is a very foul place indeed.

Your refrigerador, she runs? Ay, no.