Wimsey's Blog: Diary of a Manhattan Bloodhound #304

Entry #304

May 10, 2013

Hello Everyone, it’s me, Wimsey, coming to you from Manhattan’s Upper West Side where the parks have been packed in spite of the somewhat chilly spring that we are having.  And whereas this puts a damper of the number of water bottles that people are carrying and that I am stealing, it is still preferable to the hot weather that is to come and to the commencement of my dodging Hound sun avoidance walking techniques.

 

It’s been a quiet week around here so this will be a short post.  The most exciting thing that happened is that I have a fancy new Hurtta raincoat that both my human Maria and her friend Elizabeth managed to find fault with anyway.  They get no arguments from me—I am the antithesis of a clothes Hound—but this is the third raincoat that I possess, all with different types of issues, other than them being raincoats which is the primary issue for me.  But I do enjoy the sight of my wardrobe taking up an increasing number of pegs on the outwear wall and squishing Maria’s clothes into the corner.  Kind of like what I do to her life.

 

Well my spring obsession with the Boat Basin Café is in full swing and there are many days when I have insisted on visiting it twice.  For those of you who 1) don’t live in NY and 2) don’t live on the Upper West Side and 3) see no point in eating at an outdoor venue on the Hudson where at any moment your meal is liable to be snatched (or drooled upon) by one of the many canines who legally frequent the place, let me enlighten you as to why the Boat Basin is a highly desirable destination:

Things to do at the Boat Basin Café

Try to pee on all the potted plants

Try to pee on all the columns

Lie down and refuse to move until someone feeds you something

Lie down and refuse to move until one of your humans buys a beer and chugs it so that you can play with the plastic container

Take an olfactory survey of what everyone is eating

Bay at the other dogs

Sit on the stone bench and get scratched by patrons who love giant, slavering Hounds

Sit on the stone bench and terrorize patrons who are afraid of giant, slavering Hounds 

Trip the waiters on their way to deliver platters of burgers to the hungry diners

Sniff all the patrons hanging out at the bar and encourage snack sharing and ear scratching

Make people scream by slinging slobber on them (this is especially effective in the summer when ladies have lots of exposed skin)

Make women scream by investigating what is under their skirts with a wet, cold nose

Stretch out the wide way on the route from the bar to the terrace so that everyone has to step over you

Insist on it taking two humans to haul you out of there

The only negative thing about the Boat Basin Café is that I am actually permitted to be there.  Generally it is more enjoyable to be where I am not supposed to be and where no one wants me to be.  Especially my humans.

 

Well let’s see, in other news I have come over all itchy so I was unceremoniously plunked into the bathtub last night for a double wash medicated shampoo.  The directions require that the shampoo be left on the unfortunate canine for two 10-minute sessions which meant that the shampoo required two unfortunate humans to keep me in the tub for two 10 minute sessions.  This entailed massaging me and feeding me turkey in an unsuccessful attempt to make me forget that I am standing in a bathtub covered in medicated shampoo.  It also entailed checking the cell phone with increasing frequency hoping to move the digits along quicker (did I mention that my humans have to have a cell phone in the bathroom because I once locked them in?).  But at least Elizabeth had the decency to keep unplugging the hair trap so I didn’t have any of my Poseidon Adventure moments that make my bath time so exciting.

 

And of course, this being shedding season all that massaging had the effect of transforming Elizabeth’s white tiled bathroom (the ladies use hers because it is bigger) into a black and tan tiled hairy cave.  It required extra -strength cocktails to recover from this one, but a lovely meal was prepared for me and I managed to coax some subsequent pizza out of the jaws of my humans and into my receptive and capacious maw.  The relief of the bath being over, assisted by the application of adult beverages made my humans more than usually generous. 

 

And because Maria was having a repair man come over in in the morning and my presence was deemed inimical to the process or repairing anything, I got to spend the night with Elizabeth, which is always one of my favorite things to do and one of her least favorite things for me to do.  The amount of mess that I can create in a short space of time is legendary.  We will say nothing of the state of the bathroom but turn our attention instead to the huge, sticky glob of slobber mixed with some miscellaneous substance with which my slobber is frequently imbued that now decorates the mid section of her large flat screen TV.  Also her walls and her ceilings.  The floors are littered with stray bits of kibble, cookie crumbs and sharp pieces of the bone and connective tissue of a large ostrich leg.  And of course hair.  A lot of hair. And I hadn’t even been there 24 hours!  I also woke Elizabeth up from a deep, Ambien induced sleep at 4am by loudly flapping my ears—ear flapping it is a crucial element in my nap repositioning ritual-- and then an hour later as I cruised by her head to make sure that she was still breathing.  I also managed to consume an entire bowl of water during the night and to wipe the results all over her couch.  But she loves me anyway.  Or so she says after enough gin.

And to try to escape the stinky reality of life with a giant (although magnificent) Hound, Elizabeth has been reading those alphabet mysteries by Sue Grafton—A is For Alibi and so forth.  I think that I should have my own alphabet series:

 

Wimsey’s Hound Alphabet Series

A is for awesome

B is for bratty

C is for conniving

D is for devious

E is for entertaining

F is for something unprintable that I hear a lot

G is for gardening

H is for hilarious

I is for imaginative

J is for jumping

K is for kleptomaniac

L is for large and lovable

M is for “mine”

N is for “not yours”

O is for oppositional

P is for pee. A lot of pee

Q is for quiet (not)

R is for relentless

S is for stubborn

T is for turkey

U is for unmanageable

V is for vet bills

W wrinkles

X xtreme towing

Y is for yeasty

Z is for zippy

I think they would make excellent reading and even better eating.

Anyway, I think I will end it there for this week.  Until next time,

 

W is for Waterlogged Wimsey