Wimsey's Blog: Diary of a Manhattan Bloodhound #316

 

Entry #316

August 23, 2013

Hello Everyone, it’s me Wimsey, back at last and manning (or dogging) my usual post on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where August feels more like June which felt more like August.  However, while the rest of the world takes August easy my human Maria and her friend Elizabeth are inundated with professional responsibilities which means that I am inundated with Houndly responsibilities-- principal among them is to make sure that amidst all the busy-ness my needs remain paramount. So bear with my spotty reportage in August.

Let’s see, Maria has to work late pretty much every night in August and when she works really late, I get to stay over with Elizabeth so I can be properly companioned and looked after.  This is always a great deal of fun if for no other reason that I like to pit the gaseous contents of my digestive tract  (I like to sleep with my nether bits pointed at her head) against the sleep inducing powers of Ambien.  When they invent a pill that can keep someone asleep while they are being asphyxiated with Hound gas I want to invest in that company. In the meantime, August is not yet over and there remains every hope that I can hang out with Elizabeth again and force her to cook for me and then disrupt her sleep with the results.

 

Elizabeth, on the other hand, suddenly had two new projects come in at once so she too, is very busy which means that it is my duty to take up as much of her time as possible and to squeak my Hedgie during important telephone call (which by definition are actually not important telephone calls because they are not about me). Part of her time, however, is spent playing around with her new Samsung Galaxy S4 phone that she acquired to keep her Blackberry Z10 company. She is threatening to turn her fax number into an iPhone 6 which means that Maria and I are threatening to enroll her in a 12-step program for gadget and gizmo addiction.  Of course she has been using the new device to take some nifty pictures of me which allows for some degree of mitigation.   And she had a real chuckle when the phone salesman tried to talk her into a hugely expensive screen protector since, expensive or not, it would offer no protection against that which it needs protection against. Namely, me and my copious secretions, both salivary and follicular.

Any ahroo, with my humans being so busy and it being summer, life has been a bit uneventful. Of course this didn’t preclude me from turning a 15 minute vet visit to draw blood for some routine tests into a 2 ½ hour outing owing to my insistence on visiting LUSH, a purveyor of natural handmade cosmetics on the way home.  In the first place the store smells amazing and in the second place it was chock a block with ladies who were eager to admire me and to pet me.  The fact that the store had a consignment of freeze-dried treats, courtesy of the pet shop around the corner, had absolutely nothing to do with it.  LUSH is now on my “tow to” list but it has not yet ascended to the heights of the “tractor to” status enjoyed by the our local JP Morgan Chase bank where the combination of a bowl of large, cheap cookies, the cool tile floor and the AC cranked up into the Arctic range have made visits thereto one of my chief summer obsessions.  And whereas pet shops are used to giant, smelly, drool flinging Hounds (to the extent that any commercial establishment is used to giant, smelly drool flinging Hounds), my appearance at the bank is inevitably greeted with shock and awe.  Consequently, JP Morgan has now become the epicenter of the Wimsey Universe and all locations lead thither. Fortunately, Elizabeth is always in need of an ATM to fund my gelato purchases and to deposit my many insurance checks.

 

And speaking of locations to which I obsessionally tow, I continue to be relentless in my pursuit of visits to the Boat Basin Café. I even managed to crash a private party.  I began drooling all over one guest whose lack of concern initially seemed related to the large glass of vodka that he was drinking until he proudly produced pictures of his dogs at home—2 large Newfoundlands that made me look petite.  Anyway, there are no good pictures of me being surrounded and adored at this party as Elizabeth tends to keep two hands firmly on the leash at these moments, but she did manage to squeeze in one as I was being taken (dragged) away.  Now I visit that section of the Boat Basin at every opportunity to see if that party is still in progress.

And Maria and I have been running into my Frenchie friend Pluto quite a bit in the morning which means that no one in the neighborhood is sleeping much these days owing to my acoustically dynamic greeting style. It also means that Elizabeth and I have been running into neighbors quite a bit who start conversations with “Is this the dog that....” They get no further because Elizabeth always says “yes,” since she pretty much knows that whatever it is, I AM “the dog that....” I have not been able to teach Pluto to bay (he seldom ventures anything beyond vigorous snorting) but I have had greater professorial success with instructing my canine companions on the fine art of standing on one’s head, as demonstrated here. I now have several non-Hound adherents who realize how attention-getting a gesture it is. The other day I was standing on my head for a lovely lady pit bull of whom I am quite fond when she reciprocated much to the amusement of all. But especially me. If all dogs were more like Hounds they would lead much more satisfying lives. Their humans not so much.

Well I know that everyone must have one burning question these days—am I using my new Kuranda bed that my humans purchased for my outdoor napping pleasure in out little yard.  So here’s the skinny (or the wrinkly): yes and no.  The back story is that my humans have started a new tradition—after Elizabeth has finished her volunteer work at the animal shelter on Saturday evenings she appears with a bottle of cold white wine, a container of mixed nuts and an apple and we all repair to the back yard where I demand to be fed a substantial amount of the apple and then make my humans comb through the nuts to feed me the peanuts of which I am inordinately fond.  This last Saturday pizza was also produced and I was lured onto my Kuranda bed (which I had been studiously ignoring since its arrival) and fed some of this pizza. So naturally on Sunday when I felt the urge to munch a slice I got up on the Kuranda and waited. When no pizza was forthcoming I took a nap instead.  My humans were ecstatic and pictures of me napping on the Kuranda were flashed around the world. However, it is best not to count one’s chickens before they’re hatched (especially if there is a Hound around) and I have not used the bed since.

 

Now as you can imagine, my humans get along quite well because the principle mission of both their lives is me.  However, they do disagree from time to time. Lately this involves Maria’s use of the word “spoiled” in reference to me. Elizabeth dislikes this word (probably because she is the one doing the lion’s share of the spoiling) because it implies that something that was once good is no longer so and she doesn’t think that this applies to me. She prefers the word entitled.

How to Determine if your Hound is Entitled

The Hound insists on chewing his crunchy, crumbly ostrich bone at the edge of the futon and then staring at his human to retrieve it for him when he shoves it off. Repeatedly.

After the Hound has had a session with his ostrich bone his human must carefully vacuum up all the sharp pieces that he has distributed throughout the apartment.  The only time that his human feels comfortable depriving him of the ostrich bone is when she is giving him a bully stick.

All furniture is measured carefully before purchase to make sure that it is deep enough to comfortably accommodate the Hound’s expansive posterior.

The Hound’s human has to squeeze herself into the tiny space allotted to her on the bed when the Hound decides to sprawl the wide way.

If the Hound is occupying the entire couch, his human watches TV on the floor.

If the Hound is occupying the entire bed, his human sleeps on the couch.

The Hound is endlessly scratched and petted and told he is a good boy even though he is never a good boy.

The Hound greets his human by exposing his belly for her to rub.

After being leashed up for a walk the Hound climbs onto the couch repeatedly so he can be bribed off of it again.

Hound will not eat cups of gelato or yogurt that are placed on the ground for him—he insists that his human spoon-feed him.

The Hound’s humans routinely carry 4 or 5 different types of snacks for him and the Hound spits them out until he finds the one that he wants.

The Hound’s human is forced to visit the bank when she has no banking business because the Hound likes their cookies.

 

The Hound’s human is forced to visit the Boat Basin Café when she doesn’t want to eat or drink anything because the Hound likes their cookies.

The Hound’s human is forced to visit all the pet shops in the neighborhood when she has nothing to buy because the Hound likes their cookies.

The Hound’s human scours the Internet for products that will interest the Hound when she should be doing other things, like earning a living.

 

The human’s coat is crammed into a corner because the Hound’s wardrobe monopolizes the hallway coat hooks.

The Hound’s water bowl must be refilled after each use because he doesn’t like drool in his water.

The Hound’s human wears a sweater indoors in the summer because the Hound likes the AC turned down low.

 

The Hound’s humans make a trip to the Farmer’s Market and the only things they buy are freeze-dried duck hearts and ostrich strips.

The Hound has his own credit card for all the charges that he likes to run up at the vet’s.

When on a road trip humans must limit the size and amount of baggage that they bring because the Hound’s stuff takes up most of the room in the large SUV that they were forced to rent to accommodate it.

If you have it, the Hound wants it. If the Hound wants it he gets it.

 

Well, those are just a few examples of how to determine if your Hound is entitled.  There are as many other examples of Hound entitlement as there are Hounds.  But no one spoiled us. We come that way.

Before I leave you I would like to reference my last post on the many uses of Hound drool. At the time I only had 8 uses, not a nice round 10.  You will be happy to know that this situation has been remedied. Our friend Bentley contributed  #9--- his humans find drool to be an excellent paint remover. And on the Sunday following the blog post Elizabeth came home from a particularly productive walk to find that her jeans stood up by themselves.  So the #10 use for drool is fabric starch.  And I misspoke when I described drool as neither a liquid nor a solid.  While this is most often the case, I forgot about the drool that fails like a bevy of raindrops at or on my humans’ feet when I desire to be fed something that they are eating. This drool is clearly liquid as evidenced by the large pools that it forms.

Well I think I will leave it there for this week.  I have a busy weekend of being entitled.

Until next time,

Wimsey, an Unspoiled Hound