Max has only once peed indoors and it was in the house of a friend whose came over today with their dog.  While otherwise engaged, that dog peed on the carpet downstairs which was later reported to me by my father.

Me: Did you see him pee?
Dad: Yep.  He lifted his leg next to the chair leg by the carpet and just stared at me as he let lose.

I assume the dog was thinking something like the following:

The game is afoot.

My brother got a new dog creatively named “Rex”.  He is a mix of genetic party favors but appears to have a goodly streak of American Pitbull Terrier in him marked by the a wide smile I would call arrogant (the dog, not my brother).  Rex is young and when he came over our aged Max quickly tired of him.

Me: Can you tell your dog to stop mounting Max?
Ryan: Max started it.
Me: Max can barely make it up stairs let alone make an effective pass and literally screwing the pooch.  Please restrain your dog.
Ryan: You’re just jealous that my dog is better than your dog.
Me: You were the one that picked out Max in the first place.  So, sure, you’re better at picking out dogs than you are.
Ryan: That’s what I thought.

Max and I were invited by a friend to spend a weekend in Ventnor City and Max was initially quite excited to be in my car.  Max very much seems to enjoy going to new places and then pooping at them followed by going home.  He grinned through sliding over the plastic backs of my seats and being stopped on the AC expressway.

On arrival, Max leaped from the car, peed on a neighbor’s flowers and seemed very happy with himself.  He was excited to enter a new house until he found out there were other dogs there and his interest faded quickly.  Moose and Duke were the two dogs already present and between them they clock in at less than a 1/3 of Max’s weight.  Max was unconcerned with this calculus and chose to avoid them or at least tried in one case simply walking through a screen door to make his egress from their company.

As the day wore on, Max encountered some difficulties with the more complicated aspects of where he could and could not pee.  At home, his world is simple.  Thou shalt not pee inside, all other places whether they be the driveway, lawn, forest, flower bed, or vehicle tire are fair game and he was confused by the idea of a porch which was both outside and a place where he shouldn’t pee.  This confusion got to him and he eventually peed outside… on the porch… on my foot… and then other people’s feet… a total of four times.

The final act of the canine comedy of manners involved one of the dogs taking a tiny tinkle inside, followed by Max taking a larger tinkle over that tiny tinkle, followed by another dog remarking that spot, followed by Max proving his herd supremacy and simply flooding the carpet in that area.  I can now recite the directions on how to use Woolite PetSmart Stain release without looking at the bottle.

Horror is rarely the descriptor I use to describe my first emotion when I wake and horror, in this case came from the simple and normally uncontroversial act of looking down.  I had spent the night on some sort of Scandinavian folding bed/chair that probably went under the trade name of Vuddekista which probably came flat-packed in a shrink wrapped box the size of a toaster oven.  Upon this lumber-gami contraption there was a… mattress-esque padding wad that possessed absorptive powers well beyond conventional science (we’ll come back to that) topped with a fleece blanket-let.  During the night I had tossed and turned such that the fleece was now on top of me and my comparatively virgin skin came in contact with the seat pad.  The seat pad had the normal stains of a household trapping such as coffee, a bit of mud, as well as the expanded canonical college stains of vomit and Keystone Light along with what appeared to be a rogue’s gallery of bodily fluids whose investigation may net both a Nobel prize in medicine and literature.  As when one is so angry as to emit silence, I was sufficiently repulsed that the only response I could muster was a very long blink followed by looking at my host and saying “Dylan, I think I have hepatitis”.  He sipped his coffee and shrugged.

I showered aggressively, ate some seasoned pecans, refolded my bed Frankenbed, ate some seasoned pecans and we departed the company of our host who was now down a goodly quantity of seasoned pecans.

[Editor’s Note: I really wanted to include a joke about Hep Chair as a play on Death Bed the Bed that Eats People but couldn’t get it to come together.]

To Oklahoma City.  Slowly.  The I-35 corridor between Austin and Dallas is a 200 mile stretch with a Frontage Rd. that never quite becomes busy but never quite peters out.  There is a pottery stand the size of a used car lot, billboards that haven’t been taken down for developments that never opened, and historical markers of dubious historical value.  Moreso, as a straight, high speed, well-maintained road it is subject to a ridiculous number of accidents per mile.  This time, we lost an hour seemingly because a parade of police cars wished to line the median and introduce two lanes of traffic to the wonder of the shoulder.  This compares to an accident we passed through near Memphis were a lane of traffic was opened and guided literally between two smashed vehicles.  The drive was hot and what I thought was Suzie stretching was really her tiny fingers clawing for cooler air.  As a person, I possess sub-par aerodynamics for such things, but I am working on this.

Once in Choctaw, we met our host Justin and his perpetual copilot Kevin and shortly thereafter two very large, very hair dogs.

Rocky

Rocky

Rocky is a St. Bernard that clocks in at about 190 lbs and was how I thought Justin got to school prior to learning that his family had only had him for two years.  Rocky is also notable for being the first St. Bernard I’d met that wasn’t named “Beethoven” nor did he appear to have a fondness for brandy.  The other dog appeared to be some sort of genetic hybrid designed to simply produce hair.

Massive Dog #1

Other Dog Whose Name Escapes Me

I have a reasonably hairy dog.  One can use a horse brush on Max and pull off enough hair to fill a plastic shopping bag in about 30 minutes of brushing.  This dog was capable of producing a solid cat’s worth of hair simply by rubbing against your extended finger as evidenced by Justin having a dog hair scarf.

Hair Scarf

Hair Scarf

The final pet was Princess the cat who possessed the paramount attributes of the adorable ur-cat: being curious, and being people-friendly.

Cat thinks of murder

He was batting the power brick earlier

Justin works at a science museum and nibbles away at school.  We also met up with Cody, a graphics semi-artsy person who is…. tall and who I picture comes home every day yelling for his dinner while slamming down his briefcase.  I’ve been assured he does no such thing.

Spooner and Princess

Cody made better looking by holding Princess

Kevin is a guy with attributes who I believe does things.  I know him mostly as a sniper in TF2 as well as the first person to respond when I posted that I had a milligram accurate scale that I was giving away.  He probably needed it to mete out tiny amounts of glue to mount decorative tea cozies.

Justin and Kevin

Kevin

We didn’t come to “do” anything and not doing anything proved very entertaining.  We learned that Justin’s wifi password is an MD5 hash of the name of his cat.  We also learned that cat paddling is indeed a real phenomenon.  Finally, I learned that the enjoyment in Cards Against Humanity is very dependent on the group and that Mike Noble knows that “Bees” will always win the trick if I’m the judge.  As the evening wound down, John got hit by a shower head and I passed up on a game of “Toss the Expensive Thing”.

Kyle and I left at 3:40 PM and ground to a halt to the forces of “Rt 1 and the Infinite Backup”.  Playing the local, I tried a convoluted set of back routes to get onto the turnpike via a rarely used on ramp and saw the source of the delay:

Der Accident

Der Accident

This was compounded by having spent more than six seconds behind this person:

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Popemobile circa 1982

Driving was dull, asphalt passing at about 70 MPH on the 65 MPH areas of the turnpike.  After about two hours I noticed that the GPS’s arrival estimate hadn’t changed meaning that the device was programmed to assume we were speeding.  That little bastard.  Kyle started driving an hour or two after the snow started and I remembered that my least favorite form of precipitation is brine.  Every mile we covered was red in tooth and claw salt and topical microfissures with time slowing as our maximum speed dropped to 45 MPH due to the conditions.  Time lapse failed to make the progress seem faster:

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A side effect of tooling along at 45 MPH behind a salt truck was setting  a record of 34 MPG on a single tank.

We arrived in Columbus after midnight and caught Chris and Stephen in their element:

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Chris Lutz, fortified with Vitamin Beard

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Stephen surrounded by the trappings of modern domesticity: Rock Band and SceneIt

Meeting Chris’s dogs was fun in the sense that they had a matter-of-fact view of people which divided our race into either petters or chair-warmers, each having no compunction with stepping on your junk, lungs, or face should you occupying any corner of their domain.

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Daisy, the Junk Stepper

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Emma, the Face Crusher

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Small Dog (yes, that's the dog's damn name), the Underchair Warmer

I want to get the two an acrylic or plexiglass chair so I can see Small Dog in her native element.  Alternatively, maybe an IR-sensitive flipcam would do.

Chris situation seems best described as restless comfort.  I sympathize with his feeling that his job takes care of him but is far from the last step he’ll take.  I look forward to seeing him turn into a preacher’s wife at some time in the future but Stephen’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring could use some polishing.  I consider it a personal triumph that I’ve made no “polishing the organ” joke otherwise but did find it hilarious that he had a collection of nutcrackers.

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A Reminder of the Hazards of Boxer Shorts

Stereotypes either inspire humor or loathing in me and I immediately picked up on Chris’s collection of scrapbooking shears.  He insists they aren’t his but I’m skeptical.

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A Scrapbooker's Armory

I hoped there was some ritual in receiving each new set of sheers may they be egg/dart, sinusoidal, or traditional pinking shears involving defeating another scrapbooker in a scrapbooking duel but that doesn’t appear to be the case.  Or it’s like Fight Club and even if it were the case I could never know.  The day ended at 4 AM after my first trip to a Waffle House which didn’t involve my vehicle being cased and falling a sleep on a hide-away single bed that could have been more comfortably packed with gravel.

We’re dog sitting for a friend of my brothers and said dog Judas has a few quirks.  Our dog Max needs a bit of a lead to catch things thrown at him whereas Judas could pluck a side-armed pistachio from the air.  Judas also has egregiously long claws that make walking for him something akin to secretaries that have to type with their palms because of having 4″ acrylic nails/talons.   He also has a tough time navigating stairs to the point where if he’s at the top and wants to go down he simply barks endlessly.  Today we got a lick of possibly why he does this: he built up such momentum going down that when he tried to brake at the bottom, his paws couldn’t catch (his claws were lifting his paw pads) that he smashed into the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

Engineering!

We’ve installed a doggy crash pad consisting of a bath mat and a pillow and he now ascends and descends stairs with abandon.