Last night I woke up around 2:00 a.m. wondering what the heck I was hearing. Upstairs and directly overhead (in my office) there was some stomping around, some pacing, and then some suspicious silence… which usually means one thing specifically: Lucy has peed in my office.
If you’re new here, or if you simply missed it - here’s the thing about Lucy, bless her heart… she’s always had continence issues, in the wake of a disastrous spay operation that did some damage to the muscles that support her bladder. She got unlucky, and so it goes.
It’s really not a big deal. We keep a pee pad lying out both upstairs and downstairs, each with a towel folded on top - and she doesn’t even use them that often, for over the years her bladder and bowel control have improved considerably. (The rescue from which we adopted her used towels rather than pads - as a money-saving effort, I’m sure… but this practice taught Lucy that any textile lying on top of any floor was the right place to do some business.) In short, she’s been batting almost a thousand, for years now.
A largeish, mostly black shepherd/husky mix offers an innocent, flirty side-eye and an assurance that she has been up to exactly zero shenanigans while you weren’t looking.
But the upstairs pee pad is in my office, and our bedroom is directly beneath my office. So I heard her shuffling around up there and thought, “Oh well. She hasn’t done that in a couple of months. No big deal. I’ll handle it in the morning.”
However. The rumbling and shuffling continued long after it typically stops. And it took on a new element: a bizarre dashing thump that ran from one side of the main living level to the other. Back and forth, over and over. Once or twice, I heard the distinctive scramble of Lucy backpedaling, then rallying to jump off the couch.
Awake enough to be curious, I felt around for my glasses and flip-flops, and headed upstairs to see wtf was going on.
(As Greyson has gotten older, I sometimes worry about him at night. Not that I’ve ever had a reason to, necessarily, but a couple of times he’s fallen during the day and needed help getting up. So I kind of keep one ear out for him, just in case.)
At the top of the stairs, I saw three things: (1). Greyson’s snoot on the floor, poking around the doorway (he likes to sleep in the hall, for some reason - and that’s what he’d been doing), (2). Monty, his pupils as big as nickels, panting slightly as if he’d been up to no good, and (3). Lucy, also panting and grinning - then suddenly looking guilty. Lucy then launched into her butt-wiggle of “Nothing to see here, Mom, go back to bed…”
That’s when the smell hit me.
She had, in fact, done a whizz in my office. She’d also taken a giant, soft-serve crap that looked suspiciously like the result of, shall we say, a dietary indiscretion. It was vile. And copious. And entirely on the towel provided, which was great - except that the pee had been deposited…both on the towel, and everywhere else. She’d started at the edge of the towel and I suppose in an effort to avoid her own stink, she’d baptized half the room. (It’s not a very big room.)
It was too much to ignore.
The towel was a loss. It was the middle of the night, I was not at my sharpest, and the smell was overpowering - so I folded up the warm jelly shit in the towel as best I could, took it by the corners, and deposited it on my front porch where I vowed to deal with it in the morning. The rest was a matter of dumping the soaked pee pad in the trash and grabbing every towel within arm’s reach to blot the rest like a mofo, while I silently thanked heaven that I’d sprung for a Ruggable so I could just wash the whole damn thing if I had to. (I didn’t want to. It fills 85% of the room and to wash it, I have to remove all the furniture first… which is only one of the irritating downsides of a Ruggable, but I liked the pattern and they’re pretty cheap, so. Anyway.)
When I was finished, I threw another towel and pee pad on top of the blotting towels, sighed the sigh of someone who feels like she now needs a shower but is too tired to take one, and settled for washing my hands like Lady Macbeth before going back to bed.
As soon as I’d tucked myself back in, the galloping races upstairs started up all over again.
So what I’m saying is, I think Monty and Lucy have figured out how to play together. At least when the lights are out and no one is looking.
A large and mostly black husky/shepherd mix sits about four respectful feet back from a small gray tabby who’s watching birds through the storm door.
So things are coming along, over here. In broad daylight, in front of God and everybody, the dog and cat are pretty chill - and they give one another their space. Maybe they just don’t want a referee, I don’t know - but I do hope they can figure out a better time to go tearing around the house in a wild game of “tag” than oh, say, two in the morning. After pooping all over my office. Please. Come on, guys.
Momma needs her beauty rest.