Left In

Mommy and the Big Guy are painting the garage. They will not let us out of the house to come and watch. I am very distressed. I am crying softly. I do not know why they won't let us come out.

Earlier, Duncan was outside. He was standing next to the garage. Because he is a happy boy, he was wagging his tail. When he stepped away from the garage he had Behr Apple Crunch in satin on his tail.

Thunder

For a while this afternoon it was a nice day. We all went outside, and Mommy looked to the north and said, "We can get some weeding done yet before it rains." So Mommy started weeding, and Duncan started rolling on his back on the porch, and I started licking the basil that is growing up through the garden fence.

After about 20 minutes, it started to get dark outside. Mommy kept weeding. Then we started to hear thunder. Little drops of rain started to fall. Duncan went in, while I walked over to Mommy to inquire as to why she persisted with her work in the garden. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then I went inside.

Duncan and I just didn't go into the mud room. No. We went all the way into the house. We don't like the thunder.

Soon Mommy came in and it really started to thunder. There was lightening, too. The sky got dark, and the lights went out momentarily. Then there was a huge thunder crack.

Mommy was sitting on the sofa. Duncan and I came over to sit close to her.

We all are watching out the front window. The rain is very heavy.

A few minutes ago I barked at the thunder. It answered me back with a loud boom. I was quiet for a few minutes after that.

Vacuum Cleaner

I am not the histrionic dog that Little Dog is. I keep my cool. Except when you have a ball, or that one time when I went to the dog park and refused to leave the water because I was having too much fun, I am a Zen dog. If I were music, I would be Jazz. If I were an alien, I would be a Vulcan. If I were president of the United States, I would be Barack Obama.

But the vacuum cleaner undoes me. I see it come out of the closet and I get tense. I watch it from far away with a nervous look on my face. It comes near me, so move to my safe place between the chair and the ottoman. It cannot respect my personal space any more than it can respect my ears with its high-itched scream. It comes near me again. I move away, quickly, my tail down. I hide in another room, and hope it will go away.

Vacuum Cleaner

I used to bark at the vacuum cleaner. It is a strange and noisy creature. Now I stay as far away from it as possible on my pug perch on the top of the big chair. As it comes nearer to where I am, I keep still and watch it out of the corner of my eye. If I make no sudden moves, maybe it won't see me.

Friend

Friend is my stuffed animal toy that looks like a pug. Friend has had many lives. The first Friend disappeared when I tried to take him on a walk. Other Friends have had their stuffing ripped out and their heads torn off. Friends often disappear out in the yard in the fall and are discovered in the spring, lying in a mud puddle. Friend has a doppelganger who lives at my grandparents' house. However, never in the many incarnations of Friend has Friend met his end in an unfortunate lawnmower accident. That is an honor belonging to Stretchy Dog, a dachshund look-alike toy who, as his name indicates, stretches out when you pull on him.

Today, Friend is lying in the exact, geographical center of the back porch. Both the porch and Friend are wet, as it has been raining. A squirrel crawls slowly toward Friend. From the squirrel's angle, Friend looks like another squirrel; he is roughly the same size as a squirrel, and has similar coloring. The real squirrel crawls closer, sniffing. Crawling is the right word, as the squirrel's knees are bent and its belly is dragging on the surface of the porch. He gets close enough to Friend to determine that Friend is not a dead squirrel. Then he runs away, around Friend, keeping a wide berth.