My wife got new furniture the other week, couch, coffee table, and end tables. I only recently felt comfortable enough to remove my thigh, knee, and shin guards while walking around the furniture she bought three years ago, and now I have to suit up again! Different dimensions, different corners; it’s like the boobytraps in the third Indiana Jones movie. I might have to put a cable box in my office, complete with DVR, so I never, ever have to go in the living room. Hey, and maybe a little fridge and tabletop stove.
And to make it worse, now we don’t have a dog couch (love seat) which the dogs were allowed by my wife to sit on. In fact, the long couch is where the dog couch used to be, and where the long couch was is now just a window and bare drapes and a weird tall, long, narrow glass-top thing of a table. I don’t know when or where she got it; it was just suddenly there.
I asked my wife how she was going to train the dogs to stay off the new couch, and she said she didn’t know. I researched canine tasers and doggie prods, but no one makes those, and both would require my presence at all times. Besides, I’m pretty sure they won’t get on the couch when I’m there, but I’m equally sure they will when I’m not. So I need a deterrent for then.
There are animal repellents, but I’ve smelled them leaking through their caps at Exwork, and I won’t use that stench on furniture even as a last resort. I thought I might buy a dozen or so little mouse traps, cover the seats and the tops of the back cushions with those, and teach the dogs that way. But no, I’d forget and sit down. I’ve been snapped on fingers before, but I’ve never had them clamped on my earlobes, eyebrows, nose flaps, and lips, and I don’t want to. And that would be too much trouble setting them up anyway.
While grumbling to myself about change and how I don’t like it, I suddenly envisioned turning my wife’s pets into tree dogs. I could build them a high-rise house in the woods. It would have a sun room, an enclosed area with a small AC, say a 50 BTU (do they make those?) a food room, a growl-and-snap-at-each-other play room, a place where my wife and grandkids can visit them, (have you ever read Go, Dog. Go! By P. D. Eastman? It’ll be something like that, but not on top of the leaves) and a pooch crapper, which will be a hole in the floor with a large PVC pipe under it that connects to our septic tank. My wife will have to teach her dogs how to flush with the paw pedal, but I’m sure there are YouTube videos about that. It would be a lot more work than I ever did for my kids and grandkids, but they never shedded on my furniture or pooped in my yard. That I know of.
But a tree house isn’t going to happen. So I guess I’ll never sit anywhere in the living room but on my recliner, and I’ll Febreze it every time I come home from a store. (My wife has assured me that she will not tolerate my peeing around the chair to mark my territory.) But masking the dog odor won’t really work long term. I need to get a hand-held upholstery cleaner, a wet scrubber-vacuum and thereby unsoil my chair every time I…no, no, that too is too much trouble. Boy, do I really want her dogs to live in backyard trees.
