Creature Comforts and Malodorous Mayhem

Yesterday was one of those days where the only thing I could think of on the way home from work was climbing straight into bed – so my arrival involved a quick greeting to the happy hound crew (“What? No walk?”) and then a beeline straight for my room. PJ’s, blinds closed, under covers. Ahhhh…..bliss….quiet. Wait...click, click, click went the sound of toenails on tile floor, and a shadow outside the bedroom door. Up, out, take Rory back to the kitchen, reassemble admittedly poorly designed gate/box/chair mechanism to keep Rory from roaming the house unattended. Back to bed. Whine, scrape, click, click, sniff, nudge door… Right, up, out, back to kitchen. Rebuild blockade, add another chair. “Stay!” Yeah, not so much. I finally resorted to the “zones” gadget. Handy little collar warns and then zaps little canine buddy when he comes too close to the white disk thingy placed on top of the blockade (by the way, Seth is watching all of this with great interest, as he is quite content to stay in the kitchen and hog all the blankets to himself). “Oh” says Rory, “you want me to stay in here, okay, I get it now.” Sure he does. Until I go back to bed. There was nothing to be done for it, so I grabbed some dog blankets and invited the dogs to join me in the bedroom. Well NOW they’re happy! And I’m happily anticipating a nice little nap. Just as I’m drifting off, Keelan gets home. I don’t know what it is, but kids absolutely must knock on the bedroom door every five minutes if their mother is in bed. He’s a teenager and we could go all day without more than a few (quality, of course) verbal exchanges, and now he is a veritable fountain of information, insight and probing questions. Fabulous. And the dogs are farting. Well, Rory is anyway. There’s another of life’s mysteries. How is it that Rory and Seth can eat the same food but Rory’s farts are borderline fatal while Seth’s are merely unpleasant? There must be a way to use this to my advantage. The farting, I mean. There is yet another knock at the door. “Release The Noxious Hound Gas!” I yell to nobody in particular, then: “Come in.” Keelan opens the door and is immediately bowled over by the aroma. Funny how fast previously pressing matters can be set aside.