Well, as I go into 2013 and take stock of what happened last
year, I want to write a few lines to tell you about Molly. For those of you who
don’t get to read my column regularly, Molly is my soon-to-be one year-old
Labrador dog. Christmas was pretty bleak for Molly this year. Here in the Holst
house, we still subscribe to the old “naughty or nice theory” when it comes to
being rewarded at Christmas. Molly is way on the wrong side of naughty and
nice. You could run the Sherco power plant down in Becker for a couple of days
on Molly’s growing coal pile.
Molly has an affinity for toilet paper. When she finds the
door open to the commode, she will go in there and take a huge bite out of the
toilet paper roll. She doesn’t
unroll it or scatter it around; she just takes a gargantuan bite out of the
side of it. That leaves whoever is
using what is left of the roll, wiping with something that resembles paper
dolls. Needless to say, this makes
for other hygiene problems with your cuticles, and things like that, but we
won’t get into any specifics here.
I buy Molly a lot of bones to chew on as a way to keep her
from eating things, I would rather she didn’t eat, such as my shoes and
furniture. She loves bones when they are new, but as soon as she has them
chewed into a sharp shard that resembles a Cro-Magnon man’s spear tip, she
abandons them—all over the house. In the house, I have to wear engineer boots
with steel soles for leisure shoes, or risk lacerating my feet. I tried picking
the bone pieces up, but apparently she doesn’t like that and goes to great
lengths to reestablish them in my traffic patterns. I drink no water after four
p.m. as trips to the bathroom at night, in the dark, are strongly advised
against.
Eating time has now become somewhat of a hassle for me
because Molly likes to beg for some of my food. Actually, her own food dish,
with actual dog food in it, has a spider web over it. She doesn’t flip my arm
up, or bark, or cry—she’s subtle and just gently lays her head in my lap—and
drools. I am now wearing the bottom half of my fishing wet suit to the table to
prevent having this “just wet your pants” look. She does get to lick the
plates, which does help with the dishwashing, but my plates are losing their
pattern on the bottom because she is quite aggressive with them. I have also
found missing dishes in unusual places, like in the traffic patterns in the
house amongst the bone shards and on the basement steps—the very ones I walk
down, carrying a basket of clothes that I can’t see around.
When my kids were young, there was a kids’ program on
television called “Muttley the Snickering Hound.” You know the old “heh, heh,
heh” laugh. Now I’m not for sure about this—and she might just be panting—but
she has this same sound coming from her jowls every time I injure myself on one
of her carefully-placed booby traps. One other thing I should mention—Molly
likes to lick your ears. Not up and down or sideways. No, she forms her tongue
into a wet corkscrew and tries to get right down to the old ear canal. Water in
my ears used to be a summer swimming thing, but not anymore. On the good side,
no more earwax. What’s that you say? My pants are wet?
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