I hate to say this, but I've been too busy packing, scheduling the movers, and picking up great deals on kitchen base cabinets on Craigslist to be seriously wicked this week. I have slacked off in my wickedness to such an extent that I even went to yoga again. (What can I say? You got 5 classes with this Groupon, and whether I actually like yoga or not, by God I paid for those classes!)
Fortunately, my dog is more than happy to take up the slack in the Wickedness department.
Milady (so-named for Milady de Winter of The Three Musketeers renown - an equally beautiful and enchanting femme fatale who is just adept as our dog at covering her tracks and casting the blame upon others whenever she's done something truly appalling) is either unable, or unwilling, to grasp that the change of seasons and the concomitant earlier rising of the sun does not necessarily entail the earlier rising of her owners (or, as she calls us, the servants). In the past week alone, I have been rudely nudged with a wet nose, repeatedly whacked by an impatient paw, loomed at, stood upon, and finally robbed of my blankets. (No...no... Not by my husband. Stop that.)
Darling Mrs. Wumples (which is Milady's other name, when we are fond of her, which is practically always, despite her great wickedness) is also adept at thieving and scrounging when it comes to food. Having been raised by an animal hoarder who had about 40 cats in a small apartment in the projects of the South Bronx, she learned some rather deplorable foraging habits in her youth, some of them involving garbage cans and even, on occasion, toilets. Last week I was at the theater waiting for the curtain to go up when I received the following text from my son:
Toilet clogged. Dog fished everything out & dropped it on floor. Where do you keep the mop?
I only had about a minute to text back that he ought to know by the age of 18 where the mop is kept and if he didn't, then I'd neglected my duty as a parent, and that I was going to put that dog in her crate until her whiskers turned white the second I got home, and -
Luckily for all concerned, that's when the curtain went up, and The Rivals was excellent, so by the time I got home I was in a good mood again and my son had found the mop and That Dog was grinning at me ingratiatingly, her breath slightly worse than usual. (I try to brush her teeth, but whenever she sees the toothbrush, she runs into the kitchen, lies on her back and turns her head to one side so that it's under the the kitchen cabinet and I can't reach her teeth.)
They say that border collies are the most intelligent breed. I. of course, cannot say with any certainty whether this is so. I can say that Milady, who looks as though she is the love child of a border collie who forgot her breeding and ran off with a corgi - who, I believe, must have stood on a bench in order to achieve that mad, sweet coupling - has a truly remarkable vocabulary, being able to distinguish between her Mr. Bill chew toy (who realistically wails "Ohhhh, nooooo!" whenever he falls into her punishing jaws) and Professor Grubbly-Plank, a one-eyed woolly toy sheep we found in the park and named for his extreme state of filthiness before putting him through the washing the machine.
So I don't know whether her latest act of wickedness was in response to our unkind complaints about toilet breath. It's entirely possible. I'm not ruling it out. Nevertheless - I'm just saying that I found it disconcerting to get home Monday at noon and find the bathtub full of little brown paw-prints, the liquid soap dispenser overturned, and the soap-dish that had recently contained the pleasantly-scented bar of hotel soap (souvenir of our last vacation) lying - chipped, forlorn, and empty - in the bathtub.
When I was a little girl, if I forgot myself so far as to say a bad word, the threat was that Mother would wash my mouth out with soap. I am sorry to have to tell you that, in the case of Mrs. Wumples, soap-eating appears to be an amusement, rather than a punishment.
She never had a single ill effect - not even an upset stomach - and her breath has smelt faintly of lavender ever since.
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