In Which My Dog Causes Me to Spend Money

Dogs are great. The upside to owning a dog far exceeds any downsides. From the way the dog so openly shows love for you to the way other people on the street love on your dog randomly... pretty cool.

There are downsides, though. Mainly, that they do not speak English.

If my dog (Ashley) spoke English, I'd have some extra dinero today. Alas, my dog does not speak English.

This started a few weeks ago. I came home from work while Sarah was at the gym. Ashley was sitting under the desk in our den with a full view of the door, awaiting my return. That would be OK, except her crate, which we keep her in for safety reasons when we're out for a bit, is in another room.

At first, we wondered if maybe we just had failed to zipper the crate fully and that Ashley was able to nose through. However, Houdini here had other plans.

We started to use twist-ties to ply the crate's two zippers together. You would think a creature lacking opposable thumbs would be confounded by this. But no... we'd come back in and there was Ashley, hanging out, probably wishing she had the thumbs to order a keg so she and her underage friends could carouse.

Yesterday, we hit a tipping point. I took a luggage lock and put THAT through the holes in the zippers. If the dog had escaped this, it was either going to have to be via chewing through a fabric crate (creepy) or someone physically entering our apartment and letting her out (super-creepy).

Fortunately, in that sense, she opted for option #1. We found her still in the crate, though she had mangled the crate to a point that it was clear we needed a longer term solution.

That solution involved getting the larger metal crate out from storage. However, in a small apartment, friends, the adventure does not end there. See, we had to move a small piece of furniture out of the room to accommodate the new crate. Which also meant eliminating a lamp. So we needed more lighting.

Also, the metal crate makes a racket. Ashley will drop her bone in there and it will make a crashing noise and rattle around and generally not be good for the people sleeping in the bed next to her. A dog bed to cushion such travails was going to be required.

Almost exactly $100 later we had all of that. This dog does nothing to earn her keep. While she can run and get her rope/ball/bone she is woefully unable to deliver my slippers to me. She does no chores. While I toil at work, she sits on the rug and sleeps. And yet... I spend money to make her comfortable. And I wouldn't change that for the world.

Though if she gets creative with the new crate, she may just find her 3-year-old self at obedience school...