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Category Archives: storytime

The Dog Food Bandit

I have a new potential supervillain identity. And it makes for a really good exercise routine too. I am going to be…The Dog Food Bandit.

Think about it. You’re shopping at a big warehouse store and you leave your cart unobtrusively unattended at the side of a display in order to run down a crowded aisle to pick up an item. But when you get back, heavily laden with consumer goods, you find that your cart suspiciously now has a 35lb bag of dog food in it.

Bewildered, you look around for a cart with similar items without the dog food, but there don’t seem to be any unsupervised carts anywhere. You search awhile longer for your cart, but it’s in vain. Since the only logical explanation is that someone else had taken your cart without the dog food, you just unload your item into the cart, park the sack of dog food by a pallet of water, and continue on with your shopping trip, always suspiciously looking around to see if there’s someone else with similar items to yours in their cart.

Your bewilderment and bemusement stay with you for the rest of the day causing you a certain amount of unease. Why would someone steal your cart? What would be the point of such an exercise? That person now has the eggs you spent a great deal of time examining to make sure they matched you exact specifications. That cart thief probably doesn’t even appreciate the time and care you put into selecting the carton of eggs.

Yet…the cart thief seems to have a similar preference for perfect, unblemished eggs. In fact, the carton of eggs looks eerily similar to the one you had picked out earlier. But this definitely was not your cart. You definitely didn’t have a 35lb bag of dog food in your cart.

You give yourself a headache pondering the particulars of the situation.

And off to the side, lurking in the shadows, I rub my hands in glee as I watch you struggle with your predicament. Your day is ruined. And all I had to do was nonchalantly walk around the store with a 35lb of dog food to offload into your cart when you weren’t looking.

In which Yaris executes a plan of her own devising

Yaris is a punk.  We’ve already established this.  But recently, she did something so outrageous that it begs to be documented.

Yaris and Horse recently spent some time at a doggy camp.  They were housed in the same cabin but I knew the cabins only had one large cot in the back, which would be big enough for both dogs to sleep on, but I knew it wouldn’t work because Yaris doesn’t like to share a bed with another dog.  So when I dropped them off at camp, I left her car bed with them so she would have some place familiar to sleep (as I was also pretty sure she would be whiny at night in unfamiliar surroundings).

When I picked them up from camp, I decided that I would have to wash everything they had with them at camp before bringing it back into the house, and I hadn’t had the time or energy to wrestle a dog bed through a wash cycle, so it’s just been sitting the garage.  Yaris still has her blanketed cot in my room, so it’s not like she didn’t have any place to sleep at all.

But sometimes Yaris wants to sleep some place soft, or at least softer than a bunch of blankets on a cot.  Her spare bed is outside in her apartment and I haven’t bothered to bring it into my room.  The only other soft surface to sleep on in my room is Horse’s bed.  So…she hatched a plan to steal Horse’s bed.

The other day, Horse was napping in his bed and I was in bed reading a book, when Yaris came in and enacted her plan.  She started acting really excited.  Horse and I both wanted to know what was so exciting.  I asked Yaris why she was so excited, but she ignored me and continued acting really excited, dancing around the room.  Horse finally got caught up in this; he wanted to be excited about something too.  So he started prancing around my room also being very excited, although I knew he had no idea what was so exciting.  Yaris kept up her whole excited dance routine for another moment or so, and when she judged Horse to be adequately distracted by his prancing about my room being all excited, she dropped the act and made a beeline for his bed and plopped down to take a nap.

…what.

Horse did not notice right away and was still prancing around saying that he was really excited.  But then after a few moments, he realized that Yaris was no longer excited and was in fact taking a nap on his bed.  And then he looked around and he didn’t know what was supposed to be exciting.  And then he was sad and didn’t know what to do.  He looked around my room for a little bit longer and then at Yaris who was napping away and then decided to just lie on the floor, confused.

Seriously, what a punk.

And no, I don’t intervene when she steals his bed in the middle of the day for a nap.  I only intervene at night when we all turn in for the day.  Horse is just going to have to learn to be less gullible.