Dachshund

I Know What You’re Doing, China, and It’s Not Going to Work

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Per my previous post about how much I really adore getting free crap in the mail (even if the sender expects me to go to the trouble of telling all of you about it), a strange phenomenon has occurred: other people have jumped on the “send Lorca free crap” bandwagon. But there’s a catch…none of it works.

Screw you, free crap sender.

I was sent a smartwatch to review, only I’m actually far smarter than this watch. My Dachshund is smarter than this watch, which is an incredible feat considering my Dachshund is actually dumber than the paperweight on my desk. Since the smartwatch doesn’t work, the paperweight is smarter than the watch, too. I swear this is what algebra looks like if you try to apply it to real-world situations.

I told the smartwatch people, “Hey, I’m all for helping out my fellow man, so before I tell the whole internet how stupid your smartwatch is (I didn’t bring up the Dachshund yet), I just want you to know that it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t connect to my phone, it doesn’t alert me to things happening around me, and it doesn’t actually keep time because the hands aren’t really on there that tight.”

They apologized and sent me another one.

It had a human hair stuck to the watch face, underneath the glass. Yes, in one of those places that makes it irretrievable unless you void the warranty by breaking the glass. My OCD and germaphobia kicked in big time on that one.

And it still doesn’t connect to my phone.

Then another company decided they could trump the stupid smartwatch by sending me their “smartband.” Guess what a smartband is? It’s a smartwatch that is too stupid to tell time. Yes, this doohickey has to be worn alongside your watch if you want to know what time it is AND be told all kinds of important things like “your phone is ringing.” Why would I wear a band to tell me my phone is ringing? If I have the ringer turned off on the phone for some reason, then I probably won’t take any immediate action if it starts ringing. Can’t bother people in a movie theater with the ringing of a phone, but I can bother them by having a conversation on that phone?

Oh…and the smartband doesn’t connect to my phone.

But my writer brain has figured out what’s actually going on here. China (yes, the entire country) is mailing me cheap pieces of crap with a sinister plot in mind. Once all the pieces of the puzzle combine in my house, they’re going to morph into a Transformers-type robomonster and begin the first phase of US domination.

Sure…tell me you weren’t already thinking the same thing.

Luckily, all these pieces of crap are dumber than the Dachshund, so even if they do combine and turn into some giant robot, they won’t be able to work the doorknob. We’re all safe.

Don’t Judge…He Really Deserves It

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My husband really is a great guy, even if I sometimes find myself having to repeat those words as a mantra of sorts.I could certainly do worse than to have a husband who goes to work, pays the bills, loves the kids, and at least pretends that he should keep himself in good physical shape.

Sadly, my husband doesn’t read my blog, so he’ll never know those things. While I can freely write them for the entire internet to see, if I were to walk up and tell him how pretty close to great his is, it would just result in him getting to be too big for his britches. Gotta keep ’em humble. And a little bit afraid, but that’s another post.

His major character flaw right now, though, is that he absolutely cannot stand our little dog. His hatred of this poor little animal knows no bounds. I, too, am not this animal’s biggest fan, but (mostly as a reaction to his venom) I am on the brink of painting her nails and carrying the little thing around in a Kenneth Cole handbag.

The dog’s greatest flaw is her constant need to use our entire house as her personal toilet, something that my germaphobe husband cannot live through. (I forgot to mention that he’s a germaphobe…it’s Hill. Air.Eee.Us). Whenever the dog has a tinkle moment (if you carry the dog in a purse, you have to refer to it as tinkling), my husband gets on the floor with eight chemicals and a portable carpet shampooer and begins scrubbing at the spot like Lady MacBeth on crack.

So here’s the fun part: I’ve been going through the house for the past month spilling shot glass-sized puddles of water on the floors. I’ll give you a dollar if you don’t tell him.

It’s absolutely hysterical to see him calmly walk into a room, stop, turn, peer closely at the tell-tale spot on floor, dab it with his toe to see if it’s actually wet, then go positively ape-shit and start gathering his supplies. He drops to the floor cussing under his breath and scrubs violently for about ten minutes.

The best part is, I’ve also been keeping a map of where I’ve done this and I’m rotating out the spots so eventually he will have deep-cleaned the entire floor. The living room carpet should be finished by sometime next week and you can now see your reflection in the kitchen grout.

My dog is neither this smart nor this athletic.

It Doesn’t Cost Much to Adore Me

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I’ve always envisioned coup leader as my ultimate career goal. All the aptitude tests said I’d be good at it. They also coincidentally said I’d be good at being an engineer, but since I’m horrifically stupid at math I think they meant the person who drives the train.

But if I got to take over a country, I’d be so, so good at it. I wouldn’t start out with killing people or making them change their religions and there would be no book burnings except of children’s books that don’t rhyme. I love me a good rhyming picture book.

Obviously, this has not come to pass. But if I ever do get the chance to take over something, even if it’s just a corporation or something in a major stakeholder buyout thing, I’m prepared with my legions of worshipful followers. In the form of one undersized and very stupid dog.

What my dog lacks in physical stature and mental capacity, though—and I mean she doesn’t have the mental capacity to walk into a darkened room without falling down, and falling down for her only means moving about two inches—she more than makes up for in worshipfulness. This dog literally sits outside the bathroom door and waits for me to get finished showering so she can drink the water that’s left in the bottom of the tub. THAT is adoration, people.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and I realize there were a number of famous czars and dictators and emperors who had this kind of effect on people, but those leaders also had to have royal tasters to keep them from being poisoned. How awesome could they have been? Doesn’t every willing-to-die-for-you-subject get negated by every assassination attempt?

I mean, sure, so there’s a servant somewhere who drinks your bath water to prove his loyalty. So what? Good grief, he’s got to be crazy! Your claim to fame is that you surrounded yourself with people who are just psychotic enough to lick your feet, and you BRAGGED about it? Desperate for friends much, are we?

Nope, I’ll take a standoffish cat any day, and I hate cats. But at least you know where you stand with them. They’re not going to stretch their lean bodies out over a mud puddle for you, then run inside and rip holes in the crotch of all your underwear with their claws. They’re going to let you know that you are only around to work the can opener for them. Hmmm. Maybe you could soften them up by drinking their bath water.

I wear a size 11. You could die from alcohol poisoning if you tried drinking champagne out of my shoe.

Keeping You Badger-Free Since 2011

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Those of you who were reading my blog around this time last year probably remember that we finally had our elderly dog put to sleep because she started to smell like the plague. We got a new one, a really great poodle from a poodle rescue center (yes, they specialize now), and the only thing that made him really great was he knew not to get his leash wrapped around mailboxes when we would go for a walk. This Mensan of a dog could look at an object and decide to go around it without me having to drag him by the neck. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. I got a bathrobe and an office chair for Christmas, I’m kind of low maintenance that way.

I didn’t write about it at the time because I was still on the verge of throat punching people, but our great Mensan poodle was stolen back in the fall. I couldn’t very well go tell the poodle rescue people that I managed to lose a dog WHILE I WAS HOME and I needed them to give me another one, so I went to the local regular dog rescue and had to take whatever they had. Unfortunately, they had no poodles, but they did have a Dachshund.

I really should have paid better attention to the fact that they were way too excited about getting this dog a home. They offered to deliver it. Only now in hindsight is that making alarm bells go off. But it didn’t look like any of those wretched things on the Sarah McLaughlin commercials so I thought it would be a good pet for us. Well, that and the fact that this dog was on clearance. I’m a sucker for anything on sale.

This is possibly the stupidest dog alive. Forget learning any commands in human language, I’m not even sure this dog speaks dog. I’ve pulled this tiny animal out of our toilets and trashcans more times than I care to think about, especially when I see it licking my husband’s face. No, wait, that’s actually kind of funny.

The really sad thing about the dog is the fact that it looks like it was made from parts of other dogs. It’s legs are obviously too short because it’s a Dachshund, but it’s back is also too long, it’s head is so big compared to its body that it has trouble keeping its ears off the ground, and it trips on its own horrifically long tail a lot. This thing looks like someone’s idea of a genetic joke. There’s something so galactically wrong with it that I’m not even sure I should be capitalizing the name of its breed.

I knew there had to be a purpose for this breed besides “court jester,” kind of like how retrievers bring things back and collies keep things in a circle, so my brother Googled it for me. Sit down for this one: Dachshunds were bred for their ability to keep badgers away.

If I am ever in danger from a badger attack, say, while waiting in the carpool lane at my kids’ school, all I have to do is whip this stupid thing out of my purse and those badgers will tuck tail and run. I’m envisioning ruffian Vikings going on midnight pillaging runs with Dachshunds strapped firmly to the front of their armor to ward off the unsuspecting town’s badger defenses.

Since obviously the Dachshund can’t actually take on a badger in combat, I think the purpose for the dog was to make the badgers not want to be anywhere in the vicinity. So far the only defense mechanism my dog has in the ongoing struggle against badger attack is this unholy smell that she emits from a special anti-badger gland right on her ass. The vet keeps having to “express” it but I think he’s actually making a commercial-grade badger defense spray out of the foul-smelling ooze that goops out of her. I can already testify that it is effective in keeping one’s family members away, which is reason enough for owning a stupid wiener dog.