stole it from istockphoto, but you get the idea

This morning Lloyd woke me just before the alarm went off (which in hindsight was a good thing, since it might have saved his life) with a huge head and paw on the bed.  I gave him a scratch and a pat, and staggered to the shower.  He grudgingly followed me into the bathroom as is his habit.  I’m never sure why he does that, voluntarily spending time in a steamy bathroom when he generally shuns heat as much as possible.  Anyway, I get ready, say goodbye to Nikki and go downstairs to feed the dogs.  Lloyd rumbles along beside me, getting increasingly excited as usual about the prospect of food, or so I thought.  As I turn the corner to go down the basement stairs, strangely Lloyd isn’t right beside me.  Some kind of sixth sense made me stop and listen at the landing, it took me a minute to figure out what it was I was hearing.  I called out uncertainly, “Lloyd?” A very un-Lloyd-like slow few steps down the stairs to where I was waiting around the corner on the landing, and there he stopped, continuing to pee on the carpet.  The sound I had heard was the sound of a full on pee hitting the hardwood, then dribbling down the stairs.  Lloyd wasn’t about to let the fact he was still peeing get between him and his breakfast, but it was harder to walk and pee at the very same time.  Needless to say the next few seconds were very busy and profane, two whacks on the head with the plastic food scoop (all I had handy, but hardly satisfying), curse a couple of times, grab a double-handful of fur and start hauling 110lbs of dog upstairs, etc. but the end result is Lloyd choked it off enough for all of us to get to the front lawn with at least a liter left to go.

It took a monumental act of self control to realize that he had tried to tell me he had to go, but I had ignored his unusually early morning greeting.  It seems that the cause of Lloyd’s downfall is the fact that he habitually drinks Harvey’s dish completely dry every chance he gets, so last night that was an extra 2 cups of water, plus the cup and a half I gave him “so he wouldn’t be thirsty at night” before bed.  I don’t care how big you are, close to a liter of water will start to become a pressing matter after 7 hours or so.  A rule of dog ownership is that when a dog drinks a liter of water, he will manufacture that into 2 liters of pee.  Science be damned, it’s just the way things are.

The best part for me was realizing on the bus somewhere around Bayshore that my sock was somehow wet in my shoe…. and now I am wearing dog-piss socks all day.