This morning I walked out into the living room where television reporters were excitedly talking of the space shuttle's return to Earth while an infrared camera shot images of the craft shooting back into orbit. J, on the couch, looked up and without saying a word pointed down to the floor. I looked around, but not having gained my full daytime vision or thought process capabilities yet after a night of deep sleep, couldn't get what he was after. He pointed again. "What?" I asked him. "Poop," he said, and then I saw the three little dog turds on the rug. Our Mina, after staying at my parents' house, often has this problem. The weekend of ham and peanuts and crackers and Brie and other gourmet treats that my father throws to the dogs, quickly and behind his back so that we think the hunks of food have just landed in their mouths by accident, are a lot for 10-pound Mina to handle, and since she isn't the best at letting us know when she needs to go out anyway, poop on the floor is usually the result.

You would think we would have wizened up to this occurrence and, you know, would maybe take her out more often or something after she's gained about five pounds in two days, but laziness presides. We go to sleep with happy dogs, absolutely beat from their weekend of gorging and then running around the backyard and sometimes being thrown in the pool (I'm not gonna say by who...) and then we wake up to a surprise and Mina lays on the bed wagging her tail, beating us down with her cuteness so it's never even really that upsetting.

But what does amaze me is the ability to look at poop on the floor and not immediately react. Not run to the bathroom, tear off a huge amount of toilet paper, pick up the load and dump it into the toilet to be flushed from our minds forever. Then what follows is at least a spraying and disinfecting, if not thorough cleaning, of the area affected on the rug.

I don't know if my reaction is normal, or if I'm picking up some of my dad's completely neurotic tendencies. When we were growing up, a hairbrush anywhere near the kitchen counter meant we might as while not eat any of the food in the refrigerator for a good, long while. Sightings of my mother's "snotrags," a term he used to describe the pieces of tissue she'd keep tucked away in her purse if she had a cold and needed easy access to them, were cause for not only a grimace, but full covering of his face with his hands and sometimes, having to leave the immediate area.

I don't think I'll get that way, necessarily, but I'm pretty damn sure that pointing to poop on the floor, looking up with wide eyes, and saying "poop" is not the best way to deal with the problem.