This weekend we had some friends in town to celebrate J’s birthday. There were a few nice cameras among the group, and while we were taking a walk down by the water, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine, my friend Matt suggested it might be fun to throw Mina up in the air and get a few good pictures of her.

Which turned out to be one of the best ideas ever.

Thanks to Tom and Sam for taking these amazing shots.

Yesterday was our second anniversary and although wedding anniversaries are normally a chance for a couple to ruminate on their love for one another, I think J and I are the kind of people who would really prefer to treat them as another birthday. So our day yesterday was punctuated by us saying things like, “Well, it’s my anniversary, so I’m going to eat whatever I want,” or “It’s my anniversary, I’m going to buy this even though I normally wouldn’t.”

I tried to get my parents in on the idea, too, like by telling my father Sunday night that I would really appreciate it if he would bring me coffee in bed the next morning because “it’s my anniversary.” This is something he tricks me into doing quite often. He lies in bed yelling at the top of his lungs, “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello,” until someone, usually me, yells back, “What?” and then he says, “Come talk to me, I’m lonely,” and then when you do that, he’s sitting there with the newspaper holding out a coffee cup. At this point he states that, “If you really loved me, you’d get me some coffee,” and inconceivably, this works every time.

J and I actually have dinner reservations in DC tonight since the place we wanted to go isn’t open Mondays, so we decided to spend our day yesterday hanging out together, getting lunch at a good deli and walking around Annapolis.

Before we left, however, we had to deal with some things.

It was after I’d finished cleaning up a pile of small-ish turds I’d found on my parents’ bedroom floor, left undoubtedly by Mina, and was proceeding to get ready for the day that I noticed Cecilia, our big pit-bull mix, was acting kind of funny.

Normally a happy-go-lucky, goofball type, she had retreated under the dining room table and was not engaging in her normal tongue kisses with the Labradoodle, and I had, literally, just said aloud, “Huh, I don’t think Cecilia feels good,” when I heard a bad, sick sound and turned around to discover she’d puked all over the carpet.

I know that some of you are going to say “just wait until you have kids,” but I’ve been around lots of babies and children and I’ve also been around lots of dogs, and I’ve got to tell you - dog puke really takes the cake. And this was seriously unreal. Cecilia has a sensitive stomach anyway and since we’ve been living here she’s been heading gleefully down to the water and eating her fair share of dead fish that wash ashore, and, I mean, you get the picture. I don’t want to trigger any gag reflexes or anything, just know that this was above and beyond.

I threw her outside and started calling wildly for J, who’d headed down the driveway to check the mail or look for a bird or something, “The dog threw up! The dog threw up! Cece threw up! I can’t believe it, it’s so much,” while I grabbed an entire roll and a half of paper towels, some soda water and starting cleaning with a speed and intensity I reserve for true emergencies.

In the meantime, she puked on the porch, and I started to really lose it. It was my anniversary, damnit! My day! What was wrong with her, didn’t she know?

It took some serious time to recuperate from the incident, but J helped talk me through it, helped me forget some of the more intimate details, and we proceeded to have a great afternoon. We both admitted we hadn’t gotten each other presents and so we picked out things in stores and “bought them for one another” using our joint checking account. We stopped on our way home and got food to grill out and a bottle of French wine for dinner.

And I did get coffee in bed that morning, although not from my father despite my lying there for a while yelling “Hello,” at the top of my lungs for an extended period until someone came to my rescue, which will definitely come into play the next time he claims he wants me to come talk to him, but really wants me to be his slave.

It was instead my darling husband who brought me a mug of coffee as I rested in bed, before getting up, before the chaotic events of the day unfolded, and when he placed it on the bedside table he told me that he’d “put a secret ingredient in there, see if you can taste it.”

I couldn’t - only tasted the coffee with milk, the way I like it - and so he explained that he’d put a little chocolate syrup in there, at which point I started laughing, and he said, yeah, yeah, he knew putting a little chocolate syrup in doesn’t make it a mocha or anything, but that it was sort of a mocha.

I thought about J’s special coffee the rest of the day. It got me through spraying Resolve carpet cleaner around the dining room in a maniacal manner and I smiled about it while walking around town.

It just may have been my favorite thing about our anniversary - the kind of gesture you can only give to someone you are comfortable enough with to know they will be pleasantly surprised, and not angry, when you add chocolate syrup to their regular coffee lineup. The kind of thing you do when you want to do something nice for somebody you love to make an everyday experience a little extraordinary. It’s both hilarious and heartwarming, and it’s why cleaning up seriously ridiculous amounts of puke on your two-year anniversary is only a minor pitfall on an otherwise wonderful day.

I know that people think it’s real, real cute when dogs make faces like this:

But the thing is, when you spend all day with the dogs, and the dog in question is making that face because there was a miscommunication, and she thought that when you very clearly said in a very loud voice, “Get the HELL out of here I am trying to work,” what you meant was, “Do you want to go swimming?!” and therefore proceeded to cock her head and then prance around from foot to foot like an overweight ballerina, and then twirl around in circle, followed by a flagrant display of French kissing with the Labradoodle just because of the sheer joy of the potential situation, and, of course, the grand finale of grabbing a stuffed dog toy and throwing it into the air before breaking into a chorus of high-pitched, excited whining, well then, actually, it’s really not that cute at all.

Vinnie took some great pictures of Mina doing some of her favorite things - eating Christmas cookies and baring her teeth - over the holidays, that I thought it would share. After all, nothing makes people happier than a small, angry, hungry dog.

Thanks to my wonderful mother-in-law, Mina is even cuter than normal. As you may have noticed, she’s not too keen on her princess outfit, leprechaun suit or sundress. But in this bandana? She’s, like, prancing everywhere. And posing for the camera. And being given mad amounts of treats for being so adorable. She knows how to get what she wants.

While this whole new blog business has made life rather exciting lately (I told you, a whole new level of nerdiness) one aspect of our life that has been scarily calm as of late is our little cinderblock house, and that’s because Cecilia is up north and will soon be headed to Camp Buffalino in Maine.

Camp Buffalino is not a real summer camp. Rather, it’s a phrase I’ve coined in my own mind to describe the wonders my dog will behold as she travels up to a house on the ocean to spend her summer with a rock band.

Buffalino, you see, is spending their summer in Boothbay Harbor, rocking hard, and then will be on tour down the east coast. As Vinnie is the drummer of this awesome band, I asked if he wouldn’t mind adding my dog to the cargo, especially since he’d already agreed to take the labradoodle, Cecilia’s bosom friend.

I knew leaving Cecilia up in D.C. this weekend, where Vinnie will pick her up, would make me sad, and it did. As she stared at me with sad eyes while I drove away, I couldn’t help but think she probably thought I was abandoning her, and that the feeling might remind her of the abandonment she’d experienced as a puppy, before she was brought to the animal shelter. Once back home in North Carolina I felt sorry for her, and for me, before I remembered that dogs don’t exactly experience complex emotions such as these, and that Cecilia was probably scratching herself on the kitchen floor awaiting her new owners, or whoever she thinks they are, and totally ready to explore some wooded areas. In fact, she probably wasn’t sad, whatever that means to a dog, for more than three or four seconds, if that.

Since I was so obsessed being depressed about leaving her, I didn’t realize what the lack of her presence would mean for our house. J, on several occasions, let slip that he was - oh, maybe not happy - but not too bummed that our lovely, 70-pounds-of-muscle-dog wasn’t around. “Oh, Cecilia’s not here. Maybe the bluebirds can peacefully lay their eggs and have babies without worrying about getting eaten in our backyard,” he’d say. Or, “Hey we don’t even have to put a sheet on the couch when we leave now, because it’s only Mina, and Mina’s really clean!” Stuff like that.

Now that it’s been a couple days, I do see what he’s saying. The house is cleaner, our work before leaving the house in the morning, less (not having to clear the coffee table of remote controls and cell phones on the off chance Cecilia might decide to revert to her younger, more mischeivous ways and eat one of them) and the house has assumed a sense of general calm. It’s almost unnatural. Even Mina, who is generally fired up, or even a little vicious, has become a sweet, quiet thing who sleeps all day long and hides under our bed in the morning, almost as if she’s trying to catch up on rest she misses out on when the presence of another dog means she’s constantly on an assault mission. I mean, what do you expect? Do you expect her to allow Cecilia to sit there and eat her bone WITHOUT a Miniature Pinscher/Pomerian Mix humping her back at an alarming rate? No.

I’m excited to see my wonderful, big dog later this summer, but must admit I am at least somewhat excited, too, for a month or so of easy dog walks (when they weigh ten pounds there is no question who is boss) and not being woken up at 6 a.m. when someone, at the height of their adolescence, sees a squirrel, and if she isn’t allowed to go get it, she is probably going to die, so she’d better lick your leg, and cry, oh, and breathe hot breath right in your face, until you wake up and all is well again.   

I decided in between work obligations and driving to Alexandria this evening to come home and give Cecilia a bath. J and I, after observing several nights of her cleaning herself obsessively, to the point where we had to yell at her to Stop, Please stop, That’s disgusting and you are driving us beserk, decided to take a look at her skin and noticed some red bumpy patches as well as - goddamnit - a flea. When J and I see a flea, we don’t think rationally. We don’t think about flea medications or shampoos. We think - How bad can this get? Will we have to vacate the premises and let loose a barrage of harsh chemicals? Burn down the house? Sometimes J gets more upset and I have to calm him down, and then we switch roles.

I’ve found, in fact, that ridding the dogs of fleas, or, more specifically, a flea, is actually no harder than putting the dogs back on the preventative Frontline, which I forget to give them most of the time, until I spot a flea. Buying Frontline is essentially the same as paying rent on another house, but it works, and I love to make veterinarians smile by paying inordinate fees for things to make my dogs happier. Like nail clippings and shots.

Before applying the miracle drug however, I wanted to give the dogs, who both needed it, a bath. Unfortunately the May weather is still on the cool side down here. I’m not complaining - we’ve had gorgeous, humidity-free days, which is rare for this late in the season, but it meant that rather than torture Cecilia with frigid hose water, I’d have to get her in the bathtub.

She got pretty excited when I got the leash down from its hook, but when I tied it to the faucet and told her sweetly to “Come here,” she got the picture and skidded under the coffee table where she placed her hard head on her paws with a resolute expression I translated as something like, “Please, for the love of God, I hope she can’t see me under here.”

I got it done as I always do, of course, hoisting her back end over her front until she tumbled with a horrendous thud into the tub and I proceeded to pour buckets full of lukewarm water gently over her body and head, telling her what a good girl she was and singing some songs I made up on the spot. She continued to look sullen and desperate, as though she were receiving some great punishment, which bothers me, because I’d give anything for someone to douse me with warm-ish water, rub me down with nice-smelling shampoo while singing me a song about how I was the best thing ever.

I let her get herself, clumsily, out of the bathtub, and proceeded to wash Mina (pick up, hold steady, pour water, scrub down, pour water, pick up) quickly, then let them both out in the back yard to dry off in the sun. And rub themselves in the dirt.

I love watching dogs after they get baths. They always seem to find some untapped reserve of energy for such an occasion and act like idiots, running in circles, so extremely joyful to be free from the torture of being properly cleaned. Today as I watched them I saw that same joy, and I also noticed, for some reason, how they looked without their collars on. Especially Cecilia. Stripey, and big and muddled colors, looking at me with her mouth open and ears perked up, I couldn’t help but notice how much she looked like so many of the dogs I’d known while working at the animal shelter. Without her prepster sailboat collar, she could have been any of those dogs. Her face and coloring matched hundreds of others, many of whom never made it out. I took Cecilia home when a foster dog I’d had for a few days starting fighting with Mina. Teary-eyed, I took the foster back to the shelter on a unbearably grey day during one of our infamous ice storms. I felt like I was taking her to her death, having not found a home for her, and thought the least I could do was take someone else. Cecilia’s brother had been adopted just a few days before, and she sat in the back of her kennel wagging her tail timidly and bit me playfully all over my arms when I reached in to say hi. I took her home because I felt bad about all the dogs who never find homes. I remember distinctly J’s reaction when he came over to see my new foster puppy, like, Oh, I see. That kind of dog. A week later I was lying to people who called in response to the “Adopt Cecilia” posters I’d placed around town, telling them she’d already been taken, and then I stopped lying and just admitted I wanted to keep her.

I’m not very keen on yelling at people about adopting dogs from shelters, telling people how many animals are homeless, and how many die because there just aren’t enough homes for them all (unless drinking at times). I just think they should be loved. Of course they should - I’m not sharing any deep knowledge, it just struck me today, looking at my collarless dogs, how randomly they came into my life and how I’m so happy that they did but every once in a while I am totally overwhelmed by how many more need that same chance.