The steam also rises

An apology for the coming rant: all my high-minded blog ideas have gone out the door with our idiot dog, who just ate a pen. A Pilot Precise V5 rolling ball pen, to be precise, my wife's favorite kind. A nice plastic tube just filled with juicy, runny, colorful ink. In this case, midnight blue.

I'd left the incorrigible canine unattended for 20 minutes while taking Samuel to school. I returned to hear an all-too-familiar crunching sound, and met a mutt with a blue mouth and blue paws, standing in the middle of a blue polka-dotted carpet. He was not cute and it was not funny. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never.

I mentioned that the cursed cur was in the middle of the floor. Not in an obscure corner or behind the sofa. Not in a place that could conceivably become the new location for a chair, but right in the middle, in front of the TV, six inches from the partially gnawed rawhide bone we had bought him so he'd have something legitimate to chew on.

I spent a good hour of blog-writing, paper-grading, class-preparing time on my hands and knees, but the floor is still not pretty. An entire can of carpet cleaner is gone, and most of a roll of paper towels. After 20 minutes, I noticed a red color mixing with the blue and realized that I'd scrubbed several layers of skin from the outside of my left thumb. I learned that blood can be just as hard to clean up as ink, and felt a bit like the Cat in the Hat, whose pink bathtub ring just got bigger with every effort to clean it up. Unfortunately, I couldn't call up Thing One and Thing Two to help me blast the spots.

I may have to call a professional carpet cleaner. The spots probably won't disappear completely until we replace the carpet.

I'd rather replace the dog.

A stick would do nicely.

Want to trade?