Lessons Re-Learned

[akirlu]

Much domestic puttering today. I'm catching up on laundry a bit. (Full catch up never seems to happen. I have too many clothes.) I'm sewing on buttons and fixing small tears and putting away summer clothes and pulling out the winter wear. Linens and rayons and cottons and short sleeves or none swapping for silks and wools and fleeces and corduroys with long sleeves and turtlenecks. I'm also re-washing a bunch of 'clean' clothes to get the smears of dog blood out.

No, nothing terrible has happened, and no, Kaylee has not miraculously re-grown her ovaries. But I forgot a couple of important lessons. For one, unlike Sarah, Kaylee is a hoarder. Specifically, if you give her a rawhide bone chew that's too big to finish in one go, she will chew on it for a while and then slink off to 'bury' the rest. Indoors, that means pushing it under pillows, between cushions, into laundry baskets and similar whatnot, contemplating her efforts, deciding the burial plot will not suit, pulling out the buried rawhide, and taking it off to some other pile of fabric to repeat the whole process. The burying part is done with her nose. She nuzzles and nudges the bone until it is satisfactorily wedged in her chosen spot. The trouble is, with enough repetition, she wears a raw spot on her nose and begins smearing blood everywhere she 'buries' her prize. After I most recently forgot this process last week, circumstantial evidence suggests that Kaylee at least tried burying her chew in two different baskets of clean laundry, the covers on our bed, the pillows on our bed, and a silk cushion in one of the living room chairs, before finally stuffing the thing down the white couch. So, sheets, pillowcases, whites, and colors, plus that silk cushion, all smeared with blood. For a wonder, the white couch was clean. Well, as clean as the white couch ever is these days. Must. Buy. Slipcover.

Luckily, as I'm finding, because this is effectively a dry-brush technique Kaylee is using for these efforts, the blood is not soaked in. That, thankfully, makes the blood a bit easier to get out, using bar soap, cold water, and elbow grease. And the sheets came *mostly* clean. Still, I have no idea how the "dry-clean only" linen jacket that was in the baskets waiting to be put away with the other summer clothes is going to hold up to getting a cold water wash. Sigh. Oh, well, I got several seasons out of it.

So, lesson the first: don't give Kaylee rawhides bigger than she'll finish in one session.

Lesson the second: don't start more laundry than you expect to be able to iron, hang, and put away the same day. Yeah, like that's going to happen. But a girl has to have dreams.

And, while I'm at it, lesson the third: fiddling around with Media Monkey putting together a dance mix is a Giant Honking Time Suck. You will lose four times as much to it as you think you'll spend. Here's a hint: 103 songs at a minimum of 3 minutes each is how long...? And that's not counting discarded tunes and random stuff you just want to give a quick listen to. Yeah.

Comments

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Danny just switched me over to Media Monkey on my square dance netbook, with appropriate playlists for teaching various forms of two-step, waltz, nightclub, shadow, east and west coast, sorted by speed.

He's such a love.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that brings back memories. Trying to get blood out of the unlikeliest places and things, ugh. Our Kerry Blue terriers were great hoarders. The German Shepherd mixes were more likely to set something down and forget where they put it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's very handy having a geek sweetie. I quite like Media Monkey, but I can spend way, way more time playing with it than I think I will when I start.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yep. I really should find another dog to give that big rawhide to. It's only going to tempt someone if it stays in my house.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Sarah was more like the latter. Actually, she was most likely to fling a bone under a piece of furniture and then not be able to get it out. This meant one of us would have to fetch it out and give it back or hide it, otherwise she would be digging at the floor, trying to dig it out. She was one single-minded dog, so I knew she'd do damage to the floor or herself sooner than stop.