There are the usual foodie smells that have potential to wake me up in the morning, be it the subtle waft of caffeine perking out of the coffeemaker or the warm drift of fresh bread baked by timer in the bread maker.
And the smell of bacon sizzling in the frying pan remains one of the favorite aromas to jostle my nostrils and awaken me from a good night’s sleep.
Of course none of these wonderful mental stimuli avail themselves in my neck of the woods. Nope.
Instead I am yanked before sunrise from my fantasy dream, wherein Brad Pitt is saving me from a hungry pack of wolves.
Into an immediate wide-eyed state I am thrust all ears to the guttural grunting of “uh-ah, uh-ah, uh-ah”—or in layman’s terms—the sound of a dog about to upchuck inside the house.
There is that jujitsu moment pulled from the ‘Matrix’ movie where I leap from the sheets into mid-air, grab my housecoat with one hand while doing a half twist across Pete’s side of the bed and hit the floor with a stuck landing.
I throw open the bedroom door, and in the dark, bolt into the kitchen, dive over the butcher’s stainless steel table—arms outstretched for the door handle in a frantic effort to release said dog into the outdoors to throw up.
Now, if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I can stomach the sight and feel of just about anything as long as it didn’t just come from inside a dog.
And the situation is much worse when I’m not even sure what the wet blob of a thing is that is staring back at me on the rug when I flick on the lights at 6 a.m. after I have stepped in it.
I’m not sure if the temperature of the thing would have felt as gross at that moment if it had been cold, but as the warm, oozing globule squeezed up through the toes of my left foot I was wishing just then, that it had at least had been below body temperature.
I squinted to identify the thing, because my contact lenses were still in their case on my dresser.
Ah yes, the rug. The brand new rug—now embedded with what appeared to be, in my fuzzy vision, a copious mustard-yellow slime splayed outwards in a size seven-foot imprint.
The dogs had backed up under the kitchen table, dreading the inevitable expletives that spilled out of my mouth. Yet as soon as I began hopping on one foot to avoid spreading the thing around the room, the canine stupors took that to mean play time and bounded about.
All things being equal, Murphy’s Law dictated the thing would then be spread around by paw marks. And it was.
Once outside, the dogs disappeared into the cold air, yet again chasing the illusive nothing they are after each and every morning and on this morning giving not a care in the world for the Alpha who fired sparks of fury at them with her eyes.
I stood in the frigid morning air and crabbed my impatience at Mother Nature for her sluggish stroll into spring and the sunrises I longed for at 5 a.m.
And because my foot was still covered in slimy doggy-doo of some sort, I used my common sense and decided to make a quick rush at the snow bank near the back step and—cold or not—clean the muck off.
If this whole affair had happened on the first day of the workweek I could have blamed it all squarely on the Monday.
Of course this is never the case in my neck of the woods. Nope.
And if it was, then I would have to add to the equation the frozen dog poop I stepped on in my bare feet in the dark that morning, that was right there off the back step where I suspect a certain dog left it the night before instead of going off to his or her regular pooping grounds when out on bathroom detail in a deep freeze.
Needless to say I ended up back in bed and started the day over again—on the other foot.
After all, it was February 2nd, Groundhog Day.
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