Why does the dog...

have my oven mitt again?

Every time I turn around lately, it seems as if Murphy is walking past me with my oven mitt in his mouth. He keeps taking it off the counter when I'm not watching and carting it off to his own sovereign territory, better known as his dog bed. He doesn't damage it--he just sort of gnaws on it and licks it until I take it away from him and return it to the kitch--uh, I mean the laundry basket.

Now you might wonder why a real man even has an oven mitt in the first place. I mean, that's sort of a thing that you'd expect to find in a girly kitchen, right? Well, truth is, it was a gift--from a girl--and while I use it for cooking sometimes, I've also been known to press it into service as a barrel-changing mitt for my machine guns. I've had to do this ever since I lost the military-surplus asbestos glove that I used to use, both on the machine guns and to take hot pans out of the oven. A gal I used to know thought that it was unseemly to use a "Mitten, heat protective" in my kitchen, so she bought me this neat yellow oven mitt with finger pads which not only makes it easier to grab pans off the oven rack, but also helps me get a better grip on those smoking-hot machine-gun barrels when they need to be swapped out. And since I misplaced the asbestos one, the new one has come in quite handy for both applications.

Now if I can just keep it away from the dog.