I hate dogs.

Until I cool off, Murphy and Belle are now "outdoors dogs". They can live in the pen forever now.

Because it was so hot when I went to work, I decided to do the nice thing for the dogs and leave the basement door open so that they could go down and lie on the cool concrete floor while I was gone. Normally they don't go down there but these last few days I've seen them coming down while I was reloading or working in my basement shop just to flop on the cold concrete. So since there's nothing really down there for them to get into, I figured why not just give them that option while I'm gone. It sure beats leaving the whole house air conditioning on for them, right?

Not even factored into my decision was the laundry tub containing some new storage food that I'd bought to put up. This particular tub, covered with a lid but not yet sealed, contained large sacks of rice and pinto beans and a couple of cans of oatmeal--2.5lb. cans of oatmeal, to be precise. The big ones.

The dogs have never messed with this stuff before even though there has always been right at their level in my kitchen pantry every day. But there's a first time for everything, and when I arrived home, the basement looked like a Rocky Mountain pass in January--it was covered in white flakes, and there I found the remains of two of the large oatmeal cans. The dogs had opened the tub and gone to town on the oatmeal.

Damned dogs, I thought as I went upstairs. But at least the oatmeal cans only cost me two dollars each and they'd left the bigger, more expensive sacks of rice and beans alone.

Lesson learned by me, right? Oh, but there was a bigger one coming, one that I wasn't thinking as I walked up the stairs into the house proper. This lesson concerned the effects of several pounds of dried oatmeal inside of two German Shepherd dogs who apparently also drank a lot of water. Apparently all of that oatmeal really expands when water is added inside a dog, just like it does in a bowl, and the end result is about ten pounds of oatmeal barf and dog crap on the floor in quantities and locations that leave me no doubt that both dogs were equally guilty in the oatmeal theft.

Yeah, I'm not really a dog fan right now. I don't even know of any local pet stores with hamsters but maybe the feed store in town will swap me even up, two Shepherds for a box of ducklings. Failing that, I may just go visit that guy at the new Chinese restaurant in town and see if his cash offer on them is still good.

And thanks to Bob for the pic. Sigh.