Let me first tell you this: we love our Georgia Peach.
That's her name, usually, Georgia Peach, or just Peach or Peaches. But in the manner of parents everywhere, we reserve the right to call her by her proper name when she's in trouble.
We love our Georgia, yes we do. But love is not wholly incompatible with feeling like you want to reach out and strangle the damned dog.
Take the time I woke up to an odd crunching noise, just forward of my ear. Georgia was merrily munching away on...a stick?
Where the hell did she get a stick?
I reached out and inserted a couple of fingers into our puppy's enormously cavernous jowls. Rooting around for a while, becoming positively beslimed, I eventually dug out a four-inch length of white wire I couldn't immediately identify.
Until I noticed a wire-shaped hole in the electric blanket. Which, by the way, was plugged in. How the lights didn't go out in Georgia I have no idea.
I got a belt last month. A nice wide one, a belt which actually seems to do an adequate job of keeping my pants from shimmying down my legs. (Georgia may be a peach: I'm a pear, myself.)
Said pear foolishly left his belt where the peach could get at it, and found it in pieces. Our Georgia's what the puppy toy industry refers to as a "power chewer". Actually, more than once we've brought home something with the word "durable" written seventeen times on the packaging, only to have her chew right through it in five minutes flat.
I won't mention the four pairs of slippers. Oh, I just did. Okay, I really won't talk about her predilection for Eva's lacy underthings. Or the fan cord she ripped through. Or...or...or...
We love our Georgia.
The worst thing she got into? One morning Eva got out of the shower and entered the bedroom to find our puppy chewing her way down through the top of our mattress. Stuffing had spilled out everywhere. Tux was cowering by the foot of the bed, as if to say Mommy, that's not me. I'm not doing that. Just so you know. My sister's being a BAD DOG.
No kidding.
When I first moved in with Eva, she slept on a narrow futon that made old pull-out sofa beds seem cloud-soft by comparison. After two nights on that thing, I informed her that we were going to go out and buy a new bed. Today. Now. (How many couples do you know who were out buying a bed together two days after their third date?) Anyway, we got ourselves a very thick King Koil that was guaranteeed for twenty five years.
It lasted four...and the last six months were sheer agony for Eva and not far off that for me.
Nonplussed, we found ourselves in Sleep Country one day. We were just scoping out prices, trying to determine how many banks we'd have to rob to get a quality mattress. Honestly, we had no intention of buying a bed that day.
The Sleep Country girl explained to us that no mattress is meant to last a quarter century: the working life of a good mattress is seven or eight years, and the fine print of any warrantee of longer duration would prove that. Just try to return a bed after more than five years. If it's not in mint condition, so solly, Cholly.
Okay, said my wife, but I'm fat. I need a good mattress, and I'd like it to last at least a little while.
Invariably, whenever Eva comes right out and says she's fat, people are taken aback. I've never quite understood that, because unless you're blind it's pretty obvious she's telling the truth. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not exactly skin and bones myself. When it comes to mattresses, that quite simply means that the $199 special won't cut it.
We bought a bed that day, of course. They get you to lay down, you've lost: wave the white pillowcase and reach for the wallet. We selected a top-of-the-line Simmons BeautyRest. The mattress itself is two feet thick, the foundation that again, and it all rests on a wooden frame Eva fashioned out of two-by-sixes, putting the whole thing that much higher still. Lovely durable construction, that bedframe, all the better to drop on your bare foot.
That bed's served us well for...about as long as the last one did. Now, of course, it's got a Georgia-divot in her side and the top is wearing right out. That's it: next bed's made out of something more permanent. Like diamonds. Or taxes.
So once again we sallied forth into Sleep Country, once again with no intention of buying a bed today.
We are the proud owners of a Sleep Number bed, arriving our home next month. (We got a great deal on one that's currently in an Ottawa warehouse.) I'll be happy if this lasts even close to half the eighteen years it's rated for. (The 'Sleep Expert' explained in great detail how this bed differs from everything else in the industry: it is, essentially, a very high-tech airbed, adjustable to recreate anything from a feather-bed to concrete...and while you can wear out springs and coils, it's kind of hard to wear out air.)
I'm a 65; Eva's a 50, maybe a titch lower. She reported, after five minutes of laying on the bed, that her back pain had almost entirely abated. That made it a no-brainer as far as I was concerned. It was only a little pricier than the last bed we bought, and they assure us this bed will last longer. It is, apparently, designed with heavy people in mind.
More care will be taken with this bed, in the hopes it'll pay us back. We got a mattress pad this time, and I will be making sure the bed's made...it was the exposed, worn out, hanging-together-by-a-thread mattress top that so tempted our Peach to go digging.
Oh, yeah, and it's a king size...which means there'll be room for everyone.
Including Georgia.
2 comments:
Don't get me wrong, I do (abashedly) love my dog, Winston. He's a Maltese/Bichon cross, about the size of a large fluffy white rat. I call him our "punt" more out of desire to end his ceaseless yapping than any actual physical action taken.
Good thing is, he don't chew, and he don't take up a lot of room. His exercise needs involve running up and down the stairs twice and then he's good for the day. So low maintenance on that front.
Our funny dog story:
Sometime early one morning I woke up feeling sand on the sheets scratching my skin. In the half doze I started brushing it aside muttering "What the hell?".
Couldn't get rid of it all, which woke me up. Squinting in the dusky light I saw what looked like a whole bunch of white flakes. More confused then ever, I brush them all aside and go back to sleep.
Wake up in the morning and stumble downstairs to let the dog out and feed him his breakfast. He doesn't want breakfast, just wants out. He ALWAYS wants breakfast, so that is odd. I turn around and see my wife's breakfast bagels lying on the kitchen floor, open.
Well....
Turns out, middle of the night, Winston had pulled the bagels down, extracted one bagel and ran up to bed, got back under the covers, and proceeded to consume his prize (and create the aforementioned white flakes). He's 8 pounds soaking wet, each bagel is about the size of his head. How he ingested the whole damn thing, I'll never know.
However, he never sicked up from it, which is even the larger mystery to whole thing.
I had a lab once who, after being locked in her backroom for being "bad" ate thru a dry wall to get to her food. I had no idea she had done this until she threw up what looked like concrete in the garage. Very odd dog she was. This was the same dog who also ate all the lino in the house. How she didn't die from some mysterious intenstinal disorder I'll never know.
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