I walk my guinea pig and you can't do shit about it

So far I've written about boobs, being too good at sex, and my dog's golden showers. I don't know where I expected this blog to go, but that's a bit of an alarming direction. My whole life is one alarming direction, perhaps. But today I'm gonna turn things around for some G-rated shit.

I have a guinea pig and I take her on walks, and I get weird looks but I don't give a shit because why should the dog get to be the only furbaby to take walks? Yesterday we went through the Yakima Arboretum. I stopped in the Japanese Botanical Garden for some pictures.

I got my guinea pig from my job working at a cheap motel in not-the-best neighborhood in Bellingham. I was a manager on duty, and had discovered an absolutely trashed room with food on the walls, clothes and luggage and dishes strewn across every surface, and a decent collection of drug paraphernalia. The housekeeper and I cleaned the room together, because it was one of those rooms no one should have to cope with alone. It took us a solid 20 minutes just to clear out the trash enough to begin even thinking about stripping the bedding off the mattress.

As I started to pull the blanket off, I heard a very distinctive "WHEEEK!" noise. Having owned guinea pigs in the past, I knew right away what it was. Immediately we began searching through the pillows and around the floor, where disturbingly we found mousetraps set and ready to spring.

"Um...Katt?" I will never forget the look of sheer horror as I turned and saw my housekeeper with her hands on the foot of the bed, staring wide-eyes at the blankets, her face pale with terror. "This lump just moved."

Layer by layer, I peeled back the blankets and sheets while the housekeeper kept the "lump" pinned. As I pulled back the final sheet, I noticed the distinctive football-shaped droppings -- at least a day's worth -- and a tiny, terrified golden-brown furball was awaiting. Pippin was about five weeks old and fit in the palm of my hand. I brought her home with me, because no way was I ever gonna give her back to that cokehead who abandoned her.

I attempted to harness train her because I once saw a picture of a guinea pig walking a dog on the Internet and thought that was funny. For one solid month we spent time every day getting in the harness so she could adapt and eventually be leash trained. At the end of the month, I had a guinea pig who excelled at getting out of harnesses.

So now, I take her on walks in a carrier. She has a shoulder-bag-style carrier and a rolling-luggage-style carrier. I get some weird looks, but people generally react positively to encountering a guinea pig on the trail.

I remember one lady came up to me from behind while I was walking her along the beach in Bellingham. "Oh, it's a guinea pig!" she exclaimed. "I kept seeing people passing you with funny looks on their faces and had to figure out what you were holding!"

Bellingham is basically mini-Portland, so it's not unusual to see people doing weird things like walking unusual pets there (the same park where that lady made the comment to me is where another women regularly walks her two pygmy goats). It will be interesting to see how Yakima takes to her. So far, people seem to love her here!

When you're too good at sex

A year and a half ago my ex husband told me he wanted to end our marriage. We had been married for six and a half years; the whole of our relationship spanned almost a decade. I was devastated, to put it mildly. He left me so he could go fuck his coworker. He told me they were just friends, but they went "public" with their relationship before the divorce papers were signed, and were engaged less than a year after the divorce was final. Just friends my ass. He was too cheap to buy her a ring. That ho can have fun dealing with his broke ass now, as far as I'm concerned.

Ahem. Anyway, when he left me, my friend called him to try and see if she could help fix things. The conversation degraded to him essentially interrogating her about my history. He was trying to find some dirt on me, because telling people he left me to go fuck another chick doesn't make him sound noble.

A bit of background: I only had one boyfriend before him. It was a friend I dated in high school for three months, so it barely counted. Being a good little Catholic girl, I did not go "all the way" with this guy. I saved myself for...well, for engagement at least. I lost my virginity to my ex husband, not my ex boyfriend.

However, I hit third base with this ex boyfriend. I did everything but. My ex husband was well aware of this.

After my ex dumped me, he started interrogating my best friend about this ancient history boyfriend. He wanted to know if there was any way I could have lied about my sexual history, about losing my virginity to him, if there was any way I had fucked my ex boyfriend before him. Apparently, I did some things in the bedroom that seemed "too good and too experienced" for a virgin.

Why would I have lied about an ex boyfriend? Why would it have mattered over a decade after the fact?

Those are good questions. But the question I really want to know is, if he thought I was particularly good at something in bed -- and no, I don't know specifically what I did that he thought I was "too good" at; yes, I'm curious as well -- if I was really that fucking good, why the fuck would you not want that? Why would you dump that? If I was that good, if I was "too good", stop questioning it and just fucking enjoy it already!

IDK what I did. I read magazines and watch porn and get ideas from those. That's all I can offer. Yes, girls can watch porn, too. Even good little Catholic girls. (I said good; never said great.)

If you're dumping someone because they're too good in bed, you're relationshipping wrong. Just sayin'. I'm kind of proud of it actually, that I was too good at sex for him to handle, so he left me. Sounds better than the truth that he was just a cheating asshole.

Hmmm...does "My ex husband left me because I was too good in bed" work in a dating profile?

Golden showers and my dog is a passive aggressive asshole

I got my dog, Ozzy, when he was 9 months old. He was already potty trained by then. He is very good about being asked to be let out to do his business, though he will then commence to spend 30 minutes finding the exact perfect clump of dirt to shit on, but I digress.

Don't be fooled by his innocent looks

Unfortunately, his timing is sometimes inconvenient, waking me up at odd hours of the night to let me know insistently that he absolutely must be let out now. When I was with my ex-husband, this became a game of "Who will get fed up with this furry little shit and let him out first?". We would both lay in bed attempting to play possum until one of us finally relented and let him out.

One day, the dog became wise to our game. As we both laid in bed trying to out-wait the other, the dog decided to communicate his need more clearly. He did this by jumping up on the bed and peeing directly on my ex's face!

I thought it was funny. My ex was not amused. Regardless, the dog made his message clear. We never ignored his whining again.

Ozzy is fairly good about letting me know when I need to pull over to let him do his business while we're on a long drive. He starts whining and jumping around in a slightly different way than his OMG-we-are-going-for-a-drive whining and jumping around that's his normal baseline in the car. The day he peed on my ex in the car, he did none of these things.

We had just finished a day hike and were driving back to town. My ex was asleep in the passenger seat. Suddenly and without warning, my dog climbs on his lap, looks me straight in the eye, and starts letting it go right there. This wasn't some excited little tinkle that dribbled out, either. This was a full on 30-second piss blast right on my ex's lap. We're talking very thoroughly-soaked denim jeans.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to yell at the dog for fear he'd spray it all over the car, and we were less than 5 minutes away from home. I was also fascinated because my ex was not waking up, and I was morbidly curious to find out how long my dog's stream was going to last and how long it would take my ex to wake up. So I just...let it happen.

All of this rationale was given to my ex when he finally woke up just as the dog was finishing up. The ex was not happy. The fact that I explained this rationale through tears of laughter probably did not help my cause.

There's a reason I got the dog in the divorce, it seems.

(My dog has never peed on me. He likes me too much.)

How to use boobs to shovel snow

This was my first winter in Yakima. I moved here last August for work. I had to get studded tires on my car and shovel my driveway, which is like 50' long or something. It's decently long. From December 8th until sometime in early March, my lawn was white and frozen. It's late March now and it's thawed and I have to go clean up a winter's worth of dog shit that's suddenly visible before my landlord notices.

Local residents say it was a bad winter, though I have no real frame of reference to tell. I moved here from west of the Cascade mountains, from Bellingham. They get a lot less snow. They get so little snow, that one year the city council was like, "Why are we paying to maintain all these snowplows? Let's sell them!" So they sold all but one, and that winter had one of the worst winters in a decade. As far as I know, they never learned their lesson and still only have one.

Population wise, Yakima and Bellingham aren't too far off in size (93,200ish for Yakima, 82,600ish for Bellingham). Yakima is relatively flat, the snow that falls is a light powdery fluff, and the city and county are pretty excellent about sanding and plowing. Bellingham is more vertically-inclined with steep hills, gets the heavy wet slick snow, and, as aforementioned, owns a single snowplow. I feel that one of these cities is more fun to spend a bad winter in than the other.

I grew up outside of Bellingham in a little community called Sudden Valley, which is notorious for steep and winding roads. The curves of the roads don't even follow the hills. As a friend once described it, "It's like they gave a drunk monkey a map and a crayon and let him go to town, and that's how they plotted the roads". What I'm getting at is there roads were steep, curvy, and made no fucking sense.

The hills made for great sledding on snow days, but they also brought more work to us kids. I lived off of a side-street of a side-street; it was a long cul-de-sac that was fairly flat except for a steep slope where it connected with the next road. Our side-street was so insignificant and ignored by the public works that it never saw a street sweeper in the fall, forget about a snowplow, and because adults still want to go out and do adult shit like work and grocery shopping even when the schools were closed, us kids suddenly made convenient, free snow-removal labor.

I remember one such snow-day when I was about 15 or so. We woke up to over half a foot had fallen overnight. Mom was like "Go shovel the hill at the end of the street". So my younger brother grabbed our one snow shovel to take the first shift.

Now our street didn't get plowed, but the side-street we connected to was well-utilized enough and steep enough that it saw more attention. My brother was out there shoveling wet, cold, heavy snow for an hour. About every 10 minutes, a snowplow would pass him on the other street, completely ignoring him. I know this because I could see them pass him from where I was sitting in the warm house, sipping hot cocoa (with mini marshmallows, of course).

After an hour, my brother comes in, cold and soaking wet, and grumbled "It's your turn."

Now, due to a combination of my inner thermostat being set high (I'm always warm wherever I go; I cannot stand long-sleeve shirts during any season) and me being a teenager with no goddamn common sense, I decided that proper snow-shoveling attire included a remarkably low-cut shirt. Fashion before function, after all. I was about a C or D cup at the time, and proud of it!

So I go out there, and I'm bent over shoveling snow, and I'm wearing a low-cut shirt, and I'm bent over shoveling snow, and I'm wearing a low-cut shirt...you could see all the way to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, is what I'm getting out. I'm out there for maybe ten minutes, tops, when a plow goes by...and then it stopped and backed up, and the driver leaned out the window.

"Hey, you want me to plow that for you?" he asked with a wink.

Being a good little Catholic girl with no firm grasp of sexual innuendo at the time, I was like "OMG could you please?"

The driver plowed the entire street. I was thinking well, my work here is done, so naturally I went back home where it was warm and dry.

I'd been outside a grand total of about 15 minutes.

"That wasn't an hour," my brother scoffed when I came in.

"Look outside at the street, bro," I replied.

His jaw dropped when he saw the road. "Ah...I...you...how...that's not fair! MOM!"

My mother looked out the window, looked at me, looked at my shirt, looked out the window, looked at me, looked at my shirt, looked out the window...Mom's no dummy and I'm her daughter; she connected the dots fairly quickly. She shook her head, as if knew she should scold me, but she also seemed like part of her was a little proud of me, so all she said was "Well, the road's finally cleared, guess I better head to Costco and stock up on groceries before it snows again."

And that's how I learned to shovel snow.