Meat Tenderizer, Old Dogs, and Love

That face. It makes up for a lot.

This is my dog, Dog. She's pretty much the greatest thing ever. She's also a bulldog, which means, amongst many other things, she has some pretty bad allergies. While she's on several (expensive) medications that manage them pretty well, sometimes they're just bad. Bulldogs gonna bulldog. And when her allergies get really bad, she'll often scratch her face folds or chew her paws until they're bleeding. Not badly, but she'll definitely break the skin and get her face and/or paws all bloody. And when she's scratching herself bloody, she's usually also rolling around on the couch, or on my bed, or some other piece of furniture. Blood, of course, is often quite difficult to get out of most fabrics.

As you may have guessed, Dog has recently had a bad bout with the ol' allergies, and managed to get blood stains all over my sheets and comforter. Which happens fairly often, but usually in small amounts easy enough to hide, so I generally just ignore them, hoping they'll come out in the wash (they don't, but I'm lazy). But apparently this spring has been really tough on the allergies, so there's a lot of dog blood stains on my sheets. Which is pretty much as gross as it sounds. So I've been spending all afternoon today scrubbing my sheets and bedspread and whatnot with meat tenderizer, which is one of several methods I'm attempting to get the stains out. It's precisely as fun as you image repeatedly slowly scrubbing every stain on a set of sheets to be.

Dog is also, like all bulldogs, very much a shedder. As in, she sheds so much hair I quite literally can't understand how she still has hair on her body. And I'm not abusing the term there, I definitely mean I have no literal explanation for how much she can shed. Seriously; sweep the house on Saturday and every surface will be coated in dog hair by Sunday. If I could find a way to monetize it, I'd be rich. If I could find a way to turn it into an energy source, I could solve global warming.

So between the two, pretty much everything I own is coated in dog hair and often with a few healthy smears of dog blood as well. Or to put it more bluntly, I live like a disgusting animal. As I've been engaged in the twin futile endeavors of sweeping and scrubbing out dog related detritus all day today, it occurred to me that due to Dog's fairly advanced age (especially for her breed), there will be some point in the not-too-distant future in which everything I own will not coated in dog hair and dog blood. And that will make me sad. I will somehow be legitimately sad for a long time at the fact that everything I own is not coated in dog hair and blood.

I guess this about as good a definition of love that I've ever been able to come up with. That I would quite honestly rather have everything I own coated in dog hair and blood than be able to ever wear dark colors (can't because they show the dog hair so well) or have sheets in any sort of light color (can't because they show off the dog allergy blood) again. Because as long as everything I own is covered in disgusting old dog detritus, it means she's still around. And I'll take her being around over pretty much everything else available.