A Dog By Any Other Name Would Still Smell Stinky

Remember all of the names I gave to Tilly? Well, this weekend gave cause to give her a few more names. Yes, they're all printable! This is a family blog. Sheesh! (I usually only think the less appropriate names in my head...)

A week ago when my parents were visiting, my dad helped us fix our blinds. As I've said before, there were a few things wrong with this house when we bought it. (Really? I've beat that horse to death? Huh...) Nearly every blind in the house was broken. When all of the blinds were down and you looked at our house from the outside, the windows looked like a mouth full of chipped teeth. It looked very trashy. I'm surprised our well-meaning neighbor didn't mention it in their letter. So. Broken blinds + helpful father + helpful daughter= a house full of repaired blinds. Yippee!!

My dad and Maggie spent the better part of a morning on the tedious job of replacing slats in the blinds. He showed me how and I helped on two of them, lest you think I was tucked in bed eating bonbons, but then priorities interfered with my ability to continue helping. (Translation: my mother and I needed to do a little shopping.) So now I have this knowledge in my head if I ever need to replace slats in blinds. Even better, so does Maggie. And due to my seniority, if the blinds ever get broken again, I will be promoted to a supervisory position and my daughter can do the actual work. I'm not above child labor, people. In fact, I promote it every chance I get. Which is why my children think I'm the meanest mom in the world.

Hmmm...did I mention broken blinds? I did, didn't I? Yes, it was lovely to have every blind in the house working. Saw that past tense, did you? Uh-huh. We had lovely blinds for a whole week. Then, the Tillenator got her paws on one. Quicker than you can say "Arnold Schwarzenegger" the dumb dog was able to undo all of that work. Now this is the equation: Broken blinds + helpful father + helpful daughter + dumb dog = a house full of repaired blinds - one. *sigh*

The blinds used to look like this:

Forgive the horrible photography. I was in a hurry. Did y'all want a post to read today or not? Shut up.

Now, after The Tillenator's karate chop, they look like this:

Charming.

I believe that the real blame lies squarely on the lumpy shoulders of the neighbor's cat. She had the nerve to be dancing and blowing raspberries walking across our front lawn while Tilly happened to be looking out the window. And I, in my foolishness had left the blinds down. So, when the dumb dog saw the trespasser, she jumped up, putting both front paws on the window. And what goes up must come down, right? Yep. Right through about eleventy billion of the slats. *whimper*

I have to admit, I was just as cool as a cucumber. (Yeah, right...) I believe she heard several of her previously posted names and a couple of the ones that I thought were only bouncing around in my head before she got wise and high-tailed it out of the room. All of this occurred in about 2.6 seconds. If you weren't paying attention, you would have just seen a blur of fur and felt her breeze as she blew by heading outta Dodge. I may call her a dumb dog, but clearly she's smart enough to know when to lay low for awhile.

There is no repairing this blind. She killed it. My dog is a window covering killer. A blind murderer. Well, she's not blind. She murdered the blinds. (Oh hush. Y'all know what I'm saying. Help me out here.) If she had a super hero name, it would be Destructo Dog.

She added another name to her list when I was letting her out this morning. We no sooner got out the door than she saw a cat--for crying out loud, would it kill these people to keep their cats in?--in our treeline and she took off like a shot. Into the trees, down the fence line and straight through the gap in the fence that we were hoping she would never discover. You know what's on the other side of our fence? A berm. Know what's behind the berm? A large pond (or could be called a small lake) with a lovely fountain. Know what's in the pond? Geese. Oh. And did I mention that the neighborhood that contains the berm, pond, fountain and geese is a gated community? No? Well it is. A gated community with 15,000 square foot homes. Homes that contain bajillionaires. My dog, who was now tearing around the lake chasing geese and causing much hissing and honking and surprised flight, was doing it in a gated community. Of Bajillionaires. We are officially Riffraff, y'all. I'm fairly certain these people live in this community to keep families like ours out. Suckers. We're here now! And there's nothing like a dog disrupting your idyllic quiet at 7:10 in the morning to let you know it...

"So," you might be asking. "What's her new name?"

I'm not telling. This is a family blog.

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