Ruby's Employed!

For anyone who hasn’t yet heard, Ruby is now a certified therapy dog. Instead of spending her free time face-planting Max into snow drifts, she now visits a local schools and libraries and reads with kids from Kindergarten to 3^rd grade. In exchange for helping these children practice their literacy, she gets to lie around and listen to stories all afternoon. Sweet deal, right?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no one could have foreseen the unfortunate consequences of the events previous to story time….BATH TIME!!!!!

Now, for Ruby this isn’t a big deal. She is a Newfoundland after all, and couldn’t be more at home in the water if she’d been adopted by a pack of wild frogs when she was a puppy. For Ruby, bath time is not an issue. It’s Max who still has nightmares.

As I’m sure many of you know, with siblings, what you do for one, you have to do for the other or life is a horrible, unfair, temper tantrum day. Well, same thing goes for pet owners. You can’t really give one dog a bath and leave the other to frolic joyfully in his masculine odors, which is how Max and Ruby ended up at the doggie beauty parlor.

Everything was going smoothly, so we were told, until the groomer discovered a large amount of matting near Max’s derriere. No amount of combing could untangle these knots, and Max was beginning to get pretty anxious by the time his stylist arrived at the last resort.

Shave the mats out.

A necessary, yet desperate measure, Max’s buns were now exposed to the sub zero weather of last week. As a result, whenever he absolutely HAD to go to the bathroom (and trust me, he could hold out for a while) we would open the door so he could sprint outside, piddle as quickly as possible and come charging back up the stairs to bang on the door and scream bloody murder because his humps were frozen.

But, this story does have a happy ending. After the trauma of BATH TIME Max now enjoys many nights warming his buns by the fire and sampling popcorn while watching a little reality TV before dozing off and dreaming sweet dreams of furry underpants.