Happy Holidays

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Merry Christmas, Winter Solstice or whatever offends you the most.

Inside joke: the Greyhound is obsessed with his hedgehog collection, a ragtag bunch of stuff toys, all with the squeakers destroyed.

Rat Dog gets a bath tomorrow and one can only wonder how she'll remedy the situation. She can't stay clean for more than a day.

She found a tasty way to filth one Christmas a few years back. My father-in-law was doing the patriarch thing and carving the turkey. He carried out his morbid work on the chopping block table, the bird set in a shallow pan. The family scurried around, getting the rest of the meal on the table. The Rat Dog's fuzzy tail protruded from under the chopping block table, the rest of her obsured by the trash can.

Father-in-law kept slicing the bird and below, the Rat Dog didn't move. "What are you doing?" I leaned down and hauled her out from under the table. Grease flattened her hair and dripped from her ear tassles.

It was a juicy bird and the shallow pan had overflowed. Pulled by gravity, drippings ran in golden streams down the table legs onto the floor and the Rat Dog. The Rat Dog thought she'd died and gone to heaven. Even as I yanked her away from bliss, her little pink tongue reached for the grease moat.

Heaven was followed by hell when I dropped her in the sink and washed her with dish soap, which, by the way, doesn't cut grease on Rat Dogs.

Eat, drink and be merry.

Pat K.