Coincidence? Or Conspiracy?

     

                                         Y’all are gross. Seriously.

When Adam and I went to go visit his family a few weeks ago prior to heading up to his cabin, we were planning on staying with his older sister. As we were heading down the stretch of highway between the last ferry and his hometown we got a phone call telling us plans had changed. 

While his sister and her family were out that afternoon, their adorable chocolate lab puppy had chosen the one carpeted room in the basement to have an accident in. 

The carpeted room was the guest room, where we were going to be staying. And the accident? The accident wasn’t just pee my friends (is it ever just pee?). No, instead Finnegan had diarrhea all over their light beige carpet.

So. Carpets were cleaned, dogs were quarantined and Adam and I stayed with his parents instead.

Case closed, yes? Yes.

UNTIL!

Fast forward to yesterday. Adam’s twin sister is visiting from back East, and she, Adam’s older sister, his nephew and his dad are all coming to visit us for the weekend.

We went down to Vancouver to meet them on Sunday and had a lovely day chokablok full of IKEA, antiquing (Again! We have antiqued TWICE now! Adam bought an ugly chair! More on that later!), eating etc. 

We left Gus at home, after taking him for a big walk and swim earlier that morning. Around dinner time we started worrying about how long he’d been cooped up inside because it’d been around 6 hours since we left. 

Look. I know that right now, you think you know where I’m going with this. But don’t get ahead of me! I’m not going there. You know why? Because being responsible dog owners, Adam and I had left him with plenty of food and water and made sure he had time to do his business outside before we left.

Nonetheless, we texted a friend and asked him to go by the house and let Gus out for a pee break just to be safe.

Around 7 the friend texted back that he’d been by the house, Gus had gone out for a pee, was still topped up with food and water and they’d had a good play session in the backyard.

See? SEE! You didn’t know where I was going with this at all! I’m positively full of tricks and surprises! We had covered all of our bases and everything was fine, no dog of ours was going to poop on the carpet.

Gus sorted, we had dinner in the city and then headed back home. All of us. To our house. Where everyone was going to sleep. Some of them in our guest room.

As soon as I opened the door, I smelled something. The smell wasn’t a poop smell though –  I would describe it as “farty”.

I even said to Gus as I was greeting him, “So, this is how you spend your day? Sitting here farting in my living room?”. I went around and opened some windows, trying to air out the dog-fart smell before everyone else got there.

And then Adam went into the guest room.

(Yes. YES. Okay, you were right. We’re there.)

Adam went into the guest room. This one.

Except now, it now looked something like this:

Internets, that is not a fart.

Two separate houses. Two separate dogs. Two separate guest rooms with two separate beige carpets. Now forever bound together in history after being identically befouled by canine fecal expulsions.

The only difference? Finnegan is 70 pounds. Gus is 180.

Friends, that is approximately 2.5 times the diarrhea. But I guess that’s the deal when you buy a giant beast: you get 2.5 times the love, but also 2.5 times the poop.

(You know what? Last night I would have probably forgone some of that love in exchange for less poop. No, I take that back. I would have DEFINITELY traded love for less poop. Seriously. Is this possible?  Make me an offer.)

Whenever I find myself at this point, staring at a mess of dog shit sprayed onto my carpet and knowing that it’s not going to go away unless I put on the gloves and start mucking, I always think of my friend Lisa.

Lisa is not a dog person, will never be a dog person. Her husband is however, and they have an ongoing argument about whether or not to get a dog. When they visit he’ll hold Gus’ big face in his hands and say, “Seriously honey, who wouldn’t want this?”. In return she’ll glance doubtfully at the drool smears on my walls, the thin layer of dog hair perpetually covering my floors. “I just think dogs are too much work” she’ll say, “They’re dirty and messy and gross.”

I can’t deny that, no dog owner can deny that, and that’s why so far she’s winning the argument. And so far, to my knowledge, she’s never had to scrape still-warm dog feces out of her guest room carpet with guests looking on in horror as she yells at her husband to bring “Towels! MORE TOWELS!”

So, that’s was our night! Up to our elbows in GUS. It was almost 10pm by the time we discovered PoopFest 2012 and we did the best we could with warm soapy water and the remnants of a bottle of Spot Shot I dug out of my cleaning cupboard, and then this morning I went and rented a steam cleaner.

As of this afternoon all evidence had been removed, our carpets are cleaner than they were before and since I was planning on doing them before Baby comes in October anyway, I wasn’t too bothered by getting it a few months early.

The only lingering issue is that these two incidents – the diarrhea in the guest room there and the diarrhea in the guest room here – they are so similar, so eerily mirror-image. They resemble each other so completely, right down to the location of the “accident”.

All of it has me wondering, PoopFest 2012: Coincidence? Or conspiracy?