I'm home, sick, from work today (really sick, not Oscar sick), and thinking about how attached we get to our pets and how much it sucks when they pass on.

The topic has been on my mind lately. The Unseen One and Rhodester both recently lost well-loved pets, and MCF recently had a close call.

Pets are important to many of the bloggers I read. Lorna has her cat and B13 and Cube and Otis have their dogs, and here at Darwen.us headquarters we're a two-dog house. We have our principal dog, Tilda ... and in the event that Tilda is for any reason unable to fulfill her canine duties, we have our relief dog, Chester.

Wendy would probably insist that I have the order backwards; that Chester is the principal dog. She'd be wrong for a number of reasons. For one thing, Tilda was here first. She has seniority. And besides, Tilda understands what the garbage truck is for.

Chester, on the other hand, has a terribly dysfunctional relationship with the garbage truck. He's figured out that every Thursday morning these guys in a big white truck come down the alley and ... gasp! ... STEAL OUR GARBAGE. He's bound and determined to put a stop to this weekly theft, so every Wednesday night when we take the trash out, Chester insists on sleeping outside, just inside the fence from the trash cans. Then every Thursday morning when the garbage truck comes, Chester goes into full scale terror alert mode, doing everything he can to get us to come outside and catch those garbage-stealing bastards in the act. And every Thursday morning after the truck is gone he comes back in the house and spends another day formulating a better plan for next week.

The other day I came home from work and showered, and then sat on the couch petting Tilda while Wendy used the PC beside me. Wendy asked me "Why do you love that dumb dog so much?"

"Well," I responded in my most self-pitying voice, "Tilda is the only body here who's ever happy to see me when I get home from work."

Wendy was indignant: "Oh, you KNOW that's not true! BOTH dogs are happy to see you when you get home!"

And she's right. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

Really, it is nice. And if you're not a pet-owner, you'd never understand. On the other hand, judging from the pet-lovers in my blogroll, I'd say I'm in pretty good company.

Labels: Dogs, Humor, Personal