Monday July 20... PAPER

Well I am jumping the gun a bit here with this post but I have to get my writing minutes in tonight before 4 A.M. You see when I write I like to do it late at night, I try to write from 10 or 11 until 3 or 4. My husband calls those vampire hours but because I don’t work outside the home at the moment I can sleep in which I think he equates as being lazy.

 My topic today is paper.  To Murphy it doesn’t matter if it is a newspaper, a mail envelope, a receipt, the plans from the surveyor to be delivered to the city for our building permit or toilet paper he loves it all. Oh he doesn’t eat it, he just likes to shred it from one end of the house to the other. No paper, not matter how small is safe. His favorite of course are newspapers because there is always an endless supply for him to get. He likes newspapers so much he will take a running  jump from the back of the couch across a couch table to reach the newspapers he knows are on the dinning room table (a good ten feet) and his feet never touch the ground. Rather startling to walk in and find a 5-month-old puppy, who weighs close to 50 pounds, lying on your dinning room table having the time of his young life ( and he almost ended then) shredding paper for the next celebration parade.   Then he looks up with at you with goofy Lab grin that says see mom how clever I am.

He also loves toilet paper. Our cat used to love to sit on the john and pull all the paper off the roll. Well Murphy is too dignified to do that. He waits until I head to the bathroom and lays in front of the door so I can’t go in without him. Why the trip to the bathroom is such a thrill I don’t know, though it may be that if we are not careful when taking a shower he likes to climb in take one with us. Cute when he was a puppy at 30 pounds not so funny at 65 pounds and he won’t get out unless you do and hogs the water.

Now unlike the cat he doesn’t pull off the paper from the roll on his own, it is only when you pull off your piece that he demands his own piece, which he proceeds to eat and then choke on every time. But if you don’t give it to him don’t think about even getting off the john, isn’t going to happen because he will lay under your feet and if you try to stand he stands too and you go flying into the glass shower door. Now the simple solution, you say, would be to lock him out in the first place. Well unlike my children when they were young who would sit in front of the locked bathroom door and kick their feet to rhythm of their screams, he has learned to jump up and turn the doorknob (there is no lock on the door). Not sure how he is doing this, maybe our dead cat is channeling the instructions because she could do it as well, but he gets in every time. 

The bottom line is you never realize just how much paper one has in their daily lives until you have a dog that loves to shred it. Though I do try to keep things in perspective. My brother and his wife came home one day to find that his Lab had eaten a couch: yes all that was left that was identifiable was pieces of wood and the springs. A very bored Labrador named Mocha did this carnage in one afternoon.

Well from Murphy and me hope you all  have a great Monday and we will be back tomorrow with more adventures, as long one of us doesn’t run away in the meantime.

Jody and Murphy 

PS He also loves to chew on books ( especially the binding)  as well as the cover of books and many of you know I am avid reader of romance and historical fiction as well have a large collection of Romance and  Scottish research books. Last week I caught him snitching books off my shelf near my desk and I followed him to find that he had been pilfering the bookshelf and stashing the books under a corner table for later chewing. In our house damaging books is a hanging offense and he spent much of the rest of that day in his crate for bad behavior. But the minute he got out he was back cruising to see where he could find more books to hide in his stash.