Step One: Do Not Own Dogs.
The sudden arrival of hundreds of tiny black specks in my bed should have been a sign that there was something amiss. And yet each morning for the past week I have straightened our sheets and fluffed our pillows while brushing these hundreds of tiny black specks off of our bed and onto the floor, become passingly annoyed at Kendrick for having gotten into bed with dirty feet (or dirty something)…and then forgotten about the whole thing until the next morning, when I have once again found myself brushing hundreds of tiny black specks off of our bed and onto the floor.
This story is going exactly where you think it is, so if you want to stop reading now please be my guest.
Did you know that if you Google “what to do if I discover my dog has fleas,” you find out all sorts of neat information, like the fact that fleas actually poop? And that when they do this, the poop looks like tiny black specks?
I have spent the past week of my life sleeping in flea shit. I’d be horrified, but it actually feels like a kind of achievement. This thing happened, and not only did I not shudder myself to death…I didn’t even know. It also feels like another thing I can blame on Donald Trump et al., so that’s nice.
Soap is so hot.
The upside to discovering, as I did last night, that your dogs have truly astounding numbers of jumping/biting creatures residing on their bodies: in short order, your entire house will be cleaner than it ever has been before, including when it was built. Over the course of the evening many (oh, many) things happened that I wish had not (chief among them, plucking still-wriggling insects out of my dog’s FUPA with my bare fingers, and I’m sorry for the visual but I need you right there with me on this) but the evening can effectively be summed up by the fact that around 11PM I found myself vaccuuming my mattress crevasses. I was not even aware that my mattress had crevasses, and have never before in my life written out the word “crevasses.” I’m not even sure I spelled it correctly. But my crevasses (sic)?
THEY ARE SO CLEAN.
On the less-positive (but equally exciting) side: did you know that when you give a dog with fleas a flea bath, you can actually see the fleas decamping from the dog’s body with their tiny little flea-parachutes? It’s surprisingly adorable. I mean, really: parachuting fleas?! (By the time they hit the ground they are dead, which is sad if we’re thinking of them as miniature circus performers, but is also the intended result, so.)
Alright, so there you go; that pretty much covers the last 24 hours of my life, aside from the fact that I accidentally drank six cups of coffee and had a caffeine-induced (and hopefully invisible) panic attack in the middle of a meeting. Here’s hoping that my next post is about cute sweatshirts, and not “what to do when you try to get rid of your dog’s fleas but can’t.”
Send love, and bleach.
x
J
