"He would kill you like a small dog. Let your anger be as a monkey in a pinata."- Master Tang, Kung Pow: Enter The Fist

Scooby is perhaps the best dog in our house, with the exception of his continual staring at me, judging me, telling me to call Jodie Foster.

The Mrs. is one dog away from being a Crazy Dog Lady. I’ve told her this. We had a husky-cocker mix, and a miniature poodle with a Napoleon complex. On top of two kids under six, this officially qualifies us for “menagerie” status. But that wasn’t enough.

The Mrs. talked to a nice lady (Dog Rescue Woman) who specializes in rescuing dogs, just like it says on her cape. The Mrs. had her heart set on a nine year old terrier that got the boot when his owners decided to reproduce with an actual two footed variety of child versus the four footed variety. The Mrs. discovered Dog Rescue Woman’s super power when The Mrs. came home with two little terriers instead of one. Dog Rescue Woman’s super power is to make people like The Mrs. take two dogs versus the one she had planned. So, now we have the official Mongrel Horde.

As if it weren’t chaos enough showing up at home with three people and two dogs immediately clamoring for my attention after a long day spent slaying the dragons of business entropy, now I had seven (not counting the vole) mammalian creatures jostling for my undivided attention as I walked in from the –40F ambient temperature outside into the warmth of the house.

To give her credit, The Mrs. doesn’t ask me to do much with or about the flowing mass of fur that periodically rolls through our house like a prairie thunderstorm. Mainly she just asks me to let them out once in a while, and that’s the problem.

No, not the getting off my butt and walking the fifteen feet to the door to let them out (though I grumble from time to time), no, it’s not that. It’s what goes on outside. Mind you, I’m very happy that what goes on outside stays outside – the dogs are all well house-trained. It’s the residual bits.

Specifically, in the summer time the waste products of the animals evaporate, percolate, or degenerate pretty darn quickly. No fuss, no muss. I haven’t studied it, and do not wish to. The stuff disappears. Gone. Maybe bigfoot eats it. I don’t really care, since I live in a forest, and the stuff isn’t stuck on my shoe. This would be wonderful if the effects of summer lasted longer than the fifty-three seconds that is the average duration for summer in Fairbanks.

No, in winter, the “stuff”, both solid and liquid (which soon becomes solid) stays. It may well stay as unsquishy frozen chunks, as close to tidy as is possible since they’re in essence freeze-dried, like instant coffee. However, let’s not kid ourselves. We all know what it really is that’s lurking out there. You can sweep it away from the house, but the little biological processing machines that are our dogs will soon make more. And, since the temperature has been hovering around –40F, there’s not a lot of incentive for me to walk the dogs (there’s barely incentive for me to open the doors to let them back in), and nearly zero incentive for the dog to walk another sixty feet away to do “the business.” Sixty feet times –40F equals a dog with very frosty tootsies, or if it ventures too far, an attractive lawn ornament.

If you’ve ever been to a cave with stalagmites, (which I believe, are the pointy things on the floor, not the roof) then you can imagine the way our male dogs have decorated the propane tank on the barbeque grill with expelled liquid dog stuff. Said dog stuff freezes instantly into decorative shapes that would be considered beautiful if they were made of something, anything else.

Would a rose smell as sweet if called by another name? Probably. But The Mrs. would still smack me silly if I tried to give her a rose that was made of frozen dog urine.

We’ll be below the melting temperature of water for months yet. Perhaps I’ll grow to love the lemon-yellow sculpture in the front yard. I’m not betting on it. But, I’ll get to look at it until at least April. I’m hoping for snow. Every three or five days. At least that will cover up most of it, and I can pretend that our house is my idyllic, peaceful home, and not the world’s northernmost fire hydrant.