Dogged by a tiny terrorist

As people line up to take sides on the new health care reform, I can't help but be torn between the two sides. On the one hand it is a little socialist for my taste, but on the other you have my wife.

My wife is the perfect example of why people need health care. If it is going to happen to somebody, it will happen to her. Without health insurance we would have been living in cardboard boxes a long time ago.

Unfortunately for my wife, things don't get better. Apparently she has agitated my dog and now there is a full-fledged war going on in my house. My wife isn't winning.

It all started a couple weeks ago when my wife began talking about bringing yet another dog into our household. We already have two rat terriers inside and I suppose my wife doesn't think that is chaotic enough. So she started talking about this dog and that dog, showing pictures and making plans in her head for the new addition.

Kramer, my boy dog, apparently didn't care much for this line of thinking. Now I know that you are thinking "how would your dog know," but let me tell you he is smarter than your average dog. He understands people better than a lot of people I know and always seems to know exactly what we're talking about. Let's just say he doesn't want a brother and he is showing it.

He first started by peeing in the house whenever my wife is home with him. He never has an accident when I'm home, and hardly ever does period, but lately when home with my wife, he just squirts away whenever he feels like it.

Then, my wife and I came home one night after being gone for several hours and let Kramer and our other dog out of the bedroom. There, laying in the floor, was a shank. I kid you not. My dog had gotten into our trash can, gotten a discarded toothbrush and chewed it into a shank.

This was not an easy feat. Our trash can is one with a lid you have to step on a pedal to open . He apparently stepped on the pedal and got the toothbrush without disturbing anything else in the can.

Then the little jailhouse dog chewed a perfect shank. Sharp as a razor on one end, serrated on the other end so it would cut better. The only thing missing was the little 20-pound dog standing in the doorway with it in his mouth ready to prison-stab my wife. Instead it was laying by her side of the bed as a warning.

A few days later he made another from a discarded plastic razor in the upstairs bathroom. I had left for work and once again he opened the same kind of trash can, left everything else alone but the razor, and went to work on the plastic. He was smart enough to leave the razor blade alone and make his own out of the plastic, leaving it in the bathroom doorway for my wife to step on when she got home. He is crafty, I'll give him that.

Then came what has become known at my house as the "mysterious nose incident." My wife has had occasion to break her nose, specifically twice in the last decade from falling in the bathtub and getting head-butted by a child. The other morning she awoke to two black eyes and her nose broken once again. The only problem is, she doesn't know how she did it.

My guess is the dog. I know, it sounds a little far-fetched, but let me finish. The cute little pooch sleeps in my wife's legs at night and with the slightest move he goes into a growling fit that the meanest of pit bulls would be jealous of. My guess is, he waited until my wife was snoring loudly, as she often does, and somehow broke her nose. Or maybe my wife ran into the doorframe while getting up to go to the bathroom and she somehow can't remember.

That leads us to the latest mystery in our household, known as the "passenger-side mirror incident." My wife got up to go to work Friday morning and when she left, her passenger-side mirror was broken. I got home from work at about 2 a.m. and sure didn't notice a mirror dangling from her car, so it had to happen between 2 and 6 a.m.

The most logical explanation is my wife hit the mirror on the side of the garage as she was backing out. However, she vehemently denies this so the only other explanation I can think of is Kramer slipped out after we were all asleep, took a baseball bat in his mouth and went to town on the mirror.

A little ridiculous, for sure, but so is a dog opening a trash can with a lid and making perfect shanks. I'm going to stick with my dog theory because as long as he is terrorizing her, I am less likely to come home to another little four-legged family member.

That and it is a lot better than the alternative: that my wife is in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease. How do you not remember breaking your nose or breaking your passenger side mirror? I wonder if the new health care reform addresses 32-year-old women with Alzheimer's and nursing homes. Something tells me I might need to check that out.