You teach people how to treat you.

thanks, mom.

puppy diddle

i cried over dog pee last night.

zack and i had just gotten home, both from wonderful weekends in different places. we had missed each other, but i was moving quickly toward my sunday night meltdown, wherein Laura Realizes What She Didn't Get Done This Weekend And How Close Monday Morning Is.

and our adorable, energetic, frenetic, five month-old puppy (see above) had, quite predictable, lost control of his inordinately large bladder during the four hours we left him home alone. he peed on the kitchen floor.

it's a lovely kitchen floor--spanish tile, raised, so that any time you spill a glass of water it forms little rivulets that run like streams down the grout to the back door. no big deal when it's water, but extremely tricky when it's smelly puppy urine.

and i saw it, and zack didn't, and he thought he had already cleaned everything up. he was proud, glad that artie had stuck to his little pee pad. but he hadn't, and i pointed that out with just a little bit of i-can't-believe-you-didn't-see-that-this-is-probably-your-fault in my voice. which is when i started to tear up--those hot, stinging tears of frustration that pool up in your eyes and blur your vision, that make your nose tingle and make you realize that there's other stuff going on behind the dog pee. but really, if a puppy drives you to tears then GOOD GOD how in the world will you ever deal with CHILDREN?

there they were, sliding down my face and collecting underneath my chin, and after awhile they dripped off and i was there, with my tears and the smell of diluted bleach and the dog trying to lick my toes, and then all of a sudden it was our house, a very very very fine house, and the dog pee was gone, but it would come again. you know? it always comes. it's always something. but it's our house, and life is easier with you. someone cleans the dog piddle, and someone cries, and then the next day it's someone elses turn to cry while the other one cleans the piddle.

books n books

I discovered this incredible website today, bookshelfporn, and have spent the last twenty minutes poring over all the different ways that you can display books--stacked, shelved, strewn, by color, by title, by author, on racks, on the floor, on ladders, and (my favorite) as a stairway. can you imagine? "to get to the bathroom just walk up the books. careful on the fourth step; that's first-edition flaubert."

Right now we've settled for a lovely (truly) Ikea bookshelf and way too many stacks of seven and eight books in inconvenient locations throughout the house. as gorgeous as the stacks in this photograph are, you can do a lot more with sleek design and fashion coffee table books than with short and chunky philosophy volumes or every copy of pat conroy you've ever seen because you might have one more friend you haven't given his books to. those just aren't the prettiest books out there.

luckily, though, i now have a decorating scheme for my pied-a-tierre on the champs elysees.