Okay. I admit it. I love dogs.

It's not like in that movie either. You know, that movie MUST LOVE DOGS that is about this lovely girl, Diane Lane, I think, who would never have problems meeting a guy except in a movie. Apparently someone else runs an ad and tells her would-be suitors that they must LOVE dogs because she LOVES dogs, but there's the rub. She doesn't. Now to me that is the true flaw in this movie. She doesn't love dogs??? Are you kidding?? What kind of mutant is she? What's really wrong with her. Obviously she has some weird genetic defect that leaves her unable to experience true love - as it is the only kind of love a dog gives. Mutant. Freak. Social misfit. Anarchist. Bed Wetter.

Okay, so I do love dogs. Really love dogs. Okay so maybe I'm a little over the top about them. Well, not all of them. Mine in particular. I'm looking at one of mine right now. He's sleeping. He is very handsome. He's dreaming right now. He's kind of a big boy so he encompasses this whole chair that he is sleeping in right now. It's his daddy's chair only daddy never gets to sit in it anymore because the big boy is always in it nowadays. See? I just referred to my husband as my dog's daddy. As if I gave birth to a 145 lb. Great Dane. Ouch!! Nevertheless, he is adorable. He is my baby. I am... his mommy. I know. It's nauseating. I gotta go. I need to give him a hundred kisses. Right now!!

Saturday. Blah.

It's one of those defining moments. I'm sitting at the computer. I want to write something brilliant. All I can think about are those puffed cracker snacks that are sitting in the closet downstairs. Why do I always get hungry at times like this? Paul is relaxing with his favorite robe and his favorite dog. He's cramming in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern as much as one can cram when one is basically sleeping. Hoagie is resting his 20 lb. cranium on Paul's stomach so he is captive. This dog can make himself comfortable faster than any living creature I have known. He has the ability to lay some body part on me and totally trap me for hours. At night I've been known to move less than 2 inches at a time in any given direction because he has monopolized the rest of the bed between Paul and I and we are forced to the very edges of our Kingsdown mattress. Good thing it's oversized or I'd be sleeping off the edge... or on the floor. Not that he doesn't make us enormously happy mind you but those nights when he is having a dream it's like being on a ride at Universal. I am so used to being kicked and farted on during the night that I barely register just how wild things get. I wake up just long enough to log in the thought "Hoagie is dreaming again" and then I drift off. I don't know how. He must be dreaming of chasing badgers or something. The feet are going in four different directions. The lips are curling in an Elvis Presley like grimace. Occasionally there is boofing. Boofing is the non bark that happens during dream. It's the suedo-bark. It's the dream bark if you will. It's just another noctural noise that saturates my own dreamscape and wakes me up for the fourth time that night. I wonder why I have bags under my eyes.