Do Your Job #PottyMouth

My people are obsessed with my potty habits. They are constantly saying, "Amelia, do you need to do your job?" Which is the polite way of saying go to the bathroom. 

When they are being patient, they take me out and say, "Okay, do your job." And when they are being impatient, they say, "Come on, take a pee," or, "I know you need to poop." As if they didn't understand that these things take time and that it is important to find exactly the right the spot.

In the morning, they take turns taking care of me, and then they leave each other coded notes like the one above, which means:

Amelia peed (#1) and pooped (#2), which equals 3, and she ate (8) her breakfast.

Taco ate (8).

They don't ever tell Taco to do her job because Taco does her job whenever she wants in a box in the powder room. I envy Taco's freedom. It must be nice to be above all bossing around. That said, I know that going to the potty outside is way better than using a box inside. Sure on cold, rainy days, it'd be nice to stay in the warm, dry house, but Taco never gets to feel the breeze on her bum. Poor sister-cat.

Anyway, as I said, they're obsessed with making sure they know if I did my job. Sometimes, when we're away from home, it's hard for me to find the right spot and feel comfortable, and this stresses my people out a lot. The first time they ever took me on vacation, I refused to pee for over 24 hours, and on the ride home, they literally stopped at every single exit off the highway from Freeport, Maine, to Lowell, Massachusetts, trying to get me to pee. I never did. I preferred to wait until we got home.

I've gotten better since then--that was five years ago after all!--and I think our trip will be fine in this regard. For me, anyway, because as we've previously established, I go outside. 

What Diane's worried about now is her own potty issues. You see, the Big Rolling Crate (BRC) isn't like an RV. There's no plumbing. 

The other day Diane and Todd came home with the emergency toilet solution: A toilet seat that snaps onto a 5-gallon bucket. The people are going to have very cat-like toilet habits, it seems, on this grand adventure. 

From the look on Diane's face when Todd snapped the seat onto a bucket, you'd think she'd just stepped in poo, and not that Todd was proposing a place to go #2. She studied the bucket-toilet and said, "I think I'll just maybe be dehydrated a lot and not eat much."

Todd assured her it's only for emergency because most of the time there'll be Walmarts and truck stops and fast food restaurants and camp grounds and, of course, the woods. Personally, I think the woods are the best toilet, so I'm not sure why Diane makes that face every time Todd mentions it. 

The Big Rolling Crate

There's a lot of excitement at my house right now while my people try to get everything ready for our big adventure. My boy-person, Todd, whom it is my duty to protect from all dangers real and imagined for as long as I shall live, spends a lot of time preparing the Big Rolling Crate, and my lady-person, Diane, fusses around the house, doing all the stuff she didn't have time to do during the school year. Diane is a teacher, and during the school year, she's always going on and on about not having time.

My people call the Big Rolling Crate "The Bus," or sometimes "The Ambulance," but I call it the  the Big Rolling Crate. We have a lot of rolling crates right now and I like them all.

Diane's rolling crate is small and I like it because it is always clean and it has a sunroof, but it doesn't have a center console, so it's hard for me to see where we're going because I can't stand and look forward very easily.

Todd's rolling crate is bigger and I LOVE the big center console. I can balance my front feet on it and my back feet on the back seat and it's like I'm actually driving the car (except I'm not, of course, because paws aren't good for driving cars). Todd's care is always dirty, though, and I usually have to share the back seat with lots of tools and stuff.

Then there's the big, loud rolling crate, which Todd calls "the Ford" and Diane calls "the pickup." It's very noisy in the big, loud rolling crate, which sometimes frightens me, but I do love the bench seat. I get to sit right between Diane and Todd in the very front, and they get made at me sometimes because I want to lick Todd's face while he's driving (Diane never drives the big, loud rolling crate), but I don't care, because I like to lick Todd's face.

The rolling crates are much more fun than my regular crate, because my regular crate just sits in the sunroom and there's no room in it for anyone but me. The rolling crates can fit a whole bunch of people. Usually it's just me, Todd, and Diane, but sometimes other people come with us, like friend Caitie or friend Zeb or Mammam Dot, and even though I'm a little afraid of other people, I'm not as afraid of them when we're all in the rolling crate going somewhere, because I know we're going somewhere fun.

You see, crates are my safe places. Whether I'm in the regular crate at my house or one of the rolling crates far from home, I know I'm safe in there, and I like that, because, to be honest, I get scared a lot.

Diane is afraid that my scaredy-cat nature is going to cause problems on our big adventure, but I know that as long as we have the Big Rolling Crate, everything will be okay.

Right now, Todd's fitting out the back for a big bed and hooking up solar panels so we can electricity. I don't need electricity, because I'm a dog, but my people seem to think this is important. I guess if Diane's going to update my blog from the road, we'll need electricity, so now that I think about it, for the first time in my doggy life, electricity might be useful to me. See that--I'm getting more and more like my people every day.