A Life In The Day

A day in my life usually starts with me waking up to the sounds of my wife getting ready for work. She starts this ritual around 6:30 am but the alarm has been going off for about a hour. The dog has also been trying to wake us up, or her shall I say, by using his nose to nestle in between the sheets and put that cold old thing on her as she tries to sleep; me I’m already half awake but I’m trying not to appear so because Joe our dog will come straight over to me.

As she’s dressing Joe tears at her cloths as a sort of a tug of war game and although she always wins he always adds an extra twenty minutes to her getting ready for work too. Next, after she’s kissed me good-bye Joe sets his sights on me and is fully active in the “I’ve got to wake them all up” department of his life. He gets me up between 8:30 and 9:00 depending if I had a bad day the day before and on his more generous days he seems to think that having wet paws is a blessing that I think is funny. Well I don’t Joe and if someone is reading this to you then please stop it.

I always have time in the morning for a little love for Joe using my hands and sort of cooing him; going back and forth using the back of my hand to make sure that he doesn’t bite me and just sort of petting him and rubbing the under side of his chin. He seems to like that and so do I.

I taught him two games since having so much time alone one of which is called “Catchin-dee-Air”. All you have to do is to put a rhythmic sound to it as I did and any dog can learn it; bee-bop sort of. “I take the ball and throw it and you catch it in the air, if you wanna play the game then you catch it in the air”. Just put it to music as I did and your dog will love it too, well maybe, I don’t know mine did.

Another game that I play with Joe in the mornings is Underdacovers. I put the same rhythmic sounds to playing this game and he seems to go crazy over what is under the covers, which are just my hands. He thinks it’s some sort of spider but its fun for the both of us.

By noon my day has taken form of what may seem to be the good life to many but to me I am bored shitless just having two dogs and an occasional phone call to talk to. Oh I write my blogs and I build web sites which is more than a lot of people do with their lives when on Disability in this day and age but I used to do so much more within a day that I almost feel obligated to do more, hmm…guess not.

Anywho, I check in with my wife and she always brightens my day with her telling me something about how her day is going or her telling me that I have to do something around the house, almost like orders for the day. It feels good to be needed ya know. So by 2:00 I am again task-less and looking forward to her arrival at around 5:pm but still thinking of her as I do almost every day.

Just about ten minutes before then, or before she gets home, both dogs go outside toward the back gate which is where we come in the house and they both sit and also wait on my wife. It’s funny to watch them do this every day. They hear the sound of her car engine as it rolls over the railroad tracks two blocks away and both come a whoppin and a hollerin, running throughout the house, nipping at every stuffed animal within an inch of it’s life. Now Joe, our small Cocker, has a problem with his piddlen everywhere and he gets pee all over the place when he gets excited. So here he is zipping around the house making little spots of pee everywhere when she isn’t even home. Needless to say that when she gets home I have to carry a couple of paper towels around and the both of us keep to the kitchen where there is linoleum until he calms down.

Meanwhile Crazy and Crazier are tearing around the house digging out every stuffed animal that I spent part of the day putting away and making pit stops into the kitchen to tinkle on our feet. We kiss and talk about how our days went.

After the dooters calm down my wife proceeds to change cloths and Joe is on the ready to help out again. He stands ready on the bed and as she disrobes he attacks he garments and shakes them violently. His favorite of course is her bra because of the Velcro or the elastic but none the less he runs around the house with it and if the neighbors ever came over at that moment it would be quite the scene.

Like most people my evenings are filled with a nice dinner, maybe some love making and that’s IF the dog doesn’t interrupt us, and then we’ll watch a movie or some TV. Very rarely do we ever fight and never do we go to bed mad at each other. This has been the success of our 22 year marriage and I am looking forward to writing another one of these columns on or at about our 50th anniversary.

I’ll tell ya, a day in my life may sound boring to some, it may sound exciting to others, it may even sound cliché, but to me it just sounds like just another day.

Such is the life of Terry L. Corwin aka Lazlo T. Hofstedder

That’s the Lazlo Report for March 20, 2007