I live in a house full of animals. Whether or not that includes my Beloved Curmudgeon depends on what day you ask me.
Today, he’s okay. 
My dogs are so spoiled that it alternates between being irritating and humorous. They do their jobs so we pretty much cut them a lot of slack. Well, and its not just them, its the bird and cat too. I haven’t quite figured out what jobs the bird and cat do around here though. The dogs at least take their jobs of protecting hearth and home quite seriously.
Like most other people we have our routines and the animals all know exactly what to expect when. At least they know when things are supposed to happen that have to do with them. They know when I feed them, let me put it that way. They absolutely won’t let me wait even a few minutes. The cat comes around and head butts my leg until I go downstairs and put food in her bowl and then she’s good to go till the next evening. She knows when my husband comes to bed and comes back to me and crawls up in my lap and stays there until I go to bed.
The dogs know when its time for me to let them back into the house and will start barking like a couple of maniacs if I think I’m going to get away with letting them stay outside another 30 minutes. They also have their rituals for what happens when they come inside.
Here’s how it goes. I go downstairs and let the dogs come upstairs. They go thundering up the stairs and Beloved Curmudgeon gives them each a doggie bone. They swallow that in about a minute and then he gives them a pig ear or a piece of raw hide to chew on. The Doberman comes out on the back porch to chew his and the mutt stays in the den to chew hers. The Doberman gets very upset if the door is closed to the porch once he gets his chewy thing. He’ll pace around and whine until he gets out to his spot and can lay down and work on his pig ear. Its sad that he’s so neurotic. He almost literally can’t eat it anywhere else.
While the dogs are getting their treats from The Master, I’m downstairs feeding the cat, cleaning her litter box and giving her fresh water. This all happens about the same time very evening like clockwork.
This evening the routine was disrupted by the fact that Beloved Curmudgeon was on the back porch with the door closed when I let the dogs upstairs!!!! They were all a twitter about it.
They are both around or over 100 pounds so I could hear them thundering up the stairs as usual and thundering into the kitchen as usual. Then I heard them running all over the place upstairs. Uh - oh - somethings wrong. I went about my business of feeding the cat. I had to open a new cat food bag so I took longer than usual to do all the cat stuff downstairs. This made things even more anxiety provoking for the dogs.
As I was opening the cat food bag I heard the dogs thundering back down the stairs. I fully expected them to come barreling around the corner into the cat’s area and try to grab her food. That’s usually what they do if they make their way back downstairs while I’m feeding her. They just run over there and with one quick lick take her whole bowl of food. I was ready for them this time. But they never came around the corner.
I finished what I was doing and started back around the corner to go upstairs. As I was rounding the corner I heard them thundering back up the stairs and laughed to myself. They were watching me and waiting for me to come upstairs. Their full throttle run up the stairs was their version of stealth. Ha!
When I got up the stairs, sure enough, there they stood with angelic innocent expressions on their faces waiting with waging tails for me to give them their doggie treats. It was obvious that they were convinced they had pulled one over on me and I would believe they had been waiting there all along.
I laughed and petted them and gave them their treats. Now I’m writing about it on my blog. I don’t know, but I think that makes me as crazy as them!