an all too familiar scene

Sitting in my office, my brain is in that weird writer’s fugue where time blurs and I take -10 to all my passive perception checks. I realize that my dog, who has spent much of the day at my feet, doing everything she can to capture my attention, isn’t there. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I last saw her; it could be a minute, it could be thirty minutes.

I push back from my desk and walk out the open doorway into the hall.

“Ferris?” I call out.

I listen. Nothing.

“Ferris?” I walk to the end of the hallway. From out in the yard, I hear the familiar jingle of her tag against her collar.

I walk across the house and toward the patio. Just before I get to the door that goes into the back yard, I see Riley. She’s lying down as low as she can, watching me. The tip of her tail barely wags. I’ve seen this before; it’s what she does when she is establishing an alibi. If she could talk, she would say, “Just so you know, I’ve been here all along.”

I quicken my pace and into the back yard. “Ferris!” The jingling stops, but I still don’t see my dog.

I’m pretty much speed walking at this point as I cross the back yard. I know she’s gotten into something, but what? We’ve had a lot of construction recently, and though I do my best to make sure anything that kills dogs isn’t in a place where she can get it, I remain paranoid.

I make it across the yard. As I pass the Chinese elm, my brain reminds me that I need to have it trimmed ā€“ it’s weird, the things your brain spits out at you in times of potential crisis – and around the corner of the house.

I see her before she sees me. She’s dragged a huge black trash bag off the tops of our cans and taken it to that spot in the yard where she takes everything she wants to chew on. Over the years, it’s been a graveyard for shoes, toys, loaves of bread we didn’t put far enough back on the counter.

I take a breath and use my deepest, growliest, angriest, you-are-in-so-much-fucking-trouble Dad Voice: “FERRIS!”

She flinches, drops the bag, and slinks toward me, head down, submissive.

“Dammit, Ferris. This is not for you.” I walk past her and pick up the bag. It’s full of rags and rolled up plastic. It smells like paint. I’m glad I caught her before she could really tear into it.

I find the top of the bag and cinch it closed, making sure I don’t get paint on my hands.

“Really? Paint? I can understand disgusting old food, cat shit, and all the kleenex and Q-tips you drag out of the trash cans, but paint?”

She looks at me, slowly lifting her head up, perking up her ears as I talk. By the time I finish and pick up the bag, she’s wagging her tail and smiling at me.

I walk past her with the bag, on my way to stuff it inside the trash cans that she can not open. Yet.

She trots alongside me, and sniffs at the bag. She looks at me, expectantly, tail wagging faster and faster as we get closer to the trash cans.

If she could talk, she would say, “Hey, can I have that? It looks like it would be fun to tear apart.”

I shake my head and stuff it into the can.

“No, Ferris. No you can not.”

53 thoughts on “an all too familiar scene”

  1. Dean Devlin just made it official over on Twitter. Congrats on a spot on Leverage, Wil! Makes me wish I was visiting my friend in Portland next week, so I can cross off two Geek Wish List items as once: see Leverage filmed, & meet Wil Wheaton.

  2. Well crap! Is this only an American thing? Cause this is the first I have ever heard of Leverage and so I imdb’d it and then I searched it on my local listings thinger and nada.

  3. Leverage is a show on TNT (on American Cable), which is produced by Dean Devlin and John Rogers. They’ve only done one season, but are filming their second season right now in Portland, Oregon.
    The show is pretty cool, shorthand description is “A-Team plus Ocean’s Eleven”, a group of former thieves go around helping people who’ve been screwed over by big business, and do it with tons of cons, heists, and style.

  4. Well that is why I am not familiar with it. No TNT here in Canuckistan at least not through my cable service provider. What a shame. I don’t care much for Ocean’s Eleven *gasp* but the A-Team rocks my socks.
    *edit* Oops so does that Wil Whatshispickle (rock that is). What a shame, what a shame, what a shame.

  7. The Chihuahua I used to have would do similar stuff. I once found a Baby Ruth bar that she’d buried in the potted plant in the dining room AFTER she had died. She had died at age 16 and we’d had the plant for several years, so I have no clue how long it had been there.
    By the way, Wil, you tell awesome stories! My boyfriend, a friend of ours and I are all participating in http://www.julnowrimo.com/ next month. You might consider trying it. I hear it’s a blast and a nightmare all rolled into one!
    Jess K.
    http://www.twitter.com/mynock77

  9. I love it when you post about your dogs. I just spent a whole hour on Blog Talk Radio yapping about my cats; one of them has a similar issue to Ferris, dragging rubbish around to munch on. Bizarre, lovable, maddening creatures!

  11. My german sheperd doesn’t get into the trash often, and he doesn’t like the smell of paint. Guess I’m lucky he doesn’t. Instead, he likes to come and bump my elbow when I’m typing….

  12. I tought my cocker Sinbad not to get into the trash as I have done with all three of my dogs. When he was young I put pepper in the trash can and the bag, when he got a snoot of the pepper that was it. NOW I could leave him all day and he will not even come close to the trash can. Now for 10 years he has never trashed the trash… control, control control! Placing pepper in the trash bag will not hurt her (FERRIS) but will give you the control that you should have…

  13. Hey I love the dog’s name. Mostly because it is also my name. But hey – you’re gonna be on Leverage? I’m gonna have to start watching it now. Thanks a lot! Just when I was trying to cut back on TV. . . šŸ˜‰

  14. Happened to us too the other day. Only this bag was full of Poopy and Wet Diapers!!.
    Got home to find him sitting happily on the front veranda with chewed up diaper peices strewn across the font yard with little lumps of poop and piles of the goopy gelatinous crap from inside disposables all over the place. Not Fun!
    He got out during some wind (blew over part of the fence) while we had our 3yo son at the hospital (routine tonsils and adnoids) I’d left the bag on the front step since arms were full of kids and bags for the hospital trip and it’s a fairly roundabout walk to get to our actual trash cans etc… and thus had forgotten to go back for it. *sigh*
    One of the grossest cleanup jobs ever.
    That damn dog was so darn proud of himself too!! heheh.

  15. That can backfire. My husband once spilled a batch of homemade habanero salsa. The dog started licking it off the floor… and kept on licking until a quart was finished. She then begged for more. She’s encountered black pepper a couple of times, too. No effect.

  16. I got all the way through this the first time, thinking, “well, yeah, destruction, of course, what did you expect with a name like that?”
    Then I re-read it and realized you named your dog FERRIS, and not FENRIS.
    And boy, did this ever sound familiar. I had a dog named “Houdini”. For very, very good reason.

  17. yep sounds familiar! My jack russell terrier Teabag (dont ask) is obsessed with the postman and anything that resembles a letter, every morining its a race to get to the door before he does!

  18. But it has neve backfired, Ha! dogs will eat just about anything and I mean just about anything. BUT the pepper goes up the snout of the dog, not in his or her belly, Dogs have a very keen sence of smell, as you may know, maybe 100 times stronger then ours. So by them getting a noise of pepper this will divert them from the trash can that is what your looking for Correct (Wil?) I have always used this and has always worked not only for my dog but for my oldest sons dog when they came to visit FOR 6 MONTHS. Black pepper is good and Red pepper is even better, I would not, nor have I ever used red pepper on the trash cans, unless I’m cooking mexican…

  20. Wil, you made me tear up I was laughing so hard. We just got a 4 month old black lab puppy named Emma. She’s the cutest little shit, but by god if there are any socks, papers or cloths on the floor or furniature, its hers.
    We had a similar experience with what you were just describing. We just got a new grill three weeks ago, and thought a cover would be nice. We came home and our cute lil 4 month old puppy had done a great job “working” on it all day. Needless to say, we’ll wait on replacing it.

  22. “I shake my head and stuff it into the can.”
    Does your head make that fun spray can rattle when you shake it? Why did you stuff it into the can?
    HA is joek. Funny though how sometimes that’s all it takes to turn a story into a Terry Gilliam cartoon.

  23. My dog has learned that if she rolls the kitchen trash can down the basement stairs, it kindly spews it’s contents all over the basement and she has to do very little work.

  24. The only difference between this post and a post I could have written about my dog is that my dog does this with cat poop.
    Not. Fun.

  26. So, you’re working on Leverage. I assume that means you’re coming to Portland, so I’ve helpfully compiled a list of beers you need to try.
    No need to thank me, I just like to do good works.

  27. LOL. You broke the Dad voice out on the dog? That’s too funny, man! Thanks for the laugh, very entertaining story. Glad to see that you averted a possible pet catastrophe with the power of the Dad voice. Having been Dad voiced on the old Soapbox, I only have an idea of what it truly sounds like, I just remember having an “Oh shit, Wil Wheaton just yelled at me!” feeling that was pretty frakking scary to me at the time because it was so unexpected.
    So Ferris was attempting to huff paint, huh? That’s a new one! I wonder if she got the idea from some stupid news spot about kids who huff paint to get high. Those stories piss me off so bad because it’s almost as if they’re purposely trying to plant the idea in kids’ minds just by mentioning it in the first place. It’s a personal pet peeve (pardon the pun) of mine.
    And hey, congrats on landing a role on Leverage! That is such a great show, words cannot even describe it. Is this the Mysterious Project X you’ve been hinting at for the past couple of weeks? If so, you’re good, Wheaton…the suspense was practically killing me. Are you allowed to discuss details about your role, or is that still classified information? I swear, this acting stuff is almost as bad as the CIA, the NSA and Homeland Security put together as far as actors being allowed to discuss future episodes or plot lines within the show.

  30. She can also headbutt open doors that swing away from her.
    And last year managed to somehow open a door with a doorknob that opened towards her. (To get to yet another trashcan)

  35. My dogs are both crazy about eating crayons. On the few occasions when the kids have forgotten to put away the crayons, the dogs have eaten the entire box…And over the course of the next 24 hours, the poops in the backyard are quite spectacular, like the 4th of July.

  36. Out of curiosity Wil (since this post and your dog reminds me of Marley) have you seen the movie Marley and Me?
    You know, I didn’t think I would like it. But did I ever cry like a baby for hours after watching. I was a mess and I have never really had a family dog.
    The person I watched it with was a bigger mess because he had a lab that was in his family for 17 years and last year they had to put him down because of cancer.

  39. I can totally relate. We had a husky who used to get into the garbage…until one day I had just cleaned out the fridge of leftovers that had been sitting there for about a week and tossed them in the trash. Well instead of putting them in the bin outside, I put the garbage bag under the sink…(BIG mistake) I went downstairs to go play some WoW, came up a while later…Gir (named after Gir from Invader Zim — not to mention the whole Grrrr double meaning thing). ANYWAY, one of the things Gir had eaten was week old left over ribs…lets just say, Sunday morning hubby and I got up to find that Gir had repainted our carpets a stinky darker brown ALL over our living room rug, and you could see just exactly where it went from solid to liquid. Started cleaning carpets at 9:30am and finished around 4:30…hubby was not pleased. >< Gir never ripped into the garbage again though LOL.

  41. Looks like a list I need to try too. The Rogue Hazelnut Brown Ale looks interesting, I’ll have to see if it is at my local store. Probably the best beer I’ve ever had was the Hazelnut Porter at the Blue Loon Brewery in Toledo, OH.
    Wil,
    congrats on the Leverage gig.

  42. Wook, that was quite amusing! šŸ™‚ And of course now all I can picture is the Terry Gilliam version of that situation…
    -Alicia (@AliciaWag)

  43. Wil,
    This is what we really miss–your old style blogs about pets and vets and family and marathons and Stinky at Starbucks and pork and beans with pineapple and Aunt Val. This is the real you. Keep up the family blogs–we love you.
    Freeman šŸ™‚

  44. Wil,
    I had to add to this. Seeing that we have the three poodles, Tasha, Data and Will Riker, l can relate. Tasha and Data are Mom and Dad to Will. Will can be a brat. Before he was two, his favorite job was to take my panties, yup, and chew them up. Not the cheap kind, nooooo, Victorias Secret panties. The boy pooped cloth after doing it. Caught him and made him wear what was left. The other thing he still likes to do and so does his brother Smudge, is put his toys in the toilet. Have to watch before going in our house.
    Having dogs is the best,
    Pat

  45. As a writer myself I find that words come to me easy but yet here I sit working on the third draft of a comment. I have watched you on tv for years and can honestly say I find the real you much more intresting been fallowing you on twitter for a bit now and can say your funny as hell. Thanks for letting an good old Trek Geek like me see the otherside of the looking glass.
    Oh and yes I am so much a Trek Geek that I’m writing a new Trek book sad I know.
    Shawn

  46. What kinda dog is Ferris? Is he the white one or black one? They’re both cute. And okay, I know you and Anne named Ferris after the band Save Ferris.. but did the band Save Ferris name themselves after the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Hmm.. yeah my dogs used to get into the trash but I dont have any of my own now so I dont have to deal with that problem anymore. But I would love to have a (nice, friendly, non-dead set on killing) Rottweiler or some kinda big or decent size dog because all my life I’ve had small dogs. And congrats on Leverage! I had never heard of it but I looked it up on wiki and it sounded interesting.

  48. Hi Wil and everyone else,
    the three things I love most about this blog: politics, music, and pets. I remember your story about getting a new cat and the two other cats being horribly pissed about it. Well, guess who just agreed to take care of her best friend’s cat while said friend’s out of town working. (Hemingway! His name is friggin’ HEMINGWAY! I prefer Faulkner, but it had to start with an H.). My own cat’s not amused at all. They were chasing each other around the furniture all day long while I tried to work, and then they joined forces in peeing on the rug (the rug that tied the room together, yeah. Actually the rug my Swedish grandma-in-law spent one month making as a christmas gift for me and that can’t be washed or dry-cleaned by any means.) Well, no more details. After feeding them both with their respective Royal Canin special diet (not that they would eat anything ordinary from the super market) and trying to clean up a bit I’m reading your blog and listening to my favorite ever playlist, featuring Wilco (a discovery I really owe to you), plus the Eels, Marcy Playground, Calexico, Lambchop and lots of other stuff I love – while watching the two cats who finally both fell asleep on the sofa, just inches from each other. Do you know how much you brighten up people’s day with your great writing? Just wanted to say thank you for that. Keep us up to date on Ferris, Riley and everyone else in your household!

  49. I read this story the other day(and it was great), and then the next night I had a dream that zombies were invading everyhere, and the only way to escape them was to ride rollercoasters because the zombie’s limbs couldn’t hold against the extreme velocity, and alot of people were eaten or turned into zombies. At the very end, I became a zombie but it was at the exact moment the antivenom was found and I survived.
    and you were in it! You were actually just one of the extras, running around screaming in the background, in the vicinity of a large english duke who was trying to protect his mansion from the zombie apocolypse. I think you were eaten.
    anyway. have a nice day!

  50. “She flinches, drops the bag, and slinks toward me, head down, submissive” — we all have much to learn about human relations from our canine friends.

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