Crystal’s Adventures

No, I don’t really mean my mood. I’m talking about the carpet.

On Sunday night, unbeknownst to us, Violet knocked one of Clinton’s paint markers onto the floor, and Charlie literally ATE it while we slept. He chewed up the entire marker and injested the (not non-toxic!) acrylic wood paint inside of it. When we woke up in the morning, his paws and beard were blue, as was the livingroom and bedrooom carpet, in deep-blue splotches, smears and paw-shaped stains. Clinton flipped out, calling Charlie a “traitor” and telling him he would never look at him the same way again. Charlie, tail between his legs, spent the rest of the day in his kennel looking guilty and just overall pathetic. Later in the day yesterday, Charlie barfed up a bunch of blue goo and bits of plastic.

At 9:30 PM last night, we drove to Cary to rent a “Rug Doctor” from the grocery store. We stuffed the unwieldy machine and two bottles of miracle solution into the trunk of our car and drove back home to begin the whole process. We steamed the stained parts of the carpet over and over and even treated it with super spot remover to soak overnight before beginning again this morning. We must have emptied 15 full tanks of dirty blue water into the toilet between yesterday and today. Yet the carpets remain splotchy and blue.

Unfortunately, the situation seems hopeless. We had to return the machine back to the grocery store tonight and have “thrown in the towel”, so to speak, on our attempts to get the carpets back the way they were. I’m afraid we’ll have to pay for replacing all of the carpets in the unit, which could cost up to $1500. Ouch. So, I guess you could say our moods are blue, blue, blue, too.

To top everything off, tonight we had to give Charlie a bath because we discovered that every time he drank water from his bowl, his blue paws were getting wet and tracking additional blue paint all over the house! Thus, today our evening was spent washing a large smelly, shaggy black dog in the bathtub with Pantene shampoo, hair and blue paint flying across all corners of the bathroom.

The moral is: if you have a chew-happy dog, do not assume that anything on a table or elsewhere is safe. Our advice: Go through each and every item in your whole house, imagining a puppy eating it. If any item is liable to explode and or ooze when bitten, LOCK THAT MOTHER*&$!#@ THING UP! (Item, not the dog.)

Hope you’re having a better week than we are. Peace out.