Ridiculous Ideas from the Texas Legislature

Some Texas politicians are scum. If you don’t believe me, check out H.B. 738, related to inattentive driving. Should this piece of garbage pass, it will be illegal for Texas drivers to do the following while operating our vehicles:

Interact with pets
Interact with a passenger
Eat or drink
Interact with your stereo, CD player, MP3 player, et cetera (including changing the station or track)

Et cetera, so forth and so on, blah, blah, blah. These are just the most outrageous things that Rep. Chente Quintanilla included in this piece of crap.

Up yours, Quintanilla. You’re an embarrassment to Texans, because you’re in league with the nanny state. Instead of holding people accountable for the things that they choose to do, your introduced legislation attempts to prevent all of us from doing normal, routine things – like talking with passengers or taking a sip of soda while we’re going to work to earn the taxes that pay your useless, miserable ass.

What sort of scum-sucking, anti-freedom oxygen thief would even think of introducing legislation like this?

Peanut Butter is Awesome

Peanut butter, not beer, is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. (Sorry, Benny Franklin, but I’m disagreeing with you, however brilliant and patriotic you might have been.)

A PB and J on white bread cheers you up, fills your stomach, and satisfies the sugar requirement of your daily diet. When you’re feeling really depressed, a spoonful of Reese’s peanut butter – which is the most awesome PB ever made, mostly because of the insane sugar buzz you get just from smelling the stuff – makes everything all right again. It’s even better than a spoonful of chocolate frosting.

Best of all, peanut butter on the end of your finger attracts The Annoying Dog. In our house, The Annoying Dog is Dad’s blue-tick coon hound. She’s named Highway because that’s where Dad found her. And because she kind of looks like asphalt. Asphalt with white-chocolate chips.

Highway likes to make all sorts of strange noises. She does a half-woof, half-whine for attention. She has a low, dragged-out grunt of sorts when she wants food. And she has a strange sound in the back of her throat, that sounds like a pinto-bean fart inside a sleeping bag, when you do something that she doesn’t like (such as feeding her dry dog food).

But she also adores peanut butter. Unable to resist the urge to lick my finger completely clean, she floats across the room, her tongue hanging out one side of her big, loud mouth.

“Goooood dog,” I say. “Goooood girl. Baby girl’s gonna shut up in a minute, isn’t she? Oh, yes, she is.”

Yep. I will baby talk the dog when I’m feeding her peanut butter. Because I’m giddy over the fact that, when her tongue is temporarily glued to her palate, she can’t make a single sound.

God bless you, JIF creamy.

Norm's Brother is Here

We've corralled Norm's little brother, who is now named Cliff. Why, yes. That is a "Cheers" reference. Why? I don't know. They don't even look like Norm and Cliff. And as far as I know, neither of them have gone anywhere NEAR the Guinness in the refrigerator.

The poor little guys have messed-up fur around their necks: the normal, smooshed-down look that dogs get when they've worn collars for a while. (Neither were wearing collars when we first saw them, though. Said collars had, we figure, been removed when these two guys were dumped. Quite a few animal dumpers do this. I don't know why, to be honest with you.)

And a couple of times a day, they squeeze their way through our front gate and trot up the road. Inevitably, we find them right where they were when we first saw them.

These dogs...these formerly-homed, once-loved pets...are returning to the last place they saw their previous owners. Norm and Cliff are waiting for their ride home. A ride that will never come, because they were abandoned by the person who was supposed to love and care for them.

When we bring them back, they just stand there and look up at us with their huge, brown eyes. They look up the road, toward the spot where they were tossed out of their human's vehicle. Then they look back at us. I think that they're wondering why we don't put them in one of our cars and drive them back to the humans who, they think, are worried about them. Who, they think, are missing them.

Then, they come into the house with us. They let us pet them, and they eat the dog food that we put out for them. But they don't wag their tails for us. They don't want to play with us. They don't follow us from room to room. Because we aren't their humans. As far as these dogs are concerned, we're just a doggy hotel; a place to stay until the real owners come back.

Folks, I completely understand the tough times that many of us are facing. Believe me. I know what it's like to make a grocery list, count your money, and think, "How am I supposed to feed the pets and myself?" If that's the case with you...find some sort of home for the pet. If you can no longer care for him, find someone who can. The local animal shelter is perfectly fine if you can't find an actual home. The people there will help you. And while they're waiting for a new person to come along and adopt your pet, they'll take good care of him for you.

Dumping the animals? Never acceptable. Ever. As soon as we adopt a pet, we're responsible for that life. If we don't want that responsibility, we shouldn't adopt in the first place. It's that simple.

The strange thing about all this?

I don't even LIKE dogs. Seriously. I'm 100 percent Crazy Cat Lady, but even I'm pissed off at the oxygen thieves who dumped these dogs.