Canine Coniptions

MyWife's Dream

As I wrote about earlier, my wife is preparing for her annual pilgrimage home to visit family in Panama.  A couple of years ago the airlines changed baggage policy reducing the weight allowance to 50 pounds per bag.  This had a huge impact on my wife who liked to push the old 70 pound limit to the wall for every trip.  I remember several times over the years, usually to the immense embarrassment of the children, where we had to hastily repack luggage after her bag failed weigh in at the ticket counter.  Yes, all of you waiting in line and pissed off that someone was holding it up because of frantic repacking, that was us.  She is such a kind hearted soul that she buys things all year long to give away in Panama.  I now have a large number of extremely large suitcases from that time gathering dust and cob webs in the basement.  If 70 pounds were a challenge, the 50 pound limit is almost torture for her.  For this reason she approaches packing for these annual trips as a project, usually starting several week ahead of time.  She spends this time distilling  the contents down to the absolute necessities while still getting as close to the 50 pounds as possible. All of the overflow goes into my suitcase which usually starts out at around 30 pounds but never fails to push that 50 pound limit after my wife's additions.  I'm always afraid the customs people in Panama will ask to look in my bag and then ask what I am doing with all the woman's clothing.  This requires repeated weigh ins during the home packing phase using a hand held scale she bought for precisely this purpose.  My part is to hold up the bags to be weighed - usually after I have settled down to watch something.  My wife will emerge from her latest packing frenzy and supervise my weighing of the bags.  She always asks, while I have this 49.9999 pound bag suspended in mid-air, if I am absolutely sure that is what the scale is showing, at least twice .  This is all background to what was going on last night at home.  Our dog, Buddy, always goes into high alert whenever he sees suitcases being bandied about.  You cannot approach any door without his intervention and highly emotional insistence on accompanying you.  We've done a good job instilling some discipline in him since we acquired him a couple of years ago.  That all goes out the window when a suitcase is sighted.  Since trips by us usually means some kind of adventure for him as well, he just loses it.  Last night all these forces converged.  As soon as I got home from work my wife was ready for an initial weigh in of her bags.  Buddy observed this from downstairs and immediately charged up the stairs, a forbidden act for him, to inform us he was more than ready for the trip.  This led to a comedic moment as I stood with the bag suspended at chest level, the dog circling beneath and my wife demanding the second reading from the scale (choosing to ignore Buddy).  Buddy, enthusiastic to a fault, managed to knock over a small table my wife had dedicated to a beloved sister she lost several years ago to cancer.  Buddy now had my wife's full attention while I managed to catch several of the items cascading from the shrine.  These shenanigans continued downstairs with Buddy literally bouncing off the walls whenever either of us moved.  He was too excited to go outside to "do his business", afraid he would be left behind.  This went on for well over an hour.  By the time my wife and I headed out for out for our weekly date night movie, he was exhausted.  He quietly entered his kennel and immediately fell asleep.  I think it was important to him that we understood he was ready for the trip, message received.  The movie we went to see, Contraband, was actually pretty good and even had a significant portion of the film set in Panama, although my wife complained that they only showed the bad parts.  Initial weigh in results:  Bag 1 = 46 pounds  Bag 2 = 43 pounds - my wife is back hard at work today filling in the missing 11 pounds.  Buddy stands ready to assist.

Buddy - The Wonder Pooch