A Moment of Puggy Zen
I was changing the cartridge in my razor this morning - and the idea that one changes a "cartridge" in a razor is alone worthy of reflection - when I thought of one of the founding pugs of the BlogDog family, now deceased. She was called Tiggy though her formal name was Sandyhook's Classic Antigone. Too much name for the runt of the litter but she was a sweeheart just the same. She was, to put it bluntly, a chewer.
The home of Mr. & Mrs. BlogDog had some lovely new blue wall-to-wall carpeting installed after we moved in and I will give much credit to the good decorating sense of the XMBD: It was wonderful carpet. But it seems thecarpet was not in too terribly long before we found little Tiggy sitting in the middle of the living room chewing away on something. Let me note that she could not have chosen a more conspicuous place to gnaw had she been blessed with actual intelligence. And what had she happened on that she decided was so delicious? A ball point pen of course. Now I have no idea why a ball point pen would send her into a chewing jag but indeed, there was a nice blot of ink smack dab in the middle of the room. My uninformed cleaning efforts mitigated the blot but didn't solve it, I'm sorry to say.
Ah well, moving on. What else did we find little Tenzing Norgay (another name she came to have after her brother's climbing ability got him tagged "Sir Edmund Hillary") having a taste for? There was a sewing needle with thread. The XMBD was a very talented needlepoint artist and had left a needle with a length of floss somewhere, possibly on her nightstand. I spotted a thread hanging out of the pug girl's mouth as she was working her jaw. Worried, I scopped her up and found the needle in her mouth, not stuck in any flesh at all, mind you, just in her teeth. A bullet dodged for sure.
I suppose she liked to chew on things that had been handled - the pen, the needle and the last item which I would have to assume is loaded with epithelial cells: a razor cartridge. Now you see the genesis of the post. Mining the trash, or the snack bucket as pugs seem to think of it, the Tigster had found a used razor cartridge and, using that impenetrable puggy logic, she set out to chew it up. Luckily, I found her chewing with her nutty concentration when I couldn't think of anything that she had a legitimate reason to be noshing, so I opened the mouth and found the cartridge. Oy. If she had swallowed any of those things, we would have had an emergency run to the vet for sure. But we were lucky enough, I think, to have caught her chewing misadventures.
Changing a razor cartridge brings this moment of puggy zen.