The puppy has several methods of waking me up in the morning when she's ready to do her business. The first one she used was jumping half up on the bed and raking her claws down my back. That was exceptionally effective at waking me up but it did not put me in the spirits to provide her with the friendly companionship that makes a morning poop so much more enjoyable. In short, she quickly came to learn that this wasn't acceptable.

She then moved to whining (or as my Brit readers would say, "whinging") but found the results to be less than satisfactory. I'm a pretty deep sleeper and little noises like polite whining, televisions and fire alarms don't have a very good chance of waking me up.

Then she discovered the power of the puppy nose. There is no good way to describe the sensation of being brought out of a deep slumber by having a cold wet puppy nose jammed up your ass crack. Suffice it to say that this method had much better success at rousing me (yes I said 'rousing' in conjunction with a dog's nose up my crack. Get your minds out of the gutter. The word you are looking for is "arousing", which I didn't use because I wasn't. Aroused that is. Pervs.) than did mere whining. After a bit of negative reinforcement, the pup learned to aim higher and I thought we had a mutually agreed upon system. Oh how wrong I was.

Interruption for immediate background info germaine to the story: Yesterday at some time in the early afternoon, whilst Lovely Wife and the boys were out, Kota broke into the fridge and ate a goodly portion of a serving bowl of goulash. This is not noodles with tomato sauce American style goulash. This is Hungarian style big chunks of meat and veggies and garlic and stuff goulash. I had gone to bed thinking that Lovely Wife would put Kota in the kitchen overnight to avoid any possible "elimination issues". Now back to our story...

I was in that semi-dream state. Not awake and cogent but not quite asleep any more either. That intermission state you get when one dream is flowing into the next one. I smelled something. I crept a bit further out of sleep. It was something bad. I slid far enough out of sleep to open an eye and see what the clock said. Four fourty-five. Three quarters of an hour before wake up time. A quick bladder check showed that there would be no difficulty in remaining in bed for the full fourty-five minutes so my eye closed and I began to slip back into happy fun land.

Wait. There was a dog. The puppy was sitting right there when I had opened my eye. Why was that important? What was that smell? Why was I using rational thought when I should have been dreaming again? Damn, that smell was nasty. It smelled like shit, only older and more rotted. It smelled like shit? The puppy wasn't in the kitchen?

Oh, man. The puppy shit in the house! I was awake now. I crawled out of bed, giving the cold shoulder to the dog (who had no idea why I was being so rude to her). I made my way carefully out of the bedroom, looking hard at the floor to avoid stepping in anything. I made it through the hallway and the living room (no poop! Yay!) and got my slippers on. Now that my feet were protected from a mushy surprise my search became pointed and direct. Dining room - no poop. Kitchen - no poop. Hey, maybe she did it in the downstairs bathroom? That wouldn't be so bad - it's tiles instead of carpet. The bathroom was poopless.

Oh, horrors. The bedroom. It was the only place I hadn't checked. And come to think of it, the only place where I had smelled the dog crap. This was bad. There was no way to clean up the bedroom without waking up Lovely Wife. This was very bad. I snuck into the bedroom and conducted my poop search. It was poop free. There was no poop at all anywhere. The puppy hadn't pooped in the house! Yay!

I took her outside to do her business and she got right to it. It was as she was squatting and letting out a mixed stream of fecal matter and air that I realized what had happened. She had found a new way to wake me up. The claws were out, the whining was ineffective, the puppy nose was apparently no longer amusing enough since my arse was off limits. Now she was just walking up to me in my slumber and farting at me. I think I want to go back to claws.

The joys of pet ownership.