Plumbers and Dogs Who Take Off

I'm not talking about plumbers and dogs together. Two separate things.

The plumbers came here today and dug up our back yard to gain access to our busted pipe, and I was assigned the supporting role of Random Wife Who Turns on Water. The bathtub faucet ran full blast for 15 minutes while I did a phantom load of laundry, filling up the washer and putting it immediately on "spin." This after I emptied the 40 billion coats from the living room closet because plumber dude thought he needed to slither into the crawl space. [Insert joke here.]

But no, he sticks his face in the front door and says "Hey! I don't think I need to get into the crawl space after all. I've found a way in through the back yard." [Insert joke.]

They were efficient and stuck the root-chomping snaky thing deep into the core of the earth and suddenly the heavens opened and I was able to do laundry again without gray bilge water from the devil ship filling the bathtub.

I am very sad to say that I was trying to be nice and I took two of my precious bottles of Aquafina outside to give to the sweaty plumbers. It wasn't even that hot today. 80 and humid and overcast. Aquafina rarely darkens our door here because we make a quarterly run to the nearest Costco (100 miles away) and stock up on enough bottled water to create a snow globe inside that Stephen King dome on CBS. Thus, boring old Kirkland water is our staple, like a homely dog sleeping on our porch. Only when the Kirkland has run out do I get the happiness of Princess Aquafina appearing in her fine blue gown. Here is the salt in the bottled water wound: Those douches did not even drink the Aquafina! One of them unscrewed the lid and took a tiny nancyboy sip that would only have confused the two taste buds that it fell between, and the other dude did not even open his! I wanted to wrestle them to the muddy ground and use that root chomper on their swampy back yards.

Which brings me back to Turbo. Which is already a falsehood because I have not yet mentioned Turbo.  Turbo is a hound dog that was on one of the dozens of Alaska/Mountain Men/Deadly Fish/Kill Your Own Meat/Nobody Showers Out Here/Shoot it Now/Shit, Clem Done Fell Through the Ice television shows that Scott watches when he is not watching Food Network. Before yesterday I had never heard of the likes of Turbo. Oh, but yesterday I got to see a snippet of the show where Turbo, one of three hound dogs owned by some insane mountain guy, got a wild hair up his hound ass and decided to take off during the night. He got lost. Keep in mind, Turbo is a tracking dog. I made the mistake of walking into the room to fold laundry just as the owner was looking for the lost Turbo, along with the other two dogs, and yelling "Turbo! Where you at, boy?" up into the frigid foresty hills. "Hey!" he tells the dogs as they ignore him and daydream of lengthy afternoons of butt lickage. "I think I see somethin' movin' up on that hill!" And dang if Turbo didn't come runnin'!

Ten fricking seconds of Turbo story and it stuck in my brain like a lima bean in a toddler's nostril.

I couldn't stop talking about Turbo. "Glad Turbo was OK," I said. At the dinner table it was "I figured that dang Turbo was a goner" (taking on the dialect of the old goat on the mountain) and, while eating my decidedly not-deadly salmon, muttering simply "Turbo."

I questioned my own sanity throughout the evening, reasoning that "Turbo" was probably a dwarf in a dog costume, placed strategically into a "reality" drama just to screw with me and get me hooked enough to watch again, and finally I regained my equilibrium.

Until I got into bed with Scott and I said "That ignorant Turbo." 

"Oh," he said. He had seen another episode. "Nobody's heard from Turbo since he jumped down into a hole to take on Three-Toe the wildcat."

Screaming. Curtains ripped from windows. House caving in.

The least I can do is go find that wildcat hole and toss down a bottle of Aquafina.