Yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.

As those who read this on a regular basis know, given the things she eats the bigger dog in the house should be dead.

On Monday I did the spring cleaning back yard rake. Not a pleasant task, of course, but it is a fascinating one. Fascinating in the sense of realizing as you scoop the broad variety of things the dogs eat. And yes, you can usually tell which pile came from which dog.

We were not bad over the winter keeping up with the scooping but there is always a disgusting mess in the spring. This, of course, is mainly because no one wants to go outside in a howling blizzard in the dark of night trying to figure out where the dogs pooped just so they can scoop it up.

So, spring comes – maybe not as quickly as we’d like, given that there was snow yesterday and there is more predicted for tonight – and you have to clean things up. And get a lesson in the things puppies eat which in the case of big puppy would be food and non-food items.

Some of the things were expected: string from a roast, a plastic tray from who knows what kind of meat, eggs (or maybe just the shells), crayons and various other non-food items.

The plastic gimp was a little unexpected; we haven’t had any around the house for ages so I am not sure where she got that. The big surprise, though (a surprise in two ways: why she ate it and that it survived) was a light bulb from the Christmas tree. Intact. So she ate it for whatever reason (in her mind just about anything may be food, so she always tries, just in case it is food. This makes giving her medicine easy-peasy. As long as you throw the pill at her, she assumes it is food and swallows), and it managed to get digested…and expelled…without breaking. Amazing.