Nate's Weird Little Dog -or- How I Missed the DeKalb Townie Christmas Party

It started off as a simple plan:  Head out to the hinterland, get the dog acclimated to new surroundings, run some errands, head out to D-Town, drink festively, return the next morning, head back to Chicago, the end.  Sounds nice, huh? Well this is what really happened:

We've been watching my good friend Nate's dog (pictured above) since September while he and his kids are in the process of moving.  It's a good deal.  Nate doesn't have to worry about the dog and Jenny gets to mollycoddle something other than the X-Box 360.  The dog is super-sweet, but how to put this mildly... um, er... nuttier than a sack of squirrel turds.
So, now Jenny is in Williamsburg, VA for the holidays and I'm home alone with the dog.  The parents were up in Wisconsin, so I figured that I could just take the dog out to their place and use that as my base of operations for some festive wassailing.  I headed out of the city around noon.  Well, noon-twenty. I should have known to end the adventure when it took 20 minutes getting the dog into the back of the Jeep.

I solved that challenge with an elegant flying tackle into shot-put technique after ten straight minutes of creative swearing failed to do the trick.
We got on the road and despite my repeated suggestions the dog insisted on standing for the duration of the trip.  This wouldn't have been a big deal if the traffic hadn't been stop-and-go for the first half of the journey and the dog didn't have the sense of balance of a turnip.  So what happened was: Accelerate - Dog slams into back window, Decelerate - Dog slams into safety gate, Turn - Dog slams into side window/spare tire.  Motorists were actually pointing and laughing, and I began to feel and equal mix of anger and humiliation often reserved exclusively for 14 year-old girls with their families at the beach.  I tried reasoning with the dog and even went so far to try and explain Newton's three laws of motion to her but it was no use.  We finally made it there just as I suspect she was just starting to grasp the concept of linear momentum.
I suspect she grasped the basics of linear momentum, because once I opened up rear door of the Jeep she shot off like a furry missile. FUCK. So I'm running through 2 feet of snow (in Converse) trying just to keep her in my line of sight. After much pleading, cajoling, and a bit of creative swearing I finally got her into the first fence on the far side of the house that wraps around the pool. Her first order of business was to run out to the dead center of the frozen pool and defaecate. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

Flash forward 10 minutes - I'm exhausted from chasing the dog in a circle around the pool, swearing, and waving a frosty pool skimmer trying to get her to go into the fucking yard. I give up, prop the gate open with a shovel, and head into the garage for a beer.  She finally wanders into the yard, I leap out of the garage, slip on the ice, spill my beer, lunge toward the gate, and slam it shut with an "A-HA, GOTCHA!".
I took her into the yard, set out some water for her (which horrified her beyond description for some reason), and attempted to show her how the doggie door into the (heated) garage worked. I sat there for another 10 minutes sticking my arm through the dog-flap and gently trying to nudge her through it.  It didn't work at all.  Fuck it.

With that ordeal in the rear-view, I unpacked some stuff and focused on some holiday-themed projects such as fishing frozen dog turds off of the pool with aforementioned skimmer, emptying several mouse traps, and affixing my new MP4 Smith & Wesson Q3 tactical flashlight onto my Rock River Arms LAR-15 rifle.  After I finished up my festive tasks, I left the dog out in the yard while I ran into town to pick up another one of my bad-ass machines that was out for repair:

I returned not even 45 minutes later and it looked like the dog had spent the entire time alone trying to jump over/dig under the 5 foot fence.  When I found her she was standing in a hole with her front legs poking through the chain-link fence looking like she was awaiting the sweet embrace of death.  We went inside and I filled up one bowl with food and another with water which she stared at with a look of unbridled horror and ran into the other room wherein she saw a vacuum cleaner which she stared at with a look of unbridled horror and ran into the other room wherein she saw a chair which she stared at with a look of unbridled horror and ran into the other room, etc. (repeat for one hour).
I was starting to suspect that my DeKalb drinking adventure was probably in jeopardy at this point, so I decided that I just make a run to WalMart and call it a night.  What to do with the dog?  I looked around and realized that I could put her in the entry way with her food, water, and a doggie bed.  It was about 8 foot square, so she would have plenty of room, and the doors shut on both ends, so she wouldn't wreak havoc in my absence.  Hell, this was nice enough that I could leave her there later and run to DeKalb, make a showing, have a couple of beers, and come back in time to let her out and go to bed.  I'm a fucking genius.  I left for the store incredibly pleased with myself and picked up some festive items from WalMart such as 4 bags of water-softener salt, Windex, paper towels, sugar-free Red Bull, a carton of Winstons, and a couple boxes of mint tea.
I came home to URINE... and lots of it.  I have no idea how one animal can piss so much.  It was rolling out from under the closed door.  I guess the trick is to miss anything absorbent, as the dog-bed remained unscathed.  I cleaned up that mess, did a few odd-jobs, made myself a sandwich, switched on the Steelers game, and settled down - my hopes of making it out to the party utterly crushed.  I got into the second quarter of the game before I figured out that the dog had planned to spend the entire night wandering around in circles, crying, and being horrified by every item in sight.
Fuck it, I'm going home.
I made good time heading back, the dog doing the hairy pinball act the entire way home.  I let the dog out of the back and she was ECSTATIC!  She was running around, hopping about, and looking at me like: "OMG! That was the funnest trip EVER!"  Fuck you, dog.
I went down to Fireside, grabbed a beer, hung out with Jimmy, watched the end of the game, and tried to put the whole fucking ordeal behind me.
And that's why I didn't make it out to the DeKalb Townie Christmas Party.

The End