The Trials of Miles Part Two

My little dog Miles does not quite grasp the concept of daylight savings time. He tells time by the sun, and when it gets dark, he feels he is entitled to his dinner. When it gets light, he thinks he is entitled to his walk. Before daylight savings time, we were walking him at 7:30 AM, but as soon as the clocks changed, Miles was snarfling and snuffling by 6:30, licking our ears, and generally being a wiggly, waggly little alarm clock.

You might imagine that the poor little tyke's bladder is threatening to burst, but I promise this is not the case. When he really has to go, he'll run out the door and immediately pee on the nearest shrub. In the mornings, though, his bladder doesn't get going until after he's walked a little way. Miles' insistence is nothing more than impatience to get out into the glorious morning air where he can snuff out squirrels to bark at.

So today we decided we'd had enough, and we were going to make him adjust to the new schedule. He started snarfling at 6:30 as usual, and we held him down on the mattress. He tried to lick us to within an inch of our lives, but we held firm. He began wriggling at about 6:45, so we initiated the belly-rub sequence, which bought us another fifteen minutes in bed. At that point, the grumbling and growling started, along with desperate lunges toward our faces, aiming his slimy tongue at our nostrils and ears, missing by mere milimeters. This lasted until 7:15, at which point we went limp from exhaustion, which allowed him to waggle himself out from under our grasp and leap off the bed. From there he growled and barked, and nipped at our blankets, generally being a bratty little pest. At 7:30, I finally got up, struggled into my sweats, and took him for his customary 45 minute walk.

At best, it was a hollow victory.