A Dish-astrous Dog-tastrophe

So, this last week has been rough on my poor dishes. My whole family has Sango dishes...I have Nova Brown, my mom has Nova Black, and my sister has Avocado. We are rather fond of them. But we've had a run of bad luck in the last few days...the handle broke off of my one of my soup bowls with a mere tap in the dishwasher, a tea cup cracked when I filled it with hot water...but last night was sheer devastation in Nova Brown Sango world.

It was about 10:30 and I was laying in bed sulking, as has become my wont when it hits me each evening that another day has come and gone without my daughter making an appearance. My husband was in the kitchen doing the dishes, because in my sulky fit I had complained about how they were stacking up. However, I had also taken my complaints back, because I knew he was tired, and told him several times to leave them for the next day. He insisted on doing them. (Which, of course, gave me the right to say "I told you so" when the impending disaster transpired...)

All of a sudden, the peaceful silence of my sulk was disrupted by the most horrific scream I have ever heard from my husband's mouth...although in real life it probably lasted ten seconds, it seemed to go on forever, and the scream was my dog Nika's name sevearl times in this terrified and panicked voice. To make matters worse, the scream was accompanied by the violent and protracted sound of things crashing and smashing and breaking and splintering...and I'm not talking about one little breaking noise. When I say protracted, I mean it went on AND on.

I leaped from bed, my heart in my throat, and ran out to the living room much faster than I thought I could propel my body these days, only to encounter a scene straight from the post-party hotel room of a rowdy rock band. Thankfully Nika was okay (I had honestly thought I might find her seriously injured or worse, the way my husband's voice sounded) although she was cowering in absolute panic as my husband tried to calm her. The kitchen and living room floors were covered, COVERED, with smashed dishes and reaking with a terrible odor. It was a true household apocalypse.

What had happened, apparently, was that Miss Nika (we don't call her Sneaky Neak for nothing) had decided it would be a good idea to sneak a lick or two off of the dirty dishes my husband was loading, and somehow had gotten her collar stuck on one of the plastic prongs that hold the dishes upright. When she went to pull back and realized she was stuck, she panicked and tried to run, pulling the ENTIRE FULL LOWER RACK out with her, breaking it and nearly every dish in it as she tore in terror across the kitchen and into the living room with the rack still attached to her neck, slamming into and dislodging the table and her kennel, and the whole while spraying (my husband assures me the correct verb was spraying, not dripping) anal leakage across the walls and linoleum and carpet. For those not in the know with canine secretions, anal leakage is not the same thing as poop. It's a glandular fluid of a particularly foul, pungent, and lingering odor. If you haven't ever smelt it, be thankful.

Needless to say, the clean-up process was intense, involving sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, carpet cleaning, and wall and window scrubbing...but my sweet husband took charge of it while I took charge of calming down poor Nika, who's skittish at the best of times, not that this was one of them. I think we're lucky our little girl puppy didn't have a heart attack.

Anyway, I'm hoping that breaking dishes doesn't have any of the same significance as breaking mirrors, because if it does, my household is in for it. I'm also thinking that if hearing that kind of screaming and breaking, and my subsequent panic, couldn't put me into labor, then there's not a thing on the planet that will.

On the upside, I have a new task with which to occupy myself: looking for replacement dishes.