Kathy was forced to bring Harley and her brother Zeus with us on a four-hour road trip to the middle of nowhere. As we're meeting up at Grandpa's place in Spring so we can take one car, I dismount the truck and discover that Zeus apparently has a rather weak stomach...and does not like riding in a Mustang GT, as he was kind enough to show us by puking on the side of his sister's ass. We hose them both off in the yard, get a new sheet for the backseat from Grandpa, and we're on our way.
Several hours later, we arrive in Gonzales, TX...when Kathy discovers that she left the Wolf Chow at her boyfriend's house. Bad idea on her part. Apparently, wolves don't eat Kibbles and Bits. Unfortunately, the local Wal-Mart doesn't sell food specifically made for wolves, which is supposedly what you're supposed to feed a pure-blood wolf. And please, for the love of Jodi Foster, don't ask me why my aunt Kathy owns a pair of pure-blood wolves. I really don't understand why, and she really couldn't tell you.
So the Wal-Mart doesn't sell Wolf Chow, but they do sell beer and wine. It's not a "Super Wal-Mart", so the beer isn't cold or anything, but they had Rolling Rock and it's not terribly bad when it's luke-warm...which is good, because the mini-fridge in our motel sucked at chilling down the beer. Regardless, we both stayed up far too late last night, because we were unable to sleep. And we had booze.
If you know my aunt, who's been a registered nurse for the past 20 years, you know that she's a complete freak about microbes and whatnot. Seriously. She's worse than I am about politics and religion. She insists that we remove the bedspreads from the beds we're sleeping in, because motels aren't required by law to wash and sanitize them like they are required to do with the sheets and blankets underneath...and they often don't. I now know why you should ALWAYS pull the bedspread off the bed at a ratshack motel.
So we pull the bedspreads off our beds and pile them up in the floor. Harley and Zeus try to eat them (just like they did with their new dog bowls, my left boot, my pistol, the trash can, the television remote, a roll of toilet paper, the motel room's telephone, and everything else they could reach). Eventually, they calm down and go to sleep.
I'm up until 3am, partly due to nervousness about the events of today and partly due to the mass amount of redbull I consumed while driving to Spring. I woke up at 4:30am, and Zeus is hovering over me. 30lbs may not seem like too big of an animal to you...but it scared the hell out of me, mainly because there was wolf slobber all over my throat. Seems like a good indication that my larynx was probably inside the jaws of a wolf at some point that night. I go wash myself off in the sink, and go back to bed. Harley has decided that she really wanted to share my bed with me, and she wanted her half right out of the middle. I tried to persuade her to move, but soon realized that I probably shouldn't do that.
So the alarm goes off at 6am, we snooze-button until 7am because we're both dead tired and mildly hung over, and then make a mad rush out of getting ready for court. On our way out the door, I notice that one of the wolves has taken the most massive canine grumpies I've ever seen. Right in the middle of the bedspread I had pulled off of my bed the night before. ALWAYS take the bedspread off the bed of a cheap motel room. We come to the conclusion that we really need to get going, so Kathy and I decide to deal with it when we get back from the courthouse.
Court didn't last nearly as long as we thought it would, and we were back at the motel by 10:45...which means if we can get our stuff cleared out of the room in 15 minutes, we get our money back for the second night we had paid for. We hop out of the ride, and I unlock the door for Kathy so she can be gathering our stuff while I return the key and collect our refund. Punjab's wife asks if we're out of the room, and I tell her we'll be out by 11am...which is, at this point, ten minutes from now.
I get back to the room and find Kathy on her hands and knees, scrubbing up the painful lesson learned by giving Kibbles and Bits to a pair of wolves. The dump one of them took in the bedspread was obviously the last solid turd either of them would have that day. While we were at the courthouse for less than three hours, both of them dropped Big Mac-sized piles near the door. You could tell they both grumpied on the floor, because the piles were two different colors. One was a reddish brown, while the other was a greenish brown. It was like Christmas. But with wolf poo.
While I'm trying to gather up all of our stuff, and Kathy is scrubbing the carpet furiously, the room's phone rings. It's Bride of Punjab, wanting to know if we're out of the room yet. I inform her that we still have eight minutes. She informs me that my watch is slow, and we're two minutes late. Housekeeping is waiting outside. All of a sudden, it dawns on me. There's still a massive pile of poo was still tangled up in that bedspread. Housekeeping is now banging on the door. I attempt to stall by shouting "Just a minute, we're almost out." Apparently, my Spanish is worse than her English, because the maid didn't stop beating on the door after I shouted "Uno momento, dammit!". I had a flashback to Tommy Boy, and was trying not to laugh.
I've got our stuff piled up by the door as Kathy is flushing the last of the two piles by the door, and as she walks out of the bathroom I point at the bedspread. Housekeeping is still beating on the door. Bedspread is still wadded up on the floor, with a huge surprise waiting inside.
I open the door to our room, and Housekeeping is still waiting, with the cart and vacuum blocking the doorway. I tell Housekeeping to please move so I can get all our stuff out in one shot. We throw our stuff in, get the dogs loaded up into the back seat, and burn out just as Housekeeping is walking in.
I tell Kathy that I'm feeling rather guilty about it, but didn't want her to lose the money she paid for the extra night. I tell her that karma is going to kick our asses. She replies by telling me that leaving a grumpie-filled bedspread in Punjab's motel room is "showing support for our troops". I inform her that Iraqis and Afghanistanis are Muslim, not Hindu...so that exemption can't really be claimed in this situation. Her response? "Oh well, they needed to wash that nasty-ass bedspread anyway."
And the moral to this story? If your aunt decides to take her wolves along on a road trip, make sure you don't check in to the motel in YOUR name...
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