My Sissy Dog

A friend of mine got married last weekend. She invited us to stay with her for the weekend. We drove up for the wedding. Prior to our leaving, she was kind enough to invite us to bring Zachary with us.
She and her husband just bought a new house. (This plays in later)
I was pretty concerned about all this. I hate the idea of boarding Zachary because he's old and his leg is bad and he has separation anxiety, but on the other hand, he gets sick easier than any dog I know.
I took off work on friday and Mrs Schwartz and I headed out. We spent Friday afternoon finishing up wedding details, before going through the rehearsal and actually getting to bed early.

On Saturday, I was trying to figure out how I could make it back to the house as frequently as possible, but you know how weddings go; there's just no way.
So here it is, the day of the wedding. Mrs Schwartz and the bride are off getting hair and makeup done. The groom and I are packing up the car.
We had planned on relaxing by the pool for a couple of hours before the big ceremony. I go to grab my suit from the closet...here's the jacket....here's the shirt....where the hell are my pants?

Sure enough, the pants were hanging on their own hanger back in Atlanta.

So now it's a mad run around town with credit card in hand. In record time, I had a new suit and new matching shoes. The only loss was that we only had time to hang around the pool for an hour, then off to the church.

We'd been gone from the house from about noon until midnight.

Sure enough, dog diarrhea in the upstairs (thankfully) office.

Like a SEAL team, the five of us snap into action with some mad steamcleaning before the remaining guests arrive from the reception. We quickly make it to "good enough".
We have a wonderful party at the house.

Sunday was a recovery day. There were still plenty of bodies lying around. All was right with the world.
I wisely chose to take Monday off of work. There's nothing worse than dragging yourself to the car for a four-hour drive, where you lose an hour. I had planned on waking up first thing in the morning and getting on the road, so that I'd be able to get a ton of stuff done around the house.

Sometime after midnight, Zachary's sqeaking noises woke us up to discover that he had left more diarrhea on the carpet in the guest room. What could we do? Our hosts had to wake up for work, so we couldn't drag out the steamcleaner and wake up the whole house. We, as quietly as possible, did the best clean up job we could do with paper towels, then opened the window and turned on the ceiling fan.

After that, there was no sleep. Zachary was really feeling sick. He was sqeaking and fussing the whole time. Every time he got upset, we had to let him outside. I think I let him out four times. I don't know how many times Mrs Schwartz got duty. A little before dawn, I considered laying down on the front porch and sleeping there. If we had put him out alone, he would have started barking like mad. The last couple of hours, I was just waiting for our hosts to wake up, so I could start cleaning.

Somehow, the little bastard was able to drop some more dribbles in the hallway and the livingroom, and SOMEHOW in the hosts' master bedroom. I think he must have run in there while she was showering and I was upstairs, scrubbing. That was about the time I was seriously thinking of putting a bullet in his thick head.

The new bride left for work. Mrs Schwartz had forwarded her work phone to her cell phone. She had not gotten the day off of work, so she was on the computer.
I spent the morning on my hands and knees, scrubbing.
Thank God they had good stain remover. We got on the road a little after noon. Since driving straight home would have put us in Atlanta's rush hour traffic, we stopped in Chattanooga for some lunch at the Pickle Barrel, but they had just finished putting out a fire on the grill. Besides, they had no wireless internet.
Since Mrs S had to put up the facade of being at the office, we had to frequently stop and leech off some hotel, or truck stop, or coffee shop. She'd exchange a few emails, and we'd be back on the road.
We drove around and found Big River had access, so we rewarded their investment by having lupper there.
At least he had the ability to not mess up the Jeep on the road.
His sleepover days are behind him.