Why You MUST Have a Sense of Humor if You Own an Aussie

This past weekend, we had the opportunity to drop everything and head south to the coolest family resort I'd ever heard of.

The only bad thing about this place is that, despite it's name, Great Wolf Lodge, canines aren't, in fact, welcomed as hotel guests.

Vacation without having to wake up early and take the dog outside to do his "business?" Okay, twist my arm. Roy's reservations were made at the local doggy spa and I was counting down the minutes until we would be dropping him off. I was also counting my blessings because this little trip meant that I could postpone giving him his much-needed bath until we picked him up Sunday evening.

And who doesn't love wrestling a 55-pound Australian Shepherd with really sharp fingernails (I suppose they would technically be called dognails, right? Since he is a dog and dogs don't have fingers) into a bathtub? Okay, I give up, I do.

Well, the weekend came and went and Roy's bath was the last thing on my to-do list before watching some really bad tv.

I ran the bath. I got the nozzle ready. I fetched the special doggy shampoo. I gathered up some ratty towels and I proceeded to try to trick him into coming upstairs and into the bath.

Not an easy task. Did you know that you can't trick a dog? Yeah, me neither.

After pulling every fiber out of my carpet, I finally got him to the bathroom door.

There was no way he was going in there on his own accord. I'd have to lift him.

So, lift him I did. I am thinking at this point that wrestling a komodo dragon with one hand would have been easier, but I get the job done.

After lots of scrubbing and rinsing (it is ridiculous how much hair this dog has, it really is. I would think that with all the shedding he has been doing lately that there would be a little less on his body - wrong!) and rinsing some more, the bath was finally over; which is a good thing because my back wasn't feeling very well after getting him in the tub and then leaning over him for 30 minutes washing his mangyness down the drain.

Now that Roy was all squeaky clean, he needed to be dried. Towelling off a wet dog should be an Olympic sport, really.

When I got tired of drying him the old-fashioned and labor-intensive way, I resorted to another method: the hairdryer.

He huddled up against my bathroom wall as I dried on half of him and then I made him switch, noticing the hair he was leaving stuck to the wall in the process. That's sure a lot of hair on the wall, I thought to myself as I continued to blast him with the hot air from the hairdryer (he actually loved this part - the only thing he likes about bathing), and then I looked at the floor.

Every inch of my bathroom floor, including my favorite bathroom rug (you do have a favorite bathroom rug, don't you?), was covered in black and white dog hair. Even the scale, and I'm okay with the dog hair covering the scale, really, I am, because after this weekend I don't want to see the numbers that will pop up on it tomorrow morning anyway. But the rest of the floor - completely covered.

It would take me years to clean this up.

Good thing he's cute.

But I did manage, with the help of 2 able-bodied kids who owed me big time, to get almost every hair removed from the bathroom floor, even from the scale. The trick is to use scratchy towels and even dirty clothes from the hamper waiting to be washed. They make excellent dog hair picker-uppers!

That is, until I saw this on tv later that night (I told you I had some really bad tv to watch):

This incredible machine hooks up to your regular vacuum and collects ALL the dog hair! That means no dog hair in your vacuum filters, no dog hair wrapped around the beater bar, and best of all . . . no dog hair anywhere!

I'm thinking of ordering 2, what do you think?

*this was in no way an advertisement for QVC or that ridiculous looking contraption!