…That's what I said to my younger dog, Cleo, after a stagey gasp, when Fuzzy presented her to me for her bath last night. The nice thing about small dogs is that you can bathe them in the kitchen sink, using the sprayer hose, and as long as you remember to disinfect the sink, after, life's usually good.

We got really annoyed with my parents because their dog, Abigail, a six-pound fawn colored chihuahua, left our dogs with fleas. Not that this is difficult to deal with. A little borax sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming, bleach in the laundry, and they're pretty much dead, but once they get ON the dogs, it's harder. Especially when we have to treat Zorro, because we think, but are not certain, that flea medication is one of his seizure triggers.

Last night, I noticed that Cleo had been chewing at the base of her tail so hard that there was a bare patch, and the skin was irritated. Poor puppy. We give them Advantage top-spot applications whenever bugs are really bad, and with painting and all we'd been loathe to bring more chemicals into their lives, but we had no choice. So that meant a break from packing, and last night our sink became a canine car-wash.

Anyway, they were still damp when we finally tumbled into bed last night, so I left their collars are. Ever worn wet jeans? My dogs react to wet collars the same way most of us react to wet denim. Ick!

It says a lot about my state of exhaustion that I didn't wake up every time Zorro moved last night, convinced he was having a seizure. You see, the jingling of his tags changes when that happens, and without the tags I can't tell without consciously checking if his moving about is normal, or not. Usually I sleep in fits and starts when he doesn't have them on.

So, today, we're off to lunch, because we slept late, and only just got up. Oy. At this rate, we'll be killing ourselves to have the condo ready for the realtor to hold it open on the weekend. (And the fact that we can't be there means that Sunday will be an enforced trip to the beach with the doggies.)

But now, at least, I have two doggies who don't smell like dogs, but vaguely of citrus. (Actually Zorro's mostly a chihuahua, and never smells like a dog, because chihuahuas just don't have that dog-odor). Except they're still naked.