Mr Darcy Eats My Treats

Saturday morning, I had to be up at an ungodly hour of the morning to arrive for setup at the SoCapOtt conference I helped to organize. When my alarm went off at 5:00am, I dragged myself into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and started waking up.

My fur baby.

It was only when I got out of the shower that I realized my geriatric pug, Mr Darcy, was nowhere in sight. As our usual morning routine involves him bogarting the bathmat and me kicking him with a wet foot until he skulks off, it was unusual not to see him. And when he's not in eyesight, Mr Darcy is usually  into trouble--namely, he's usually eating something he shouldn't be. I remembered that I'd emptied the kitchen garbage into a plastic bag last night but had forgotten to put it outside; with a sigh, I resolved myself to go see the mess my dog would have created, and get started on the cleaning.

But when I stepped into my bedroom to get changed, I discovered Mr Darcy. He hadn't found the kitchen garbage, but he *had* found my bar of expensive dark chocolate from the night before. I'd accidentally melted it in my car during the afternoon, and had put it on my nightstand to harden again. Now there was only an empty cardboard wrappper, 

I ran forward, yelling, and he skittered away, wildly gnashing his teeth because the melted bar had bonded on a molecular level with the thin aluminum foil wrapping. He'd managed to get the chocolate down his throat, but now the tinfoil had lined his teeth like fillings, giving him that horrid metallic flavour in his mouth and that unliveable metal-on-teeth tingling sensation that I know you can picture as you read this.

I know exactly how this felt because at 5am, when my alarm first went, off, I had been starving and had

Mr Darcy regrets nothing.

blearily reached over, snapped off a square of that same chocolate bar, chewed it, and spent the next ten minutes in the bathroom gagging on the tinfoil shrapnel stuck to the back of my tongue. 

I may not look  like my pet, but we do have some similarities.

(He's fine, by the way. A tummy ache, yes, but that evening he was back in the garbage, eating any leftover tinfoil he could find.)

(Yes, I need to get a garbage bin with a lid.)

(No, it won't slow him down.)