It's beginning to look a lot like Ihatemydog...

I don't know what the heck has gotten into Scotch lately, but he is seriously pushing my buttons.  Not Skip's, of course, because Skip is perfect in Scotch's eyes.  I'm the evil obstruction that keeps Scotch from his master... urgh... So I get home on Tuesday night after running a quick errand with Preston, and when we were coming in the back door, I see Evil Red Dog peering around the corner of the stairs, and he goes running off (chewing on some plastic something).  That's code for: "I'm doing/just finished something I'm not/wasn't supposed to do."  So I walk into the kitchen, and I see a trail of crap from the garbage all the way into the living room, including a torn up plastic baggie, random paper scraps, and wet coffee grounds, fresh from the coffee that Skip had made before he went to work.  Yay.  Keep in mind that I have white carpet, so wet coffee grounds look like pure mud.  It also came to mind that I'm assuming what he was after in the garbage were the turkey bones I had thrown in there from dinner, and they are nowhere to be found.  Which worried me because dogs aren't supposed to eat cooked poultry bones.  Let's just say I wasn't a happy camper that I had to sweep, mop and vacuum at nine o'clock at night... Scotch knew I was pissed, too, mostly because I scolded him (since he was in mid-plastic-chew when I walked in the door), and because he followed me around like a little puppy the whole rest of the night, until he curled up on the sofa facing away from me.

So last night, we get home from dinner, and everything looked fine in the house.  There were a couple of little pieces of paper on the floor, but I assumed they were just scraps from something Scotch had maybe just chewed on.  Well, a couple of hours later, I go upstairs to bed, and as I'm walking up the stairs I step on what looked like the paper cups from Reeses PB cups.  Hmm... Just then I realized there was also a torn up black and green striped box along with those paper cups, indicative that Evil Red Dog had done the following: Jumped up to our dining room table (which is counter height), torn open the gift wrap on my parent's gift to Mannings, torn open the plastic wrapping on the box of Frango mints, taken the box to the landing of the stairs, and eaten ALL of the chocolate... leaving just the torn up box and paper cups.  Urgh... Once again, though, not only was I pissed that he ruined part of the gift, but also that he had eaten all the damn chocolate!  He seemed fine, though, because Evil Red Dog has a iron stomach, and rarely gets sick.  So I put the gate up to keep him downstairs since I was pissed, and an hour later he's at the bottom of the stairs barking his Evil Red Brains out.  This was approximately midnight.  Urgh...

I don't know what's getting into him.  He's been exercised, fed, loved.  So who knows.  I do know, however, that it's time once again to restrict him to only certain parts of the house when we're gone-- parts of the house that do not include anything edible!

More to come later on our holiday festivities, since we have kind of postponed most of them until this weekend...