We love having friends come stay with us. We have a nice little townhouse that we are lucky to have, and we like it when friends from out of town get to come and stay with us. If you ever want to visit Nashville, come stay with us!

Sometimes a friend of a friend will come stay with us, too. We have found this to be a fun way to meet to meet new people. Our friends are nice…and their friends are nice, too.

I have a friend named Renee. We like her a lot. Renee and I go way back to high school days in South Carolina. Renee has a friend named Alvin. Renee is going to be out of town for the next week, and her friend Alvin needed a place to stay…because, as you might guess, Alvin is her dog. He is a Maltipoo, acutally. A male Maltipoo. That’s kind of similar to being a male ladybug, I think.

Lyndsay volunteered us to house sit Alvin while Renee is gone. That is fine. I like to help Renee out…and I can endure anything for a week. Or so I thought. Either way, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to settle the two year old debate between Lyndsay and I on whether we should own a dog or not. She says yes, because she wants a friend. I say no, because the thing will destroy our nice new house.

Alvin is fairly well trained as dogs go. I can make him sit and beg on command already. And he is what girls would call a “cute dog,” which makes him endearing. But the one thing he has not been trained on is going to the bathroom outside the house. He has been trained, Renee told us, to go to the bathroom on a little disposable pad that you put out around your house. Okay.

So far Alvin has been with us for almost 36 hours. He has peed on the kitchen floor, pooped on the kitchen floor, peed on the carpet, then on the couch, then on the carpet again, then on the wall, then pooped on the kitchen floor again, then peed on the carpet a third time, and on the couch a second time. The one place that he has not peed or pooped? The pad. It’s still as clean as when it came out of the package.

And it’s not like we haven’t given him the option of going outside our house…we’ve taken him our 4 or 5 times. And he goes to the bathroom out there some too. But yesterday Lyndsay walked him for 30 minutes…and he didn’t poop…and as soon as he got inside, he went straight for the kitchen floor and pooped on it.

Oh the joys of pet ownership. Why someone would pay money to subject themselves to this torture, I cannot understand.