Cleaning With Dogs and Santa's Beard

I have a system for cleaning the floors.  If you don’t have a system for cleaning the floors with four dogs, you might be crazy.  (Now I realize at this juncture you could say having four dogs is crazy and I would agree, but now that I have them, I must clean up after them.  Not cleaning up after them makes you the Mayor of Crazytown.  So there.)  I don’t have any carpet in my house. NONE…expect for a small Persian rug at the front door.  I learned years ago that dogs and carpet don’t mix well.  My floor cleaning process is very structured.  I start by sweeping the floors, then I vacuum the floors, then I use a swiffer dusting pad all over the floors, vacuum again and then mop.  The structured process also includes lots of cuss words directed at the dogs and their shedding.  An additional side activity of the floor cleaning structure is the dogs; they do attempt to jack up the process by running through the cleaning area and, of course, continuing to shed. 

I got home from work yesterday to scraps of brown soggy cardboard all over the house.  Tiffany explained that Harpo had located an empty wrapping paper tube.  I wrapped presents earlier.  The tube was apparently widely popular with all the dogs.  Everyone had a turn.  There were even fights.  It was high drama.  The drama maximized the destruction and spread the chewed up scraps everywhere.  My dogs are nothing if not thorough.

This morning I saw a story about a Santa mishap in Florida.  Apparently a mall Santa tried to make an "exciting" appearance to his “North Pole” post by rappelling down a rope.  Well…his beard got stuck in the rope and he dangled there for awhile, working feverishly to detangle the beard.  I found this very funny.  It reminded me of sitting in meetings and listening to stupid ideas that sound really fantastic if you completely remove the logistics of it actually working successfully.  You can almost imagine being the person sitting across the table and watching a coworker yell, “Dude!!!  Santa could make an appearance by rappelling!  Wouldn’t the kids love that shit!!!!!!!”  Same coworker would naturally be off work the day Santa's beard got stuck in the rope.