Un. Lucky.

You know it's been a bad weekend when your husband kisses the top of your head on Sunday night and says, "I think that was the worst two-day span we've been through since we've been married." I'd like to tell you I just nodded my agreement, but sadly I had to think about it and given the past several months, I'd say I could have argued the point. Still, it's definitely in the running...

On Friday I went up to Hubs' college for an event his department hosted, and when we came home it was freezing in the house. I figured I was just extra cold because I was sleep deprived, but after a few hours of me shivering Hubs checked the thermostat and realized it was only 60 degrees in the house. So he went into the boiler room to check on the furnace, and smelled natural gas. Meaning that at about 11pm, we were forced to vacate the house and wait in our car in the driveway, heat cranked high and watching House episodes on Hubs' iPod. Hero was so confused - he paced back and forth in the back seat until we finally let him come up front and he fell asleep on Hubs' lap.

When the gas man arrived, he followed Hubs into the house (given that the gas man had the natural gas "death sniffer" detector in hand, Hubs was kind of hoping he'd go first, but no such luck). After a brief investigation, it was determined our furnace needed a new ignitor switch. So we piled back inside, beat ourselves over the head for not enrolling in the protection plan we'd been meaning to, and signed off on the $200 repair. Early the next morning, we finally fell into bed hoping the house would be warm again when we woke up.

Saturday, down $200 but hoping to end the weekend tally there, we'd planned to have a friend we'd met at the dog park groom Hero. J has a poodle of his own and invested in a grooming table and all the requisite supplies, so when he offered to save us $40 by trimming Hero we figured what's the worst that could go wrong? A bad haircut, and then we'd end up spending the $40 anyway.

Hahaha.

Oh, hindsight - you little devil you.

Hero had a lot of mats in his fur, and so we spent hours bathing and combing him out before bringing him to J's house. Needless to say, we weren't his favorite people that day. Which is saying a lot, since we're pretty much his only people. At J's house, he glared at us as J groomed Hero... into a poodle. That's right: we have a poodle. Is there anything about us that says poodle to you? God I hope not. We're not poodle people. It's not just the cone that makes Hero look funny in the picture. It's that fact that his little face, once adorably covered in shaggy fur, is now bald. Yet because of what followed, his body is pretty much left ungroomed. So he's got a shaggy body, and liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle poodle head. If only it had ended there - with J giving us a frou frou dog with a laughable haircut.

While trying to cut a mat out of the hair behind his ear, J clipped Hero with the scissors. His skin just sort of... split. I mean, I felt like I could see his muscles. It was disgusting and horrifying, and while J suggested we just glue him back together with some crazy glue (seriously, he did), I mentally calculated how this was going to play out. Hero wasn't bleeding and hadn't made a noise when he got sliced, but it looked bad. Clearly the crazy glue solution wasn't gonna happen. Hubs and I are smart people - smart enough to know we're not in any way trained as veterinarians. For matters involving anything remotely serious, we call in the experts. This same principle applied to the furnace: we know when we're out of our league. Monkeying around with natural gas is not something Hubs would do; neither, for that matter, is monkeying around with gaping canine flesh wounds.

So we took our bald-faced poodle and got the hell out of there. We don't really blame J - he didn't intend to do that. He was just trying to be helpful. His poodle (yes, obviously the fact that a man with a poodle gave our dog a poodle haircut shouldn't have come as a surprise - that's the one outcome in this whole mess we could have reasonably predicted had we taken the time to think it through) is well cared for and much loved. This man is a good dog owner and truly was sick over hurting Hero. But I was kicking myself the whole ride home for putting Hero through an amature haircut which I could already tell was going to cost us big. How ironic that I was trying to save $40.

We stopped home long enough to eat a quick dinner and look up the address for the emergency pet hospital on the internet. We were at the emergency pet hospital for hours. We had to confess to numerous people that in an effort to save $40 we'd subjected our dog to unnecessary harm. (In our defense, we've spent so much $ on this dog already - we figured the $40 would go to his next vet bill, not to our new shoe fund...)

We left with a dog hopped up on morphine with a cone around his neck, about ten stitches, a course of antibiotics, and a $300 bill.

As Hubs pulled out of the vet hospital, with our weekend tab now running $500 high, we saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. As it turns out, Hubs had been driving without the lights on. The cop took one look inside our car and must have felt sorry for us: we were bleary-eyed and exhausted and Hero was sedated in my lap looking miserable with the giant cone on his head. He gave us a warning and sent us on our way, despite the fact that Hubs has an outdated license, had made an illegal u-turn, and had the navigation system afixed to the windshield (which is now illegal in MN, don't even get me started on that though, that's a whole other post).

Once again, in the early morning hours we fell into bed and hoped for better things when we woke up. When I did finally wake up, I just pulled the covers back over my head. I literally didn't want to get out of bed. I wanted to crawl under the covers and hide. Instead I crawled out of bed and pasted a smile on my face to go to my MIL's birthday dinner. Hero glared at us for about a day from behind that cone, shooting knives through our already bruised hearts. We felt so guilty. We're supposed to take care of him. We'd finally gotten him to stop biting. He trusted us. Is he traumatized now?

The answer is no, he's not that much the worse for wear. He's incredibly funny looking, and his beady little eyes stare at us accusingly every once in a while when we laugh at our satelite dish dog. But overall he's okay. Me, on the other hand - after our crap upon crap weekend I'm about as beaten down as I can get. If ever there was a gal who needed to catch a break, you're lookin' at her.