Almost everybody has to face unwanted visitors this time of year. But of all the unwanted visitors for the holiday season, the MOST unwanted would be the one that showed up for me the day before yesterday: The Stomach Flu. I don't know why I am so prone to getting every stomach virus that has come around this year. Maybe they're just worse bugs. Anyway, I'm over it now - Thank God.

Meanwhile, as if things were not already weird enough at our house, the dog has suddenly started to bury things. Now, there's nothing weird about a dog burying things - outside. But Winston is not an outside dog. He lives in the house, he sleeps in our bed. In this weather, which has not been cold, but mostly windy and rainy, his total amount of outside time is about 20 minutes per day.

Winston has no inclination to bury anything outside, even when he is out there. He's never been much of a digger, and for that we can be grateful. Some mastiffs are prodigious and enthusiastic diggers. It's actually very easy to train them to dig in certain places....and with paws the size of dinner plates you could have a new garden in no time! Alas, a fair number of these magnificent dogs wind up in large breed rescue simply because it never occurred to uninformed owners that dogs dig holes and a large dog can dig a large hole, or a series of them, pretty much ruining a suburban yard.

When we lived in MA, Winston liked to spend time in the back yard in good weather. We'd put him out on the tie out while we were out, and then he wouldn't want to come in, so we'd stick our heads out ever half hour or so to check on him. Ever the gentlemen, Winston dug a very discreet hole for himself to cool off in when it was warm out. He dug it right alongside the house, where nothing was growing in the first place. With his belly and legs cool, he could continue to sit out and watch over the neighbors children.

I really do think that's what he was doing. I think he felt attached to the kids in the neighborhood up there, because when he was a puppy, we took him around to all the houses near ours and introduced him to the kids and their parents. We did this partly to socialize him, and partly to show we were open to any concerns of the parents that we were getting a "big tough dog"....though that was a real doggy neighborhood, and most people were already familier with mastiffs from Dozer, down the street. Dozer was a Semper Fido dog - a foster dog taken in by a family when his own family was on active duty in the service. Nobody ever bothered to put Dozer on a leash - he hung out in his own foster yard, with his yellow lab foster brother and ate a lot of tennis balls.

But I digress.

The thing with Winston, and his natural desire to bury such things as chew toys and rawhide cheweys is that he has met this need by using either a) boxes of books or b) laundry in baskets. The book box isn't so bad. Winston treats the books themselves with such respect you'd think he was able to read. He gently moves one or two paperbacks out of the way with his enormous paw, drops in his chewed up chewy and then noses the books back into place.

The real problem is when you have a basket of what you think is clean laundry waiting to be folded or ironed. You're going along and, about half way through the basket....there it is. A slimey, smelly, half-eaten rawhide chewey. And when you pull it out, along with the now soiled surrounding articles of clothing, he bounces up to his feet with an eager and happy expression - as if to say "I was WONDERING where I put that! Thanks Mom!" Explaining to him that we are on austerity measures here and don't have unlimited amount of hot water to do laundry have met with no sucess. It's very difficult to explain anything to a mastiff, particularly one that's all excited to have been reunited with his half eaten rawhide chewy from 2 days ago.

I wonder if I wrote to one of those housekeeping magazines if anybody could give me a hint for THIS housekeeping problem?