Chippy Wants a Drink

I heard this sort of quiet mewling sound beside my chair. Chippy looked up at me expectantly.

Well, she was trying to look up as much as her little neck muscles would let her.

Chippy is our dog, part Dane, part Chihuahua, and her gigantic head weighs as much as her body.

Chippy weighs a total of 18 pounds, so imagine a ham on a roller skate and you've about got it.

Except she's a dog, not a ham roller skate mutant hybrid from the planet Duag-poo 7.

I figured Chippy wanted something. I know her 'I need to go out and deposit on your lawn' mewl from her 'I can't get at a toy that has gone under the sofa' mewl.

I thought that maybe this particular mewl meant that her downstairs water bowl was dry. I looked back, and sure enough, that's what it was.

"You and me both, Chippy," I said with my own human mewling sounds.

It had been a rough day here in Flusherville compared to the days SOME people are having in LAS VEGAS right now Mrs. Flusher... not that I'm complaining or naming names. HEY QUAD QUEEN. HOW'S VEGAS WITHOUT ME????

And lots of other sad stuff going on. Tough day at the grommet plant. Remember Kenny Blankenship, who lost a piece of his ear last year?

He's got a huge lump on his neck, and we were thinking it is not good news. He showed it to us in the lunch room.

"What do you guys think this fucker is?" Kenny whined.

"It's nothing, don't worry," somebody said.

"It's just a zit," said Jimmy Poon. Kenny turned a bit pale.

"But it's so huge..." said Kenny.

"That's what SHE said," someone shot back. Grommet linemen crowded closer, giggling like school kids, to see Kenny's bump.

"It's a boil," said boss Norbert, who had sidled in from nowhere, like an SBD fart.

"It's probably nothing," I offered patting Kenny on the back, maybe a bit to close to the zit/boil/deadly tumor on his shoulder. He actually yelped - now that I think about it, somewhat like Chippy does when she hits her gigantic melon-head on a doorframe - which is fairly often.
 
"It's a boil. That's no zit. It's a boil. My cousin had one, it got as big as a kiwi."

"Shut up, you ass," I said to Norbert. He shot me a look.

"It's either a tumor or a boil," he went on. "When they took a foot long needle and without any freezing, lanced my cousin's boil..."

Kenny dropped like a plastic bag of 2,000 quarters. (What do you want, it's a gambling blog.) In so doing, he hit his head on one of the lunch tables (which are firmly bolted to the greasy lunchroom floor.... in case one of us valued grommet linemen decides to try to take one home). Like I would really want a table at home that has "Norbert sucks grommet releaser compound off of syphilitic donkey balls" carved into the top of it.

I keep getting carried away...

Like I said, I really needed a tall cool one after all the crap today. So I poured Chippy a bowlful, and poured myself a triple Prince Igor vodka on the rocks.

Prince Igor is considered to be a step sideways from Plastic Cask vodka - you know the kind. P.I. has a nicer label, if you like vague references to Russian royalty, but probably comes from the same source. You know, 'aged for up to 3 hours' (in a 10,000 gallon plastic vat)? You know, 'gravel filtered'? Made from 82% utility grade bio-materials?

I can't afford the good stuff like I drink in Vegas for free. The taxes on booze up here see to it.

Anyway, there's nothing like the sound of a long, happy tongue lapping up a deep, cool drink from a dirty bowl on the floor, in a heat-wave in June in Flusherville. And Chippy enjoyed her drink as well.

There have been some goings-on in Vegas since Mrs. Dealt Flusher hit her sweet 50 cent Dealt Royal. But I'm not party to much of them, except for what I can glean from the foggy, out of focus MrsFlusherFone pictures she sends to my Inbox.

Obviously, she's hit some quads, including one on dollars.

I particularly liked getting these pictures from Treasure Chest at the Cal.

Hit a quad, pick a treasure chest. This was on dollars too... what would it be, what would it be....
 

$180. Not bad, the minimum, which you usually get, is $140. (It's possible, they say, to win up to $5000 on a quad, I think it is. I've never seen it.)

And this just came in.

Followed by this.

It looks pretty good, right? But these are sprinkled through a day of playing around. I gave her a quick call and sure enough, she's down today about $300. But according to her points online, she's had $12,000 in action since late Saturday night.

And I have a feeling in about half an hour, she'll be playing some more, watching Game 6 of the Stanley Cup at some bar somewhere.

Oh - when we went to pick up Kenny Blankenship, the side of his head was bloody. Somehow, his fast-falling head caught a loose piece of chrome trim on the table and nipped off part of his other earlobe. The good news is, the thing on his shoulder sort of let go. It was probably just a big zit after all.

You can see why I need a few stiff drinks after all this. Life is tough. Then there's Vegas.