I can spot a rug a mile away....

No, not really.

But if you're visiting someone's house and the rug is bad, you can't ignore it.

It's the decorating equivalent of having spinach stuck between your front teeth.

You don't want to talk about it, but it's just there.

But when you have dogs, it's not so easy to keep the rug looking nice.


Witness the two wet dogs, Bijou and Bella taking a nap on their favorite spot: the living room rug. Click on the photo and you can really see how ragged it is: pulls, rips, missing yarn.

At least the color blends in with Georgia clay so it doesn't look dirty. But you still wouldn't want your baby crawling on it.

Too bad the rug is only nine months old.

I bought it with my birthday money last year to replace a nine-year-old rug that had lost its fringe. It has paisley and for some reason, I love paisley.

It was billed as an indoor-outdoor rug. Great for dogs right? But it was trashed in two days. Their claws snagged on the loops and it has numerous pulls. One section has even come unraveled.

I do love the dogs more than my birthday present. I never yelled at them for tearing up the rug because they didn't even realize they were doing it.

But I should have known better to buy a hook rug. Again.

I used to have this great lemon-patterned hook rug in the kitchen. The dogs, then puppies, loved it too. The picture on the right, is our late great Golden Retriever, Bailey. She only acted like she wanted to eat the rug, but she left it alone.

Bijou (below) came along six months later and posed for a pretty picture on the rug, but waited until I was out of sight to unravel it. Completely.

Isn't it funny that when humans and animals do something they know they're not supposed to be doing, they do it in secret?

Thankfully, Bijou's out of that stage now (she's eight, and is the top dog in the big photo.)

I also hated to see that lemon rug go because it's sort of famous. That rug used to belong to Bobbie Batista, the former CNN Headline News anchor.

Ten years ago, she was getting rid of quality junk and I was trying to decorate a new house, so I bought several things from her. The rug was the big prize. And I'm still using almost everything else that I purchased. At the time I didn't have dogs. My sixteen-year-old Cocker Spaniel had died a few months before, and I wasn't ready for another dog.

I was single at the time, and that pretty, clean, nicely decorated house soon got awfully lonely.

When I told my mom I was getting a puppy, she gasped, because she knew what would happen. "The house..." she said. She didn't have to finish, but I knew what she meant. Paw prints, accidents, fur on the furniture. Rugs with stains that won't come out. Landscaping displaced by industrious digging.

Still, I knew I wanted a dog. I needed one. I was ready to love a dog again.

I got one puppy, then another and they were worth every bit of trouble they caused, which really wasn't much.

I have a website that I made in 2000 dedicated to the two original dogs (we lost Bailey last year then adopted Bella.) I'm about to shut it down as I cut non-essential expenses, so if you like dogs a lot, click here and take a look. If you've got insomnia, this page might help you feel sleepy. And if you want to laugh at silly excess, this is the page to check out.

My husband is at work now, and the only sounds I hear are the clicking of the keys as I type and the dogs snoring.

It makes the place feel like home. A little messy, a little too fuzzy. Not just a house, but a home.