If you need a laugh...

... and you either own a dog or have owned a dog, then this is the book for you. Emily Yoffe's What the dog did: Tales from a formerly reluctant dog owner had me laughing all through the book. She mixes personal experiences with the beagle she and her family adopted from Beagle Rescue Education and Welfare (BREW) with experiences of other dog owners, some beagles, some non-beagles. She chronicles the time it took to make Sasha, their adopted beagle, a decent canine companion that no longer felt the dining room table was an appropriate place to take a nap. She also includes some descriptions of the wide variety of beagle personalities that came through her household as fosters.

I think anyone who has had a dog, lived with a dog, or currently has and/or lives with a dog can relate to some of the stories in this book. None of her stories particularly stood out, but as I was reading, I certainly was laughing.

And I certainly was thinking of some of my own dog tales, from the time Molly decided that she'd check out Mom's newly redone bathroom and locked herself in and managed to get out through the window way at the top of the wall after shredding the laundry basket and turning on the faucets so the bathroom flooded to the time I came home to a twelve-pack of coke sitting on the floor with coke cans with bite marks and coke squirting out all over the kitchen in giant arcs (the dogs sported sticky mohawks, by the way). Or the time that Nicky decided she was going to help herself to some poor kid's sandwich while we were at the park (he was waving it around right at her nose level). Or waking up nose-to-nose with Alex under the covers and then realizing, hey, he wasn't under the covers when I fell asleep. Or my roommate's whippet that would come in and poke me so I'd lift the covers for him to crawl into bed with me.

I think the one thing I learned from this book, or actually it was simply reinforced, was that living with a dog always provides lots of entertainment, and that it takes lots of time and work with a dog to make sure they are decent canine companions and realize that you're the boss. I do look forward to the time when I have a house with a yard and can get my own dog.