Some days I have been thinking about renaming Sherman to Shiva. He has this wonderful habit of grabbing things. Like the dish towels off the counter (nearly bringing the blender jar down on his head. Which might broken the jar…), stealing the remote, cellphones, shoes, library books. Ah yes, library books. An amusing anecdote:

Cindy, myself and four friend of ours went out to dinner. We’re sitting there talking, when my Nextel Direct Connect phone beeps. That’s unusual, because Cindy is the only one with my DC number, and she was there. Sometimes it’s a wrong number, no big deal. So I flip open the phone, and the caller ID says “Cindy”. WTF? My first thought is someone has broken into the house. My second thought is that with Makeeta there (crazed German Shepherd), that’s not likely. About a minute later the phone beeps again. I say to Cindy “Didn’t your phone do this a long time ago, where it was sticking, or doing something weird?” She says “Yeah, I vaguely remember that.”

Then I wonder if I really latched Shermans crate correctly or not. I had flipped the door over so it opened from the left instead of the right. The left side has holes for the hinge pins, and the right side has slots for the locking pins. Flipping the door over means that you have to be more careful about getting the locking pins aligned. This thought scares me…

About 7 minutes later, it happens again. We all laugh some more, but I’m feeling a little nervous. We finish dinner, say good byte, head home. Coming up the basement stairs, we are greeted by not two dogs, but three. One looking very proud of himself, and the other two saying “Look, we had nothing to do with this, OK?”

Sherman had chewed on the cellphone a bit, and I think when I beeped him back after the second time, he dropped it. Then chewed on it some more. Still works, but it has virtually no antenna, and a couple holes in places that are not Nextel approved. Some magazines were shredded. The TV remote has a few more teeth marks in it. And 3 library books are now casualties (Cindy took them back, and had to pay $34 for one, and the other two were deemed to be still readable).

Our four friends were dying to know what we found when we got home, so I called them and related the story. One suggested that Sherman was simply calling to ask for a doggy bag…