How things roll.

Rocky went missing yesterday. Jill had changed the rules-of-feeding here, and wants the dogs fed in the morning. Fine for her, cause she goes to work very early in the morning, but Seth is a) still not complete familiar with the concept of morning, and b) a creature of habit. The habit has been feeding in the evening, so the morning feedings on the weekends (Seth's days) is a bit spotty.

I wasn't sure if he'd fed them yesterday or not, so I asked him about 6:30pm if he'd done it. I got the blank "omg, I'm not sure" stare that said "uh oh, the sister's gonna kill me." Which is generally what happens if he forgets, so yes, he had reason to be concerned. He thought about it for a while, then decided to go ahead and feed them, just to be sure. The dogs, of course, weren't saying, cause they will take food at any given moment that someone offers, and frequently when they don't.

Seth came back in the kitchen and asked where Rocky was. I had no idea, and told him to ask Jill. He already had, and she had said he was in the crate. "He's not in there," said the boy, so I told him to check in the corral outside, where I'd put him earlier. I looked out the kitchen window as I said this, and saw that the gate was wide open. Uh oh. No Rocky outside. How the heck did he get loose? I always check the gate when I close it, but Seth and I looked at each other, knowing that the specter of doom had just entered our kitchen, because if Jill found out, we were both gonna be dead.

We took off in the van, looking for him. No go. Came home, and Jill was now gone looking for him, according to Dan. We went back out. Came back, and Jill was crying on the front step. Dropped off Seth and took off again with Jill, who was sure that the wicked witch had made off with Toto, and we would never see him again. We must've driven the neighborhood ten times or more, to no avail. I still held out hope because he had both a collar and a microchip, but Jill was convinced that whoever had found him would keep her darling little baby (aka ball of fire that chews up bras and anything else he can get hold of). I told her it'd be ok, and we'd just go home and wait.

She was pretty upset, till about twenty minutes later, when Seth came down and said that that little idiot dog had been in the crate all along. Jill shot him the look of death, my jaw dropped, and Seth just looked straight at us and said "I know.........I'm stupid."

I still have no idea how the boy didn't know he was in the crate. Apparently, the crate had been put in the bathroom upstairs, and I'm not sure how or why that was either -- maybe Seth had put it there because he was moving mattresses downstairs from Thomas' old room -- but he wasn't talking about it, and still hasn't.

So that's how things roll in the land of Utter Chaos, where you can spend two hours searching for a missing dog that isn't, and where a crate can grow legs and walk, with the dog still in it.