iDig it, iBury it, iHop

So at any rate, the other night the wife decided to make pancakes for supper, and one kid started doing one thing, and another kid started doing another thing, and it turned out a whole stack of pancakes got left in the oven.

The oven wasn't on or anything, but when I found the pancakes a couple of days later, they had turned to something more like an old retread than a pancake.

About the same time I was pulling the pancakes out of the oven, Sally was looking in through the kitchen window from her perch outside.

Sally is our dog, but since she has a common name, people sometimes get her confused with one of the children.

I might say, "Sally sure likes to swim," and someone might answer, "Oh yeah, my daughter likes to swim, too."

And then I'll say, "Yeah, we take Sally swimming everyday or she gets very upset. She can swim in some pretty rough current, let me tell you. She swam halfway across the river."

"Wow, our daughter just learned the doggy paddle," they'd say.

"So did Sally," I'll say. "Didn't even take a lesson."

"Wow," they'd say. "You must be proud."

I can keep it going quite a while as long as I don't slip up and mention she has a tail or sheds all over the place, or make reference to her chewing on Boy Wonder's arm when they play in the living room.

(Chew would actually be a misnomer. She pulls on his shirt until his arm is no longer in the shirt at all.)

But where was I?

Oh yeah, Sally was on her perch looking into the kitchen, and I was about to throw out the pancakes, when she perked up her ears and gave me that dog-look that said, "Don't throw them out. Don't throw them out. I know just what to do with them."

(Sally's perch, by the way, is a plastic lawn table. She gets up on it and looks back into the house.)

So I gave the dog the pancakes. About 10 of them to be exact.

And this is what Sally did: She took each pancake, one by one, and buried them in separate locations in my backyard. One went in the the flower garden. One went next to the shed. One under the swing set. One near the tire tunnel. One at the side of the porch.

And so on and so forth until they were all placed in their own little holes. Then she took her nose and covered them up. Her nose was black when she was done.

My back yard became a doggy International House of Pancakes. iHop with dirt (or as we call it, iDig).

Now I've seen a lot of strange dogs do a lot of strange things, but this one took the, er, cake.

Since then, she hasn't dug one up.

Maybe she's waiting for some syrup to go bad.

Have a good week. Arf!

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.