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It was movie night at Casa del Oceandoggy last night and we watched the eagerly anticipated Marley and Me. I have been waiting for this movie to become available on NetFlix ever since I read the book. I have often felt that Marley and Me is our generation’s Old Yeller and I was really hoping the movie would be great.

Even after it was announced that Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson would play the lead roles and even after seeing all the release posters showing Jennifer with Marley on her shoulders, I remained hopeful that Hollywood and Jennifer wouldn’t eff up another great story. 

My hopes were dashed last night.

Somehow, some kinda way, Hollywood managed to take a moving story about a dog’s life and death and turn it into a cutesy lovefest celebrating two blandly mediocre actors. And, oh yeah, did I mention there was a dog?

Except for the end, Marley was totally moved to the periphery. In scene after scene we watched as Jennifer was cutely perfect and Owen was cutely imperfect and Marley bounded around in the background chewing on things. Um, did I mention there was a dog?

Not only did Marley lose his story, he lost his identity. In the final twenty minutes or so every scene has a different Marley. They were changing dogs like a stripper changing costumes. Heeelllllooooooo, did I mention there was supposed to be a dog?

Finally, at the end of a movie largely devoted to Jennifer and Owen someone remembered that the dog has to die and it’s done in a grandiose style befitting a NASA space launch. Believe me, I’ve been there and done that and it ain’t nothin’ like that. Owen looks cutely imperfectly sad and Jennifer looks cutely perfectly sad, but life has to go on and hooboy, did I mention there’s a dog? 

I only hope that Jennifer and Owen made enough money on this film they can retire and not infect us any longer with their cutesy pithiness.

Oceandoggy’s take? Lift your leg and pee on this one. 

Good boy.

On the weekends we like to walk the beach and let the boys run. Yesterday evening when we went up they were tuggin’ in the wrong direction like boats in a storm and sure enough, when I released them they bolted. Gone down the beach until the onliest thing we could see was matching yellow Lab tails twitching on the horizon.

Which just makes me crazy. 

Cutter and Tug don’t have to do anything but laze around on the furniture and scarf up treats. I walk them twice a a day, every day, for a mile. On the weekends they get the run of the beach. They don’t have to clean up after themselves. They don’t have to help with chores. They don’t have to mow the lawn or do  long division.

All they have to do is come when then they’re ‘effin CALLED. That’s it. That’s all. Just stop what they’re doin’ and race in our direction when we call them. I don’t think it’s too much to ask and it makes me a crazy turd when they run like that. 

Which led to Miss Carol being a turd, which led to all of us being turds.

Turds by the sea.

I keep saying I’m going to write more, post more, do more. But somehow I don’t. 

It’s mostly maybe laziness, but not always. Like tonight, we had to take Cutter to the vet because when we got home his eye was squeezed shut, which meant taking Tug to the vet, which meant the entire clusterfuck of wildly excited full-on male Labs tussling with barely adequate veterinary assistants trying to corral them.

It made me giggle and the boys acquitted themselves well, giving almost no ground. But it was exhausting. Dog wrestling just flat wears you out.

I’m looking forward to the sunny sun-swept days of summer. Except for the Touron part.

Earlier this week, bored beyond tears, I happened upon a Travel Channel special called When Beaches Attack. 

And boy howdy am I glad I did. I had no idea that going to the beach ranks right up there with riding shotgun on a Humvee in a firefight in Iraq.

Who knew?

Come to find out, we’ve got stingrays and sharks and killer waves and jellyfish and hurricanes and tsunamis. And let’s don’t forget sunburn. Apparently, the beach is no place for the faint hearted and danger lurks everywhere on the periphery of  our sun drenched paradise, baring it’s teeth and biding it’s time.

Horrors heaped on horrors.

At first I laughed. Then I smirked. But when I realized the Travel Channel was serious I sprang to action, knowing I had to do my part to make people aware and help save lives. Call me Mommy Oceandoggy.

DON’T come to the beach this summer. Just stay away. It’s really not worth it. Consider your life and that of your loved ones- would you rather spend your vacation in a hot tub sipping cocktails watching a mountain sunset or in the death throes of a shark attack? Dinner in cozy, quaint, country restaurant or writhing in agony from a Man-O-War sting? Swimming lazily in the pool or being sucked out to sea in a rip?

Think hard and spend your vacation dollars wisely and please, stay far, far, away.

Don’t thank me, I’m just glad I could help.

I’d like to say that our dogs love us so much they can’t stand to be away from us.

I wish I could say that our dogs are so well trained that a simple, curt hand signal keeps them trotting at our side.

I want to say these things but I’d be lying.

The terrible truth is that hidden deep in the multiple layers that swaddle her and keep her warm, lost in the many hoodies that comprise her winter bikini are the onliest things that keep Cutter and Tug with us when we walk the beach.

And it ain’t Miss Carol.

Miss Carol and me celebrated our 23rd anniversary of wedded bliss this weekend by deciding to completely re-decorate our living room. Actually, originally, we were just going to buy some new furniture but then things spiraled out of control.

Our living room and kitchen and dining room are basically all one big room. It’s where we spend almost all of our waking hours and has remained largely unchanged for the better part of two decades. It’s as comfortable as your favorite pair of flip flops. We’ll call it Surf Shack Chic for lack of a better term to describe the evolution of our fairly inept thematic decorating. 

It had been time for new couches for a while now, so we decided that this was the weekend to go shopping- where going shopping means going buying because neither one of us has very much patience for just shopping. Hence the Surf Shack Chic.

We were going to go and buy leather furniture similar to the leather furniture we have always had in our living room. But then a funny thing happened. We found ourselves looking at sectionals. Contemporary sectionals. And not just any contemporary sectionals, but contemporary sectionals in strange, foreign colors like grey and white and cream and coffee and taupe.

And then another funny thing happened. We found ourselves purchasing a contemporary white leather sectional that is going to force us to completely re-do our living room because otherwise we are going to end up with a living room that looks like Snow White meets a drunken sailor and has illegitimate children and decides she likes being a little slutty. 

Not wanting to descend into that particular dysfunctionality we wasted no time and started with the brick fireplace.

Before.

And, later that same day.

That’s Tug, helping to soak up some of the fresh paint with his back. Thanks Tug.

I’m calling the new theme Annoyingly Beachy for lack of a better term to describe the matrimonial menopause we appear to be going through. The next step is delivery of the contemporary white leather sectional on Thursday. Hopefully we won’t hate it by Friday.

These are the condos across the street that harbor a very close knit community of, um, eccentrics? Most of the 40-some odd units are vacation rentals but the rest are home to the condominimites.

I’m sure the condominimites very nice people. Maybe. But they’re just weird.

There’s the creepy scarecrow woman who walks herky jerky around the block several times each morning and never says hi or good morning and crosses to the other side of the road every time she sees me walking the dogs. I’m not sure if it’s me or Cutter and Tug that smell bad.

Then there’s the old retired couple that wear the same clothes every single day and walk around gossiping to whoever will stop long enough to listen to them. I think they must spy on us locals with high power binoculars.

Then there’s the middle-aged power couple that take long walks striding manfully with clubs in their hands just daring anyone on the island to dare to attack them. They too never say hi.

Then there’s the lonely little woman that will walk up to you on the beach while you’re minding your own business trying to fish and drink a beer and just starts telling you all about her lonely little life as if you really cared. 

Then there’s the two kinda eccentric-looking guys with the little teeny tiny pocket dogs that are always dressed up in cutesy little outfits. I don’t have any problem with teeny tiny cutesy little dogs, hell my sister has one, but they have their place. Like a suburb or a city somewhere. Down here on the island you need to have big, athletic, dogs. Like labs. Like Cutter and Tug.

Then there’s the guy that’s always standing out in the parking lot next to his car talking on his cell phone and smoking. I don’t even want to know what’s going on there.

Then there’s the completely normal, cute little newlyweds. But they moved out.

I’m not real sure what kind of cosmic confluence brought all these eccentric (where eccentric equals weird) people all together under the same communal roof and I wonder sometimes on how the condominimites are changing our island.

Then I get another beer and turn up the music.

A woman stopped by Miss Carol’s office at the hospital yesterday. She was looking for Miss Carol ’cause she had spent the weekend with some old friends that had mentioned Miss Carol and me.

Come to find out, she had visited Don and Ann, a couple we haven’t seen in several years, people that we used to party with back when Miss Carol was bartending at the BAJA. Friends that we had, unfortunately, fallen out out contact with. Christmas card folks that no longer swirled about us. You know. 

Friends that had slipped off the radar screen of our daily activities until a stranger came looking for Miss Carol to pass on their best wishes. And then it all came zooming back to us.

Back in the day, Don and Ann lived in Carova Beach, which is a fairly inaccessible stretch of beach in North Carolina and home to some of the coolest people I have ever met. Carova is a tight knit community down on the Outer Banks. They have each other and a Life Saving Station and that’s about it.

The people  there are extraordinary. Truly independent. To this day, you have to run the beach at low tide bringing with you everything you need until the next trip out. We consider ourselves lucky to be included as friends.

Miss Carol and me met Don and Ann, and CJ and Pam, and Art and Darylin, and Bob and Debra, and others when we bought land down there, becoming one of them, at least vicariously. We admired them and their spirit and dreamed of building a home in Carova and joining them.

But we didn’t. Or haven’t. Yet.

But, ya know, things keep rolling and people and friends ebb and flow and times change and before you know it Miss Carol is working at a hospital and bringing home a story of old friends and an old dream and you wonder anew.

Granted and accepted. I am a cold weather weenie.

By February, when the season is at it’s seemingly endless, most wearisome bleariness, my abject hatred for winter and everything wintry flares like an infection.

I’m over it.

I’m over the 20 degree weather.

I’m over walking the dogs in the 20 degree weather.

I’m over being bundled up like the Michelin Man while I walk the dogs in 20 degree weather.

I’m over the icy, keening, howling NE winds coming off the ocean and being bundled up like the Michelin Man while I walk the dogs in 20 degree weather.

I’m over the relentlessly dry, itchy, skin caused by the icy, keening, howling NE winds coming off the ocean and being bundled up like the Michelin Man while I walk the dogs in 20 degree weather. 

I’m so over it.

Thank God it doesn’t snow here or I’d completely go off the rails.