News flash! Plant bites dog!

Okay, so the schefflera didn't actually bite my little barker dog, but she certainly thought it was about to when it chased her across the den a little while ago.

I have no idea what has been making the Alpha Bitch as testy as she has been lately, but she has barked at everything that moved outside and growled and snapped at Pointer Dog at every opportunity. PD is typically not one to make a fuss over things, but he's been unusually likely to join in the noisemaking over the last few days; I'm beginning to think they both just may have serious cases of cabin fever because of the yukky weather in our backyard (including a dusting of snow for a little while a couple of nights ago), and they're just letting off steam.

At any rate, AB headed for the windows a while ago to explain property rights to something moving in the neighborhood of our front yard when she managed to brush past the schefflera in such a way as to snag her collar on the handlebar of the little tricycle-like potholder it has occupied for the past several years. I'm pretty sure AB thought she was headed to the back door to continue her argument when she was surprised by the plant chasing her across the room and attempting to strangle her.

I, of course, was in my lounge chair under a layer of warm blankets and my laptop, so I couldn't easily hop up and disentangle the collar from the handlebar. Instead, in my usual hysterical mommie fashion, I yelled at her to Stop! Sit! Wait a minute!

She looked up at me frantically as she continued to drag the plant—now on its side and strewing dirt, leaves, and a stream of nasty water in a twisty trail—behind her, up to my chair, and into what she expected to be the relative security of a space under the end table next to me.

By the time she ran out of space to run any more, I had disentangled enough from computer cords and blanket to reach down and slip her collar off the end of the handlebar and to see that she had come out of the battle unscathed. Somewhat remarkably, I thought, the plant appeared not to have lost any of its live leaves and the pot didn't show any signs of cracking.

The floor, of course, was a bit of a different matter. This plant grows in a "self-watering" pot that typically has at least a little residual water in the base (and that may explain some of the somewhat stale scent in the room over the past few weeks while it's been inside, away from the bad weather). Since I had such an odd lot of parts to clean up—a remarkably small amount of lost dirt, an assortment of dead leaves and twigs, mostly collected from the summer and fall outside, and a trail of water—I grabbed my handy Swiffer "broom" for the cleanup.

It turns out that the "heavy-duty" class of Swiffer pads is just great for dry stuff but not sufficiently absorbent to make much headway with water. I'm too cheap to use up a lot of disposables for a mess like this, so I grabbed an old washrag out of the cleaning supplies, punched it into the mop head, and Bingo! Much easier than down on my hands and knees and much more effective than the "official" Swiffer pads. A quick rinse in the kitchen sink on the way to the washer appears to have pretty well recouped the usefulness of the rag.

What remains to be seen is whether AB has learned her lesson about picking fights with plants.