One time I bought my dog a coat. She is not the kind of the dog that needs to wear a coat.
She is not a floofy thing. She is not a rat thing. She is not a dust ruffle thing. She is a mutt mixture of poodle and beagle thing, barrel-chested and part grizzly bear thing. She looks like the owl in The Secret of NIMH. (No she doesn’t — inserts the wife here — quite emphatically.)
She is a little brown dog — a plain brown dog — the kind of dog that if you put a bow in her hair, it will somehow make her look worse. When we first got her, I posted her puppy picture and an anonymous internet commenter said she looked like she smelled bad. I deleted it, but he wasn’t exactly lying. She is the kind of dog that looks like she smells bad.
(NO SHE DOESN’T — inserts the wife here — although we often laugh and tease the dog about that comment.)
Again, she is not the kind of dog that needs to wear a coat. And yet, I bought her one last year, right before the supposed polar vortex.
Let me go on a tangent for a moment. Remember when the Weather Channel was a pleasant, muzak-playing slideshow of temperatures and five-day forecasts? Now it’s a mutated, deformed beast of its former self. I consider it one of the scariest websites there is, next to Fan Fiction Forums and WebMD.
For instance, if I go to WebMD, I’ll come away convinced I have Esophageal Cancer when I only have heartburn. And if I go to Weather.com to read about the rain, I’ll come away doomsday-prepping for a monsoon.
That’s how I ended up buying the dog a coat. I was certain we were all preparing for The Day After Tomorrow conditions. I was certain we were all going to insta-freeze. The weather forecasters all acted like it was going to be the thousand-year storm of sub-artic hell. Having not grown up in a particularly cold-weather region, I bought it. I bought it literally. I mean, I bought the dog a freaking coat.
Go ahead, tease me. Around here, I regularly got off school for less than a snow-flake. Some kids fondly remember their epic snow days — I remember mine as sludge-rain days.
I also did my True Marylander Official Duties during an Official Freak the Fuck Out Weather Event, up to and including:
– Buy a gallon of milk
– Toilet paper, yo. Lots of toilet paper.
– Fill up the gas tank
– Buy enough food to survive World War III
– Buy the dog a coat
The thing is, I didn’t just get any old dog coat/sweater-vest thing out of the junky pet section at TJ Maxx. Dude, I went NUTS and bought a fully-insulated, waterproof, polar-fleece coat WITH A BUILT-IN TEMPERATURE GAUGE ON IT.
Why?
Whyyyyy?
I’ve been making her wear it outside lately just to get my money’s worth out of it. Poor dog.
The Surfing Pizza 
I love The Secret of NIMH. You can tell your wife that I don’t think your dog smells bad. My dog, however, smells like corn chips.
My dog gets that corn chips smell too! It’s also sometimes a brown sugar smell. Sometimes “whitefish.” Right now it’s “diaper”
I have learned that once you have a kid nothing gets cleaned as often as it should, and that includes the dog.
The doggy corn chip smell! I don’t understand it, my dog always smells like corn chips too.
Your dog is and always has been precious. I think she looks like a cross between Benji and an owl wizard. She does need a coat. In the amount of time it took me to drag the christmas tree to the curb without gloves on last week, my hands lost feeling. It’s a fine coat. She looks super cute, if a bit wary (and definitely NOT stinky).
well she looks adorable in it so it’s totally necessary! I’m way worse, my cat has a cape (actually 2…one superhero, one fancy winter cape) and I can’t even use a polar vortex as an excuse.
Just calculate the price per wear and have your dog wear it until you get your moneys worth then donate it to goodwill – that way a Chinese Crested dog owner can buy it (it will keep another dog alive through the Day After Tomorrow carnage).
I might just have one-upped you when I bought my dog a coat with his name monogrammed on the back! I couldn’t believe it was an option. My mom and I were giggling the whole time while we bought it online. My german shepard was staring at us with an odd expression, as if he knew he wouldn’t really need it.
I buy my cat sweaters. She loves them! Your pooch doesn’t look stinky.
When my dog got to a certain age, she didn’t want to go out in the snow. Turned out her little feet got cold so quickly. So we bought boots for our dog. So I totally get the coat (and after a few times she’d get the hang of it and wait for us patiently to strap on four boots)
That dog is adorable! and I wish I had a coat with a temperature gauge. I’m jealous of a dog coat.
Your dog is so cute
The first time I read this I saw “One Time I Bought my Dog a Goat”
My dog loves goats, too.