My Dogs Can Spell.

We have a fence. So walking our dogs is as easy as opening our back door.

Based on the way we all avoid it, however, you'd think the door was two feet thick and made out of pure Unobtainium.

Nobody wants to get up out of their wallow and haul their magnificent corpus thirty one arduous feet to the back door and, using our last remaining ounce of strength, push it open so the dogs can race out the doggy door and pee on my grill.

Here's how it goes down: we'll all be sunk down into our easy-couch, eyes over the tops of our knees so we won't miss a minute of "Hoarders," and the dogs will actually lean against the front door and stare at me with their doggy eyebrows arched and their skinny little legs enpretzellated, whining through their ears. One of us will notice and quickly rebury our head into our iPad/laptop/game console/tacos and pretend we didn't see them. Then someone else will raise their head and shrug and ahem and relent and say the dogs need to go out and world war nine ensues.

By World War Nine, I mean an It's Your Turn fusillade of titanic proportions. No one wants to do it. No one will do it. Eventually, the dogs will give up and pee in my shoes.

For awhile, the dogs would keep staring at us until we got up and said out. Then they'd explode and hit the back door.

Apparently, dogs are trainable. They quickly associated out utterance of out with peeing and as soon as we'd say it, they'd bolt. So we got wise and started spelling it.

They had it down in a week. Then I started spelling slower and the poor little bastids would hang on every letter.