A full accounting of the hair, the money, and the 6 week cycle nobody warns you about.
You’ve met the employees already. Han Solo, King of the Acreage. Jack Ryan, Head of Personal Security. That report covered who they are.
This one covers what they cost.
Here is the pitch I was given, and I want you to notice how carefully it was worded. Doodles are hypoallergenic. Doodles don’t shed. Doodles are wonderful for people with allergies.
All of that is technically true, and I would like to walk you through what technically true means.
The hair does not fall out, except on my pants sometimes. That part is accurate. What it does instead is stay on. It keeps growing. It grows past the point of being hair and becomes a textile. Left alone for long enough it knits itself into a dense structural material that a person could reasonably insulate a shed with.
I did not buy a dog that doesn’t shed. I bought a sheep with opinions. Twice.
Day 1. The Fresh Groom
He comes home smelling like a candle. There’s a bandana around his neck that nobody in this family selected. Sometimes there’s a bow, and no one has ever explained the bow to me.
For approximately 4 hours I have a beautiful dog.
I know exactly how long that window is, so I spend most of it taking pictures. Solo on the deck. Solo by the fire pit. Solo looking off into the middle distance like a dog who’s about to be on a calendar. I have hundreds of these photos. Every single one was taken on a day 1, because I know what’s coming and I’m building an archive.
Day 2. Alberta Happens
Here’s the part they don’t cover in the doodle sales literature, because the doodle sales literature was not written for people who live on an acreage.
A $150 haircut has a shelf life out here of about 90 seconds.
There’s a slough. There’s mud from roughly March through June, and then again whenever it feels like it. There’s a fence line that produces burrs the way other properties produce grass. There’s tall stuff in the back that Solo goes into clean and comes out of wearing.
And there’s whatever he finds. He always finds something. I have stopped asking what it was, because knowing has never once improved my day.
He goes out looking like a show dog. He comes back wearing the entire province.
The Pond Situation, Updated
Last time I reported that fish were on the way, and I predicted Solo would consider them coworkers.
I was wrong. The fish arrived and Solo was let go.
Our friend Jay gave us 4 koi. We named them Sushi, Miso, Mochi, and Jerry. Three of those names are a theme. The fourth one is Jerry. I have no explanation. Nobody in this house has an explanation. At this point asking feels rude.
The pond is now closed to dogs, which Solo has taken about as well as you’d expect from an animal who built his entire personality on that water. He didn’t build the pond. He supervised it. He still walks the bank every morning like a man visiting a business he used to own.
There are 3 koi in there now. There used to be 4. We don’t know which one we lost, because they’re fish, they look alike, and we didn’t take notes.
So we still say all 4 names. Somewhere in that pond a fish is answering to a name that isn’t his, and the whole system holds up fine, because none of us can prove anything.
Jerry, if you’re out there, we’re thinking of you. Or you’re right there, and we’ve been mourning Miso for no reason.
Days 3 Through 20. Denial
I own the equipment. I want that on the record.
I own a slicker brush. I own the metal comb, the good one, the one the groomer recommended in the specific tone of a woman who has watched this movie before. I own detangler spray. I own a dematting rake that cost more than a decent chef’s knife, which is a sentence I’ve had to sit with.
I used all 4 of those tools with real, sustained commitment for about 9 days.
That was in 2020.
Days 21 Through 35. The Felt Stage
The first mat shows up behind an ear. You find it while you’re petting him and thinking about something else, and you tell yourself you’ll deal with it tonight.
You will not deal with it tonight.
Behind one ear becomes behind both ears. Both ears becomes the armpits, which is where doodle hair goes when it wants to stop being hair and start being upholstery. Then it’s the back legs. Then there’s a patch on his chest that has achieved a density I’d describe as load bearing.
By day 30 I’m not grooming a dog. I’m managing a slow structural failure, and I’m losing.
The Ledger
Let’s stop pretending this is about hair and talk about money.
Two dogs. Groomed every 6 weeks, roughly $150 each, which is about 8 appointments a year per dog. Solo is almost 7. Jack is almost 3.
That’s somewhere north of $12,000 in haircuts.
Add the tools I abandoned in 2020. Add the ear cleaner, the shampoo I was told to buy, the second shampoo I was told to buy after the first shampoo was wrong. Add the 4 dog beds currently sitting empty in this house, purchased with real money by an adult woman who now sleeps with 2 dogs on her legs.
Call it $14,000, and that’s being generous to myself in a way I don’t fully deserve.
I have quietly financed a used Corolla with 4 legs. Two of them.
Day 42. The Shave Down
You know the moment you’ve lost when the groomer meets you at the door instead of bringing the dog out.
She has a face. There’s a small sympathetic pause before she speaks, and in that pause you already know.
“We had to take him short.”
What comes out is not my dog. It’s a whippet who lost a bet. Legs I’ve never seen before. A waist. An expression of total, undisguised humiliation. He walks past me to the car without making eye contact and he doesn’t make eye contact for the rest of the evening.
Remo says he looks fine.
Remo says it in a voice that confirms he does not look fine.
A Note on the Hair, for the Bakers
They don’t shed. I’ve explained that this is technically true.
I’d only add that in 15 years of photographing food for a living, the hair has landed on exactly one plate.
The hero shot. After the third styling pass. Every time.
The Casting Department
We didn’t name these dogs. We cast them.
Remo loves Harrison Ford, and at some point that stopped being a preference and turned into a household naming convention.
Indiana Jones came first. An Australian shepherd, and I’m going to say this plainly because it’s true: the most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen. Strangers stopped us in parking lots about him. He took the archaeology seriously and excavated most of the yard in our old house on a professional schedule. He was good in that way that fools you into thinking you’re a talented dog owner, when really you just got lucky.
We lost him at 3, to lymphoma. We did everything there was to do, and then we did the things that probably weren’t going to work either, because you do. Three years isn’t enough. I don’t have a joke for that part, so I’m not going to write one.
What I do have is the name. By the time Solo showed up, the Harrison Ford thing had stopped being Remo’s bit and turned into something closer to a way of keeping the first one in the house. So we kept going. We’re now 3 dogs deep into one man’s filmography with no exit strategy.
The casting has held up better than anyone expected. Solo is a smuggler who steals ping pong balls and answers to no authority. Jack Ryan spends every movie trying to get home to his family, and so does ours, from roughly 40 feet away, in my kitchen, at my heel.
The only flaw in the system is that Harrison Ford characters are famously calm under pressure, and neither of these two has been calm under pressure once in their lives. One is afraid of a golf cart. The other can’t eat a meal that isn’t being tracked by laser.
We’re also running low on Harrison Ford. Rick Deckard is available. John Book is available. If we ever get a runner, he’s going to be Dr. Richard Kimble, and I’ll spend the next decade explaining that to the vet.
Closing Notes
The number is real. The number is stupid. I’d pay it again on Monday and we all know it.
Because in 6 days he’s due at the groomer again, and in 6 weeks we start over, and somewhere in between there’s a morning in February when it’s dark and cold and there is genuinely no reason for a person to be outside.
And I’m out there anyway, with 2 dogs who cost me a car, watching a sky nobody else is looking at.
That’s the whole transaction. I’ve never once come out ahead and I’ve never once minded.
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