Letter of Recommendation: The Mudbuster

become ungovernable with my idiot sons

Good morning! It’s a Friday in semi-late March, and I don’t know where you live, but does everything around you in nature look like this most of the time in March?

it feels vulnerable to show you this

Or am I just lucky?

This is what my hideous backyard looked like yesterday. It snowed this morning, but this is ~what lies beneath~.

I swear to you it’s pretty in the summer – two retired gay men owned our old-ass house before us, and did they like to LANDSCAPE. My god. In June, this yard will be unrecognizable. There’ll be pink peonies nodding their heavy heads, hydrangeas ruffling in the breeze, roses climbing, bright green grass, endless day lilies, a lot of ornamental rhubarb for some reason, bleeding hearts, ferns, robins swooping, monarchs flitting – the whole thing.

But for now, the yard looks horrible and contains a giant mud pit. Right there, at the foot of the porch. And that would ordinarily be fine – I’d just not look at it until May – but there’s a problem.

I live with two assholes.

Teddy’s on the left, Elwood is smirking

And do you know what these two assholes like to do?

They like to run in and out of their very special dog door all day long and prance about with one another in the mud pit. Only in the mud pit.

If there’s grass? they’re not interested. The only place to hang is the mud pit. They also only want to go out to pee in the mud pit. For some reason, they cannot trot anywhere else in the whole yard to pee on a nice tree or a pleasant bush.

Nope. Has to be the mud pit.

Now imagine that’s it’s been frosting or raining or sleeting for days in a temperature that is sliiiightly too warm to freeze, so that the mud pit never dries.

Now imagine you have a mostly-white kitchen floor.

And that the aforementioned gay men had installed new cream-colored carpet on the stairs right before they sold us the house, as a final, parting “fuck you, we’re moving to vegas” power move.

For years, I was at my wits’ end. Imagine me, a modern-day lesbian tradwife!!!!, hands on hips, yelling after my dogs “YOU’D BETTER NOT BE WALKING ON MY CLEAN FLOORS” ten times a day, every day, from late October through May, and you get the idea.

Now, we’d tried everything. We’d tried declaring the dog door closed for the season and toweling the dogs’ feet off every time they came in. They still tracked mud in.

and this what the door looked like after one hour of the experiment

We tried vacuuming and mopping every day. The kitchen still looked so bad – so hilariously, cartoonishly filthy by 3 PM each day – that we gave up.

“We can ignore it,” we said to each other. “We’ll just mop when people come over.”

But we couldn’t ignore it. It felt like a secret sty. It was genuinely gross.

Enter the Mudbuster.

Have you guys heard of this dang thing??? A lady in a very fluffy purple shearling hat told me about the Mudbuster one day at the dog park, and then invited me to come ::see it in action:: in the back of her minivan. (I followed her because if you can’t trust vigorous senior citizens wearing jackets unironically printed with howling wolves at the dog park, who can you trust?) She grabbed Brambles, her white lab, who had the muddiest paws I’d ever seen, sat him down outside the minivan, and pulled out a Mudbuster.

Friends, one demonstration was all it took. I loaded my own filthy animal (Teddy) into the truck, drove home, and ordered my own Mudbuster immediately.

Look at it.

r u turned on

Realllllly look at it.

This is the Mudbuster, and, apart from the fact that it looks like… this, it’s changed everything. I am no longer mad at my dogs for an entire season of the year. Because of the Mudbuster, there are two fewer hounds being constantly hollered at. That’s two fewer dogs speed-dialing Sarah McLachlan with their disgusting muddy claws! You’re welcome, Sarah!!!

To use your Mudbuster: You fill your Mudbuster with warm water, grab your dog, and stick their paw in. Then you move their paw up and down, and the little latex fingers scrub all the mud off. Then you wipe the clean, dripping paw with a towel, and you’re on to the next paw. Ta daaaa!

Your dog will hate it!!! And fight you the first time!! And then they’ll get used to it, and eventually accept their fate.

Look at Elwood’s paw before I mudbust him.

Now watch.

(How could using it still be funny every time? It’s been a year of owning this thing and I still laugh every time.)

And here is the after:

LOOK HOW CLEAN THAT PAW IS!!! You could eat off that paw!! You could stop hating spring with that paw!! With a paw like that, your heart could learn to love and trust again.

If you have dogs, and they use those paws to walk on Mother Earth’s beautiful, mud-smeared March face, you need this thing.

Let me know if you try it? And also: if they made a human-sized version, would you climb inside?

Just wondering.