It’s 2 am Saturday night and I step outside to have a cigarette. As I am enjoying that last one before drifting off to bed, I hear what sounds like a low growl, coming from the goats’ pen. I decide to get a flash light and check them out because we’ve had reports of bear and wildcats in the area. I shine the flashlight over to that area and I see all the goats huddled up near the gate. At this point I am a bit worried since it IS 2am and a breezy 22 degrees outside. The goats should be all snuggled up in their houses. I take Mario with me and we investigate….

Nothing can be found in the goat pen and the sound I had heard appears to have been Ahab’s stomach growling. Ahab is a wethered Nubian goat and basically king/bully of the roost. We decide that they are just being weird and make our way back inside. Just after steeping inside I realize that I have stepped in something on my evening stroll. CRAP! I decide it’s too late to worry about it now; I’ll leave it until morning.

Morning comes and so does my dilemma….cleaning the poop from my shoe. I wonder, is there a proper way to clean poop from a shoe? What is the best way? Right now, I’d settle for the easiest way.

The poop isn’t the really mushy, fresh kind. It’s rather a dried up sticky kind, with all sorts of lawn fragments attached. And upon inspection, I couldn’t even tell you what kind it is. It doesn’t look like goat poop, it doesn’t look like dog poop. And considering that those are the only 2 animals that frequent my yard, aside from my 4 year old (not his either), I am baffled. Should I identify it before cleaning it? How should I identify it? Would it help to make cleaning it any easier if I knew? Do I really need to smell it and look at it up close and personal? Maybe I should have posted a picture with this post and you could’ve help me identify it.

Now normally, if this sort of misfortune happens, I just leave my boots outside until the weather has basically removed the intruder, but in this case, it was my favorite pair of UGG slippers that cost me $80 some odd dollars. (as it WAS 2am!) The slippers won’t tolerate much water if I try to wash them, and I can’t limp around the yard until the 1/2 inch thick patty of poo is gone. If I did that, I could slip or throw out my back or something. Why did this happen to me and not Mario instead. What do I do now?

I suppose I could get a stick and go out to the farthest reaches of my land and start scraping. But I wonder, do they have tool that specializes in cleaning poop from shoes? If they do, are the tools designed for the type of poop? Where would I buy one? If they don’t have one, why not? Plenty of us step in poop from time to time. You’d think there’d be a market for that sort of thing. I mean we have an ice scraper, why not a poop scraper? I guess I could use a brush of some sort, but the only type of brush that comes to mind is a toothbrush, small and disposable, but there is just something wrong about using a toothbrush to clean poop from my shoe. I know that every time I brushed my teeth, with a different toothbrush obviously, I would remember cleaning my shoe. It’s bad enough that brushing my teeth hits a gag reflex, but think of how tortured I would be with a memory like that.

Now, I will spend today worrying about my favorite shoes outside in the cold, while my cold feet sit inside under my desk, pondering this heinous misfortune. How do I clean poop from my shoe…………..