Does it start with a letter or dog hair?

My black lab sheds.  A lot.  Truthfully, I don't understand how he's not bald.  When he's shedding (which is about 85% of the year), chunks of hair fall out.  All these hairs congregate to form dog hair tumbleweeds that roll down the hallway, no matter how often I vacuum.  I brush the dog; I bathe the dog; I vacuum every day and completely fill the canister on the vacuum.  Yet, there's still hair everywhere.

Lately, Gavin has been the Dog Hair Nazi.  Two hours after I've vacuumed, I hear him yelling, "Mom!  There's dog hair!"  No shit.  Fine, I'll vacuum again.

It's an uphill battle I've been fighting for years and years, and while I've accepted that I'll never win the battle, it never ceases to amaze me how much dog hair there is.  I mean, he's a short-hair dog.  Where does it all come from?

Well, last night, Gavin and I were sitting on the living room floor playing a new game.  I had purchased flash cards that have rhyming words on them.  So, I would set five different cards out in from of him (i.e. bug, snail, grape, ring, and clown), and then I would say a word like "rug."  I would ask him to look at his cards and pick out which one rhymes with rug.

At first, he cheated.  You see, each card has a different number of pictures on it.  So, all the cards that end in -ug would have five pictures on them.  So, he merely matched up the number of pictures.  Smart, but sneaky.  So, I decided to make it harder and not show him the word I wanted him to rhyme with.  When he couldn't figure it out, he would ask me for clues.  Normally, he asks me what letter the word starts with.  He'll say, "Does it start with an o or an i?"

Well last night, even though I had recently vacuumed, dog hair had collected on all of the cards that I placed in front of him.  When we got to a word he was having trouble with, he looked at me and said, "Does it start with a letter or dog hair?"  And he was dead serious.  I almost peed my pants laughing.