Socks are indigestible

But that doesn’t mean Della won’t try.

Off Her Meds

That's Della. Completely off her meds. She is currently flopping around her dog bed, digging into it as if there were a bone burried deep inside.

Lily continues to snarl at her.

I wish I were off my meds. I'd like an excuse to go postal. I keep thinking work is going to bottom out and at least we'll be at rock bottom, but the shit keeps sliding down hill. Now that I've lost my balance, I can't help but slide with it.

Mistake

gave Della a sterilized bone filled with peanunt butter. In her crate. Bone against plastic is noisey.

Didn’t write anything tonight, though I did retouch a picture of my sister from the mid seventies. Also: watched March of the Penguins. Well, listened more. Retouching won for the visuals.

Tipsey. Sat and scratched Della’s belly for a while. Lily is becoming more of a dog just to compete. All of a sudden she’s interested in us.

And the bitch peed on my foot. Except neutered, she isn’t a bitch anymore, she’s just a dog. Nevertheless, she peed on my foot. It was all about the excitement over going outside. She reserved the bulk of it for the out-of-doors, but the dribbles, she deposited on my foot.

Not that I’m bitter. Not that I’m rethinking that bone. Of course, when I close my eyes the world spins, so that can’t be all bad. Sleep it is, then. Coldplay (currently playing on itunes) can wait.

FuccaDella

Right. So I take the dogs to the dog park. Della and Lily run for TWO WHOLE HOURS. Della craps twice, I think I’m doing pretty good. Every crap that happens outside instead of inside is good news as far as I’m concerned. They run and fight and play. We finally come home, we aren’t inside for TEN MINUTES and Della stands by the front door and pees. I could have choked her. I shout “no” and she stops, I take her outside and she looks at me like “okay, we just did this outside thing, what now?”

Meanwhile, dog park story. So I get to the dog park and there is a Huskey, a Dogo Argentino, and a Weimeraner-looking dog. I’ve got Lily the Shiba Inu and Della the Springer Spaniel.

The Dogo is a big hunting dog, developed in Agentinia. They are a favorite of dog fighters because they have the same tenacity and stamina that you get in a Pit Bull. I’m sure it helps that the Dogo is all white, so the blood shows up nicely. The guy that is handling this dog is smoking in a posted non-smoking zone and has no control over the dog. The dog is humping random dogs while the owner hollers at him. The dog is not neutered.

From http://www.dopadogs.com/d_aggression.html

> Which dogs bite the most?
Male dogs (8 out of 10)
Unneutered male dogs (6 out of 10)
Neutered male dogs (2 out of 10)

So, we have big-ass muscular dog, not neutered with an owner who does not have the dog well trained. Already, another owner has had an altracation with the Dogo owner because of the Dogo’s reputation (as a breed) for agression. They had words then seperated, both staying at opposite ends of the dog park. I waltz in with Lily and Della. Lily is a big defender of her dignity. Being humped by another dog is a major insult to her dignity and she reacts with teeth barred and snarling. Dogo comes to hump Lily, Lily snarls and reacts badly.

Knowing that Lily will not back down from a fight, I pick up Lily because I don’t want all of this to escalate. The Dogo jumps on me now and tries to hump me. The owner tries to tell me that if I just leave Lily to sort it out with the Dogo, all will be fine, but I’m not about to wait until Lily bites the Dogo and the Dogo bites back.

Finally, the owner takes the Dogo out, grumbling about how I’m ignorant for assuming his dog is aggressive and how his dog doesn’t bite etc. Meanwhile, two men have been sitting on one of the benches, talking to the dog owner. They don’t leave when the owner leaves. And the owner doesn’t go very far. A car pulls up and stops to talk to the owner. He stands there for fifteen minutes, leaning into the car. The two men start a conversation with the other dude at the park, saying that if the dog is bad then the owner must be bad too.

Eventually, he (the guy with the big dog) stands and whistles. The two random dudes stand up and walk out like this is all very normal. Me? I’m not thinking it is so normal.

About that migraine

I’m convinced that BAC has got the worlds worst indoor air quality (IAQ). Frequently, in an attempt to save money on heating and air conditioning, facility managers will just close down the air vents that bring in outside air. It’s cheaper to change the tempature of inside air (it’s practically the same temperature anyway) than it is to either heat or cool outside air. So they stop bringing in outside air. Seems smart enough until you think about all of those people who breathe out Carbon Dioxide, a chemical component of air that your body can’t live off of. We need Oxygen, and lots of it. So: Lots of CO2 and very little O2 = Oxygen deprevation.

The result of which is brain damage.

Or, from http://asumag.com/mag/university_prescribing_cure/

“Unhealthy atmosphere–many people experiencing ongoing subtle illness or discomfort. The most common symptoms involve the dehydration of sensitive tissue, including sore eyes, throat or nasal membranes; a feeling of lethargy; a higher incidence of upper-respiratory infection; asthmatic reactions; low-grade headaches; and a continuum of muscle pain and general discomfort among building occupants. Much of this relates to oxygen deprivation typically caused by oxygen being displaced by other compounds, and occasionally by infestation of microbes as a result of excessive moisture remaining within the property.”

Except my low-grade headaches are turning into migraines more and more often.

Bella Della

Well, she’ll be beautiful eventually. For the moment she looks like she was peiced together out of spare parts. She’s in her crate at the moment, crying and fighting confinement.

She is in her crate because her favorite trick is to go out for ten minutes of lawn-wander, pee once, then come back in and crap on the floor. She’s a kennel dog, apparently. She preferrs to “eliminate” on hard surfaces. On the upside, when she craps on the floor, she doesn’t go on the carpet. (although she has a whirling dervish trick where she shits and spins at the same time. the results of that can be haphazard. But she never starts on the carpet.) On the downside, when she craps outside, she craps on the sidewalk.

I took her out for a 10 minute lawn-wander. She didn’t crap. Hence the crate. She is unlikely to crap in there and as I have been struck down with a migraine (more on that in a minute) the husband is on late-night dog walking duty. Which means I don’t want her crap on my floor inbetween now and when he will be walking her.

So the things that we know about Della:

She is good at the vets.
She is smart and is already picking up “sit” and “no.” It has been 30 hours or so.
She likes a bath.
She runs like a cartoon animal.

We took her to the vets this afternoon to test for lime’s disease and heartworm (no and no). After which the hubby wanted baby crates for the limited area that she’s allowed in the hallway into the kitchen. So he dropped us at the dog park for twenty while he went to Target. She runs like a cartoon, and frequently wipes out for no reason other than her adolecent brain hasn’t caught up with the length of her legs. Very funny.

She met up with a dog named Lucy, owned by a hispanic dude that sounded remarkably like Ricky. She and Lucy made like a WWE smackdown with an undeclared winner.

But if she keeps up that racket, I might have to kill her. Did I mention the migraine?

Della

Yeah, we are some kind of something… Della follows Lily as an addition to the family. She’s a 9 month old Springer Spaniel and she’s got all kinds of energy, except for the part where she is laying across my feet sleeping.

She farts.

She chews things. Everything. Like Lily. Who doesn’t like it at all. What were we thinking?

sweet dreams

And the recipe for bizarre dreams is this–drink wine. Talk to someone you haven’t spoken with in years. Go to sleep. Your end result will be as follows:

Dream you are back in high school. You are unable to concentrate or do what the teacher wants you to do because you are too busy thinking “I have a freaking degree already, why can’t I test out of whatever I am here for.” Refuse to do what was asked of you. Realize you don’t have your schedule, so you have no idea what class you ought to be going to next. Go to the office, get a locker assigned to you. Go looking for locker. All of the lockers are oversized and built for basketball players. You can’t get into any of them. When you finally find your locker, it is hanging next to a traffic light. Go back to the office to get a new locker assigned. (I wonder if that pops up as a result of my experience getting a PO Box for the business.) Back in class, your BFF walks in wearing electric neon orange. The teacher makes fun of her from the front of the class. You struggle to think up what you can do to help her. She comes back wearing several different outfits. Teacher asks her to tell him who she is. She gives name. He means “who are you” in the warm fuzzy sense. She refuses to answer, so he makes her a schedule of engineering and math courses. I don’t have the balls to tell him to go to hell and leave her alone.

And there, in one night of wine-assisted dreaming, you have my entire high school experience, all over again. Perhaps not on that 10 year reunion. A ten year DLMA reunion I’m all about. But I think I’ll go back to pretending high school never happened.

blast: as in from past

I talked to ‘the cheeze’ tonight. This all started because I want to find a set of chairs that used to belong to my family before my mother gave them away to ‘the cheeze’s’ father. These are chairs that were in my family when I was born. My theory is that I can find them and have them restored to their original glory for Father’s Day, which will trump the gift of my sister’s from last year. (the kingston trio, don’t ask)

Now, of course, it seems unlikely, because the cheeze doesn’t remember the chairs, nor does his father. But I’ve sent pictures of the chair and heard updates on most of the people I rembember from high school and have turned down an invitation for our 10 year anniversary (has it really been that long? should I go?) and told him that the bff is married (but not any more info) and relived my most humiliating of high school experiences.

And I might even have lunch. If that isn’t a 180, I don’t know what is.

Oh: and got to page 40 of the screenplay today.

a daily dose of crazy

I joke about it a lot. Madness encroaching, eating a little crazy with your cornflakes… I wonder how you tell if it is really becoming an issue. I mean, maybe this wouldn’t even be a concern if I didn’t think of myself as a writer and there weren’t that tendancy towards nutter inherant in creative types. There is something just not quite right about crawling inside your head and making up an entire world.

Because that ability to crawl inside your head and make up plots of never-ending drama allows you to crawl inside your head and make up dramatic scenarios that involve your spouse’s shaky loyalty. And because you can half-convince yourself that your plots are plausable and potentially real, your worst fears and irrational terrors take on a completely realistic tenor. And all based on what? A phone call that happened to be ending when you walked into the room.

Oh: job update.

LAC hasn’t called back. It’s been a month. I’ve got no more ability to make up what that means. I’m busy enough inventing meaning for other parts of my life.