Wondering

…whether it was such a good idea to continue rainy-day dog walks with my hair still wet, after I started getting a cold.

…and whether the rattle in my chest is pneumonia or just a chest cold.

Anyway, I feel better today than I did yesterday, when I stayed in bed (and couch) all day. Took Isis to class this morning and plan to take her to another class tomorrow. We started it last week, and I’m actually driving her to Seattle once a week for it. It’s not like I had anything better to do with my Sundays, except paint accent walls in green tea leaf and merlot.

The new class is specifically for dogs with growly issues. Our issues are exclusively dog-on-dog, but the trainers told us all to implement a very strict in-home program for the duration of the class. It’s meant to show the dog who’s boss and involves tethering one’s dog to one’s self and banning them from getting on any furniture. And giving them only one toy, and then taking it away. Can you imagine the cruelty?

I’ll admit, I haven’t done the tethering thing once, and the off-the-furniture thing lasted only one-and-a-half nights. We like having her on the bed, OK?

On day 3, I decided that all those rules are for people with bad dogs, and since we have a good dog, we don’t have to do them. Can’t wait to explain that to the trainers tomorrow night.

A new friend

On our rainy walk this morning, we passed a nice man in the woods, with a plastic grocery sack, opening a can of beer.

He said, “German shepherd?” as we passed, and I said, “Yup,” in a real friendly voice, because I didn’t want him to think I was afraid of him or judged him just because he was drinking beer in the woods at 8 a.m.

We were several yards away when he said, “Is it a year old yet?”

And I called back, “Just. 13 months…”

Isis did not view this 8 a.m. beer-drinking man as a threat or any reason for concern. Probably he reminded her of Rob.

And a cheater

I’m well ahead of the 10,002 words I need to have written by the end of today to stay on target for NaNoWriMo. But my 6,000-word lead likely is the result of my having cut and pasted blogs written during the past year of dog ownership.

I can’t help it. Why try to recreate a moment (or make one up) when I already captured it by writing about it immediately after it happened?

Such a liar

That vow I made to write a novel that’s complete fiction? I can’t do it. Not yet.

I’m just writing about my dog, whose alter ego is named “Pisces.”

50,000 words on her will be a piece of cake.

Late night inspiration

You know those brilliant ideas you have in the middle of the night? Or dreams that you want to be sure to remember? Sometimes you lie awake at night telling yourself, “Be sure to remember this tomorrow,” or you even get up to write it down.

I woke up at about 2:45 this morning, feeling phlegmy and needing cough syrup, which I took. I think I had a dream that I thought would be good novel fodder, but then realized, as I lay awake for more than an hour waiting for the cough syrup to knock me out, that it wouldn’t.

During this time, Isis moaned in her sleep like a walrus. And that’s the part I wanted to be sure to remember. She sounded like a walrus. How wonderfully descriptive.

Goo goo g’ joob.

The Accidental Remodel

I bought Isis a new toy on Thursday. Because our house isn’t completely littered with dog toys. It was one of those elongated Bobo Loofa dogs, but it was dressed like a skeleton. As she was enjoying it, I congratulated ourselves for having a dog who knows which objects littering the floors are her toys and doesn’t accidentally pick up a shoe or book to chew on.

During the night, I heard the sound of fabric ripping, and because Isis had already eaten the ear off her Halloween toy, I assumed that she’d manage to tear a hole in its body too. When I bothered to sit up and look in the direction of the tearing, I saw that my precious angel had torn an eight-inch hole in the carpet, through the padding all the way to the hardwood floor underneath.

“Bad dog!” I said, and I never call her that. But as usual, she looked so adorably pleased with herself that I couldn’t muster up any real anger…

Wait. There’s hardwood under there?

Most of the rooms in our house have lovely, fairly new wood laminate floors. The four bedrooms have (had) blue carpet, but the bedroom carpet was looking a little worn. And as of Thursday night, had a gaping hole in it.

So we ripped it out this weekend. To find that the hardwood had been used as a dropcloth during a pre-carpeting paint job. Or else Jackson Pollack owned our house before we did.

A little Murphy’s Oil, a little elbow grease, and I tell you, that hardwood cleaned up pretty good. I mean, it’s probably 30-year-old hardwood, but it doesn’t look anymore beat up than the carpet did.

The kind of book I’d like to write

Dogs_of_babel

The Dogs of Babel

I finished it last night and had tears streaming down my face. I went into the bedroom where Rob was watching the Ultimate Fighter (hey, he has his passions I have mine) and buried my face in Isis’ warm chest, still crying.

The main dog doesn’t die, or anything, but I felt so bad for her having lost her owner. Kinda more bad than I did for the widower.

The question is, why do I enjoy books that make me so sad?

It was a good book for me to read this week, because (and this will shock no one) I’ve decided my next novel will be about a woman and her dog. Usually I’m in the middle of reading two or three books. I’m still working on Travels with Charley and Mountains in the Clouds. I just got A Home at the End of the World on CD from the library.

The Dogs of Babel, however, is the type of book I make time to read, am eager to finish and am sad when it ends. A “page-turner,” you might say. “I couldn’t put it down.”

It’s like Anna Quindlen says in her jacket quote: “I read it without stopping, and I loved it completely.”

And the stars realign

We saw a deer on our walk this morning. And a bunny rabbit. Not a single vicious unleashed canine.

I think Isis and I sensed the deer at the same moment. My first instinct when I saw the movement on the trail ahead was, “Oh crap, a dog without an owner.” And then it turned and made eye contact. It took my synapses a second to run through the list of creatures I’d seen before on this trail (Short list: human, canine and rabbit), and then I probably breathed, “Ohh. It’s a deer.”

It actually took a few steps toward us and watched us, before stepping carefully into the woods and watching us through the trees as we passed by. Isis, of course, wanted to go for a run with the deer, as she did when Rob and I were at Disneyworld and she took off after one, causing Rob’s mom to chase her down in a car, calling out to every person she saw, “Did you see a German shepherd this way run?”

Anyway, it was a beautiful moment. The bunny rabbit a little while later was just icing on the cake.

Let’s just call it a bad day

I’m feeling rather frustrated and useless today. Could be because the day started with our being attacked by a dog. (Read about that here.)

Or because a site visit went awry when I arrived and there was no one there but a boxer (the canine kind). That part wasn’t actually so bad, because it amused me to wander around the deserted facility with the guard dog happily trailing behind me. I was thinking, Can you believe this is my job?

But when I got back to the home office, I found out about a number of happenings that I should have been aware of prior to their happening, which made me feel like I’m not quite as on top of things as I thought I was.

Have had to reassure myself that this is not evidence of a character flaw, but simply that today was a bad day and tomorrow will be better.

Besides, I had my one-year review this week (tomorrow is my one-year anniversary, I can’t even believe it), and as far as everyone else is concerned, I’ve exceeded expectations.