Adventures With An Elderly Dog

For the past 5 years or so I have asked Jason to get me a puppy for every birthday, Christmas and anniversary and the response has always been "You have two dogs, you don't need a puppy". While this may be true, I am constantly reminding him that Simon is nearly 14 years old and in Lab years that's like....3 paws in the grave. Not that I want Simon to die or anything, because he's a good dog and I love him, but it is an eventual inevitability with a dog as old as he is.

What we are both beginning to realize, however, is that living with an elderly dog is as much of an adventure as living with a puppy. Gone are the days when Simon would never even think of peeing in the house, even if he refused to go outside for 3 days because he doesn't like to go out if it's too windy, or cold, or raining, or snowing, or too hot, or it's a Saturday in June. I'm just saying, the dog is picky. This has never been a problem before. He would resolutely refuse to go outside and he would hold it for days. Now when we sleep in on weekends, we wake up as soon as we hear Simon's snoring stop because if Simon is up, he has to go outside...NOW. If you have never tiptoed past your dog to avoid waking him up so you can get dressed before you have to take him outside, you have never lived. This is the only point where it's sort of lucky that he's gone deaf. We can talk and brush our teeth and he's totally oblivious. You just can't walk past him too closely, or he can smell you and it's all over. And on those nice occasions when we do wake him up and he doesn't go outside NOW, he leaves a trail of pee through our house so we can find him like some screwed up version of Hansel & Gretel. Because yes, he walks while he pees. He can't just go in one spot like a normal dog. The fact is, I'm not entirely sure he realizes he's drizzling through the house, and if he does realize it, I get the impression that he's trying to run away from his own peeing. Thus, pee trail. At least if he stayed in one spot I could get the rug shampooer out and only have to clean one place. When he walks, I have to follow the trail through the whole house. And inevitably that means down the stairs. Have you ever tried to shampoo pee off of your stairs? It's not fun.

And of course there are other things we get to enjoy as owners of an elderly pet. Your dog going senile is an adventure. This often manifests itself in Simon forgetting that we have fed him. Or thinking that every time we come home from ANYWHERE, he is supposed to be fed. We feed him after we get home from work every day, so apparently the leaving and coming back is a trigger for "Food time" to him. He will stand in front of his bowl and shuffle back and forth, grunting at us like we have done him some sort of horrible disservice. I'm 99% sure he isn't even hungry, but he firmly believes he MUST be fed because we left and came back. This often happens even if we've just gone out to get the mail and come back into the house.

He has also decided that now that he's old, he's going to do what he wants. This means walking out the front door whenever he pleases, drinking from the toilet, barking at everything that moves outside the house, sleeping all day, eating Sam's food, and vomiting on the floor whenever he's bored. And forget playing ball with him in the house. Now, when he gets really excited while playing, he spontaneously poops. It goes something like this:

*Jason throws ball*

*Simon chases ball and brings it back*

*Jason throws ball again*

*Simon chases ball and while chasing drops some poo on the floor*

*Simon looks at Jason as if to accuse him of being the one who pooped on the floor*

*Jason puts ball away*

*Simon stares at poop until it is cleaned up, highly offended that Jason would do such a thing*

This has become my life, day in and day out with the joys of an arthritic elderly dog. Where I used to worry that he was getting played with enough, I now worry that he got his daily aspirin. It's all an adventure.

And some days it makes me rethink that puppy idea.

Even The Mona Lisa has flaws

Sometimes I think that people, myself included, notice everyone else's flaws and we're pretty quick to point them out. I'm sort of awful about criticizing people when the truth is, I'm really not all that much better than anyone else. So, today I'm going to share some of my flaws, because it's good for me to remind myself how far from perfect I really am.

#1

I SUCK at taking empty shampoo and conditioner bottles out of the shower and taking them downstairs to the recycle bin. Seriously, I'm the worst ever.

#2 I have a ton of dishes that are hand-wash only and I use them almost every night to make dinner, and I almost never wash them before going to bed. I just leave them sitting in my sink all night, and I almost always have to wash all of the stupid dishes before I can cook dinner the next night. It's less than awesome.

#3 When I'm sick, I typically walk around the house carrying a box of tissues, and I tend to just leave tissues lying on the end tables or the night stand in my bedroom. Yes, this is gross. And I always clean them up and Lysol the tables after, but I do just let them sit around for days when I'm sick.

#4 I am really terrible about actually putting my clothes in a hamper. I have one. I don't use it. I just leave dirty clothes in a pile on the floor and wait until laundry day to wash them. I think the only person who appreciates this habit is my dog, who often makes a nest of the clothes pile at some point during the week. I'm not proud of this.

#5 Speaking of laundry, I almost never fold my laundry. I have no problems washing the clothes, drying the clothes, and putting the clothes into a laundry basket, but the actual folding process is just something I can't be bothered with. If Jason didn't fold the laundry every Sunday, I'd live out of the laundry basket all week. Laundry folding sucks.

I'm sure I have more, but this is a pretty decent starting list. Anyone else want to share?

It's All About Knowing What You Want

Back in June, when my 6 month contract with Thomson Reuters ended, I found myself facing the frightening fate that a lot of people around the country are facing right now. I found myself unemployed, and that was pretty nerve wracking. On top of that, Jason's long term subbing ended and he found himself unemployed as well. It was less terrifying for us than for a lot of other people, because we had savings to live off of and I was getting unemployment, but the word "Job" was a the top of the priority list. Jason got a temp job with Domino Farms, and that helped a little, but I knew that I really needed to get a job. And then I did. I took a job in August with a company that offered me more money than I've ever made, and suddenly money wasn't as big a worry, which felt better. And yet, it also felt like a failure. I had several interviews for teaching jobs, and nothing came from any of them. Sure, I had a job, but it wasn't doing what I really want to do.

Now, after working in my new cubicle job, doing the thing that's making me a lot more money than I've ever made, I find myself wanting nothing more than to walk into a classroom and take over teaching a bunch of kids. And, it's becoming more and more painfully obvious that the more time I spend in the cubicle, the more likely it is that I won't ever get into that classroom. It's pretty heart breaking. What's worse is that I may be forced to choose between my family and my job. I've said all along that I don't want to pack up and move somewhere out of state just so that I can have a job, I don't want to leave my family, my friends, my niece and nephew, or my life that I've built here. As hard as it is not to be doing the job I've wanted to do for years, I can't say that I lead a bad life. I lead a really beautiful life. I don't want to leave it. So now I have to decide whether I want to be happy in my job, or happy in my personal life, and I have to wonder if the two are really separate entities. Right now I know that living in Ohio for the majority of my week, sitting alone in a hotel room, living out of a suitcase, that's not the life I want. And the travel is temporary, but the feeling I have about being stuck in that cubicle every day isn't. I can't work with my drama students anymore, and I find myself talking about them constantly while at work. I find myself missing those kids almost as much as I miss my family when I'm out of town. I miss the excitement I see in them every time I'm up there, and I even miss the things they do that drive me insane.

When taking all of this into consideration, I have to say the thing I have the hardest time dealing with is hearing people who are doing what they supposedly want to do, and what they claim is their dream and their passion (and some of those people are doing exactly what I wish I could be doing every day) and complaining about it as if it's the biggest hassle, or the worst thing they're doing. I hate seeing countdowns to the weekend, or to vacations from people who claim they're doing what they love. I am definitely not doing what I love, but I don't find myself waking up on Monday and starting the countdown to Friday. Sure, everyone has a bad week every now and again, but some people do this constantly and I sometimes want to say "Then quit and do something else!" When it's people who are teaching, I want to shake them and tell them there are a lot of people out there like me who want to do what they're doing so if they're so miserable, so give it to someone who really wants it. I think that the one thing I've learned from all of my work experiences since leaving my student teaching is that I know exactly what I want and I know exactly where I want to be. I just wish I knew how to get there. But, it doesn't mean I'll stop trying.

Memories For Sale

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have an obsession with seeing the inside of other people's houses. To be honest, it was the most exciting part of house hunting for me. And this doesn't apply to the houses of people I know, just to the houses of complete strangers. There was an episode of the show "Dead Like Me" where George, the main character, talked about how she always loved Halloween because it meant seeing inside the houses of strange people and I practically jumped off the couch and shouted "THAT'S SO ME!" And, while I know it's a weird thing to enjoy, I just can't help it.

Now that our house hunt is over, I sometimes wander over to real estate websites and go through houses with photo galleries for their listings so that I can enjoy peeking inside of people's houses without feeling like a total creeper. Tonight, as I was sitting in my hotel in the middle of nowhere Ohio feeling a bit bored and lonely as the rain hammered the window of my hotel room and missing home, I decided to go clicking around to see what some other people called home. I was struck when my website search pulled up an address I recognized all too well. It was the second address I could recite from memory at three years old, the first being my own home address. My grandma's house was being sold. This isn't the first time her house has been sold, since she sold it herself years ago when she moved in with my family, but as far as I'm aware this is the first time it's been on the market since she sold it herself. Over the years, I hadn't thought too much about the place. Right after Grandma passed away I was feeling nostalgic and drove past it a few times, but the outside didn't look anything like I remembered and what I saw didn't have any of my grandma in it. The buyers had remodeled it and added on, so the outside looked completely different.

Tonight as I clicked on the photo gallery photos of the inside of the house, I was a little shaken. Where the outside didn't look anything like my childhood memories, aside from the large pine tree they left in the front yard, the inside is more like my memories than I ever expected. Despite the remodel, they kept a lot of the inside the same. They kept the vintage door casings, and the front door into the mud room is original to the house. The kitchen has new cabinets and countertops, but the layout is the same and I could see myself standing next to my grandma at the stove waiting to take pretzels out of the oven early in the morning when I was about 9 years old. I think they turned grandma's bedroom into the family room, and I found myself wondering if they left the wall and doorways between the kitchen and the now dining room where my cousins and siblings and I spent hours running in circles between the rooms chasing each other.

Suddenly, as I was looking at the photos, I felt like I just didn't want anyone living in that house where I had so many memories. I found myself wondering if the laundry chute was still there, and if it still went to the strange cage-like contraption in the basement. I wondered if any other children had locked a sibling in that cage and thrown things down the chute at them like we used to do to my brother. I looked at the back porch, which had been turned into a sun room and remembered how grandma used to hang wind chimes out there. I wondered if the basement was still damp and a little creepy. I wondered if they were as perplexed as everyone else was when it came to figuring out what to do with the nook in the dining room that used to hold the organ that my grandmother owned but didn't really know how to play. I wondered what they had done to the upstairs, which there were not photos of, where my mom used to sleep when she was growing up. I wondered if they kept the built in dressers that used to fascinate me when I was little. And, among all of this wondering, I found it sad that someone else would live there. Someone who was not related to me, who could not look through the pictures and share any memories with me. I never thought about this when grandma sold the place originally, because she was still around and my memories were not tied to her home. Now that she's gone, I am sad. I hope a new family is able to make their own memories there, and that they can look back at their time there and laugh like I do, or share stories with each other like my cousins and sisters and I have done over and over again. I also found myself sort of wanting to call the agent and schedule a viewing, just so I could walk through it one last time.

So with that, and my nostalgia fresh in my mind, I leave you with some photos of my grandma's house as it is now. Not as I remember it, but hopefully as someone else is remembering it, and hopefully their memories are as fond as mine.

No, I'm Not Offended By a Little Girl With a Foul Mouth

Last week Jason and I got the movie "Kick-Ass" in the mail from Netflix and watched it. I had heard a lot of people mentioning that I was going to be blown away by Hit-Girl in the movie, so I put it into the DVD player and sat on my sofa eagerly anticipating the impending carnage. I wasn't disappointed, since about ten minutes in there was a scene with poor little Mindy, who would become Hit-Girl, being shot in the chest by her dad so she could feel how a kevlar vest works. That was a bit disturbing, but also kind of funny.

As I watched the film, I did something I usually do and started looking up the trivia on IMDB to find out extra tidbits about what I'm watching. Overwhelmingly, I came across info about people throwing a fit that Hit-Girl, with her innocent girl face and cheerful smile, at a mere ten or eleven years old was spouting lines like "So you cunts want to play huh?" or "Show's over mother fuckers!" and how wholly inappropriate this was because a little girl shouldn't be saying such things. As I read this information all I could think was "Why? Why is it so wrong and inappropriate for this sweet little girl to say these things? If she were a boy, no one would be saying crap about this!" and let's face it, I'm totally right. Plus, I found myself sitting there thinking about all of the movies where girls walk around whining about losing their boyfriend, or give up their family and friends to be with some guy who might be "the one". Or the movies where girls have to be rescued by some guy because they don't have the ability to take care of themselves. Is this how girls should be in films? Why do they have to be that way? Why can't they be foul mouthed ass kickers just like their male counterparts? I love that Hit-Girl actually saved the guy's ass in this movie, multiple times. And, on top of that, I love that she did it in a skirt!

The more I think about it, the more I wonder where the balance is between what makes a strong female and what makes a girl who is helpless and depends on a man to provide for her, or take care of her. I actually made a joke the other day when I was telling Jason that I want to learn to bake pies, and I want to get all Martha Stewart-y if we host Thanksgiving this year and then I said "Jesus! When did I turn into Suzie Homemaker? I feel like I should hate myself right now!" Then I started thinking about that attitude and realized that baking and enjoying having a clean house doesn't make me some weak-willed female who needs to be taken care of. It just means that's what I like. Know what else I like? Building things. Renovating houses. Using power tools. Changing the brakes on my car. Those are the things that make me the strong female who takes care of myself. So, I guess my conclusion was that you can make pie and change your brakes and that's ok. I'm sure there are guys who do it. Just like adorable little Hit-Girl can have pigtails and wear a skirt, and do an aerial cartwheel while slitting your throat. Two sides of the same coin.

So, to all of the people who are pissed that the little girl in the purple bob wig is slitting throats and calling people fuckers, I guess I have to say that I want to know where you all were when there were teenage boys doing similar things in other movies? Why do you get mad simply because the person with the foul mouth also has a vagina? I guess you probably can't be a mommy if you swear, or if you are a hard core martial artist. Maybe it just threatens someone's warped 1950's view of what a girl should be.

But, to be honest, Hit-Girl is my freaking hero.

Finding Happiness

Tonight I was working out in our front yard removing some awful limestone that was slowly choking the life out of one of our trees while Jason was mowing the lawn and at one point I looked up at the house and thought "I love it here". That's not some narcissistic pat on the back or anything, it's just that despite all of the turmoil in my life and the uncertainty of life at the moment with no job and no current prospects, I'm still managing to find peace in my life. I know it sounds stupid, because buying a house when you know you're going to have to quit your job and you don't know when you'll be getting a new one is totally insane and generally not a good idea, but buying this house was probably the best thing we ever did. There has been nothing to this point in my life that has brought me such a sense of pride and accomplishment. Sure, my college degree is right up there in rank because I worked so hard for it, but I think the house is at the top of the list. To be honest, this whole house purchase shouldn't have worked out. It was really one of those situations where the stars just aligned in the right way, since we had such a small window of opportunity before I was going to be quitting Borders and the loan wouldn't have worked out, and there were almost no houses on the market that weren't short sales with a 3 to 6 month wait for sale approval and we got rejected for this place once while it was a short sale and it just happened to re-list RIGHT before we were at the end of the timeline we had set up for calling it quits and then the appraisal came back WAY cheaper than the asking price and we got a serious deal on the place. So, as a member of the "everything happens for a reason" club, I really feel like this was supposed to happen.

I'm sure people get tired of seeing updates about our home improvement projects, but without school in my life I sort of need something to make me feel accomplished and this fills the void. Plus, I know that everything I'm doing is going to pay off in the long run. Not just in that whole "sweat equity" way, but in the pride I'm able to take in looking around and loving where I am like I did tonight. It's little things like looking around and loving a paint color, or walking out the front door and being greeted by big pink flowers where a half dead shrub once stood. I find myself smiling unexpectedly, which I never used to do. I get excited over stupid things now, like painting night stands and I get excited every time something I work on ends up being better than it was before. I am making sure to pay attention and remember these moments, because they will probably be fleeting. At some point life will sweep me away and I will have work and the drama department will devour me and at some point I'll have kids and ballet classes to drive to and sleepovers and the time I was able to spend working outside or taking on projects will be much more limited and I'm afraid I'll miss it. So, I'm trying to pay attention and enjoy what I can right now, before stress and life sweeps me away from it. Tomorrow morning I'll probably be worrying about not having a job and possibly losing this place I love so much, and I'll be focusing on other things so I just thought that I should write this down so I can remember how happy I was to be right where I was tonight. I loved just sitting on the curb, looking at the freshly mowed lawn and the flowers blooming and I was just...happy. I want more of this. I want more of the smiling and the happiness at the little stuff, and I hope I find it. It feels nice.

An Open Letter to Small Dog Owners

Dear Small Dog Owners,

Just because your dog is small does not mean it is not a dog. This means that certain dog courtesies should be observed. So, for example, when you let your little yappy bitch dog take a crap in my front yard without cleaning it up, it is no less annoying to me than someone allowing their large St. Bernard crap in my front yard. Additionally, when you allow your bitch dog to crap on the SIDEWALK in front of my house, I am not only annoyed that you didn't clean something off of the sidewalk, I'm also pissed off that my neighbors are going to think that it's from my dogs. This is not ok, especially since I clean up after my dogs because IT'S WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO! I can guarantee you that if I let my large dog just do his thing in your yard, you'd be pretty mad and I'm sure you'd be the first one filing a complaint with the HOA about it.

Additionally, just because your dog is small does not mean it is not noisy. Leaving your yappy little annoyance out in your yard to bark incessantly at anything that moves does not make me very happy, especially since people filed complaints about my dog barking INSIDE my house. Why no one is complaining to you about your dog standing on your patio yapping away at 11:00 at night is beyond me, but apparently you get special privilege because your dog could be drop kicked across a room, whereas my dog would need to be taken out with a lot of brute force. But, again, common courtesy still applies. When people complained about my dog barking from inside my house, I decided to make sure to close all of my windows when I leave so that the noise doesn't carry well and people are far less likely to hear him barking. That's what responsible pet owners do. Owning a tiny annoyance of a dog does not give you the right to be an irresponsible pet owner.

So, to conclude, stop being an assbag. Your tiny dog is still a dog and the rules still apply. If your mutt craps in my yard again and you don't clean it up, I'm leaving a nice pile of Sam poo on your front porch. Let's see how you like it. And, if that doesn't work, I'll just let my dog eat yours.