My dog woke me up at 3am this morning. Jack doesn't bark. He doesn't whine. He paces and may throw in a whimper, and he pants loudly. Lucky for him he's just noisy enough to wake me up. But there have been times that his quiet routine hasn't roused me until it is almost too late, and we get out the door and make it a few paces off the porch and he explodes.
He needs to learn to be a little more vocal. Kinger would stand next to the bed and put his chin next to my face on the pillow and whine gently. Missy would whine loudly and sometimes bark if we weren't responsive or tried to ignore her. Jack is just too quiet.
He had gone out at 8pm as usual, so I didn't know what his big deal was. Normally fluffyass makes it the whole way through the night to about 7am without needing to go out again. Last night was a different case. I'd given him a piece of left over haddock mixed into his dogfood, and I guess it was saltier than I thought. He ran out the front door and jumped right into the creek and drank for about 10 minutes while I stood there cursing at him. When he came out, he did his regular doggie business, and we went back in where he stood next to his water dish and looked pathetic. I filled his water dish and began thinking of the books I've been reading lately. I read "An American in the Gulag" by Alexander Dolgun and am currently reading Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" because I wanted to read another account of the experience.
In the books both writers talk about dehydration due to salted fish. The starving inmates were crated onto trains and were handed fish to eat. Some of the other inmates would say "No! Don't eat it! They have filled it with salt and will not give you water!" They knew from experience. But the first timers - they were starving. They were hungry. They ate the fish.
Hours later many of them were begging for water while the guards laughed. The fish indeed was heavily salted, the torture of the ride would continue for hours and hours.
And I bet that's how my dog felt last night.
I got back into bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking of how horrible it would feel to experience that. I was no longer angry at Jack for jumping in the creek and coming back soaking wet. I thought of all the millions of Russians and other nationalities who suffered tortures as recently as sixty years ago. It began to run in circles in my mind, thinking of all the atrocities and all the suffering that was experienced, and for what?
Three hours later I fell back asleep.
This happens to me a lot. I wake up around 3am on my own, without help from Jack, and stare at the ceiling thinking of things that I can't control and can't make go away so I can fall back asleep. Sometimes I get up and play an hour of Playstation just to make my head stop running, and I'm able to go back to sleep, but invariably it is rarely before 5am, and I curse the alarm when it goes off.
The big sleep think lately has been of houses, obviously. And the big fear factor is swimming pools. I don't think about Geoff drowning, I think of other people coming into my yard, complete strangers, high school kids on a pool hopping mission, either while we're asleep or while we're away, and getting into our pool and drowning. I hear the William Shatner 911 call in my head, and imagine the terror of finding someone at the bottom of the pool when I just go out there to take the dog out to pee. How their hair would look all standing up and floating around their face. What clothes they have on. I toss and turn and eventually, 3 hours later, fall back asleep.
Maybe we can't get a house with a pool. I may never sleep again.
Speaking of which, we are looking at 2 houses tomorrow and taking the kids back to see the house by the elementary school, the house with the in-ground pool and porno paneling shag carpeted basement. I will remember to take pictures this time.
My kids came home from Grandma's last night. Turns out Geoff accidentally broke my mother's Nintendo Game Cube. D'oh! He opened the top to change games and didn't wait until the disc inside stopped spinning, and he reached down and stopped it himself rather than wait. Sproing! Broken.
My mom bought a new one online at Bestbuy and I'm mailing her a check today.
There goes Doug's birthday money right back to her. Oh well. She told me that she didn't freak out at him, that he felt badly and told her immediately that there was something wrong rather than hide it. They tried to fix it together, and he was in typical Geoff fashion devastated. She told him that was okay and they went online together and she bought a new one to have shipped to her, and he felt better.
If it had been me and I was 9 and did that? I doubt I'd be sitting on my buttcheeks right now. Yikes. Grandmas aren't the same as Moms.
It was nice to come home from work and have them back here. While I enjoyed having time without them, I loved having Geoff curl up on the couch beside me and wrap his arms around me while we watched "Everybody Hates Chris."
I have the day off today. I brought work home with me, and the laptop, so I can keep myself busy and do stuff that I don't need to be at my desk for. I'm glad to have the day away from the office. Our office is so noisy and busy lately that it makes my head explode, and you know that's not good. I don't have adult ADD but if I did... voof.
I am supposed to work for cateringman at some point, but he has not called. I have a doctor's appointment at 2 as well. I haven't had a physical since before Geoff was born... so I scheduled one. It's about high time, no?
The good news is I put myself on a diet right after Geoff's birthday. I've lost 20 pounds, but I'm still a humongous lardass. In 2004, long time readers know I lost about 35 or 40 pounds on Atkins (or, Fatkins as Ed from BNL calls it). I went way off the diet in September of 2005 and gained most of it back in a few short months. So I'm back on the carb detox, but not as strict as I was the first time around. I find that if I deny myself carbs wholly I end up craving them and go on a carb bender. So I'm pacing myself a bit differently and it's going alright. The doctor will still tell me that I am 100 pounds over my target weight. In essence, I'll be happy if I lose 30 more. And get to a certain point where I'm comfortable.
Ick. I let my coffee get cold. I need to call cateringman and get the day figured out. Guess it is move-along time here.
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