Tag: emotions

Demons and Dreams

Imagine being sound asleep blissfully dreaming about exotic locales with a handsome dark stranger, when you are rudely awakened to the sounds of a vicious dog fight in your bedroom.  There was growling followed by whimpering, then more growling and snarling followed with more whimpering.  It sounded like one of the dogs had gone off the deep end and was about to rip the head off of the poor victim.  I sat straight up in bed scanning the room ready to leap out of bed to stop the impending melee.

But none of the dogs were awake.  Once again, Orso was sound asleep dreaming of what I’m not sure, but doing battle with himself in his sleep.  He was like an actor in a play, playing two roles, the hero and the villain.  He was lying at the foot of the bed twitching and growling, then jerking his head back and whimpering.  It must have been an epic battle in his dreams.  I watched him for a few minutes fighting with his demon and crying because the demon was hurting him.  It was spooky and comical at the same time.  I stroked his back to calm him and hopefully save him from the demon in his dream. 

Orso finally stopped the fight, I wonder who won.  Now the real battle begins.  Will I be able to get back to sleep before the alarm goes off at 2:30am?

I’ve Been Acclimatized

I’ve been acclimatized!  It all started last winter.  We had a very mild dry winter, no complaints here.  That weather pattern carried on into spring, delivering a warmer, drier than normal spring, still very few complaints.  I was able to get my garden planted earlier, did a bunch of dividing and transplanting plants.  I even fertilized and spread weed killer on the yard.  That’s when the rain officially stopped here.  Finally we have had the summer from hell, literally.  This has been the driest year on record and one of the hottest in history.  Absolutely miserable.  We’ve had to water, water and water constantly, driving to me consider getting a second job just to pay the water bill.

Finally the sweltering heat dropped down from the hundreds to a more normal realm of the eighties and low nineties.  Yesterday I walked out of work to go to lunch and was greeted with eighty six degree temperatures and thought it felt very comfortable and mild.  Can you believe that, eighty six degrees and I thought it felt very comfortable and even a little cool with the wind blowing?  I had to look at the thermometer just to confirm the actual temperature.  This morning we took the dogs on their morning walk at 4:30 and it was sixty five degrees, where was my jacket?  This does not bode well for me when we revert back to our normal freezing winter. 

I may have to start wintering in Florida.

We Were Not Alone

Our normal morning walk at o’dark thirty, 4:30am actually, started as always.  Me trying to get the dogs and leashes under control.  AJ will only walk on my left, Charlie and Orso don’t care which side they walk on as long as Orso is on the outside and Charlie is next to me.  Orso and Charlie will switch from the left side to right multiple times during the walk almost always by crossing behind me causing me to have to juggle the leashes around to keep from getting yanked around from behind.

On this particular morning, the walk started off with our normal chaos, sniffing, peeing and snatching grass to munch on during the walk.  But when we got to the long stretch of road that has no houses on either side, a ravine on the left and a wooded hill on the right with houses on the hilltop, the dogs discovered we weren’t alone.  Something was keeping pace with us.  The invisible stalker was up on the hill to our right.  Orso discovered our stalker first, stopping and sniffing the air with his head held high, straining at the leash to get a closer sniff.  Charlie soon caught a whiff and joined Orso straining at his leash too trying to get closer to whatever “It” was.  I looked around in the gloom, but couldn’t see anything, I listened intently to try and catch any rustling sound to try and determine where and what was out there, but I didn’t hear anything.  I tugged on their leashes to pull them away from the area and hopefully leaving the thing, whatever it was alone and hopefully leaving us alone too.

But no, our invisible stalker stayed with us, keeping pace staying high on the hill and being quite stealthy.  The only giveaway was his scent which evidently was tantalizing to the dogs.  Me not so much.  I couldn’t smell, see or hear the stalker, so I was getting pretty unnerved trying to keep the dogs under control and alert to a possible threat.  The rest of the walk was uneventful when we got past the dark stretch of road and back into the glow of the streetlights.  Of course that was until Orso shook his head and I about jumped out of my skin.  Just a little jittery, silly me.

The Call Of The Wild…Sorta

Camping in the wild lends to unique sounds from the calls of the local inhabitants claiming their territory or seeking a mate.  Hearing wolves howl late at night is both an exhilarating and unnerving sound, knowing you’re not alone and wild animals are nearby, protected only by the wall of a camper or the thin material of a tent.  Camping out in the wild you expect and hope to hear the noises, that’s one of the reasons you’re out there in the first place.  Since I don’t go camping, my idea of roughing it is that the ice machine is at the other end of the hall, I usually only get to hear the late night sounds of wolves howling on National Geographic.  So imagine how unnerving it was to wake up to the sound of howling at midnight in our bedroom. 

I bolted straight up out of a semi-sound sleep looking around trying to find the source of the soulful howl.  The howling came from across the room, inside the bedroom.  Living in the Midwest, we don’t have wolves, a few coyotes, but no wolves, so you can imagine how being roused out of my sleep to the eerie howl would be a bit strange to say the least.  The sound didn’t come from outside, because the dogs were still asleep and if there was an interloper outside our window, the dogs would have jumped up barking and throwing a fit.  AJ was asleep in the round bed next to my side of the bed so he didn’t howl.  Charlie was asleep at the foot of our bed, so he didn’t howl either.  No, the howling came from the dog bed next to Mitch’s side of the bed.  Orso was dreaming and for some reason he howled in his sleep.  The weirdest part was the neither of the other dogs stirred a bit.

Why I have no idea, because when they’re awake, they don’t howl.  I know, I’ve tried to get them to howl, but they won’t cooperate.  So I’m usually standing around howling all be myself, looking pretty silly.  Most dogs run in their sleep or make small woofing sounds, but I’ve never heard them howl.  So now I have a dog that dreams he’s a wolf.  Next he’ll start sleep walking, raiding the fridge.  I see lots of sleep interrupted nights ahead.

Definitely Not A Botanist

Sunday the temperature was around ninety nine degrees and it felt like stepping into a blast furnace when you walked outside.  A great day to sit inside a dark movie theater, munching popcorn and watching the latest movie, or visiting a museum, anything indoors out of the heat. 

But the heat didn’t deter one man, our local groundskeeper.  A very nice man that works hard to mow and maintain the city grounds.  One of his tasks is to weed whack the weeds along the road edge to keep the weeds from growing too tall.  I couldn’t believe he was out in the middle of the day wielding his weed eater attacking the straggly weeds on the other side of the road.  He either doesn’t feel the heat like the rest of us or he has a death wish.  Or maybe I’m just a sissy.

I walked outside to get the burgers off the grill and saw him walking up the road away from my boulder, weed eater in hand and thought surely he didn’t use the weed eater on my ornamental grass that I had just planted a month ago.  Surely not.  Just to be sure I walked down the yard, burgers in tow to check on my grasses.  Sure enough he cut the grasses down all the way to the nubs.  I wanted to chase him down, rip the weed eater out of his hands and club him with it.  All I could think of was the hard work I’d done, digging up the grasses to replant, digging holes in the gravelly ground and replanting the grasses.  Not to mention having to listen to the diatribe from the neighbor, that I placed the granite boulder in the wrong spot.  I carefully watered the grasses until they were growing and looked like they would take hold.  Now the grasses were mere stubs in the ground. 

How could anyone mistake the tall graceful clumps of ornamental grass to common everyday weeds?  Was he blind, using the weed eater as a seeing cane to clear his path?  No, he just has no clue between the difference of a keeper plant and a noxious weed.  The only reason our local groundskeeper is still walking without the need of a cane, was the look of horror and regret on his face, and his comment of “Oh s***” when I explained to him I planted the grasses on purpose that he just mowed down with his weapon of plant destruction.

He’s definitely not a botanist.

Fire And Ice

Mitch told me this morning that we were the same story, just different editions so you wind up with the same story content being on different pages.  I asked him to explain what he meant.  He said that when I ask if he’s happy his usual answer is that he’s okay.  Okay to him is that yes, he’s happy and content.  He went on to say that while his happiness level on a scale of ten, he is maybe a five or a six (perfect for him), my happiness level is closer to a nine or a ten.  The reason for his declaration was that yesterday I had confronted him and asked point blank if he was happy because he had been walking around for almost a year now with this look of desperate misery.  He has been more closed than normal and giving off people repellent vibes.  I gave him the chance to clear the air and tell me up front what it would take for him to be happy.  I’m a true believer in making yourself happy because no one else out there is going to.  If you can’t be happy and content with yourself how can you possibly be happy in any kind of relationship?

I have to explain something about Mitch.  Mitch is reserved, closed and mostly very stoic. A classic introvert.  I think he was born old, an old soul is how his mother used to describe him.  Me, I’m probably never going to grow up. Where is the fun in that?  I on the other hand am open, happy most of the time and very demonstrative.  An extrovert through and through.  He was raised in a family that didn’t touch much, very little hugging, while I was raised in a family that hugged and kissed all the time.  We told each other that we loved them (not my brother when he was kid – yuck!).  That was a real challenge for Mitch, getting used to me touching and kissing him especially in public.  In reality we are total opposites, maybe that is what attracted me to him, the quiet reserve.  I wanted to dig and uncover the fire underneath all the layers.  And yes there is a fire way down deep.

He went on to explain that he is very task oriented and focuses all of his attention and energy on the one task at hand.  He does not multi-task well.  That was why he was coming off distracted.  It’s like a news reel in his head, total focus on the current project or problem.  Right now it is the remodel of the dining room and before that, The Great Bathroom Remodel, where every forward progress was accompanied with two steps back.  Maybe I’m working him too hard. 

I know that I’m a challenge to live with and he certainly is too, but isn’t that half the fun, having to figure out what truly makes us tick?

Happy Birthday AJ

We acquired AJ when he was two years old.  He was a shy black lab with somber eyes that were slightly hooded, like a bird of prey.  His flight instincts were and still are very strong.  He was afraid of just about everything.  We discovered very quickly that we would have work very hard to get him to overcome his fears of the unknown.  AJ had never seen stairs and had no idea how to walk up or down them.  He had never walked on hardwood and tile floors.  The first week he was with us, we had to run a trail of throw rugs and towels throughout the house in order to get him from one side of the house to the other.  People terrified him.  He would hide behind me in order to get away from well meaning strangers.  AJ was and still is the most beautiful hunting dog I’ve ever seen in the field.  Graceful, fast and always in the right place to point, yes he’s a pointing lab, and flush the ever elusive pheasant.  He is most alive out in the field working a hot scent.

Ten years later, AJ is one of our “official greeter” dogs, ready to greet anyone that wants to give away a few pets or ear scratches.  His eyes are still soft and sweet when he looks at me, there is a complete devotion that I don’t think I will ever see in a dog’s eyes ever again.  AJ loves me as much as I love him.  He lays next to the bathtub when I take a shower and is a constant companion. 

He has slowed down a bit over the years.  His clownish antics are fewer and farther apart, though he will still wrestle briefly with Orso, but he can’t hang with the big dogs for long.  AJ has some gray hair on his chin, but not that much.  His hips are still strong and can jump in and out of the station wagon easily.  His depth perception is starting to deteriorate.  AJ struggles going from bright rooms to darker doorways, which breaks my heart, knowing that he is aging so I have to be grateful for the time I still have with him.  

But not today.  Today is AJ’s birthday.  He turns twelve years old today.  For breakfast we had peanut butter, one of AJ’s favorites and for dessert tonight, it will be frozen pumpkin yogurt pops.  Even if AJ doesn’t quite get the reason for the special treats I do.  AJ was and is truly a gift to me and I’ve been so lucky he came to live with us.

Another Test of True Love

It must be true love.  We are still married.  Some days I’m not so sure why though.  After the Great Bathroom Remodel was finally finished, just two days short of nine months, I waited for a couple of weeks to spring the next remodel project on Mitch.  You know, give him time to recover.  The latest project we’re (Mitch) starting is the dining room.  What can you possibly remodel in a dining room?  Well in most homes, not too much, change the paint color or wallpaper, maybe new carpeting, but in our house it’s a major undertaking.  Our house is one of those homes that was added on to multiple times, with or without any regard to the local building codes, depending on the decade the addition took place in.  The original structure, the kitchen and front room, now our dining room was built in 1928.  No building codes then.  Two bedrooms were added on in 1932 or 1934, still no building codes.  The final addition, the living room, master bedroom and bath were added in 1985.  This time built to code. I think.

Back in the early twentieth century one of the more popular indoor wall types for cottages was knotty pine planks.  Our house was originally built as a weekend fishing cottage, very rustic.  Hard wood floors, knotty pine planks for the walls and ceilings.  All stained dark brown.  You get the picture, a big brown cave with rooms.  When the final addition was built in 1985, sheetrock was used for the walls and ceiling, and for the floor, the ugliest gold carpet, yuck, and now gone, yay!

When we started the Great Bathroom Remodel, one of the first things that had to be done was to widen the front door, in order to get the new bathtub in the house.  That meant removing some of the knotty pine planks for the wider door.  When Mitch began finishing the front door project and replacing the outdoor light fixture, I started thinking about just removing all of the knotty pine and sheet rocking the walls.  We could cover the wood ceiling with sheetrock.  This would lighten up the room and make it look much larger.  As I’ve said before, I’m the idea person, Mitch is the implementer. 

I sort of tossed out my idea at a weak moment for Mitch, after a steak dinner and three glasses of wine.  I am also an opportunistic woman, I carefully plan my moments of surprise.  In his weakened state of mind, I laid out my ideas, glossed over the rough spots and finished on a high note. 

“It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, don’t you think?  Nothing like the bathroom.” I was determined to put a positive spin on it.  Of course nothing done in this house takes a couple of weeks.

“God I hope not.”  Then he even got in the spirit of the remodel and offered a suggestion.  “We could even put down the bamboo flooring that we did in the living room and bedroom.” Yes, wine and steak, works every time.

Four weeks ago Mitch started the demolish of the dining room.  As always, he is very methodical, careful to salvage as much of the lumber he takes down, in case he has to reuse it again.  Me, I’m more of a bulldozer when it comes to demo work.  Isn’t that the point – demolish?  He was able to salvage a major part of the planks he removed, which will be used to patch a hole in one of the spare bedrooms and build a closet in the other.  We discovered there was no insulation on the exterior wall, no wonder that room is always hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  The very dated (ugly – definitely ’80’s) ceiling fan went away, which means I get to go SHOPPING!

 I spent hours in the paint department and grabbed armfuls of paint chips in all colors and hues.  The clerk kept asking if I needed any help.  I told him no I just wanted a variety of colors to compare.  He thought I was nuts and carefully backed away.  I found a ceiling fan and wall sconces that we could both agree on.  That’s always a challenge.  Our tastes and styles are complete opposites.

Demolition took about a week and a half.  Mitch only took down the knotty pine planks and left the wood ceiling unmolested, leaving it as a base for the sheetrock to be screwed into.  Hanging the sheetrock on the ceiling was a challenge.  The ceiling is vaulted with a four foot wide flat space in the middle of the ceiling where Mitch built a rafter for air conditioning duct work six years ago.  So he had to hang sheetrock at an angle up to the area for the rafter on both sides.  Of course this would have been easier if the room was level, but nothing and I mean nothing in this house is square or plumb.  After he finally got the ceiling hung, he found out the floor has a slight bow in it when he tried to hang the first piece on the wall.  I thought a Mitch Fit Warning was going to go out over the National Weather Service.  It wasn’t pretty.  Time to take the dogs for a walk.

He finished hanging all the sheetrock on Thursday except for the four inch high area above the front door.  That was proving to be a challenge.  The ceiling comes down to just above the door leaving little space to hang the door trim above the door.  For five days he has experimented with different ways to brace up the offending section and for five days Mitch has been just a bit testy.  He finally came up with an idea to brace up the sheetrock but the trim for the door will have to be different from the rest of the trim in the room.  I don’t think it will be that big of a deal and it solves the problem so no more Mitch Fit Warning. (At least for now).

 For the mudding and sanding I hired a neighbor that does it for a living to come in and do the finish work.  For all of his talents, mudding and sanding is not Mitch’s forte.  The mudding and sanding process has taken about a week and a half and should be finished this week. 

That leaves me painting the ceiling and walls.  Mitch will install the new pretty ceiling fan and wall sconces.  After that Mitch can then start installing the bamboo floor, and because the room is not square that will definitely bring on at least one Mitch Fit Warning maybe more.

An Abusive Relationship

“Are you in an abusive relationship?”  the Emergency Room admitting clerk softly asked me looking me straight in the eye, watching my reaction carefully.

Mitch was sitting behind her across from me oblivious to the question.  Did he know how lucky he is I like him?  With just a slight change in my expression or lifted eyebrows not to mention if I had burst into tears, it would have been a long time before Mitch saw the light of day again.  I was sitting in the Emergency Room admitting office with the two bones at the end of the middle finger on my left hand jutting at an odd angle for the second time in a three month period for the same injury. Maybe that was why she asked, or maybe it is standard procedure to ask every woman that comes to the emergency room with an injury.

Absolutely I was in an abusive relationship, but the abuser was me not Mitch.  I am the clumsiest the person I know.  I find new ways to cut, burn or bruise myself every day.  I walk into walls, miss doorways and trip over my own two feet.  Mitch is always amazed at the unique and seemly innocuous items that have the ability to draw blood on me.

This time I had been doing yard work while Mitch was working on one of the cars.  I walked into the garage to get my garden cart and noticed a spider walking across the top of the cart.  I hate bugs, spiders in particular and usually scream loudly and flee the immediate area as quickly as I can, knowing that they will hunt me down and eat me if given the chance.  But on this day, I was wearing gloves making me invincible, or so I thought.  I wanted my cart and here was this gigantic menace keeping me from my cart.  Mitch was under the car so he was no help, I would just have to confront the monster myself.  As the spider walked nonchalantly the top of the cart toward the edge to disappear and prepare for a sneak attack I decided to swat him with my gloved hand.  I swung my hand down with such force to annihilate the beast and caught the top edge of the cart causing the first two bones on my middle finger to dislocate and jut up on top of the third bone and knuckle of the finger. 

As usual I starting crying like a baby, causing Mitch to come up from under the car to see what I had done to myself again.  He offered to pull the bones back into place for me.  Are you kidding me?  I told him I wanted to go to the emergency room and I wanted him to take me.

He looked at me and said, “I am right in the middle of fixing the exhaust on the car, can’t you drive yourself?”

“Fine I’ll just walk then, don’t worry about me.  I’ll be fine, I can take care of myself.”  I wanted some sympathy and wasn’t getting it.

He dropped his tool on the floor and said, “Fine let’s go.”

I wanted to get cleaned up first because I was filthy and sweaty from the yard work but “No!” Mitch said that if he had to go dirty so did I.  No fair.  So here I sat sweaty with dirt and grass stains on my clothes sitting in the emergency room waiting for a shot to numb my hand and have a trained professional jerk my finger back in place.

Rule Number One – Change the Batteries

Rule number one – when you buy batteries to replace the dead ones in the indoor shock collars for the dogs, it’s always a good idea to actually change them.  I bought the batteries for the collars the very next morning and as is always the case, I got busy multitasking and totally forgot to change out the dead for the freshly charged batteries.  We had dinner plans that night with my best friend and her significant other, who were in town only for the weekend, so I was busy trying to get everything done for the day and prod Mitch along. 

Mitch is busy working on our latest renovation project since the bathroom finally was finished.  The latest project is totally gutting the dining room and sheet rocking the room ceiling and walls and covering the hard wood floors with bamboo.  Mitch is not a social butterfly, hermit fits the description better, so getting him to stop the rehab and get cleaned up in a timely fashion, is like prodding a giant tortoise to walk faster.  Not going to happen.  So while I’m prodding, nagging and giving him the Look, I completely forgot to change out the batteries.  We go to dinner and have a great time, because once I finally get Mitch out of the cave and into the light, he opens up and enjoys himself.  He’ll even grudgingly admit it later, maybe.   

We get home to barking dogs waiting for me to open the door and once inside, I’m overwhelmed with the wave of destruction the dogs have waged on the kitchen.  In the living room an empty butter container that had housed an unopened pound of whipped butter that one or more dogs had taken from the kitchen table and consumed.  Yummy, eating a pound of butter.  I can’t wait to see which dog ate that.  Farther in the living was a plastic jar of honey or what was left of it.  The lid had been chewed off and the top of the jar had been chewed with about one quarter of the honey eaten.  I picked up the empty butter container, lid and the honey jar and walked into the kitchen to survey the damage waiting for me.  The recycle bin had been opened and contents strewn about.  Why, it’s not like anything in there was edible.

The trash can was knocked over again with trash all over the floor.  Orso also left a wonderful gift in the guest bathroom off the kitchen, he peed on the tile floor.  Lovely.  Surprisingly no one looked at all remorseful.  Imagine that.

The trashcan will now be removed and a smaller one will go under the sink.  God help me if they figure out how to open cabinet doors.  The butter and honey get put up higher, just like living with toddlers and the recycle container will be emptied more often and left outside when I’m gone. 

Oh yes and I am going to change the batteries in the collars right now.