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We are terrible, terrible dog owners.

They don’t have many toys.  We had to get rid of the Buster Cube because Roxy obsessed over it and her generally mild, easygoing self would fly into hysterics if any other dog looked at it.  We can’t have any stuffed toys because GIR and Sophie really like to de-stuff things, including the couch and all pillows, and you can’t teach them to gut one thing and not another.  We also can’t have stuffed things because in Sophie’s mind (in which she is Not Right), stuffed things are babies and OH MY GOD DON’T TOUCH MY BABY GAHHHHH.  Most pet store toys last about 20 minutes.  Really cheap dollar store rope bones will “last” a few weeks or a month, where last = GIR carrying around a filthy bundle of strings.

[From the "This Kills Me" department:  Roxy's previous owners said she loved little stuffed animals and would carry them around and sleep with them.  They gave us a bag of her little toys.  She's never gotten to play with one, because someone else would take it from her, gut it, and then obsess over it.  I want so badly to take her in a room by herself and let her have one for a little while, but she freaks out when separated from the other dogs, so it wouldn't exactly be kind.]

But we have two Everlasting Fun Balls, the older and larger of which has lasted over four years (longer than a couch, in other words) and the smaller of which spends most of its time underneath furniture.  Green Ball is GIR’s most favorite toy.  Green Ball gets put in the food bowl when it is time to eat (or even when it’s not; it’s just generally where he keeps Green Ball, and also Filthy Bundle of Strings, and we have no idea where he picked up the toy-in-bowl maneuver), and oh the whining and crying if Green Ball rolls under the ottoman coffee table (curiously uneaten, though I shouldn’t jinx it).

Well, two nights ago he was whining and crying and crouched down looking under the media cabinet.  Only Small Green Ball will fit under there, and I hadn’t seen it lately, so I got down and looked.  There was nothing there.  He just kept pacing and whining, and I finally got down with a flashlight and he checked all the angles and it was clearly obvious to me that there was nothing under there.  But he wouldn’t leave it alone.  And so last night, GIR was still at it, and I was all “Look, dog, it is not-” and B said “There it is!”

It was on the bottom shelf beside the DVD player.  It’s a neon green jelly ball the size of a softball, you would think that even in our dim living room I would have seen it, but no, I just tortured the dog for two days because he’s too polite to shove the DVD player out of the way and get his toy.

Other ways in which we are evil:  The dog door is not large enough for Sophie to carry the throw pillows from the couches outside.  And I laugh when she tries.  We bought a king size bed, but it still really only holds two dogs.  We make GIR sleep in a chair that we specifically put in the bedroom for him to sleep on.  Sometimes we make them get off the coffee table.

I have to give them credit, though, because they just recently got cut off from some serious spoilage.  Ever since we moved, B had come home at lunch pretty much every single day to let them out for a few minutes.  We had a lot of trouble with Sophie’s housebreaking, and they were prone to accidents and rowdiness if left alone too long.  We do have a dog door (we bought a storm door with a built-in dog door – love it, highly recommend it), but the dogs don’t get unattended access to outside because they are idiots and freaks.  B started a new job that is too far away to come home at lunch right about the time I started travelling for work quite a bit, and so they went from 5 hours alone max to 10 hours, and they’ve done really well.  Sophie occasionally leaves us a present, but it’s a solid one that is pretty easy to deal with on a tile floor.  We have to cover the couch a little better than before, and B’s side of the couch is a little divot-y at the moment, but it’s not nearly as bad as we’d braced ourselves for, and I am pleased that the little heathens are doing so well.

We’ve had one Emergency Vet visit since we moved, and of all possible suspects it was, surprisingly, Roxy.  We don’t have any evidence to prove it, but the vet’s best guess was that she found a tube of Advantix and ate some.  Enough to make her real sick, and possibly if we hadn’t been around when she started getting sick she wouldn’t have made it.  So store your flea treatments in a dog-free zone.  I just recently found out that Xylitol, a common sweetener in sugarless gum, will kill a dog as well – there’s your Public Service Announcement for the day.

And Sophie just brought a small dead tree branch into the house, so there ends the story for the day.

I’ve just done something that makes me feel kind of icky: I’ve just made my resume public on Monster.  The most immediate effect of this is that someone at work will see it within a day.  What I have not done, yet, is update it with my latest job experience.

I don’t want to do this.  I like my company, in the abstract.  Great, great ideas.  Shitty fucking execution.  All talk, no management.  And what I need at this point in my career is some fucking awesome mentoring.  Or I’d settle for reasonable utilization.  Or professional development.  I’m not getting any of that.  I won’t get it at a competitor, either, so if I’m doing this I guess I’m doing it to change gears.

I think the thing that’s set me off, finally, is the goddamn rudeness.  It only gets pointed in my direction occasionally, which is more than enough.  It’s never, ever okay to be internally unprofessional, unless you’re talking to someone you don’t give a shit about.  So that’s my answer, I guess.

I may change my mind by morning.  I just now got an email from a customer that we don’t hear from very often, asking me some necessary questions.  Why?  Because I’m not a goddamn asshole, they know I’ll answer the question knowledgeably and not be a dick about it.

I’m not sure I know how to convince a potential employer how smart I am, and I don’t really want to have to, I’d rather have it recognized and used by the one I’ve already got, but I think this is why I’ve been feeling so shitty lately.

I completely spaced on an entry yesterday, because we LEFT THE HOUSE and there’s only so much excitement one little brain can handle.

On weekends, we generally go out to breakfast.  This is mostly because I can’t produce a meal in less than two hours most of the time, I think.  It’s just easier.  And since we moved to Dallas proper, there’s almost no such thing as a restaurant that’s not really busy for dinner all the time, and we hate crowds, so we very rarely go out for lunch or dinner anymore.  Also, I’ve become dependent on getting out of the house, however briefly (we’ll go sit and eat at Chick-Fil-A, if we’ve decided not to do a proper restaurant), in order to get moving for the day.

This is about to have to stop, I suppose, as I have determined that the stomach pain I have after eating restaurant eggs or scrambled eggs at home really is an allergic reaction.  Cook the shit out of them (quiche, egg as binder in other food, baked items, boiled) and I’m fine, but most restaurant breakfast will ruin my morning.  I can get around these issues at home, and there are some places where I can get an entire meal of eggless protein, but I don’t want to eat at IHOP every weekend.

Anyway, aside from breakfast and errands, we don’t go out much in the evenings.  Because we’re old.  But we’ve gotten a lot older since we moved into Dallas proper.  I hate crowds, B hates crowds, we don’t really like people unless we’ve chosen their company specifically, and even too many of those in too small an area will tire us out quickly.  And there’s nowhere with no crowds.  We moved to Dallas pretty much entirely for a reduction in travel time to the places we go, and I miss the far quieter Mid-Cities when I’m trying to go to the grocery store or whatever.

But last night, we wanted to go see Santaland Diaries at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, and we were going to go to our favorite Vietnamese place nearby for dinner, which is more excitment than we ever see on Sunday nights.  It turned out Mai’s is closed on Sundays (and I’m pretty sure I knew this and forgot), so we found a mediterranean place (which was fine, but was not the stellar place near the old house) and then went to the play.  Which is only an hour long, so we were home by 8:30.

I’ve been pondering the possibility that I’ve been suffering from a little short-day-induced malaise; probably not severe enough to be called SAD, and probably exacerbated by the fairly extensive work travel I did in November, but that short evening out just about drained my batteries.  I’ve got the random aches and pains, lingering pre-cold symptoms, and I sleep pretty much all night every night, which is not just unusual but completely out of character.  I woke up twice last night, once for a pit stop, and once because Sophie was sleeping with her ass on my face and there’s only so much of that I can take.  For months I’d been getting up at 5, or 6 at the latest, mostly running on anxiety, and I guess the upside to the way I feel right now is that I don’t have a whole lot of anxiety.  I’ve slept in until 8am on several occasions.  That’s just madness!

I’m thinking the way to get through this is to, for one thing, just power through it.  It’ll pass in Januaryish.  We should probably also get out a little more, as it was really nice to go out and DO something, and it was probably good for both of us to not rattle aimlessly around the house like we do.