Smooth Sailing Still Has Waves

Like I've said...I'm excited about the weekend.

But there still seems to be issues with my emotions keeping in check.

I got home last night to find that the dog...our overgrown moron of a dog we saved from the pound...had half-pulled down the blanket I put on the window. See, this dog has the habit of jumping up on the couch to look out the window, thus slobbering all over the window, pulling the curtain over the couch, and knocking things off my desk and onto the floor. Again. It's an almost daily occurrence.

This dog has cost us time in the ER after my wife decided to take an ill-advised shortcut of taking the dog out by standing on the porch with a long leash and the dog, all eighty pounds of her, decided she saw something worth chasing and took off, pulling my wife through the air until she landed on concrete pavers below. After I'm fully recovered she'll need to go to the doctor's to determine if she needs surgery on her knee.

She's eaten two leashes and two harnesses.

She's eating shoes while we're gone...that only ended when we bought a plastic tub to store the shoes in.

She craps on the floor when she's mad at us for leaving; I got angry at burning electricity (and the life of the flatscreen LCD TV) to appease her and so we compromised on leaving a radio on to keep the dog company while we're out for more than an hour. Otherwise, we come home to a sewer pile on the floor. Multiple sewer piles.

I thought she was going to damn near kill me when she pushed her paw into my incision to "launch" herself from the couch while I was recovering at home. Even with Percoset...OUCH.

She barks at nothing, or worse, barks ferociously at some visitors, or jumps on them repeatedly unless they give her food despite our efforts to break her of this habit.

She's taken off when she escaped her leash or tie-out to run to the neighbor's house. Usually it's when we're guilty of being lazy and three feet from the porch one of us lets go of the leash, thinking she's going up the stairs and instead she bolts off to the side. I learned my lesson the first time she pulled this on me. Other times she had escaped her collar.

Oh...and she's destroyed a collar.

She seemed such a sweet dog at first. She probably still could be. But she has me SO FRUSTRATED. My wife has said we'll take her to training. That would have to wait until summer, when someone is home with her enough to enforce the training. Plus there's the cost of training.

All my pets growing up were apparently trained by my dad. I asked him how he does it...he shrugged and said, "We got them as puppies. Wasn't hard."

This overgrown doofus was fully grown when we got her from the pound.

I turned red at her once again getting dirt on the couch and pulling on the curtains AND thwarting the blanket on the window to keep her down, and my wife just gaver her exasperated, "I'll look at getting rid of her..."

I don't want to get rid of her. I promised my son at potty training that once he was a "big boy", he could get a puppy dog. He really wanted one because he remembered the promise for months. That's an accomplishment for a two year old. We also spent several hundred dollars and some hazard time on icy roads getting this dog fixed and the other usual vet bills.

I just want her to BEHAVE.

It's frustrating to have a pet that rules over you instead of the other way around. I wish I could trust her, that she'd stay in the yard and not have to be kept under lock and key at all times like a prisoner. Every time my daughter or wife takes a shortcut with her, is lax with the leash, anything...I cringe. I don't want her near me while I'm recovering for fear that her paw will rip the (much smaller and slowly healing) wound open more when she decides to leap at me. And she's definitely not stupd...she's like a teenager. She's selectively stupid. She knows not to jump on me, and she stays off the couch when I come into the room. she knows.

I simply get so frustrated...and last night, making things for selling at the art festival, daughter whining to go to the boyfriend's tonight, getting student grading work and notes online for their reference (second job...),...all the little frustrations and irritations...I just plain blew up. A growing well of anger and frustration at everything in life just made me want to ram my head into a wall. Fortunately it manifested itself as just being very testy and agitated with a bonus of yelling after a short fuse being lit from a bit too much whining from the children, but still it was one of those moments where I really felt like I needed a time-out from living, some kind of escape from life.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's not the recovery, maybe it's just me, and I'm somehow imbalanced and unable to deal with life and its frustrations.