Monday Night Fights

Most of the time my dogs get along famously. They are all female. They are all pretty mild-mannered, and they respect one another's boundaries.

Most of the time.

Monday night... not so much.

For the past week or so, Flower has been feeling a little lethargic and grouchy. I don't know why. I suspected she had worms. But she has not been 100% her usual mild self.

Late Monday night, around midnight, I put my book down and got up from the sofa to go to bed. I turned out the living room light and found myself in pitch darkness. Normally I leave a light on in the kitchen in case of late-night emergencies, but I had turned it off for some reason.

No problem, I thought, I have my iPhone! It will light my way enough to get me across the living room and down the hall! So I aimed my phone at the floor and began shuffling across the room.

I had forgotten that both labs were sleeping there. They are both, of course, black. They were both virtually invisible, even in the low blue light from my phone. I took two steps and promptly stepped on Roxy. She yelped and I hopped away and staggered across the room where I stepped on Flower. She also yelped. Each dog apparently assumed the other dog had attacked her, and came up swinging. Fur was flying. There was bloodthirsty snarling and clacking of teeth. I threw myself at the wall and turned on the light to find both dogs up on their back feet going at one another's throats like pitbulls in the ring.

I've broken up a lot of dog fights in my lifetime. I know better than to put my arm in there to separate them, so I grabbed a laundry hamper from Grayson's room, dumped the clothes out of it, and shoved it down over Roxy's head. Flower circled threateningly, but I was able to drag her outside before I took the hamper off of Roxy.

After a few minutes I was able to put both dogs to bed without further incident. Grayson more or less slept through the whole thing: dogs snarling and barking, mom screaming, clothes hamper flying, door slamming... all of it. He did raise his head up in bed when I asked him if he was okay, but he just mumbled something and went back to sleep.

Yesterday morning I found that Roxy had bitten a hole through Flower's ear in the melee, which was not improving Flower's mood. I took her to the vet last night but all is well. The ear does not require treatment, and the vet tested her for worms to see if maybe that's why she was lethargic and grumpy. Negative.

I'm afraid I know why she has been lethargic and grumpy... it's the same reason I've been lethargic and grumpy: she's lying around all day indoors and not getting any fresh air or exercise. And she's not getting any younger. We old folks just get tired, especially if we don't have enough to do.

Lately, however, the outdoors has been something of an issue for me and my dogs. Well, actually, not for Flower. No, Flower's a good dog. You open the door and tell her to go out, she goes out. Just like that. She doesn't destroy anything or escape or bark maniacally. She just hangs out in the back yard... sniffing things, chasing squirrels, stuff like that.

Roxy, however, is completely neurotic. She won't go out in the morning unless you trick her or bribe her. Once out, she whines and scratches insanely at the back door (see figure A: door damage due to Roxy) until you let her in or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.

And then there's Kobi. The family houdini. My smallest dog is the one I can't keep in the yard. Sometimes I put her out back before I leave for work and she gets to the front yard before I do. Then it's a 15 to 20-minute game of catch-the-doggy. You can't actually catch her, oh no... you have to trick her into the car and then haul her back and drop her over the fence. At first I could just open the car door and she would run over and hop in, thinking she was going to get to go somewhere. But soon she got wise to that trick, so then I had to actually start driving away before she would get in the car. Now I have to drive halfway up the street with her chasing after me, stopping every few yards to open the car door to see if she'll get in. Then there's this hilarious little ritual we go through in which Kobi runs up close to the open door, but then dodges away at the last minute and takes off again. Usually this happens three or four times before she'll actually get in the car.

This can add up to major frustration and chronic lateness to work. Later even than I am normally, that is.

So finally I decided I had to turn on the electric fence again. I installed it this summer, and it works great at keeping Kobi in the yard. The problem is that if Flower gets into the fence and gets shocked, it freaks her out so much that she has to be dragged outside for a week afterward, and then she only skulks along the wall until she can slip into the garage. Last time the fence was on, Flower peed in the house three times and took to crapping in Grayson's room to avoid going outside. And let me tell you, an 85-pound labrador pees and craps a LOT.

Now I was driven to deploying the fence again to keep Kobi from either getting hit by a car or driving me to an act of murderous rage.

So I hooked it up, plugged it in and went around to the front yard to drag the old Christmas tree out to the curb. Before I got there I heard this ungodly screaming from the back yard.

"Ah," I thought. "heh heh heh...Kobi's discovered that the fence is back on. That'll show her!"

But it didn't stop. She kept screaming and screaming! I dropped the tree, vaulted the porch steps and raced through the house to the back yard, sure I would find her twisted up in the electric wire, being fried alive. The screaming stopped abruptly just before I arrived. Kobi was nowhere to be seen.

My neighbors were looking out their side window in alarm. I reassured them that I was not torturing my dog with a hot poker and went looking for her in the garage. She was there. Unscathed. She came to me and I picked her up and apologized to her. She had no mark on her, and seemed fine. But she smelled like burnt fur.

I just haven't been able to plug the fence in since then.

More Lessons from Knitting

I do hate to go on and on about the zen of knitting, but I learned another valuable lesson from my #10 needles today.

The scarf I've been working on was very near completion late this afternoon. Grayson and I had been out and about, visiting a friend and doing some shopping for totally unnecessary stuff like games. And we came home and settled in for an hour or so of mindless funny animal videos and knitting.

Well, once again, television and knitting don't mix, and I dropped a big ol' stitch that left a monstrous hole in my scarf. I tried to think of some way to pick up the damage, but there was nothing for it but to unravel back to that point... again. As before, the unraveling is easy... getting the damned yarn back on the needles was hard. So hard, in fact, that I completely lost my temper, threw one of the needles across the room, wadded up the scarf and yarn and stuffed them behind the sofa and stomped off to the kitchen to make noise at the sink.

After a while Grayson came in and said "does someone need a hug?" Well, I nearly took the poor little kid's head off, snapping "NO!" And then I felt bad and apologized and he came in and gave me that hug, which it turns out I really did need. I told him I was frustrated because I'd worked so hard on the stinking scarf and now I couldn't finish it because I couldn't find all the loops. And I was afraid I woud lose my temper with it and end up pulling it all out or throwing it away in a fit of rage because I'm a bad, baaaaad person who loses her temper too much.

"I don't think you're a bad person," he told me. And then I nearly burst into tears and didn't know if I was laughing or crying. "I'm behaving badly," I told him. "I'm sorry. I would be mad at you if you acted this way just because you were frustrated. I'd make you go to your room until you could behave. "

There was a moment while Grayson looked at me with his eyebrows raised. And then he said "Doooooo you want me to send you to your room?" And I just had to laugh and hold him and say no, no matter how much I deserved it, I didn't want him to send me to my room. I needed to just be patient and act like a grown up and fix my knitting.

So I did. I sat down with one of my smallest needles and very very slowly and patiently picked up almost all of the loops and managed to get the scarf back onto the needle. Then I proceeded to knit it back up (I'd only lost one stitch) and bind it off and now it's finished. It was a huge pain in the ass, but it's done and tomorrow I'll wear it to work, even if it's 65 degrees outside.

And the lesson? Don't behave badly. It doesn't make you feel any better and really only makes you feel worse. And if you do behave badly, it doesn't mean everything about you is bad. And finally... sometimes just going to your room until you can behave yourself really does fix things.

Despite the many setbacks, I actually really enjoy knitting. I ordered a book that's supposed to teach me, in slow, easy pictures, everything I ever need to know about knitting. So I can do more than just scarves... even though I'm not even very good at those just yet. So even if it leads to more flying needles and fits of rage, I'm going to spool out just enough more yarn to hang myself with....

In other news...

I did go to the gym this weekend... twice! On Saturday I ran the track with Grayson and then did a full hour's work-out in the weight room. Then Sunday I went back and swam with G for 45 minutes.

I did not take down my Christmas lights or clean up the remaining post-holiday clutter from my living room. Really. There's only so much a woman can be expected to accomplish in one three-day weekend.

Unraveling

I've been knitting.

I'm not very good at it. And I got a bit overambitious in this last project, choosing a nubbly, irregular yarn that is hard to work with. Despite several false starts, however, over the past week, I had managed to struggle my way through about a foot and a half of the soft, open-weave scarf I was trying to make for myself. Then it all went to hell last night.

I made the mistake of attempting to do two things at once: in this case, to pay attention to a movie on television and knit. This, it turns out, was a grave error. Half an hour into the movie I'd already lowered my stitch count by three and inexplicably created two large holes in the middle of the work. When it became evident that my attempts at repairing the damage were completely futile, I decided to unravel the damned thing back to where things were going pretty well.

One problem with that: the yarn is so woolly and lumpy that once I started unraveling, it was impossible for me to relocated all the stitches properly and get them back on the needle. Damn. Damn damn damn. I was obliged, finally, to unravel the whole damned thing – a week's worth of work, piled up on the sofa accusingly. I didn't even have the heart to start over. I just wound the stuff up, jabbed the needles through it, and drank wine instead.

It occurs to me this morning that maybe life and knitting have something in common. You can make a beautiful scarf out of plain cheap yarn or you can make a ratty-ass scarf using fancy yarn. It's not the raw materials. It's your skill, patience and craft that turn it into something worth using. And sometimes, damnit, you have to be willing to unravel it all and start over.

My life came unraveled when I got divorced, almost exactly two years ago. Since that time I've made a few sloppy starts at knitting it up, and on a couple of occasions have had to pull the work apart again. Now at last I'm beginning to get the hang of the stitchery, but I have to learn to be patient. I can't rush through, try to do too many things at once and focus too much on the end result, rather than the process. Knitting, and life, is not about getting somewhere. It's really about doing something, and trying to do it well, with practice and patience and love.

Sometimes all I can think about it what I want and how long it will be before I can have it and maybe I won't, ever, get my act together enough to make my dreams come true. Maybe I'll always be making a mess of things, watching TV and dropping stitches. But I have to believe that it won't always be that way... that eventually, if I can just focus on doing this, right now, to the best of my ability... I will get where I want to be.

It's not easy, especially when you've got a big pile of yarn and a lost week of work. But tomorrow I'll take up my needles again and cast on. Better luck this time.