For Peppy....A Slightly Mental but Lovable Chihuahua

Alas, today, we did not lose our network. Though it threatened to be a little sluggish for a while, it plodded along and then recovered itself. I was quite disappointed.

Still, I managed to get some work done. Lately, my job is scaring me. There are days when I actually feel like I could say I like my job. I won't yet though. As I've stated a few times before, I have commitment issues. In this case, I'm afraid that as soon as I say that, my job is going to go right back to being that place where I go to earn my paycheck before I get to go home and enjoy life.

Nevertheless, things aren't so bad. In general, things aren't quite so bad. A week ago, things were much worse.

I think I mentioned that I lost Sausage a week ago. When I say "lost", I mean that he had to be put to sleep.

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you'll know that Sausage was my very lazy, very selfish, very loved dachshund dog who lived at my parents but, possibly, was coming to live with me. He didn't do much but sleep and eat and, when the occasion merited it (usually when I had food or a rub on the nose), he'd show me affection.

Sausage, however, was also a little mean. He'd always been a little mean, ever since he was a puppy. I think he came from a bad home when we got him because he was always jumpy and nervous. As he got older we learned that he had very big teeth that he liked to show when he was irritated. Given that my parents had four other dogs who were smaller than him, Sausage learned to bear his teeth at the ones who irritated most. It was a scary sight which, at first, seemed harmless.

Over the years, he'd always picked on one of my parent's dogs in particular: Peppy, the slightly overweight, slightly nutty chihuahua, who looked like a mini border collie. Peppy was my 'college graduation dog'. My parents had come down to help me move home after graduation and we'd stopped at a pet store. Peppy had been so irresistible, he'd come home with us. He was very loyal to certain people, me being one of them- most of the time. He also loved my older brother and would follow him everywhere when he came home. As he got older, he started to lose his vision. By the time he turned almost13 this year, he was virtually blind. Sausage had begun to pick on Peppy more and more, attacking him when he got a chance. We worried about it but we never realized how bad it would get.

Last week, my mother came home to find that Sausage had almost killed Peppy. My dad took him to the vet but nothing could be done. We'd lost Peppy. When I heard the news, it was a huge shock. What was just as much of a shock was what had to be done about Sausage. He was getting meaner with age and in addition to the other three dogs my parents' have, my nephews and nieces are often around. Given the brutal state of Peppy, it was too much of a risk to keep Sausage around.

The next day, Sausage was put to sleep. My heart broke a little, not just for Sausage but also for little Peppy who had been the victim of a bully.

It's been a week and it's easier to talk about even if it's not easier to comprehend. It was so sudden, two dogs, two days. I know, for my parents, it was a different kind of shock. They had to deal with the physical nature of what happened. My dad had to take the dogs to the vet, my mother has been dealing with an emptier house.

I suppose, in a way, it's been easier for me than it has been for them. I got to mourn away from the scene of the tragedy. Though, I will say, it doesn't make it any easier to lose a dog. When they've been part of the family for as long as they have, it's never easy.

I think the hardest part in this is trying to comprehend what it was that Sausage did. Peppy is the real victim in the tragedy. Mauled by Sausage, he didn't stand a chance. He was a sweet dog, if a little...different. He had strange dances he did, a high pitched almost soprano squeak that he'd lift in answer to the other dogs bark when, on occasion, they'd decide to have a 'sing', raising their barks in unison to whatever invisible trigger motivated them. He would sit by my feet when I was on the computer, my 'writing dog' as I called him. He was a loyal dog who didn't deserve the fate that Sausage dealt him.

Yet...I can't help but be sad about Sausage. As my dad reminded me, Peppy is the one I feel sorry for and should mourn and I do. But Sausage was....my Sausage. In all his meanness, I loved that stupid dog. I loved the snow dance I did with him, the fact that he would manage to find a patch of sunshine even if they were few and far between. He'd recharge himself in the sun and become, as I dubbed him, Solar Sausage.

It's hard to forget those things, no matter how much I should despise him for what he did. I don't think we can help who or what we love and though Sausage turned out to be a bad apple, I still loved him. I will miss him for a long time, probably always, just as I miss Peppy.

Through all of it, I know my parents had to do what they did. I will never blame them for that. I wasn't there, I didn't see how badly Sausage injured Peppy. I didn't have to be there as Sausage left the house for the last time. I've imagined it...a lot. Each time I do, I get sad and am eternally grateful I wasn't there because, if I had been, I would have begged my dad not to take him, even though it would have been the wrong thing. I thought about it the whole night before Sausage died, thought about calling them, begging them to stop.

But I didn't because it wouldn't have been right. It's only been a week and it's still fresh in my mind. I feel bad writing this because my mum will read it and I don't want to depress her or upset her. But, as a writer, this is how I express myself and tonight, I felt like it was time to talk about it, to eulogize both dogs in blog form.

I'm not quite ready to move on yet but I've decided that when Spring comes and stays for good, I'm going to go to the Dachshund Rescue of Ohio and look for a dachshund to rescue. In my anger and shock about Sausage, I tried to find another type of dog that I might click with; I even went to the pet store with my parents to look this past weekend. In the end, it was the tiny little dachshund puppy that I kept watching and I realized that it was no good. I'm a wiener-dog Monkeypants, no matter how hard I try. I'm going to look for a little girl dog who's old enough to need to be rescued and to appreciate a good home. While the puppies are adorable, I want to find a companion who'll appreciate being rescued and enjoy the home I can provide.

In the meantime, I'll continue to miss and grieve for Peppy and, despite the circumstances, Sausage. Every time it snows, I'm going to picture him doing the snow dance and giving me one of my favourite things in the world, even though he hated snow and would cower whenever I gave the victorious shout of "Snow, Sausage, Snow!"

And as for Peppy, I'll never be able to sit at my computer without imagining him sitting by my feet, patiently waiting and enjoying the peace.

I'll miss them both.

Happy Wednesday

Monday Morning Blues...

What is it about Monday mornings that make it so hard to get going? For example, today it's a grey and snow-dusted Monday, the temperature gauge read 17 degrees and the minute I uncurled myself from my warm and comfortable down comforter, I realized that I'd like nothing more than to get back into my bed.

It never matters how much sleep I get the night before. I could go to bed at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night and wake up at 6:45 a.m. and still not feel like I had enough sleep. Any other night, I'd be fine but Sundays lead to Mondays and that makes them different.

Now it's a Monday morning and I have a strange feeling of uncertainty in the pit of my stomach. I remember having those when I was in school and I had a large test the next day or I'd had a fight with a friend and was nervous to face them in school or, the very worst, a bully had targeted me and wouldn't stop calling me names. As far as the bullies went, that old theory of "they'll leave you alone if you stand up to them," is crap. I tried that. They'd just get meaner. No, the best strategy was to not acknowledge them, to laugh at them and look slightly down your nose at them as they mocked you. They got tired of that quickly and moved on to another vulnerable target. These bullies were rarely violent but they used words to hurt instead, somehow finding the most fragile area of your self-esteem and then attacking. No matter how much you tried to laugh it off and ignore it, the words still did their job, making you doubt, second guess yourself and secretly accept that they were true.

I'm older now and the bullies are much easier to handle. They're usually at work in the form of a coworker or boss who try to use you to get ahead. My strategy with those is to let them; chances are they'll end up shooting themselves in the foot eventually.

On the plus side, we're supposed to have a major snowstorm tonight. If I were going to be a Pootle, I'd worry about the bad roads, of my family having to drive in it. I refuse to be a Pootle though and thus, I'm going to allow myself to get excited about it. We're supposed to get up to 6 inches. I can't wait to see the cascading flakes fall from the clouds and cover the world.

I can feel my mother cringing and curling herself into a ball as she reads this. As I've mentioned, she hates snow. I tried to get her to tell me why and all she says is that "it's cold." I don't get it. Then again, she thinks I'm mental because I love it. I think she should go out and build a snowman and take time to appreciate the uniqueness of a world that's covered with freshly fallen snow. The world is so much more silent like that. Sounds are muffled by the ground covering and the echo of life is much more apparent.

Yet I'm going to choose to be happy about the snow. I was going to write a miserable little blog about how cruddy I feel because I got rejected again, I was going to talk about loss and grief because I lost a friend a year ago.

I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to enable Monday to throw its shadow of simply being over me. Instead, I'm going to wait for the promised snow. I shall enjoy the fact that "24" is on tonight and though poor Jack Bauer's already had six really bad days, he's having another one and I can't help but watch.

So just because it's Monday and I'd much rather be in bed reading, I'm not going to think on that. I'm going to remind myself that I just had two days off already and they were good. I'm going to remind myself that there's another weekend in less than five days.

Now, if only that would work.

Happy Monday.