NoodleDog

Wow. So much has happened here since November. In some semblance of chronological order:

Through November, I spent most of my time working. I have to say, I’m not totally thrilled with the amount of work I have had to do lately. Oh, my attitude about it is probably better than it was in early November, but it’s aggravating me now, and over the past couple of months, my workload has been really too much. My boss, Dave, had told us he was quitting at the end of December in October, causing a lot of panic and speculation as to how things would go post-Dave (PD), and through November and December, the entire office went through a weird growing pain sort of trauma. No one likes the guy who’s going to be taking over this month (it’s January now, of course). Everyone is worried they’re going to be fired (except me – I’m not worried about that – I couldn’t be that lucky). Everyone is worried they’ll be changed into positions they hate (except me, I already have one).

In December, we also had our office Christmas party, which I sort of went to… I showed up for cocktails and then bailed out. It was alright, except some guy from the head office was in town to promote the PD Layout. He was a Talking Head, mostly. He ambushed us here in the office to tell us that he’s some sort of supply/services manager, and he has all these great national contracts that he wants us to start using, so all of the relationships we’ve built with contractors, trades, suppliers and companies since we started are all totally useless and a waste of time. Of course, that didn’t go over well, I kind of looked at him and said “yeah, we’ll see…”, and hoped that was the end of it. I like my own suppliers, trades and companies. They know me, and have worked hard for me, and the ones that are good, I keep and the ones that are bad, I don’t use any more. Easy as pie. Of course, that was not the last of it. At the Christmas party, as I was on my way over to the shrimp ring to get a bite to eat since I was STARVING, he jumped me again, blocked the table and proceeded to say how great his contracts are, again. I tried to humour him since it was a Christmas party, but eventually had to call him on blocking the food table in front of the company President and the guy’s wife. They wrangled him out of the way, thank god, and I was able to get a shrimp, for crying out loud.

In early December, it was also my dad’s 65th birthday party. In honour of this great event, I managed to drag his brother, my Uncle Paul, out from Nova Scotia, along with his partner, Robert, for almost a week’s visit, as a birthday gift to my dad (The Grumpaw). That was a feat, soured only by my sister’s scooping of all of their time. I had a meeting the night they were scheduled to come in, and had asked if Laura could pick them up from the airport, which she did. Then she refused to turn them over so I could visit with them at all, and aced me out of a late dinner with them, and then proceeded to monopolize all of their time while they were here. I saw them for dinner the next evening, for my dad’s birthday. The surprise factor was fantastic for that, actually, so that was pretty great. We also set up a big surprise party with a bunch of The Grumpaw’s friends he hadn’t seen in a long time for that Saturday evening, and that went very well, too. So that was a great success in December.

The rest of the month, though, was not successful in very many ways. I contracted a cold/respiratory infection late in November, and it went into a sort of remission in early December, but by the week before Christmas, it started to re-emerge. Working madly away right up until the Friday before Christmas, I managed to get myself exhausted to the point where the illness came back worse than before.

That Friday afternoon, too, was a bad one. I made it home in reasonable time, but to a scene of incredible destruction and dog-rampage. The Two Bad Dogs (Beau & Millie) got a hold of poor Tobey and roughed him up pretty hard sometime earlier in the afternoon (we figure at least a couple of hours). They had bitten his clawless hands, and around the head and neck, and I think they shook him. We rushed Tobey in to the vet’s office, and had him checked-over. Our vet said he looked OK, probably traumatized, but that he would survive. We shored him up in our bed and locked the Two Bad Dogs in the exercise pen we had bought to protect our Christmas tree. New Protocol was established that whenever we leave the house, the Two Bad Dogs have to be caged in the ex-pen, and we implemented that immediately.

But Tobey didn’t get better, and stopped eating and drinking. He got dehydrated and clogged-up with poo. His balance was wrecked, leading me to believe that his inner ear had been damaged, best-case scenario, or that his brain-stem had been damaged or concussed, worst-case scenario. He developed a big goose-egg on the back of his head. His eyes didn’t clear and were wonky. He didn’t want to move, or do anything at all, really, except sleep. Over Christmas, I was sick enough that I didn’t go anywhere or do anything at all (except pull a muscle in my chest from coughing so much), so I stayed with him the entire time, and tried to keep him hydrated. After Christmas, we took him back in to the vet’s office, where they kept him through the days for observation, they took his blood, and eventually put him on IV fluids to get his hydration levels back up. We brought him home every evening, and watched him. I was pretty worried we were going to lose him, but since Saturday, he’s started to do better. He’s moving around a little more now, and enjoys being petted. I take him downstairs to the Cat Area for breakfasts and feed him extra small meals throughout the day and evening so he can gain back some of the large amount of weight he lost in that week.

So things are looking up there. Last week, though, this update would have been a lot less optimistic. He still has some lumps on his abdomen, though, that I will have to keep an eye on over the next little while, and apparently now he has a heart murmur, which we have to check on next month.

That whole incident was extremely difficult to deal with. Not just because I was sick, and dragging Tobey to the vet every day over the holidays, but because I was extremely angry with the Two Bad Dogs. I don’t blame Cooter or the Noodledog, because they would never hurt a cat (unless accidentally stepping on one counts). I think those two actually like the cats, and I know Cooter loves Smudge and really thinks the cats are keen. The Noodledog just looks at them and knows enough to stay away from them, or at least not to overreact when they move around quickly. He doesn’t make a move to chase them at all. But Beau & Millie… Beau barks at them occasionally, and opens his mouth at them from time to time like a hippopotamus. Millie has chased them a little here and there and pounces at them, which none of them really like. Usually, though, they’re all fast enough to get out of her way, or up onto something where she can’t get at them, and by then, we’ve noticed and scolded her anyway, so she stops. I can’t imagine what happened with Tobey, although the destruction in the house was extreme that afternoon when we got home. It seems like the Two Bad Dogs went on a rampage and probably chased all the cats, and probably were in some sort of state where everything was game. There were a lot of ruined things in the living room, although that was not my first priority when I got home, so I can’t remember it all. They got in a lot of trouble, and because I was so angry with them, I didn’t want to pet them or play with them much through the holidays at all.

I’m slowly getting over it, but I don’t trust them any more, and I’m not at all sure I like them much any longer. Beau has been remarkably well-behaved since the incident, and I think he knows he’s in Big Trouble. Millie, too, although she forgets and tries to chase the cats, and barks out the window. Our neighbors across the street made a snowman the other day, and Millie is fascinated and terrified by it, so she stares out the window barking at it, with her little bay-howl-bark. Sure, she’s cute, but she’s evil.

Christmas itself was OK. I got Rob a chainsaw and a bunch of clothing and a CD for Christmas. He needed a new chainsaw, and picked out the one he wanted, so that was nice. We had kind of hoped we’d get the new trailer before Christmas, but that wasn’t meant to be, and wouldn’t have mattered anyway with Tobey being unwell – I wouldn’t have gone anywhere anyway.

Our financing with the Scotiabank didn’t get done – they did not inform us that both of us needed to be on title with Land Titles, although mid-December, we did go and get the transfer put through, which takes 22 business days to execute. Scotiabank then told us they couldn’t even put their application in for the new mortgage until they had confirmation that my name would be on the house title. I told them their application for the new mortgage to go on land titles wouldn’t be executed until after our application had gone through, but of course that sort of actual logic didn’t work with them. First National, where our mortgage is now, made a last-minute play to get our business back and offered some extremely attractive rates, and that combined with my ire over Scotiabank’s neglect to follow proper procedure resulted in us renegotiating with First National. We have approval for our re-financing, which is great, but it won’t come through until mid-January now.

Add that to the fact that the trailer had to be paid for over the holidays, I had to borrow money at the last minute and wire-transfer it over to the trailer dealership before they would release our trailer. They had told us that it was held up waiting for storm windows, and that they could either leave it with the manufacturer until the storm windows came in, or ship it now and then send the storm windows to us later. I opted for them sending us the storm windows after the fact, and told them to just send it as soon as they could, and sure enough, it showed up on December 29th at 8a. The poor driver guy had driven it over the pass straight through the night. I can’t imagine that was very much fun. But it arrived in one piece, largely the way we had ordered it, and it seems OK. It’s not quite as good as our first one, I don’t think. The finish is a little cheaper, there are few things that they’ve changed that don’t make any sense (like no lock on the bathroom door, only one outdoor access to the under-dinette seats, no shelf in the dishes cupboard), but at least both doors work properly and the extras we’ve ordered really seem to be pretty cool. If we had gotten the extras on the first one, and hadn’t crashed it, that would have been perfect. But this one will do. We spent some time over the past few days packing it with all our new stuff that we got to replace the stuff that was lost in the crash. The new TV, for instance, is fantastic. It seems huge compared to the one we lost. And the dishes are nice, and will be great in there once Rob builds a shelf for them in the dishes cupboard. It’s a huge relief to have it here and packed and ready to roll. We may go camping a little later on this month to try it out.

I have not studied my course material for the Real Estate Agent’s license at all, and have to write the exam in March. Nor have I had a chance to look for wedding locations, and will have to spend some weekend time on that this month if we’re going to get married this year. Wish me luck with both of those.

So while the last part of December sucked pretty hard, the beginning of January seems to be going alright. I am swamped at work, of course, but my new attitude is that there is only so much I can do, legitimately. If I’m not done all my work at the end of the day, I’m still going to go home and not overload myself to the point where I get too tired and sick again. That’s my new year’s resolution: Return to a lazy lifestyle. I was much more relaxed when I wasn’t working this hard!!

I hope everyone else’s Holidays, Christmas & New Year’s went very, very well!!