A while back I wrote this post about my dog and his budding behavior problems. Well they aren’t budding anymore, they are in full bloom. We had another incident today. The only difference this time was that none of the usual excuses are going to work. The usual excuses include, but are not limited to:
“Well, he gets like that when he’s tired.”
“He gets like that when he’s hungry.”
“There was a toy involved.”
“He was sitting with me and wanted my undivided attention.”
They’re all craplousy excuses and I know it but I have let it slide because of the emotional content of such a situation. We’ve had the dog for about four years and, by all accounts, he is a member of the family. So when he gets grouchy or territorial and growls or nips at or grazes Cookie with his teeth I have allowed my husband and the rest of my family to make excuses. I have allowed them to talk me out of my conviction that it really just isn’t going to work out with this dog, he is just not the right dog for a family with young children. I know this. And I know that I am just as guilty for my part, for letting them talk me out of what I already know.
Today O-Dog was standing in the middle of the living room, not a toy or food or parent in sight (I was actually about four feet away and behind him so he may not have known I was there). Cookie came up behind him, like she always does, and veeeeeery softly touched his back. She even said, “Nice hands,” which is what we always tell her when she pets a dog. She is such a bruiser when she charges around the house and wrestles with daddy but the sweetest, most gentle little thing with animals. And he snapped. He didn’t even give her a warning growl, he just turned around and snapped. And that is it for me. I’m over it. What if she brought a little friend over to play and the dog bit them? Would the excuse of, “Oh, he was probably just tired,” be acceptable to that kid’s parents? Would it be acceptable to me, if the tables were turned? NO WAY! The bottom line is: he is not right for this family. And keeping him around, punishing him for acting a way that he doesn’t even understand how to change, isn’t fair to anyone involved.
I’m trying to stay logical and keep my emotions out of it but it is a very sad situation. I’ll keep everyone updated but I have to say that I think the day has come for O-Dog to find a new home, one where he will hopefully be happy and calm and always at peace.
So, as I seem to be making a tradition of taking things from my girl Zazazu’s blog…here’s another. I love lists and I love blogging and finding new blogs to read so this fits the bill perfectly. I only wish I had found it last Tuesday instead of Thursday. It would be easier to list 10 places I’d love to travel to. Nonetheless, here we go:
Ten on Tuesday!
This week’s subject - 10 things you are really good at.
1. Planning parties - maybe because my mother never acknowledged the importance of it, but I solemnly swear that my kid(s) will always have kick-ass birthday parties.
2. Making cards - boring, but it’s my only artistic endeavor so far.
3. Walking in heels - never was a problem for me.
4. Spelling.
5. Remembering lines from movies.
6. Getting ketchup out of a glass ketchup bottle.
7. Spotting rabbits - they usually hop along the little bike path that runs through my neighborhood and I am, without fail, always the first to see one.
8. Listening (most of the time).
9. Arranging flowers - I was the valedictorian of my floristry program until I decided that I really didn’t want to make a career of it after all.
10. Taking the plunge when it comes to risky interior decor - I fear no paint - and it always looks spectacular. Everyone says, “I never would have picked a color like this. It’s so beautiful but I would be too scared to even try it.” Maybe that’s their nice way of saying my choices are hideous but I love them.
I am not going to yoga tonight. I usually do go on Mondays. I go and I practice and I suffer through the monotone voice and careless instruction of my least favorite teacher ever. (I’ve complained about her before, as you might recall, and recent clandestine lunches with my other teacher-friends have confirmed that I am not alone in my frustration.) But I go because Monday is the only day that me and my two new-to-yoga girlfriends can all meet up at the same time. Our schedules are completely incompatible but on Mondays at 7:15, by some miracle, we are all available. We barely talk before class and only a little bit afterwards but it’s nice for them to know someone there in the room. Safety in numbers, I guess.
But I’m not going tonight. For a few reasons, some of them good and some…not so much.
1. If you read my previous post (yes, a rare two-post day! yippee for me!) then you will know that there is a hockey game on tonight with the potential to be quite entertaining.
2. I pulled all the dead flowers out of my yard today and got quite a workout in my hamstrings. They need to be stretched out, of course, so I don’t feel sore later but they could also use a rest. On a sidenote, it’s sad when you are such a bad gardener that your flower bed looks better without the dried-up, flaky perennials you couldn’t even keep alive for 6 months. At least I tried (sorta).
3. I didn’t eat great today. I had a soda (yeah, yeah, I know) and chili for lunch. Keep in mind, I don’t eat chili the way other people do. I don’t care for meat or soup so I just use tortilla chips to scoop out the beans and get a little flavor. And generally beans + yoga = home practice. I think everyone can appreciate that.
Which brings me to my final reason. In my opinion the very best one…
4. My home practice. It needs some attention. Much like the aforementioned flowers, I can tell it’s beginning to go a little…dead. That’s the one thing that any seasoned yoga teacher will tell you - “Take care of your personal practice!” We get so intent on teaching that we forget why we started in the first place. And we can’t always rely on going to class because that isn’t always what we need. At least it isn’t for me. I don’t always need someone else to give me attention and instruction. Sometimes I know that I need to give it to myself. I give to my students and I receive from my teachers but there’s a disconnect when it comes to my own self. And that’s a very important connection, if you ask me.
Plus, if I practice at home I can do whatever I want! I don’t have to worry about 20 different individual ability levels and I don’t have to follow along with someone else’s lesson. I can hold the poses for 10 minutes or 10 seconds and no one will have anything to say about it.
I am a hockey fan. Not just a playoffs fan (you know who you are) but an actual, real fan of the game. I watch college hockey, NHL, beer league. I honestly think it’s a cool game, simple as that. And of course I have a team but, just as in politics, it’s sometimes safer to just keep one’s loyalties quiet. So this post isn’t about that.
This post is about something that happened the other night in Game 2 of the Dallas/Detroit series. If you follow hockey you’ll know what I’m referring to. If not, here’s the clip.
So, just to recap for those who don’t know, Osgood is the Detroit Red Wings goaltender. Ribeiro is a goon the player in white who reaches over from behind the net to slash Osgood across the chest/armpit/throat area with his stick. After the game was over. This wasn’t a heat-of-the-moment emotional game play. The buzzer had buzzed and the game was o-v-e-r.
I was watching that game with my husband the other night and I just sat there with my mouth wide open, completely shocked. I kept saying, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this. I can not even believe it.” Never in my life have I witnessed behavior like that…well, okay, I’ve seen similar things in other hockey games but it still takes your breath away to see such blatant and vicious unsportsmanlike behavior.
I understand that it was a very emotional game (nothing compared to how Game 3 will be, though, bet your butt!). And I saw what everyone else saw. Ribeiro comes skating by, Osgood swings the butt end of his stick out and makes a little contact. Dallas fans claim he nearly took Ribeiro’s eye out. I don’t buy that. Osgood’s poke looks pretty halfhearted to me and if he was really trying to inflict harm he would have and Ribeiro would have been down on the ice, not up retaliating. As for Osgood, yeah he probably embellished a bit. Goalies wear a lot of padding, they get hit with frozen chunks of rubber traveling 80+ mph which have to bounce off something other than human ribs and muscles. Even so, a two-handed slash across the upper torso is going to hurt, especially if it gets up into the unprotected throat area. And it’s just bad behavior. Really bad behavior. Drop the gloves and fight if you want. You’ll get the issue settled and the fight will get broken up pretty quickly so there’s little chance of anyone getting seriously injured. The same definitely can’t be said for how Ribeiro chose to handle it.
I’m just pointing all of this out, of course. Just giving my personal reaction. I’m not one of those fans that lives for fights. It’s my least favorite part of the game. But I get it. I know why it happens and why, for the players, it feels like an indispensible element. Most of the time refs are faced with two blank faces, two sets of gloves turned palm-up. The international signal for, “What? Me!?!? But he started it!” It’s a lot like being a mom dealing with two little babies (they’re even wearing very diaper-esque shorts, so it’s not much of a stretch for an analogy). I don’t know how they manage to make those calls and they don’t always get it right. I guess my opinion is just leave it alone for now. I have zero doubt that this situation will play out, one way or another, on the ice tonight.
I was making myself a big whoppin’ sandwich today for lunch (I have concluded, after a week long survey of my daily eating habits that my calorie intake was nowhere near what it should be to effectively counter my calorie expense, therefore sending my body into starvation mode and - believe it or not - causing me to store up the food I ate as fat) when the doorbell rang. This was the second time it rang today, the first being some LDS ladies that I can’t bring myself to be honest with. I take their literature and thank them for stopping by, guaranteeing myself another visit in a month or so and even more literature that I never have any intention of reading. So I wasn’t really excited about this ding-dong and meandered my way to the door.
I opened it and there was a nice, long box on the step. You know what that means. Flowers. The GOOD flowers. The ones that come direct from the grower with stems that you can make whatever length you like and arrange in the vase you want to, not the one that a mass-producing florist selected based on price rather than style. I was thrilled!
But who sent them? I wondered. Who would be sending me flowers - and, more importantly - the GOOD ones? Not my mom. She certainly knows how I like to receive flowers (and how picky I am about it) but I had already gotten a Mother’s Day gift from her. Not my husband. He told me that he actually searched around for a lotus plant to give me but no one in our area carries them so he went to plan B. And plan B wouldn’t be more flowers, or else why would he even have told me about plan A?
I was shocked - SHOCKED - when I opened the box and read the card inside. They were from my dad. The same dad that I recently got into a heated argument over parenting styles with. The same dad that lives about 10 miles away but only sees me (and his granddaughter) once every two months. The same dad who I assumed, until today of course, wouldn’t know the GOOD flowers from a pile of weeds.
I have to say, the element of surprise automatically qualifies this as one of my favorite Mother’s Day gifts so far.
My lovely friend Maria just sent me the almost-final draft of my spankin’ new business card. It is spectacular. The one little bit of information left to include on the card? My website. Like my really-real businessy website. As many of you probably know, WordPress has this fancy feature that lets you register your own domain name and then redirect it to a bloggy thing. It’s easy (for folks like me who don’t want to deal with coding or any of that nonsense) and cheap ($15 a year as opposed to $100-ish) so, all in all, a very appealing option for a startup like myself. And I can still have a blog page - yippee!
The downside is this: once I make it a personal business thing my anonymity goes right out the window. Now, I don’t think I have a lot of freaks and weirdos reading this blog (aside from the few who wander in on google searches for “braless yoga” and things of that nature) but there are things you say when no one knows your name and where you live…and things you don’t. And I might be underestimating myself but I really don’t feel as though I have the time to manage two blogs. And since this account is linked to my very favorite email address, the one that will be printed on my business cards, I kind of need this space.
So what do I do? Just delete this blog? Should I compile a list of email addresses from all my friendly readers and let them know when my “real” website is launched? Or at least the ones I would trust not to stalk me. Or should I just suck it up and make a totally new account with a different email address and try my very hardest to run both sites at the same time? Hmm…what to do? what to do?
Alright, it really isn’t that dark. Not that deep, either. But it’s something that I don’t go around blabbling about to the “yoga crowd.” I can’t say exactly why I play so close to the vest on this one. I guess I don’t want to plant the seed in the minds of any potential clients or employers. I wouldn’t want anyone to see it as a handicap or presume that my teaching ability would be sub-par because of it.
I have rheumatoid arthritis.
I may have mentioned it on here before but I can’t remember. It’s pretty mild, not crippling for me like it can be for some people. It’s more of a nuisance. But honestly I haven’t had any problems for a while, aside from the occasional crampy pain it’s been mostly a non issue. Until the last couple of weeks. Last Friday my husband actually had to stay home from work because my shoulder was all inflamed and I couldn’t lift Cookie. I couldn’t even lift a toothbrush. And here it is, a week later, and my other shoulder is bothering me. This time I let him go to work. I can deal with limited mobility in my left arm more easily than in my right for some reason.
A rheumatologist prescribed some medication for me last year, which I politely declined to take. The side effects included blindness (I would have had to visit an ophthalmologist every three months) and birth defects (I would have had to stop taking it at least six months before becoming pregnant….like most people know six months in advance…whatever). I’ve opted for aspirin and heating pads and positive thoughts but it appears that a change in treatment is called for right now.
So it’s on to acupuncture for me! Yikes. Anyone tried it? Any advice?
That might even seem like a lot to some people but here in Florida, in our three-person household, in March and with the price going up, up, up… that’s a good bill. Looks like I can scratch another thing off my 101/1001 list (#13). Yippee!
I know I’ve been a little absent lately. Sorry about that!
The truth is, I’m just doing too much at once. Plain and simple. Doing the mom stuff, the teacher training student stuff, teaching a few “practice classes” a week to my in-laws and trying to get things organized for myself business-wise so that when my registration is finally complete I can stand up and say I am a real-live yoga teacher.
I’m lucky to have talented and generous people around me, though, that are helping make it all possible. Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with a friend, an artist that I met by chance and have commissioned several times since, to work on my business card layout. It will of course be temporary, I will have a lot of information to add to them in June, but I’d like to have something for the meantime. I’ve already missed a couple of networking opportunities because I didn’t have a business card handy. So I figure it’s better to print some at home now and then get the professional ones done later than to have nothing at all now. I also have a friend who works as a flash web developer (I’m not sure if that’s his official title but fortunately he doesn’t read this blog so he’ll never know I got it wrong) who is going to be designing a beautiful website for me. He’ll be working off of the style that Maria doodles up for my business cards so it will all coordinate. The best thing is - they’re both working for practically free! Bartering for yoga lessons! I love it.
So I know it’s lame to say “I’ve been busy” but, luckily, I have.
I’ve been using a Gaiam that I bought on the cheap from Target when I started taking classes at a gym a few years ago. Before that I had always gone to a studio where I could borrow a mat and I witnessed them being cleaned with my own two eyes. But I wasn’t going to take my chances at a gym. The problem with most yoga mats is that they are 68″ long. My body is 69.” I made do, like lots of tall people, but it did get annoying. Plus the mat wasn’t as sticky as I would have liked, it was kind of a funky color (unimportant, I know, but still…) and it was really thick. Too thick sometimes.
So now I’ve “upgraded.” Just to a Hugger Mugger, so not ultra fancy or anything but it’s a step up for me. I’ve been stalking some websites for sales and finally saw the opportunity to get a 74″ one in emerald green at a price I could certainly deal with. As soon as it arrived I tore it open and rolled it out onto the floor. It just kept rolling and rolling and rolling. It’s HUGE! I measured and it’s actually 77″ so I don’t know if the package was labeled wrong or what but it’s okay with me. I can still use the Gaiam when I teach my husband, he needs the extra space more than I do, but I can’t wait to go to class tonight and have my whole body on the mat for the first time ever!
