Taking a list and a stream of conciousness and writing

I think it’s going to be an average day for me.  It’s a bit hard to see the future, even just a couple of hours away, but going from past experience, I will be unsurprised if the day goes exactly as all the others have since I moved here.

I’m caring for a puppy right now.  She belongs to my roommate, or my roommate belongs to her, however you want to look at it.  She came to live with us when she was about eight weeks old.  I’d forgotten how tiny they are at that age.  And she’s getting bigger so fast.  Today was the first day that she refused to go through her little puppy gate – I guess that makes it not average after all.  We have to block of parts of the house to keep an eye on her, but the blockade in the kitchen has a puppy gate that we can use to move her to different parts of the house.  Coming out of her bedroom today, she gave me a look that quite clearly said, “I want to be where you’re asking me to go, but I can’t do this.  I’ve tried, and I don’t fit anymore.  I’m confused; I’ve always been able to do this before.”  I guess she’s growing up.  She doesn’t understand that, though, and it’s interesting to watch.

She loves snow, though.  Which is good, because we have plenty of it right now.  It’s blowing and snowing outside.  Having just moved north (far north, to me), I’m surprised that I can stand outside right now and honestly say, “It’s not that bad out.”  The snow is definitely piling up, and I think I shoveled snow for the first time in my entire life yesterday (and the second this morning), but it’s not terribly cold or windy.  I’ve seen some gusts, though, that make me glad I’m inside.  They also make me wish I had a fireplace.  I hold tight to that old, romantic vision of a fireplace, a book and a cup of hot chocolate.  Instead, I have a puppy, a cupppa tea, and a laptop that runs very warm.  It’s not the same, but it certainly works for me.

The puppy has finally settled down to chew on her bone.  I’m thankful for this, as she was driving me batty earlier with her pacing around.  It’s only been recently that she’s housebroken enough that I can trust her to signal me when she wants to go outside.  Unfortunately, now that it’s snowing, she wants to go outside all the time.  I can’t seem to explain to her that it’s better to be inside.  But as the leader of the pack, I get to make these decisions.  Most of the time.  I don’t want her having any accidents, of course.

And, of course, as I’m typing the above, she gets up and starts pacing around again.  I know she doesn’t need to pee, she just did.  She just wants more space to roam.  I can’t blame her for that, I always want more space.  But she isn’t so well mannered yet that she can have the run of the house.  I tried giving her more freedom a few days ago, and while she had no accidents, she did manage to start on the destruction of one of our welcome mats.  That was the end of the extra freedom.  As she grows up, she can have more.  For right now, though, if I let her have the space she wants, I think she’d either go for the mat again, or try to eat my roommate’s dying mint plants.

She certainly has a thing for plants.  My roommate had to move two of our outdoor potted plants because the puppy would run by them and grab and eat a hunk every time she went outside.  Of course, this was complicated by the fact that both pots were frozen to the ground.  We had to wait for a warm snap to get them moved, and we spent a great deal of the interim shouting, “No!”

The problem is that this puppy is one of the most food motivated puppies I’ve ever met, and given how food motivated most puppies are, that’s saying something.  We can get her to do almost anything for food, but she also comes to expect it.  And we couldn’t always prevent her from swallowing a hunk of plant, so she was being rewarded every time she stole a piece, despite our attempts to make it undesirable.  I’m glad the warm snap came, but I’m concerned we’re not finding a way to make her leave plants alone.  Perhaps when it’s not icy out we can move the plants back, and take her out leashed and on a corrective collar.  A few quick leash pops, and I think we’ll get it through to her.  She’s very sweet, mellow, and eager to please (even without food), so I expect we’ll find a way to communicate with her.  It’s just a matter now of getting her to want to please us more than she wants food.  With this puppy, that might be a challenge, but at least she does have an innate desire to please.  I’ve met puppies that don’t, and it’s much more difficult.

Well, she went pacing around again, and when I finally let her outside, I watched the window panes.  I’ve never before lived in a place where frost builds up on the windows.  I feel as if I understand some of my English class readings better now.  Somehow, I find that frost cozy looking – perhaps because it’s not something I used to ever have.  Watching it all slowly melt, though, was incredibly fascinating as well.  The little rivulets of water streaming around, slipping this way and that, until meeting up with another droplet, and suddenly speeding up, until so many have joined together that they are careening for the ground.  It’s nifty to watch, but not so nifty to consider the consequences of all that ice building up right behind my back door.  I’ll just have to make sure that I keep shoveling as needed.  I’m not as good at is as my roommate, but I think my efforts help.

This work has been both longer and more “stream of consciousness” than I expected it to be.  I hope when I put it up for review by random strangers on the Internet, it won’t be too panned for those qualities.  On the other hand, it may simply depend on the first comment it gets.  There’s occasionally a herd mentality on the ‘net, and it can result in everyone saying roughly the same thing.  In effect, if one person says, “Whoa, this is good”, than the work is deemed good – whether it deserves it or not.  Same for, “Whoa, this is crap.”

Of course, the most likely thing is that it will garner no comments at all.  The other aspect of that herd mentality is that we all want to put something up, and we all want feedback (though some of us only want it if it’s positive), but then there’s too much to take in.  And we rarely take the time to scout out other works.  Thing-a-day should help with that, by bringing together a great different number of creative thoughts and works in one space, but even that is so large that it is hard to take it all in.  I know that before I sat down to do my “thing”, I read through much of the current front page, but I wasn’t mentally able to go on to everything else that was posted.

I guess it’s just another sign that information, in whatever form, is flowing at us far faster than we can process it these days.  I wonder what that means for us, and where we will take it.