Life Is a Rollercoaster

Today was a conglomeration of, well, stuff. Not any of the extremes of good or bad, just different. For starters, I went into work for a while, and I decided to take the dogs with me. Ali has been having a rough time for several days now, and I didn’t want to leave him at home. When he’s upset, he chews things up. It’s usually not anything important, just things like cardboard boxes, but first of all, it is always a mess to clean up, and secondly, I worry that he might one day he might chew up something important or be hurt.

I should explain that for the first four or five years of his life, there was no problem. Then something happened which brought some changes in him that can’t be explained. We (my hub and I) were out of town, the house/dog sitter went to a ball game, and a thunderstorm broke while she was gone. The sitter was stunned when she returned home to find that Ali had opened a cabinet door and had crawled through pots and pans, pushing some of them out on the floor, continued on to the cabinet space with bottles of coffee flavorings and cooking liquors, pushing them out onto the floor, but fortunately not breaking them. He was a shaking, hysterical mess! The eight or ten years since that time he has required special attention during thunderstorms.

When we moved into this home, he began to settle down. He still didn’t like storms, but he was no longer freaking every time. He wanted to be near me, and when a roll of thunder came, he rolled his eyes toward the sky nervously, but he didn’t hide, shake, and importantly, he wasn’t chewing on things. I tried to schedule myself to be here when storms were threatening. It has been wonderful to see him more normal.

Then 10 days ago or thereabouts, he suddenly began to freak about thunderstorms again. It still hasn’t been as bad as it was in the past, but the honeymoon is over. He’s been more clingy and nervous, and it isn’t just around storms. When he hears some noises, even every day ones, he behaves the same way as he does during storms. I think it is exacerbated by the fact that he is becoming senile. It is becoming increasingly worse, and the vet has given us a new medication to hopefully help it. With luck, we’ll see some improvement in the next couple weeks. I’ve equated his behaviors to the paranoid stage of Alzheimer’s. If you’ve been around someone going through that awful illness, you know what I mean. I watched my gentle, intelligent mother shake with fear of us all being “killed in the crossfire” of “CIA and drug dealers” as she perceived them surrounding the house in some sort of war. This is what it seems Ali is going through, too.

So, anyway, I took them along. I’d thought that if it went well, I could take them, at least occasionally, with I go in, as they are good with people, and I though it might be a good break for them.

It wasn’t a stormy day. It was sunny and pretty out. The weather forecast was for occasional showers late in the day, and possibly some thunder storms this evening. Well, Ali did fairly well. He and China both were happy to greet all the visitors (another story about that later). But after a while, he began to be very restless, whining and pacing, pulling toward the door, etc. It was time for me to go, and I stopped quickly at the grocery for a couple things.

Then we came home. Just as we got here, it began raining. And Ali spent the rest of the day glued to me, a nervous wreck ... for good reason. It has rained, hailed, blown since about 4:30. It is now 10:30, and it has finally stopped. Or at least I think so. Poor Bubba is resting now. Or perhaps he is passed out! I hope we have found in this medication something to give my poor boy some relief from this awful affliction.

Officially, we have received just over 0.5 inch of rain today. My rain gauge, however, says that I’ve had over 1.5 at my house! Since 4:30, just six hours! Yep, this is why everything is so green!

One of the items I picked up at the store was a newspaper. I’ve been reading it this evening, and I got a pleasant surprise. All the work I’ve been busting my butt over during the past week was rewarded, because when I got to the section for which I had written a significant amount of text and took pictures of several exhibits at the gallery, the story was there. I didn’t know when it would run, and I was eager to see how the information had come together in their hands. They had told me that they wanted some information about the gallery for an article in the fine arts section and pictures to complement the facts. I did so, writing from my own point of view. Guess what? They published the whole story, just as I wrote it! I was stunned! Pleased, but stunned! Not only that, but they actually gave me credit for the article. Not just a line saying that I supplied information, but my name is at the top of the page. I am floored! Yeah, that makes all the earlier headaches worth while.

Happy weekend, all!