2008-04-02
As with last spring, I am tired and stressed during the month of March and April. Eek. Budget season. Eek. Stressful job environment. Eek. Will I be able to get all my other school work done in the midst of the extreme budget madness?
Furthermore, can I accept that the proposed budget funds all kinds of stuff whilst slashing the library budget. What is that about? A test of my loyalties, I think some days, a secret test that my boss is enacting to see what will cause my hackles to rise.
And truly I am nearly done with my master's degree in library and information science, so it might not be a bad time to fly the coop, as it were, but then we all start in on the rottenness of the economy, and how are we to buy houses when it stinks like this, and why should we buy houses in connecticut when even the cheap ones require the kind of salaries that three of me are making.
But what is nice, despite all this, is that my dog is in the habit of barking at all other dogs, but the other day she met two of her own, two dappled doxies whose owners literally stopped the car to chat with Jon & I, she did not bark once. She was remarkably calm in the face of fellow hounds. The best part of the whole conversation was 3/4 in when the woman said, in a kind of stage-whisper "does she pee inside?" and it was as though the stage-whisper pee floodgates had opened, and we all started cackling uncomfortably, and Jon said, "I think if you google daschunds and peeing, you get 8 million hits." and she proceeded to tell us that her husband & her had to install hardwoods, and even that didn't quite do the trick, they now have shower curtains duct taped to a particular section of the floor that her dogs frequent. When traffic came up behind her we had to leave, but then Jon was speculating that daschund owners are singlehandedly supporting the hardwood floor industry, and that there should be a daschund brand of hardwood floors marketed specifically to owners with extra strong surfaces that resist the piddles of weak-willed girl dogs and territorial little rexes. I do sometimes wonder if we are quite hound-crazy enough to be owners, but then we think of getting more of them, and then we think maybe we are crazy enough. The other highlight was when we told the woman we had thought of getting another and she said, "Oh, they're A LOT OF WORK" and of course, we realized later, by work she meant a lot of pee. God bless their little bladders. Jon had previously speculated that the minis (which the two dappleds were) would not have a peeing problem because their brains are closer to their bladders (this being his theory on why our girl can't help herself with the squirting) but alas, it is not so. I like to think of them as like the dinosaurs that needed two brains, one to operate the front of the body and one to operate tha back end...they are just missing the back end brain.