Small Price to Pay

Wow, it’s been a while.  I don’t think I wrote a single blog last month.  My life has been a bit crazy as of late.  And while I’m still busy, it’s now at least seeming to narrow down to only being busy with a few things instead of a bunch of things at the same time. 

So here I am.  I’m making enough to get by, and maybe even save a bit for a vacation or something.  My life has calmed down, I’m not as stressed out, and I’m not being pulled in quite as many directions at once as I was a month ago.  So why am I still sleep deprived?

A lot of you know me as “the guy that works/ed with dogs”.  I worked at the SPCA for four years, and I’ll never live it down.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the animals, and I’m proud that I worked there.  It was a great experience, and a miserable one, but overall I’m happy I did it.  And I still love animals and I love working with them.  But I haven’t had many opportunities to do so since I left the SPCA.  Sure I volunteered for a while, but mostly it just annoyed me, and I didn’t like having to devote a huge chunk of my time to doing solely that.

A random Leonberger on a couch.

So now we approach the reason that I’m sleep deprived.  I’ve recently (three days now) started fostering a dog for a group called Canine Rehabilitation Center and Sanctuary (CRCS)http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canine-Rehabilitation-Center-and-Sanctuary/241882369156854.  Her name is Padme, and she’s a seven month old Leonberger.  I haven’t had a puppy that I’ve had to deal with all day, or train in years.  It’s exhausting!

Padme at four months old.

She won’t sleep at night, because she’s apparently nocturnal.  The clock strikes 10:00 pm and she thinks it’s play-time.  After the first day of having her in the house, Levi got so worn out that he’s barely moved since.  Hell, I had to call in reinforcements; I had my friend Amy bring her foster dog, Zeus (a one year old pit bull) over to play.  Zeus and Padme ran and played for 5 hours straight, and she still didn’t sleep through the night. 

Taking care of puppy is not easy (let alone one that is nearly 70lbs. and not even close to full grown yet), I can’t imagine how difficult kids would be.  Add on to it all the fact that she needs serious socialization with people (she’s very timid with people, but great with dogs), and that she has no housetraining whatsoever, and you get a cocktail that leaves me wide awake at night just wishing she would shut up, or go pee, or both, so that I could go to bed.

Padme and Zeus playing tug of war in the backyard.

Still, I’ve been told that what I’m doing; taking her off “death row”, socializing her, training her, and giving her a second chance, is a good thing.  So I suppose sleep deprivation, and running out of paper towels because she won’t stop peeing on the hardwood floor, are small prices to pay for doing a good thing.  And I know that they’re a small price to pay for getting to work with animals again.