Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

So I used my mother's computer until I felt sleepy enough to try to actually sleep, then took my meds and headed for the sofabed. Unfortunately I haven't been able to actually sleep yet, due to assorted fibromyalgia pains.). Caveat: I get rambly and longwinded (and overuse parentheses) when I'm overtired. But this really is a "quiet hours of the morning" kind of entry, and for a venting scribble, I'm not going to put it aside to carefully edit (more like rewrite) later. That's not an excuse, just a warning that this might not be my most coherent essay.

When I got up from the sofabed (after Mom woke up to start her day, I discovered that the smaller of the two small dogs here is very insistent about licking my toes. (Until then I'd been wearing shoes around her.) When I try to pull away, she thinks it's a game: "catch the foot". She's already bruised my toes once with her teeth. (No skin damage; but a surprisingly solid blow given the tiny size of her head. And no, I'm not trying to find a clever way to say that I kicked her: I was pulling my foot away at the time.) I caught myself wishing Perrine were here to put the dog in her place the way she explained the rules to anniemal's standard poodle. (Then again, although this dog is a tiny fraction of the poodle size-wise, she wasn't raised by cats the way the poodle was, and might take more convincing to learn that The Cat Is In Charge. I'm not sure whether it'd turn into an actual fight or not. What I fantasized about was having Perrine simply tell the dog to behave, beastie to beastie, on strength of personality alone, no claw or tooth contact.)

Saying, "Don't do that" doesn't work. Saying, "No." doesn't work. Hissing doesn't work. Growling sort of works if I hit a low enough pitch, but then she barks at me as though I'm an intruder (for a few minutes, until someone else distracts here). And shouting "No!" really forcefully, I fear would wake all the sleeping people in the house.

I feel like speaking Cat is just a whole lot easier than Dog. Is it, or am I imagining that because of my greater familiarity with Cat? It certainly seems as though, "Don't Do That!" is much less ambiguous to cats. They may or may not obey, but they get it right away. (Though admittedly the poodle-human conversation:

"Awoour?"
"Do you need to go out?"
"[dramatic head-toss in direction of door] Aroogh"

Times like this reinforce my attitude that "although there are individual dogs I really like (and not too many I actively dislike), I'm a cat person and not a dog person." (Yes, I know that there are folks who are both -- though in my experience many of them turn out to be "animals in general" people, not specifically cat+dog people. It's possible (not sure how likely) that someday I'll learn enough Dog and gain enough appreciation for dogness to be a dog person as well as a cat person. But at least in the past and present tenses, I am not a dog person. I do identify as a bird person (okay, parrot family, starting with parakeets) but I'm really rusty at dealing with birds.)

Come to think of it, my automatic way of attempting to communicate with a new critter is to start off speaking Cat and adjust based in the animal's reactions to that, unless I stop to think about what I'm doing first.

Oh, and don't bother explaining to me that this dog's behaviour reflects insufficient or improper training. (I get that bit.) Unless you have suggestions for ways I can help that training along despite only seeing her once every couple of months, and can explain those suggestions to someone whose fluency in dogspeak amounts to a crude catdog pidgin and doesn't grok the body-language part of it (watching or acting) yet. (Not that I really want to be training her, since I could be spending my attention on other things and I'm not responsible for her; but if it makes her less annoying ...)

Time to try for sleep again. Wish me luck.