Haunted Raffle Over!

The Haunted Sketchbook Raffle has ended!

I spent today moving. Drove up to St. Paul and packed what little remained of my stuff and the bathroom/kitchen supplies that hadn't been grabbed before. I even grabbed the thirteen dollar parmesan cheese Seebs loves to occasionally place spaghetti noodles beneath. It was one of the few foods from the fridge that could be saved.

We kind of abandoned everything in there during the move and the smell gives this fact away. There is a half-full gallon jug of milk that probably won't slosh if you shake it (even more terrifying: it might taste okay due to the power of the atom).

My favorite tupperware container was full of sliced cabbage that stank up the entire neighborhood when I dumped it out. I found the word CROATOAN carved into some suspiciously furry rotisserie chicken just before I shut the door and began crying hysterically on the kitchen floor. Adventures!

When I got back home, I stuck my hand down the side of the easy chair in the living room to see if my iPod had slipped into it... and pulled out my missing camera! The crazy thing is, I had checked there quite early in the search and found nothing. All the files are intact and everything still works. I had to break the news to the formerly missing camera that, in my grief, I had found another to love. She took it pretty well for a piece of sensitive photography equipment that's just spent four weeks lodged under somebody's ass.

The other night I walked to the gym, hooked my dog to the front door, and worked out to my little heart's content with no one around to bother me. It was a long long walk along a busy highway, but this was pretty late at night.

I got the Captain a Gentle Leader headcollar with the last of my money. He hates it like the fires of hades, but I've never had more compliant and docile behavior out of a dog.

Within five minutes of leaving the house with the Captain in his headcollar, he was my bitch. This after three months of yanking his leash and darting into traffic and generally ignoring my every attempt to make him walk nice. I tried everything--treats, reinforcement with praise, commands, tugs on the leash, getting a different leash with variable lengths.

I did the thing where you stop every time the dog tries to pull (to remove the reward and teach him that pulling is pointless). No dice. I would refuse to move until he stopped acting out, and move on only to have it happen again five seconds later, then again and again and again for the next thirty minutes.

I even put a choke chain on him. That sort of slowed him down a bit and stopped him dashing into the street, but he was still borking my wrists up by yanking on them every time we left the house. If he saw a squirrel or a bird, forget the chain, it'd be a nonstop tug of war the entire way home because he was set on going back.

The worst part was stubbornly walking along with the leash at a set length while he dangled at my side. Was the leash too short? No, he just preferred to choke himself every two seconds rather than walk with me. Now, I'm all for a battle of the wills (because I always win those), but I know futility when I see it. So, the headcollar. At 25 bucks it was kind of a pricey experiment, but I was pretty much out of options and I'd read great stuff about the results. And oh my fucking god, it worked like a charm.

When he's not attempting to slide across the countryside on his face to get the damn thing off, he is walking calmly by my side with a loose leash. He still hasn't accepted this new restraint on his lifestyle, so left to his own devices he tends to paw at it frantically and then slump to the floor in a fog of ennui so complete he may die at any moment. But I just laugh. Oh, how I laugh.

Best of all, he's mellower. He barely notices the cars and trucks that used to send him bolting. My wrists feel amazing because all it takes is one short, mild pull and the little furry son of a bitch is doing EXACTLY what he's supposed to do, and that boils down to good times for him, because dogs LIVE to please their pack leaders and he's getting the idea that his current behavior is precisely what I want out of him.

I'm the one with the thumbs, baby. Do not fuck with me.