dogs behaving badly

'midnight barking' - oil pastels

Generally speaking, I am noticing how much better I am sleeping these days, which I attribute to my continued daily meditation practice, and generally being more relaxed as a result. I used to wake up around 4am most nights, and have real trouble getting back to sleep, so that I was chronically overtired. One day last week, by contrast, I overslept until 6.50 am and missed my PT session (personal training). And Friday night I had a particularly good sleep as well.

Last night, however, the two dogs next door started barking loudly, at anything that made a sound, from about 10.30pm onwards, for over an hour. I was already drifting off when this started, but it kept me awake until midnight. At one point I even went outside and asked them nicely to be quiet, which worked for about 15 minutes. Then something else bothered them.

This morning, feeling tired and grumpy, I didn't open the door for our dog, Jess, when she was whining to go out. (I had had enough of listening to dogs!). So she weed on the carpet.  The carpet is now spread out on the grass in the backyard drying and hopefully losing its odour.

Of course, when children misbehave we commonly blame the parents. Perhaps this also applies to pets. The owners of the next door dogs appear to have gone away for the weekend and forgotten they have pets. In both these cases, the dog owners are clearly to blame for the animals poor behaviour!

I have just completed another batch of marking, Yay! And its only the middle of Sunday.

Now I am going to cook some food (possibly boeuf bourgignon) so we have something good to eat during the week, when we are too tired to cook. Still waiting for Jamie's 30 minute meals to arrive from Book Club. And how dare Channel 10 take his Food Revolution off tv on Friday night for OPRAH's last show?? As if having state of origin this week wasn't enough to annoy me.

Thinking about my last post, and about a talk I heard yesterday (Ted X talks from Sydney, broadcast on Radio National) on boredom, by anthropologist Genevieve Bell, led me to reconsider. We are losing the capacity to be bored, she suggested. Boredom, aka downtime, is good. I believe I am rarely bored. But if I was doing 'boring' domestic jobs more mindfully, and being less goal oriented, I would probably appreciate them more.

More later.