Chaos. That’s the theme of the past 72 hours. Complete and utter chaos.
It started innocently enough with a shift at the low-cost vaccination clinic here in town, something I do monthly, usually with very little to report. I arrived to find the first patient of the day, the most darling little pit puppy, with her ears taped, having recently undergone her cropping surgery. Ugh. Plus the guy was lifting her front paws off the ground by pulling up on her collar because he didn’t want her to greet the other dogs. “She’s ornery,” he said of the pup, whose tail was wagging so hard, by the way, I thought she might take off. Follow that up with a dog escaping from her (BROKEN) collar across the parking lot, a lady hoisting her dog by his scruff to toss him in the backseat of her car, and a couple other train wrecks that were so bad I’m trying to block them from my mind… and there you have my Saturday. By the time I got home, I wanted to just sit down and have a good cry, but the woman who organizes the clinic kept making one salient point: For all the things they might not be doing right with their animals, at the least they’re protecting them with vaccinations.
Then there was the time change. Under normal circumstances, it might not have been so bad. But in this instance, John left for his field site in Georgia at 5 am on Sunday. Which means he was up at 4 am, which only the day before was 3 am. The dogs were up and confused, I was up and confused, John was completely exhausted.
I spent yesterday trying little things to help the boys adjust to the time – adjusting their feeding and walking times by one hour so that instead of getting fed at 5:30, they now get fed at 6:30, etc. – though all the wanted to do the whole day was sleep. Today they’ve basically woken up to eat breakfast. I guess it’ll take another day or two to catch up from the Saturday/Sunday chaos and the lost hour.
We’ll get there.
Is your dog affected by DST? What steps do you take to help your pup adjust?
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