Forgotten Chicago ephemera. [link]

Freakouts can be productive. Mine this past fall finally got my superiors to ease off on the waterfall of new duties I'm not suited for and hire a bunch of freelance help, and now I'm (busily) working on stuff I actually know how to do and am good at.

Yeah, it wasn't a severe freakout, but I do hope my boss now focuses more on getting someone hired as my counterpart (the position has been vacant since the summer). I've been head-hunted for several similar jobs since I've been here, so there definitely is a community of people doing this work, so I don't know what's taking so long, other than inaction. And now the job's been open so long it looks bad. Oy vay.

we are dog sitting for an indefinite amount of time and I am chicken shit to tell my parents. The dog, Maya, is a black lab mix, less than 2 years old and has been living in an apartment. She will be an outside and mudroom only dog here and on day one seems to be IN LOVE with the yard, but not so keen on being left alone. Thus far she does not bark or dig.

One of her moms is the friend who has been in the hospital and was diagnosed with LAM [link] They have 2 cats, 2 dogs and a parrot in the apartment. They also have an 11 year old daughter. It is simply way too much. Maya is the biggest of the animals and as a puppy she has lots of energy. They are giving the parrot away, but I said I would keep Maya for them since I have the space and they come visit often.

we are dog sitting for an indefinite amount of time and I am chicken shit to tell my parents.

Why scared to tell your folks?

They think I take on to much.

relying on a logical fallacy

My favorite doctor has a graph in his office proving the correlation of the increased sales of McDonald's hamburgers and the decrease in heart attack fatalities. Love him.

Freakouts can be productive.

Must be going around. Mine have been directed at my overly demanding and unreasonable customers. Must have scared them because they have backed the hell off, paid their bills, etc. Perhaps I should be a bitch more often.

They think I take on to much.

They might be right, but it's a good thing to do anyway. Lab mixes can be a handful. Perhaps Mac could teach her tricks? If she can catch a ball, she can catch a frisbee...

I just got off a conference call with 20+ people on it, and someone put the call on hold and walked away. Which meant that we got to listen to the moderator trying to hold a conversation over Souza marches for the last ten minutes. (Then I left.)

Note to universe: NEVER PUT A CONFERENCE CALL ON HOLD.

She likes to run and she will fetch (the owner did not know that she would bring things back and drop them, but she did with me after 2 rounds). She knows "sit" and "leave it" and understand "stay" but will not "sit and stay". She will go out of the mudroom when I tell her, but clearly reluctantly. I am getting some outdoor toys (balls and frisbees) as well as a strong chew since they did not have any of those for her. She destroys pillows and chews fabric, so they do not have a cushion of any kind in her crate. She is crate trained for night.

She destroys pillows and chews fabric, so they do not have a cushion of any kind in her crate.

This may be unfixable, but if she has enough other things to chew, she may stop that. The key is to replace the thing she shouldn't chew with the thing she should, and keep doing it, so she learns what's acceptable and what isn't. Which I admit is hard to do (certainly my sister's 9-mo-old puppy hasn't yet learned).

But she can certainly learn to "stay" with some work.

Can she walk on a leash?

Aww, puppy. That is a lot to take on, but good for you.

So, phone fear? Is awesome when someone schedules a call for you, and then the wrong phone rings, which means it was routed over to your husband who never answers his phone. So now I can't tell if it was them or not, so I don't know if I should call them back or not. It's to schedule a convention space, so timing matters.