omg omg OMG OH MY GOD...

 Sitting in a library, something I don't do often enough, partly because the closest library to where I live is small, claustrophobic, yet has big windows that sit on a busy noisy street (which also let in TOO much light)... all these aspects make me uncomfortable... but here I am inside a library 10 miles away from home, and it's cavernous in comparison to my city library... i can find corners to hide in where no light of day reminds me of how hot it is outside... 

So I came in here just to kill an hour of time... and what do I do but browse the New Book section, not really intending to find anything of much interest... I pick up a novel by Christopher Golden (a prolific YA author in his early days - I first read a bit of Buffy-fiction that he wrote over a decade ago...) with a blurb on the cover by Stephen King, saying "...this story will take you on a trip that will scare the hell out of you... I LOVED IT...", so I picked it up and just 5 pages into it, I'm hooked... I still have 45 minutes to kill so I look at other books on the New Books shelf and find 3 other titles that bite me... I do the same, flip thru the pages and find enough intriguing paragraphs to make me want to read them in whole. I WILL BRING THESE HOME TODAY....

One of the books talked about how social media is a depository where people share mainly their success stories. How droll is that?? I'm guilty of falling into that trap too.... and frankly, I'm kind of sick of it. So I'm going to write a paragraph or two in this entry about a recent failure story I've experienced... but first, I want to blab a little bit more about how contagious the energy of thinking/writing/reading is in this place... I THINK I NEED TO START MAKING REGULAR VISITS TO THIS LIBRARY, AGAIN. I used to come here quite frequently with my mom, she loved this library and we'd spend hours and hours here...

Okay, briefly the failure story I want to share...

This past weekend I pet sit for a couple that I was recommended to by an old friend/recent client. This friend told her friend that I was the best pet sitter she had ever hired... (more or less)... This new client lived in one of the largest, most elaborate homes I've ever worked in... they have 3 dogs and a cat. When we did our walk-thru interview.. I got the impression that the owners were rather lackadaisical about the instructions they were giving me... so when I came on the job, I carried out my expected duties somewhat lackadaisically too... One of the things I was told was about the big dog that likes to swim in the large swimming pool in the backyard. They said, "Jackson likes to show off for visitors and swim in the pool. He doesn't do that when we are at home alone with him tho..." So the message I got was that it was okay to let this dog do this. They also said that their prized competitive dog does something we don't approve of when Jackson swims... it races around the pool incessantly, barking... but they gave me no instructions on how to stop this dog from doing this. I think they thought that Jackson would not stay in the pool very long and that the chaser-dog would calm down quickly. Well, once I was there alone with all the dogs, Jackson spent easily an hour at a time in the water, and the chaser dog ran laps around the pool the entire time... I could not get Jackson out of the pool, nor could I stop the chaser dog from running. Finally, when Jackson expended all of his energy he came out of the pool and the chaser stopped running.

I don't think the owners had any realistic idea of how bad this behavior was. When they were on their way home they told me, "Oh! You need to take Jackson outside to the front of the house, ALONE, so that he won't get into the pool." Thanks for telling me that during the walk-thru interview, thanks a LOT.

Another thing they did not warn me about was that their cat MIGHT try to sneak outdoors if any door is left open unwatched... so this indeed happened too. I never saw the cat go out the door that was left unattended for about 45 seconds. Well, when they got home to find that the chaser dog had injured it's paw from the rampant running, and that the cat was nowhere to be found inside the house, they had a meltdown... they shared some of their raw emotions with me, and the way it feels now, they will not be calling me for any new assignments, BUT, they might... now that I know exactly how to deal with these animals I have insights that a new sitter might really struggle getting to learn... I'm just going to be patient and let them cool down and make up their own minds...

Okaaay, gonna head out now and go home with this stack of new books that I want to dive deeply into!! Ill be back here sooooon. The one thing I've got to wrestle with is the cost of gas to drive all the way up here... I think it'll be worth it tho!!