“Remoted” Workday 170 / Day 253 (Tuesday)

The pressure has been building. The 4:00 am harsh and barky awakening from Moose to go pee seems to clearly be the new norm. Yes, it’s infinitely better than him peeing in the house, and yes, he has a condition that makes him need to pee more often, so the six-hour stretch I get between bed and 4:00 am is actually pretty amazing. My brain knows this. But at that hour I’m tired and at this time of year it’s cold out.

When Moose first came out of the shelter, he didn’t vocalize a peep for a couple months. It was both amazing and unnerving, and I wondered if his vocal chords had been altered. One day, he found his voice, and basically hasn’t stopped using it since. Some of the barking is predictable and like clockwork. He barks to wake me up, which generally isn’t bad when it is actually time to get up. He barks at me every morning when I get dressed. He barks when I join a video call for work. Then there is the barking to go out, followed three minutes later by barking to come back, but only if I’m already back in the house. If I wait at the back gate or the front door for him, he suddenly needs to go on walkabout and sniff every square inch of the yard, but as soon as I am out of sight, it’s bark city.

Quietly recovering from the freak out.

This afternoon, as our regular Tuesday team meeting began, Moose began barking, which got Winston barking. As usual, there was an attempt by me to shush them without looking like some sort of harpy shrew on screen. 

After the meeting, while reviewing a spreadsheet with 12,800 lines of data to be uploaded to a program, the barking to go outside began. I waited at the gate, Moose wandered off, and when I got back inside, the barking began. It was extra loud and extra annoying and enough to irritate every neighbor for miles. And, as an ex used to say, I “snapped like popcorn.” Or, to be more colorful, as my Dad used to say, I “totally lost my shit.” However it’s labelled, what happened next was I yelled. I yelled at Moose to shut the hell up. I yelled at him that I was sick of the friggin’ barking. I yelled a whole bunch of words that just tumbled over each other into the air in a fury. Then I looked around to see which cars were parked nearby to calculate how many neighbors had just been loudly informed that the lady in the tan house is a certifiable lunatic. 

The driveway outburst scared Moose. It was freaked out, too, and not in a fun disco music flashback kind of way. The confusion was evident in his chocolate brown eyes and I instantly felt horrible. It’s hours later and I still feel horrible for yelling at my most loyal buddy. But at least it’s quiet. It seems I scared the bark out of him. I seem to have temporarily scared the bitch out of myself, too, but at least it’s peaceful. For now.