Sleeping Beauty

Tuesday night I was a very good girl, with a mind ahead to my 7:30 am performance review, I went to bed  at 10pm with a gardening book and planned to make it an early evening., before I went to bed I asked Dogger if she needed to go outside - she said "no", because she understands the words and the concepts behind "go" and "outside" and "pee". Of course she does! I  locked all the doors, turned off the lights and switched on the alarm. And then Dogger started to bark. And bark and bark and bark. You would have thought she morphed into a yappy dog. A 78 pound yappy dog.

And she continued to yap. I don't make it habit of telling her to not bark in the middle of the night because I don't want her to get the idea that I don't want her to bark in the middle of the night. I pay her to bark at bad guys and if the situation calls for it I would pay her extra to eat the bad guys, I have no desire to make her stop barking at night... I just want her to stop barking all night. I mean after a while it loses it specialness. I don't want her barking to lose its edge and if she barks all night it becomes significantly less edgy. She barks once at someone too close to her yard and its The Daily Show  she barks all night at nothing and its Jay Leno.

So, when she started barking at 11:00, I said Bark on Big Dog, scare that person and when she barked again at 1:30 I said Whose dog is that? Make it stop. Oh, it's Dogger. Gawd, tell me she's inside. Oh. she is. Okay and then she stopped and I went back to sleep. And then she barked again and I went to see what she wanted.

Nothing she wanted nothing. She wasn't at her door waiting for me to take her out, she wasn't standing guard at her window letting the moonlight reflect off her fangs,  she was on her bed, smiling - "Hi Mommy! How nice to see you! You came to visit me!" I told her to shut up and I closed the windows in her room. She can't challenge what she can not hear or smell. I have a feeling  she wasn't barking at a bad guy anyway, real  bad guys have time constraints and dog issues.  My feeling is she was alerting me and the rest of the neighborhood to a a marauding raccoon or possum or something  that was messing around in the shrub outside her window and she wanted me to know I needed to call the city and get a live trap. At 3:30 am. Dogger is nothing if not proactive.

I had gotten out of bed and managed the stairs - hard enough in the light and while fully awake. .I wanted to go back to sleep.I had a review that I really wanted to be conscience for in a few hours and I was going to be a wreak. I wanted to be able to defend myself if needed and its really hard to do that effectively when you are face down on a conference table. Supervisors also see it as a mark of poor time management if you spend your entire review face down on their conference table. Poor form. But it didn't matter, I re-managed the stairs and went back to bed but Tiny was also now awake and he wanted to play. With my nose.