Tag: Lab

The Failed Lab Experiment

What a complete and total flippin’ bust! Neville has made his choice, and it does not include me. He only wants to be with Adam except to check if I have food. He treats me like Dad’s wife treated me. I don’t get it, though. Adam and I have opposite sleeping schedules, so when I was awake, I had him, and when Adam was awake, he had him. Adam took him out to go to the bathroom but that’s just because he smokes outside so he goes out anyway. If he was sleeping, I took Nev out. If I make Neville stay in here, he sits in the doorway and whines and dings the bell until I become livid and march him to the other bedroom.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that:

  • I got him to be my service dog. I’ve always had reservations about Adam having a dog and I knew it wouldn’t be good for us as a couple and I’m often thisclose to sending both of them to his mom’s.
  • I treat Neville 1000x better than Adam does. Adam sounds like a textbook abusive father in volume and phrases, and I don’t like it at all. I can’t yell like him, so my yelling is hardly alarming.
  • I do all the non-abusive training and treats and praise him even when I’m not impressed (Look at you! You picked a piece of food up off the floor and ate it! Wow. Like you’re not starving every second of the day).

I’ve never been rejected by a damned animal before.

I’ve always stuck with cats regardless of how much I wanted a dog because I knew how Adam would be and that I would not tolerate it. He thinks yelling and repeating threatening phrases is training. Obedience should not be out of fear. Mom tried to tell him, “Don’t do that around [Cari],” and he should know better by now. I don’t like loud noises, and Dad used to yell. It actually took Dad a while to lose his temper, but then he would just let it all out at my brother or me.

Early in dating my ex-husband, he lost his temper with his job when we were in the vehicle and I started packing and was ready to leave as soon as we got home. My ex never once raised his voice toward me but it doesn’t have to be aimed at me. Some people never change, I guess. I think it is extremely disrespectful that I am the one always making sacrifices and being uncomfortable in my own home. To go with that, I think you get to a certain age where you’re just not going to put up with certain things anymore and you learn to advocate for yourself as much as you can 🤷‍♀️. This post took quite a turn.

So, that’s where we are, and it’s all great. Great, great, great, great.

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Oh, Romeo — Nomeo!

I should be working, so of course another blog post! For school, dropping to half-time would halve my grant (money you don’t have to repay), so I am sticking to full-time 😒. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t required to take Shakespeare. Now, I get it; the guy (there is a debate whether Shakespeare was more than one person but we will go with the singular) was a genius and super talented and came up with the best stories and poems, but the old English just stumps me to the point that I need translation.

There are some choices for this class requirement but Shakespeare is actually the lesser of the evils offered, to me, anyway. I cannot remember what the others are, but I think one is Renaissance 😒. Plus, I was taking Shakespeare when my brother died and I could not deal at the time, so I have a UF (unfinished, I think is what that means), and retaking the class will improve my GPA.

My other class is an intermediate poetry workshop, so I am guessing it is a step up from the class I am finishing up on Sunday, and both classes are 300 level, which is for third years, so more writing and stricter grading. Adam has decided to go with fiction writing as his concentration, I believe, although he is pre-registered for a poetry workshop and a fiction workshop. I can never think of middles and ends for my stories and I have always written poetry, but not really any short stories. I’ve started “novels” that I eventually abandoned; that was mostly when I was obsessed with RL Stine.

My poetry workshop professor is giving me publishing resources and encouraging me to submit, but I am on the fence about that. Most don’t mention the royalty percentages, but one did and it was only 10%. Going my preferred route, I will get 70% or 75%. Of course, going through a publisher would give me more exposure, but it would also take away a lot of my freedom with formatting, editing, cover art, and who knows what else.

I’m also totally waffling with my site. I just can’t get the color scheme and image how I want it. I started out with the neon colors, which were cool, but when I decided to switch things up, I couldn’t decide what to go with. Should I use my book cover (willow tree)? Use Grandma’s painting print that I love (previous image)? Keep the image I have now? I seem to have entered a manic phase and that always involves lots of changes and me never feeling 100% satisfied. I was going to say I’m a total tweaker, but that doesn’t mean the same thing to other people as it does to me 🤣🤣. I can never leave things alone if I’m not totally “feeling” them.

Neville has started some scent training, and it is going surprisingly well. He is almost too smart for his own good. We’ve been using clove as the scent, and I take Nev into Mom’s room while Adam hides the hex bag. He then smells Adam’s hand and Adam says, “Go find it!” and he takes off and finds it. We’ve had to limit him to one room or he goes all over the house. When Adam re-hides the bag, Neville goes right to where he found it before 🤣. During potty breaks, Adam scents a stick and throws it in the yard and Neville has to find it. He has picked up the wrong stick a couple of times and knew they were the wrong ones, so put them down and grabbed the correct ones!

One day, I left my phone on the bed and came over to the computer, but I started worrying that Neville would get it and tear it up just to be a jerk (he tends to do that), so I turned my chair around, pointed to the phone on the bed, and said, “Pick it up!” and when he figured out what I was pointing to, he picked my phone up, jumped off the bed, and brought it to me without chewing on it or biting it 😊. I was so proud of him!

Once, when I was fiddling around in Mom’s bathroom, I handed him my phone so I could do something, and he sat there with it in his mouth until I asked/motioned for it back. He looked a bit confused as to why I was handing it to him but I wanted to see if he would take off with it or just hold it. I haven’t read up on teaching him to hold things yet. I know his parents have lots of ribbons and medals for retrieving, and part of that is holding what they retrieve without eating it or running away with it. I always see paintings of labs in duck hunting settings and I know they don’t get to eat the duck as a reward 🤣.

Lately, he has been ringing the potty bell in Mom’s room whenever he wants to play or leave the room. Adam comes in to talk after I wake up, and Nev will stand in the doorway and ring the bell and look up at him. I can’t help laughing when he does that, but he does it several times while we’re talking. He gets very jealous when Adam and I are in the same room.

I think I shared this before but that’s the bell. I can’t post the video because WP wants me to upgrade to do that.
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Welcome to My Electric Lab

Something is up with Neville today! I took my notebook to bed this morning so I could write but I fell asleep pretty quickly thanks to Xanax. I didn’t think to get it off the bed because Neville has not been bothering my iPad which I keep on the bed. He got a hold of my notebook and tore it to smithereens, which I thought he was chewing on one of his bones. I love that notebook. It is pink and purple and has butterflies on it. My now-deceased uncle got me two of them after my dad died in 2012.

Later, I go to pee (just feet away from Neville, who is on a long lead) and he starts screaming like someone broke all his bones, so I start yelling for Adam because I think Nev got stuck. Adam doesn’t hear me but he comes to see why Nev is crying and then starts fussing at him 🙄🙄, because that’s helpful. Neville runs into the bathroom, sits down between my legs, and is shaking like a leaf. (That’s an odd saying.) I lean over (still on the toilet) and hug him, trying to calm him down. Then, he pees while sitting there. Between my legs. While I’m on the toilet and hugging him.

When I left the room to go pee, Neville had decided to tear up another cord (he already ruined the end to my Dyson), and since there weren’t any lying around, he grabbed the heavy-duty extension cord that was plugged into the wall. It must have gotten him good because the cord was several feet away from the outlet. I ordered an outlet cover, which I didn’t know even existed for cords; I have only seen covers that plug into empty sockets so kids won’t stick their fingers in them.

I don’t know who peed in his Cheerios that morning but he was on a mission to be destructive and definitely FAFO’d. I hope he remembers what happened and stays away so something worse won’t happen. I have had the bidet plugged in before getting him and he never bothered the cord before but he was in a mood or something. Oh, he is acting fine and his usual self. His mouth and tongue look okay and he is as goofy and adorable as ever.

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