I am very low this morning, doggedly plowing through my work but not getting much satisfaction from it. Since November it has just been one thing after the other and the emotional erosion just keeps on chugging along.

Willow's appetite, or lack of one, is the hardest on both of us. Things she would eat last week she will no longer eat. She was doing so well until the middle of January and then it began to deteriorate again. We dangle home-cooked food in front of her and she just turns up her nose, but begs when we eat (things she cannot eat, with salt and spices). If she didn't want to eat period, we would understand, but it's this turning up her nose at good meat, rice, and veg and then pleading with us to feed her that is wrenching. Then there are her other habits: she is good for a few days, then does what she did this morning, defecates on the carpet, which I can handle, but then steps in it, which makes a huge mess to clean up with the biological product neutralizer and disinfectant. If we had real floors instead of carpet it would be different, but we couldn't afford them then and we certainly can't afford them now.

Most of all it's just watching her go downhill. A year ago you wouldn't have known she was going to turn fifteen, except for the loose gait from the bad tendons in her hindlegs and the white muzzle. She danced when she saw foods and a treat, she went outside with head up and curious nose a-wiggle. Now she still sniffs, she still patrols, she still eats, but it's all rote. I feel guilty leaving her locked in the bathroom because I have to get work done, but realize I'm taking away from her one of the few pleasures she has left, sleeping on the recliner. And if we make a decision, are we doing it for her, or are we doing it for us?

In the meanwhile, James made a good-faith effort to repair the desk I use for telework (one of the casters fell off because the particle-board it was mounted in gave way), but the boards he used as a prop were too long. I was hoping to be able to tip it and roll it on the other three wheels, but the edge of the board drags in the carpet (glad now it isn't hardwood, or there would be a gouge in it now). In effect I now have to drag the desk into position with the printer and my office supplies on it, which has pulled the muscles in my back, leaving it pretty painful to sit at the moment. We can swap it for the desk downstairs, which is the same desk and which does not need to move, but it involves getting them up and down the stairs. James has already fallen twice in the last two weeks and I don't want to go for a trio. (This also explains why we have a nearly 80-pound upended dead convection microwave acting as an "endtable" in the living room; we need to get the damnfool thing downstairs without hurting either of us.) And Ikea apparently no longer makes this desk. In fact, as far as I can see, they make no rolling desks at all any longer.

All I know is I'm fed up with the clutter; things that need to be gone that aren't, and I bump into them, trip over them, and can't vacuum with them there (and why I haven't had the stupid vacuum surgically attached to me by now I don't know, because the wretched thing seems to be more out of the closet than in). Not only is no progress being made, but I'm sliding backward.

Labels: dogs, emotions, frustration

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:25:00 PM

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