A rough night

Saturday Socks was probably worn out by the excitement of meeting us, getting adopted, her long drive to and from Petsmart, and all the shopping. Sunday though she started to get really excited and wanted to go out pretty much all day, except for a rest in the middle. She wore me out a few times and I had to ice my knee, and I only did about a third or less of the walks since I was also putting in five hours of overtime. The whole time, she peed a few times but that's it.

So we're convinced that we need to have a fenced-in yard, which previous to this weekend wasn't even an option that was on the table. And we need to have it now. In fact, as much as we don't like the dog-on-a-chain/runner thing, we might have to do that as a temporary thing just to let her wear herself out a bit, until we can get fencing put in. Today we'll be finding out how much fencing will cost (and how I'm going to pay for it!) plus how soon we can get it done.

Sunday night, though, was terrible. She still hadn't gone poo and she urgently wanted to go out but when she went out she just wanted to sniff and dig and run everywhere, then not poo, then once you got her back in she wanted to go out again and was no less insistent. In fact, she whined to go out.

All night long.

For eight straight hours.

Eventually I put in earplugs which hurt me like nuts, I can't stand them on the best of days and my ears were already feeling sore and tight yesterday for reasons unknown so this morning they are throbbing and I feel like my hearing is deadened somewhat, but that still leaves me with only about three hours of sleep. And I was already exhausted from all the overtime and stress and lost sleep on previous days, so I am just dead to the world today.

Naturally, I came in to a number of crises as well as the usual anxiety-attack-inducing pressure to meet deadlines on our project while being the only one who keeps morale up. This should be a positively terrible day.

There's a nugget of hope, though. On this morning's walk Socks finally went poo, a lot. And apparently she has worms, so at least that's something we know how to treat and will get right on it. Perhaps the worms are why she was so reluctant to poo, or perhaps she just hadn't found a spot she liked. Either way, hopefully tonight she won't have so many difficulties and we'll be able to get some sleep.

Even so, we can't get that fence soon enough. I knew we weren't ready for a dog (we weren't expecting to be coming home with one on Saturday) and that this isn't a good time for me to get one (they need a lot of time and patience and energy the first few weeks, and the next few weeks I will have the least of those three things to spare that I have ever had in my whole career), so I hope I can just make it through this month.