Last night The Husband had one of those nights-- you know, the kind where no matter how many times or how hard I poked him in the side, nudged him in the foot, smacked him upside the head (okay, not really, at least this time), he wouldn't stop snoring. Generally, if I can get him to stop for just a few minutes, I'll fall asleep and just snooze right on through it. But sometimes, like last night, there's an interesting combination of him being loud enough and me being too tired to wake up. And this is what happened:
Ghoulie, our blind Great Dane, is an attention sponge. Her world is tactile and she wants to be touched, talked to, and played with constantly. When she isn't, or when she's forced to lie down and stay put (such as when we're trying to watch a movie on a weekend evening), she'll lie at our feet between the couch and the coffee table, and she'll growl. I am not kidding. The more frustrated she gets, the longer and louder she growls, until we literally can't hear the television and have to interject "Ghoulie, be quiet!"-- which is usually enough to stop her for about 40 seconds before we get to start all over again. At 3:18 a.m. I stopped myself just short of sitting up and yelling that very phrase into Wes's ear, because he sounded just like her-- long, loud and growly-- and I truly believed the dog was fussing for attention in the middle of the darned night.
Somewhere around 4:30 a.m., the volume, pitch and duration changed to something like a wheezing sort of... whistling. My dream-brain interpreted that sound as coming out of the mouth of a red-skinned velociraptor that was about the size of a Great Dane but had Rorschach-like black and white spots down the middle of its back. I was hiding under the bed and this extinct dinosaur was scrabbling its way underneath it, trying to get to me. I was trying to get away not because I was afraid of it, but because even though it was friendly (??!), it had three-inch teeth and about as much control over its jaw power as an eight-week-old Great Dane puppy, as in not much. It just wanted to play and kept getting tangled up in the bedcoverings as it tried to catch me. At the end of this debacle, during which I kept hollering to my mother (who's been gone for a number of years now), "Mom, make it stop!", it was on top of the bed, I was standing over it, and scratching its back.
Tonight: I'm putting duct tape over his nose. End of problem.
Ghoulie, our blind Great Dane, is an attention sponge. Her world is tactile and she wants to be touched, talked to, and played with constantly. When she isn't, or when she's forced to lie down and stay put (such as when we're trying to watch a movie on a weekend evening), she'll lie at our feet between the couch and the coffee table, and she'll growl. I am not kidding. The more frustrated she gets, the longer and louder she growls, until we literally can't hear the television and have to interject "Ghoulie, be quiet!"-- which is usually enough to stop her for about 40 seconds before we get to start all over again. At 3:18 a.m. I stopped myself just short of sitting up and yelling that very phrase into Wes's ear, because he sounded just like her-- long, loud and growly-- and I truly believed the dog was fussing for attention in the middle of the darned night.
Somewhere around 4:30 a.m., the volume, pitch and duration changed to something like a wheezing sort of... whistling. My dream-brain interpreted that sound as coming out of the mouth of a red-skinned velociraptor that was about the size of a Great Dane but had Rorschach-like black and white spots down the middle of its back. I was hiding under the bed and this extinct dinosaur was scrabbling its way underneath it, trying to get to me. I was trying to get away not because I was afraid of it, but because even though it was friendly (??!), it had three-inch teeth and about as much control over its jaw power as an eight-week-old Great Dane puppy, as in not much. It just wanted to play and kept getting tangled up in the bedcoverings as it tried to catch me. At the end of this debacle, during which I kept hollering to my mother (who's been gone for a number of years now), "Mom, make it stop!", it was on top of the bed, I was standing over it, and scratching its back.
Tonight: I'm putting duct tape over his nose. End of problem.
