Too Much

Ok.  I'm going to admit something embarrassing.

I have completely tuned out to the political drama currently ongoing in our country.

I have no idea who will be my senators or representatives come January.  I'm sure I can look it up (and I likely will at some point), but, right now, I just don't care.

More importantly, I don't want to look it up right now, because I'm seeing just enough of the whole drama around the presidential election that I don't want to wade into those waters just yet.

My life has been too busy to care that much about politics.  My kid is at a really fun, but also really needy age.  I love playing with him, but if he's awake I basically don't have any time to myself because he is constantly needing someone to play with or something to eat or drink.  I try to get him to play by himself sometimes, but I also do enjoy playing with him, and sometimes I just have to get up and play when I don't want to because it means he won't be watching YouTube.  (I've got to come back to the YouTube thing at some point because I'm still not sure how I feel about it.  Just not now.)

On top of that, I've been studying for my CPIM Part II exam.  I took that yesterday finally and actually passed so now I don't have to worry about that anymore.  I'm excited about that mostly because, have you ever tried studying for a grueling exam while you have a two year old constantly banging on the door, or coming in and asking for a lollipop, juice, poptarts, or to touch the ceiling?  (By the way, somewhere along the line I held him up to touch the ceiling when he was younger and it's still one of his favorite things to do.  Ceiling was one of his first words.  It's super cute, but he's getting heavy.)

Also, things have been busy at work.  I've been given a lot more responsibility (19 people to be precise), and so I've been working a lot harder and putting in a little extra time every day to try to keep up with all my work.  I haven't been staying as late as I probably need to most days to actually complete all my work, but I have regularly been staying a half an hour longer than I used to, while also going in a few minutes earlier and often cutting my lunch short or not taking one at all.  I'm exhausted most days by the time I get home from work.

Puppy is also still super hyper.  She's also pretty big now, so super hyper is super fun to deal with.  Seventy pound German Shepherd wants to wrestle and run around the yard at top speed.  I'm still working on training her, too, but I've been inconsistent lately (see above), so I'm not making the progress I would like.  We also had to take a month off because she was spayed and then we spent an agonizing week trying to get her to keep a cone on and stop hurting herself.  $75 and four cones later, she ripped out 95% of her stitches by day four after her surgery (most actually on day three), and we had to start using butterfly bandages and wrapping her up with ace bandages.  She had these dangly dewclaws on her back legs we were expecting to fall off that never did.  We were concerned they would get caught on something and rip off, and apparently it's a fairly standard thing to have them removed on Shepherds.  I feel kind of bad about it, but we went ahead and had them removed during her spay surgery.  Since she could get to her back paw even with the cone on for at least two of the cones we tried, she ripped those stitches off first and, frankly, a month later there's still a small wound on her one leg.  It's almost all healed now, but it's been a lot longer to heal than the other leg that she didn't rip the stitches out of for sure.

The biggest surprise about getting her fixed was I was actually expecting her to be fairly mellow for a few days after the surgery.  The night I brought her home I could tell she was in pain and she didn't want to move much, but by the next morning she was right back to her normal, hyper-as-hell self.  On another note, does anyone know a successful way to keep a dog from absolutely destroying the cones?  One of the ones we tried was attached to her collar and somehow she got her collar up into her mouth and chewed it to pieces.  The others were chewed from the outside in, even though they went a whole head past her head so I have no idea how she got to the edges of them.

This is not the point I wanted to make when I started this post.  I'll have to come back and make that point elsewhere.  Guess I just needed to get some stuff off my chest.  The biggest thing is that I planned my test for the week before I have vacation, so after work today I'm off for a whole week and I'm so excited to have some free time to clean my house and relax.  I've been neglecting my chores (like a lot of other things this week actually) while I have been intensely studying, and I'm looking forward to relaxing in a clean house on Monday and Tuesday.  I'm so relieved to have completed that test and passed it that last night I was almost giddy.

I should have some time this weekend to come back and make my original point, which was about politics.