Walking it out

Growing older is serious business, for humans and our beloved canine companions. Dogs have aging symptoms that resemble some of the ailments people suffer: chronic aches and pains, arthritis, vision problems, bladder control issues, joint stiffness, changes in appetite. I have two older dogs, ages 14 years and 9 years (I think). Between the two, they hit every symptom on this list. The older guy really does suffer from painful arthritis and takes prescription meds twice per day to regulate it to a tolerable level. But sometimes it flares up and he is just plain uncomfortable. So much so that he can’t bear to keep still, so he just paces around. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to help.

When my mom visited us at Thanksgiving, she noticed it and said: I know how he feels. Sometimes you just have to walk it out.

Recently I decided to put this observation into practice. The last two times that my old guy had a flare-up, I gave him an extra dose of medicine, but that didn’t seem to work. He kept coming over to me, asking for comfort. So I decided to walk it out with him. We walked through the house, room to room, on a circuitous route until he got tired and stopped. Then he was able to lie down and rest. Finally.

Me too. Finally.

Mr. Sandman

I was reading an essay by the lovely and talented blogger over at Gropius vs Eddie the other day on the topic of dreams. These things stay with me, the thoughts tumble and rearrange themselves in the back of my consciousness long after the catalyst, in this case, the blog, introduces the idea. So naturally I’ve been thinking about dreams for the past couple of days.

I tend to think I have an active dream world, but just don’t usually remember them when I awake. I rise around 5am with a predefined morning agenda and the dreams just stay in dreamland. But this morning as I was making coffee and tending to a few casual chores, several of my dreams from last night reemerged in a flash. The colors, the characters, the images, the feelings. It was a tangled mess, as dreams usually are, one situation merging with another seemingly unrelated one.

Some highlights:

• A house with a barricaded stairway leading to an unfinished second floor. No doorway exists to the 2nd floor, but there is a small hole in that wall. Creepy.


• My dogs sneak past the barricade, dash upstairs and squeeze through the hole. I peek up the stairway just in time to see the last one hop through the hole. Stress.


• I’m rummaging through a kitchen drawer and find a dozen or so forgotten paring knives that I need to add to my own kitchen “knife” drawer that is already rather full of knives. Stress.


• I’m walking down a sidewalk and come to a tree with lovely, gauzy, fragrant white blossoms. I feel compelled to lie on the grass beneath the tree and watch the honey bees darting from branch to branch. Relaxing, but creepy.


• I’m walking down a nearby alley, picking my way between puddles in the uneven pavement, and my cell phone rings. It’s a fictitious woman that I met only once, but she’s calling for Cristy, not me. WTF?


• I have meticulously arranged dozens of dinner plates and salad plates in stacks on a table, inside a storage rack that is not at all very stable. It might fall apart at any moment. What was I thinking?


• I’m wearing panties and a little vest and a female police officer is swiping a baby wipe under my arms. Again, WTF?

All I can say is that I am glad I usually don’t remember my dreams. If this is a representative sample of my personal dreamworld, then it is just packed way too full of stressful and unnecessarily puzzling situations.

Counting sheep

Sleep has been a topic of conversation around the office lately. My boss underwent a professional sleep analysis a week or so ago to determine if she has sleep apnea, and if so, what she might need to do about it. So just before getting started with a meeting last week, those gathered around the conference table listened to her story and entered into the discussion about sleep. Seems that everyone had some sort of sleep aberration, either not getting restful sleep, falling asleep too quickly, or breathing (polite way of saying snoring) problems.

I think I could check off a few of those from the list. Through the years I’ve had all sorts of cycles that seemed to interfere with restful sleep. I just read an essay by an inspired blogger over at f8hasit regarding sleep deprivation and it reminded me of a time when I found it very difficult to fall asleep. Seems that I could just not stop thinking, planning, worrying, listing.

Back in those days, I had been to some exercise and yoga classes that ended with a few minutes of facilitated relaxation. It was nice. It went something like this:

Imagine yourself lying on a tropical, warm beach.
The tide softly washes up to your ankles and you feel your feet and ankles relax.
The tide continues to wash up to your legs, torso, arms, etc….bringing relaxation to your entire body.

So when I was having insomnia problems, I decided to try this out for myself. It went something like this:

Imagine yourself lying on a tropical warm beach.
The tide softly washes up to your ankles and you feel your feet and ankles relax.
The tide washes up to your legs, torso, arms. Soon you are floating, weightless in the warm water, fully relaxed.
Beneath the surface of the water there are dozens of sharks, jellyfish and scratchy seaweed. Yikes! Get out of there!

OK, so I figured out how to sabotage my own relaxation process. Typical. I'll probably not going to try that method again. Back to counting sheep.