I was reading online to see if there were any rescue groups around here. I can’t afford to get a dog yet, nor do I have the room at my house (big house, tiny yard), but I like to know these things. I found this listing on Petfinder.com:

I’d like to introduce you to Lucy, a 2 year old spayed female African Boerboel/Mastiff mix that I rescued from the Manhattan Shelter. She was surrendered there by her previous family because they said she was too big. I know….did they NOT understand the term “mastiff”?? Sometimes I just bang my head against the wall in utter frustration. Feel free to join me. ANYWAY, despite what they said about her size, Lucy is actually fairly typical female Boerboel size at 95-100 pounds, although she needs to develop some muscle mass to fill her out more. Lucy is currently being fostered by a trainer that I use in west of Albany, NY. Not only is she loving and affectionate to people that she knows, she is very well mannered, in their home, knowing all her basic commands including Sit, Down, Stay, Paw and Come. She also heals well on a leash and does great in the car. Lucy is 100% housebroken. She sleeps each night on a dog bed in their bedroom. Lucy is fine with dog savvy cats. She is a dominant female so would do best as an only dog or with a large submissive male. Lucy is not good with small dogs so will need a home without them. Lucy is very true to the Boerboel breed characteristics (please read thoroughly about them.) She is protective of her home and devoted to her family. Because of that, she needs a home that is not high traffic with strange people coming and going, and she needs a strong leader to manage her natural instincts. She would do best with a home that has a fenced in backyard so that she can play and exercise freely while staying safe. We have not yet had the opportunity to interact Lucy with children, so at this point we feel children over 10 are the best match. I would like to place Lucy into a home with mastiff experience, as she is not for the first time mastiff owner. If you would like to make Lucy a member of your family and home, then please visit our website and fill out an application, making it to my attention (Nanette.) Lucy is spayed, has been updated on her vaccinations and heartworm tested (neg) as well as microchipped.

It’s animal snobs like this who just piss me off. Yes, the original family should have done more research, but maybe they knew how big the dog was going to get, they just overestimated their ability to care for a dog that size. Maybe they got laid off and had to move from a 3 bedroom house in the suburbs to a small apartment in the city, to save on their commute. It’s not always ignorance.

I just get frustrated with these animal shelter people. They are always mean, whether you’re surrendering an animal or adopting one. They assume they know everything there is to know about everything. Ugh.

That was what one of the upstairs bedrooms looked like when I moved in. I called it Oxygen Tank Green. It was putrid. It was just paint, though, and it could be painted over.

I knew I wasn’t going to use this room as a bedroom, because it was just too small. It is the only room upstairs with an overhead light, but the door swung open so that it covered the lightswitch. Um. Yeah. The big bay windows and the fact that this is the southwest side of the house means it would be good for Nate’s amateur botany (I have two brown thumbs, and knew those windows would do me no good), so it immediately became his plant room. I thought we should make it a combination plant and computer room, and put the menagerie in the back bedroom, so that Nate did not feel like I was sequestering him to one room of the house, but he wanted the snakes in the same room as the plants, so ok. His mama snake was going to lay eggs soon, which meant that repainting this room had to get done before other projects, so that it’d be ready for her.

We took the door down for easier access to the lightswitch (and with not keeping it as a bedroom, there was no real need for it), but now we’re discovering that it’s more difficult to keep the temperature regulated in there. (Is that why she’s not laying her eggs?) We might do something nontraditional in the doorway to keep it warm in there. Window quilt? I don’t mind if it doesn’t look “normal”, I just don’t want it to look tacky. Thinking, thinking …

I learned a few painting tricks that did me no good until it was too late along the way, but if you look at the other pictures in my photostream, you’ll notice that there’s terrible wallpaper throughout the house and there will be plenty of time to practice!

It’s frustrating right now, because I need to save money to buy oil. This means NOT spending money on a couch or an entertainment center or a sander to get the floors pretty or art to hang on my walls. I think Nate thinks I’m being lazy because I’m not working around the house.

My arm is still nearly constantly hurting. The neurologist I saw a couple months ago prescribed Elavil, which I did not start taking right away. However, after taking it for a month, I called him and asked him for something else. It didn’t help with the pain at all, but more than that, I’ve been so sleepy all the time, completely unable to concentrate, and just feel fuzzy in my brain. Instead of switching me to something else, like he said was the plan (try it, if I don’t like it, we’ll try another one), he said, “Follow up with your primary care doctor.”

I’m beginning to think that no one wants to help me with this, they’d rather just turf me to someone else.

Just to round out my complaints, I’ve had a headache ever since I stopped the amitriptyline, which a cursory Googling shows to be mainly coincidental, but annoying nonetheless.

More than anything, I want to get better at keeping this up to date. I’ve been lazy about writing. I’ve been lazy about a lot of things. I’ve gained almost all my weight back (I was at a high of 235, then I got down to 186, then back up to 213). Nate bought the Balance Board to go with the Wii, and I’ve lost 3 pounds again … we’ll just cross our fingers I can keep it up. Down. Off. Whatever. But if I keep insisting that I’m going to write, maybe I’ll do some interesting things worth writing about? We’ll see.

We ran into a few snags along the way, to make things even more fun and interesting!

I have a queen sized bed, which is 60″ wide. The distance between the corner of the riser on the stairs and the ceiling above it is not 60″. I’m not sure how high it is, but the fact of the matter is, there is no way to get the bed up the stairs. And don’t give me that, “Oh, you’re just not trying hard enough, I could get it up there!” crap, because it’s crap. This is an old house and every single one of my friends has said that exact same thing and no one can get it up. So right now, the bed is in the dining room. My options are to get the bed through a second-story window (though I still have to measure the windows to see if this is an option), or to sell it and get two twin mattresses and a strip to “zip” them together like this.

For now, the bed is in the dining room, but I have no curtains, so I’ve been sleeping at Nate’s. I tried to get some yesterday, but I have six windows that need covering (and one of them is extra wide, so basically seven). Target’s cheapest curtains were $10 a piece, and there were only 5 left. Even just flat sheets would be fine, but I can’t seem to even find those. I measured the windows for length, too, and if I just draped fabric over the curtain rod, I’d need THIRTY THREE YARDS of fabric, and the cheapest fabric I could find in the ONE fabric store we have in town was $5/yd, plus it was crayon-bright felt. If I had a sewing machine, I would just need 17.5 yards. Well, I have one, but I don’t know how to use it. But anyway, since I’m looking for a no-sew option, I’ve got to double-over the fabric (which probably isn’t a bad thing since I’m looking for privacy here, and one layer of fabric probably won’t provide much).

So I guess it doesn’t much matter where my bed is, since I can’t sleep in the dining room without the whole world peering in anyway. My mom couldn’t understand why I didn’t sleep on the floor the night I closed on the house; it’s been almost a week and I still haven’t spent a night there. I broke down in tears last night at Target because I just want to sleep in my own bed in my own house for fuck’s sake,  and I can’t even do that. Nate is tired of me getting hysterical over the tiniest things (as am I), and I’m sure he wants me out of his apartment as much as I want to be out of it. Little things he does are making me more and more crazy the more I’m here, and I can’t even imagine how much I’m irritating him with my little things.