Update, Scary People, Dogs Dogs Dogs
Moose has been kind of stinky since he ate all that liver, but is otherwise none the worse for wear. As stolen food goes, it definitely beats all the chocolate he's managed to get into.
The new haircut is much easier to take care of, but not trouble-free. I may get it chopped to shoulder length in a week or so. (Right now it is just barely long enough to put into a bun.)
Played a little WoW on my main today; I was right about how easily overwhelmed I can get! I was so tired after the short play session that I felt unsafe to drive until I'd sat around and had some tea. Luckily I had time for that before I needed to go get my shots. No new content allowed on shot days unless I leave an hour or two after the session so I can lie down if I have to. A friend of mine played with me and was patient with my (inability to) pace and that was a lot of fun, so my fears that going with other people who'd done it all before would make it too speedy were inaccurate -- grouping there is fun! But I have to watch my own ability levels, because the quest log became a blur after about an hour and that's not good for me; I get very confused and that stresses me and that fatigues me.
Then I got my shots, had an extremely incoherent shopping session where I managed to buy one and a half of the items on the very long list (and lost the list, but they found it for me and came out as I was leaving to give it to me, nice!) and went home and crashed about half an hour after. Today I have eaten: dal, tea, chocolate, brown rice in broth (post-crash) and a banana. I actually made the broth! I had some farmer's market asparagus I cooked and I hate having the woody stem ends go to waste, so I made stock out of them and random other vegetables lying around (slightly wilted green onions, tag-ends of mustard greens, even some romaine cores) and it came out tasty.
The gaming was flicking from doing stuff I really ought to be doing -- the guy in jail left some stuff in our garage, without telling us, naturally, so my todo list there goes like: "Get a new lock for the garage, move the key, and ask the tenants which of the stuff isn't theirs so we can remove his stuff." He called the prior owner of our house (who he'd also been doing some work for before since she moved) and she called us. She's now on the growing list of people he's called asking for help who want us to inform them if he gets out of jail. :/ He didn't exactly scare her before he left, but he did disquiet her the last time she saw him. She also said she'd seen him go crazy twice before, and she's known him longer than we have; neither of those times were anything like this time. If I hadn't seen him do it, actually I wouldn't have believed it if someone told me. But because it happened in front of me... meh. I'm still just really sad about this whole thing. She may end up talking to him, she may not.
I don't know what to do about his stuff when we find it. Probably ship it to his mother's because we don't want contact with him, and she can at least get it to him in the future. We are NOT keeping it for him and we have no viable contacts for him in town; everyone we've talked to who knows him isn't keen on having him return. I don't think we could send it to him at the jail. But now that I know he didn't want to walk away from his stuff, giving it away or tossing it is a different story.
I still wish that he hadn't lied to us, or that we'd seen through it. I asked him over and over again about his belongings, because I couldn't believe he would just walk away. What I didn't realize then was that he wasn't just walking away because he intended to come right back and move back in. So he was saying anything to us that would get us to buy him the ticket and be convinced that he was leaving forever, to "cover his tracks" against imaginary enemies. All of this effort has just gotten him in a worse situation: he is now in real trouble with the real law, instead of the relatively minor trouble he was in here -- he had scared but not actually hurt anyone, and had done nothing overtly criminal here. He had burned his social support system, which was a definite problem, but he wasn't in danger of jail time, and if he had managed to just wait it out without scaring people he probably could still have found work among at least some of the people he used to work for. I don't know what he was intending to do in the long run, but the result is disastrous: he's lost everything and is in jail and possibly will be going to prison. He's completely broken our trust in him (because now we know he can lie to us utterly convincingly), as well as the trust of our neighbors and at least three other people outside of our neighborhood that he's contacted for help. As far as we know, no one he has contacted for help will help him any more. His own family will no longer take him in or help him -- his mother told me she couldn't deal with him at all any more, and the last thing she was trying was calling me to ask for help getting him back here. I had to tell her that he'd pretty much burned his bridges here and scared a lot of people.
I'm scared of him in a physical way -- he's been arrested for having a concealed knife, and on the last day he was here he told me about how he had been threatening to eviscerate people downtown with it. I think he reclassified our neighbor across the street as "a vampire," "possessed by demons," "evil," and "not a person" after she suggested she get help. Yeah, I don't want him anywhere NEAR here again. But it's still really terrible -- he really IS in jail as a direct result of being insane, and there's no sign that he's getting any practical treatment for his insanity there.
All we can do is be cautious, make sure he has as few anchors as possible here, and be especially watchful when he is released from jail or prison. We're keeping in touch with the neighbors, and we're probably going to get another dog, because "large dog he doesn't know is harmless" is probably the most effective deterrent available -- it works even if I'm crashed unconscious. It's kind of a crazy reason to get another dog, but the other possible options really aren't as good. Some (like alarms) are negated by being too slow on response time when dealing with someone who isn't a random burglar, and some I can't effectively use if he breaks in while I'm incapacitated. A dog that he doesn't know personally doesn't have to be aggressive -- it just has to be there.
On the "making lemonade from lemons" camp, it may mean we can set up a dog run and put both dogs in it and suddenly be able to go out without having to arrange for a Moose-sitter. I'll investigate that with my mom's dog in her dog run by taping Moose to see if he cries, but as far as we can tell, his separation anxiety doesn't kick in if another dog is present. He WILL attempt to escape by clawing at the doors and windows if a human isn't in the house with him and the other dog (we tried this out with Phoebe, and got YET more Moose-claw damage to our hundred year old doors, sad), but the presence of another dog seems to keep him from getting distressed and crying, so we'd be able to kennel him in a run with his "brother" or "sister" without causing a neighborhood disturbance. (Leaving him in the house alone means he will sob, moan, and wear himself out scrabbling to escape for well over an hour, which is way longer than the token few minutes of whinging most dogs will put up when left alone. We know this because we taped him for our trainer.) We've left him kennelled with Phoebe before, and as far as I can tell he doesn't cry then, but we didn't tape him, just went out of sight and listened. His behavior when kennelled with a dog is COMPLETELY different than when he's kennelled alone -- alone he sobs the minute we go out of sight and keeps it up, and keeps sobbing when he sees us again. We did the thing where we waited for him to stop crying before letting him out (to try to teach him that crying doesn't get him out) but his levels of distress were pretty extreme -- he's shaking, twitchy, and smells like Afraid Dog after this happens. When we kennel him with Phoebe he doesn't want to go into the kennel much, but he will, and he watches us VERY carefully and when we return he jumps up and down a lot and sometimes barks a little, but he doesn't moan or cry. He doesn't smell afraid and while he's very happy to be back with people, he isn't twitchy or spooky. He reacts about the same way at the daycare, where they kennel the dogs in pairs in contiguous runs. (I love this, btw; most kennels keep the dogs in separate cages, but they just keep a careful social history of their dogs and pair them up appropriately, and it seems to make the dogs a lot happier.) He's very happy to see us and watches us the whole time, and sometimes barks, but he doesn't smell scared and he's not stressed, just excited. He's also always very happy to go TO the daycare. It's clearly way more fun than being stuck in a run with Phoebe (whom he could kind of take or leave -- she's territorial, doesn't much like him, and won't play with him.) Still, in Moose-land Phoebe is infinitely preferable to being kennelled and left alone.
I know dogs don't exercise each other -- people say they'll get a pair of dogs so they'll play with each other and exercise and generally speaking the dogs want to play with their people and sleep the rest of the time, busily storing up more energy. But I think a dog would help Moose's social situation and it would mean we could just go out to a movie or restaurant every now and then without having to go through a rigamorale. Weird to think that having TWICE as many dogs would make some things EASIER. But it would be harder on Brad: he takes the brunt of Moose's care, especially the walks, and twice the dogs would be at least 1.5 times the work even though they could both be walked at once, taken to the vet and kennel at once, etc. But anyone who knows Moose knows he's not a feasible guard dog, and this guy knows Moose.
Todo: Track down tenants and ask them if they've bought both the guest parking permits for our address, 'cause it'd be nice if we had a permit for guests. If they bought all of them, offer to buy one off them. They get all of the resident parking permits allowed to the property because we use the driveway, so they probably only have one guest permit, if that. Appraise them of the situation with the guy, and ask them if they can help us ID his stuff in the garage. We put some shelves into the garage fairly recently so hopefully it is not too insane in there, but they can store what they like in there so it might be. We also need to change the lock and pass out keys again. Make sure our across the street neighbor gets her garbage taken out tomorrow; I may have to have Brad do that this week as I've been feeling physically very ucky. Think about what to cook next as the yummy dal won't last forever. Vegetarian would be nice as then it's easy to feed Angie when she's over. Easy would also be nice as she ended up cooking the dal after we'd had the ingredients for almost a week! Dal is pretty easy but there's sooo much chopping. Hmmm, gluten-free vegetarian without lots of chopping... I have a bridge in Brooklyn too....
The new haircut is much easier to take care of, but not trouble-free. I may get it chopped to shoulder length in a week or so. (Right now it is just barely long enough to put into a bun.)
Played a little WoW on my main today; I was right about how easily overwhelmed I can get! I was so tired after the short play session that I felt unsafe to drive until I'd sat around and had some tea. Luckily I had time for that before I needed to go get my shots. No new content allowed on shot days unless I leave an hour or two after the session so I can lie down if I have to. A friend of mine played with me and was patient with my (inability to) pace and that was a lot of fun, so my fears that going with other people who'd done it all before would make it too speedy were inaccurate -- grouping there is fun! But I have to watch my own ability levels, because the quest log became a blur after about an hour and that's not good for me; I get very confused and that stresses me and that fatigues me.
Then I got my shots, had an extremely incoherent shopping session where I managed to buy one and a half of the items on the very long list (and lost the list, but they found it for me and came out as I was leaving to give it to me, nice!) and went home and crashed about half an hour after. Today I have eaten: dal, tea, chocolate, brown rice in broth (post-crash) and a banana. I actually made the broth! I had some farmer's market asparagus I cooked and I hate having the woody stem ends go to waste, so I made stock out of them and random other vegetables lying around (slightly wilted green onions, tag-ends of mustard greens, even some romaine cores) and it came out tasty.
The gaming was flicking from doing stuff I really ought to be doing -- the guy in jail left some stuff in our garage, without telling us, naturally, so my todo list there goes like: "Get a new lock for the garage, move the key, and ask the tenants which of the stuff isn't theirs so we can remove his stuff." He called the prior owner of our house (who he'd also been doing some work for before since she moved) and she called us. She's now on the growing list of people he's called asking for help who want us to inform them if he gets out of jail. :/ He didn't exactly scare her before he left, but he did disquiet her the last time she saw him. She also said she'd seen him go crazy twice before, and she's known him longer than we have; neither of those times were anything like this time. If I hadn't seen him do it, actually I wouldn't have believed it if someone told me. But because it happened in front of me... meh. I'm still just really sad about this whole thing. She may end up talking to him, she may not.
I don't know what to do about his stuff when we find it. Probably ship it to his mother's because we don't want contact with him, and she can at least get it to him in the future. We are NOT keeping it for him and we have no viable contacts for him in town; everyone we've talked to who knows him isn't keen on having him return. I don't think we could send it to him at the jail. But now that I know he didn't want to walk away from his stuff, giving it away or tossing it is a different story.
I still wish that he hadn't lied to us, or that we'd seen through it. I asked him over and over again about his belongings, because I couldn't believe he would just walk away. What I didn't realize then was that he wasn't just walking away because he intended to come right back and move back in. So he was saying anything to us that would get us to buy him the ticket and be convinced that he was leaving forever, to "cover his tracks" against imaginary enemies. All of this effort has just gotten him in a worse situation: he is now in real trouble with the real law, instead of the relatively minor trouble he was in here -- he had scared but not actually hurt anyone, and had done nothing overtly criminal here. He had burned his social support system, which was a definite problem, but he wasn't in danger of jail time, and if he had managed to just wait it out without scaring people he probably could still have found work among at least some of the people he used to work for. I don't know what he was intending to do in the long run, but the result is disastrous: he's lost everything and is in jail and possibly will be going to prison. He's completely broken our trust in him (because now we know he can lie to us utterly convincingly), as well as the trust of our neighbors and at least three other people outside of our neighborhood that he's contacted for help. As far as we know, no one he has contacted for help will help him any more. His own family will no longer take him in or help him -- his mother told me she couldn't deal with him at all any more, and the last thing she was trying was calling me to ask for help getting him back here. I had to tell her that he'd pretty much burned his bridges here and scared a lot of people.
I'm scared of him in a physical way -- he's been arrested for having a concealed knife, and on the last day he was here he told me about how he had been threatening to eviscerate people downtown with it. I think he reclassified our neighbor across the street as "a vampire," "possessed by demons," "evil," and "not a person" after she suggested she get help. Yeah, I don't want him anywhere NEAR here again. But it's still really terrible -- he really IS in jail as a direct result of being insane, and there's no sign that he's getting any practical treatment for his insanity there.
All we can do is be cautious, make sure he has as few anchors as possible here, and be especially watchful when he is released from jail or prison. We're keeping in touch with the neighbors, and we're probably going to get another dog, because "large dog he doesn't know is harmless" is probably the most effective deterrent available -- it works even if I'm crashed unconscious. It's kind of a crazy reason to get another dog, but the other possible options really aren't as good. Some (like alarms) are negated by being too slow on response time when dealing with someone who isn't a random burglar, and some I can't effectively use if he breaks in while I'm incapacitated. A dog that he doesn't know personally doesn't have to be aggressive -- it just has to be there.
On the "making lemonade from lemons" camp, it may mean we can set up a dog run and put both dogs in it and suddenly be able to go out without having to arrange for a Moose-sitter. I'll investigate that with my mom's dog in her dog run by taping Moose to see if he cries, but as far as we can tell, his separation anxiety doesn't kick in if another dog is present. He WILL attempt to escape by clawing at the doors and windows if a human isn't in the house with him and the other dog (we tried this out with Phoebe, and got YET more Moose-claw damage to our hundred year old doors, sad), but the presence of another dog seems to keep him from getting distressed and crying, so we'd be able to kennel him in a run with his "brother" or "sister" without causing a neighborhood disturbance. (Leaving him in the house alone means he will sob, moan, and wear himself out scrabbling to escape for well over an hour, which is way longer than the token few minutes of whinging most dogs will put up when left alone. We know this because we taped him for our trainer.) We've left him kennelled with Phoebe before, and as far as I can tell he doesn't cry then, but we didn't tape him, just went out of sight and listened. His behavior when kennelled with a dog is COMPLETELY different than when he's kennelled alone -- alone he sobs the minute we go out of sight and keeps it up, and keeps sobbing when he sees us again. We did the thing where we waited for him to stop crying before letting him out (to try to teach him that crying doesn't get him out) but his levels of distress were pretty extreme -- he's shaking, twitchy, and smells like Afraid Dog after this happens. When we kennel him with Phoebe he doesn't want to go into the kennel much, but he will, and he watches us VERY carefully and when we return he jumps up and down a lot and sometimes barks a little, but he doesn't moan or cry. He doesn't smell afraid and while he's very happy to be back with people, he isn't twitchy or spooky. He reacts about the same way at the daycare, where they kennel the dogs in pairs in contiguous runs. (I love this, btw; most kennels keep the dogs in separate cages, but they just keep a careful social history of their dogs and pair them up appropriately, and it seems to make the dogs a lot happier.) He's very happy to see us and watches us the whole time, and sometimes barks, but he doesn't smell scared and he's not stressed, just excited. He's also always very happy to go TO the daycare. It's clearly way more fun than being stuck in a run with Phoebe (whom he could kind of take or leave -- she's territorial, doesn't much like him, and won't play with him.) Still, in Moose-land Phoebe is infinitely preferable to being kennelled and left alone.
I know dogs don't exercise each other -- people say they'll get a pair of dogs so they'll play with each other and exercise and generally speaking the dogs want to play with their people and sleep the rest of the time, busily storing up more energy. But I think a dog would help Moose's social situation and it would mean we could just go out to a movie or restaurant every now and then without having to go through a rigamorale. Weird to think that having TWICE as many dogs would make some things EASIER. But it would be harder on Brad: he takes the brunt of Moose's care, especially the walks, and twice the dogs would be at least 1.5 times the work even though they could both be walked at once, taken to the vet and kennel at once, etc. But anyone who knows Moose knows he's not a feasible guard dog, and this guy knows Moose.
Todo: Track down tenants and ask them if they've bought both the guest parking permits for our address, 'cause it'd be nice if we had a permit for guests. If they bought all of them, offer to buy one off them. They get all of the resident parking permits allowed to the property because we use the driveway, so they probably only have one guest permit, if that. Appraise them of the situation with the guy, and ask them if they can help us ID his stuff in the garage. We put some shelves into the garage fairly recently so hopefully it is not too insane in there, but they can store what they like in there so it might be. We also need to change the lock and pass out keys again. Make sure our across the street neighbor gets her garbage taken out tomorrow; I may have to have Brad do that this week as I've been feeling physically very ucky. Think about what to cook next as the yummy dal won't last forever. Vegetarian would be nice as then it's easy to feed Angie when she's over. Easy would also be nice as she ended up cooking the dal after we'd had the ingredients for almost a week! Dal is pretty easy but there's sooo much chopping. Hmmm, gluten-free vegetarian without lots of chopping... I have a bridge in Brooklyn too....