Irritations

I have two little things that are bugging me right now. As in right this very second.

It's the dogs: Thing One and Thing Two. For some unknown reason they seem to need to spend their days bugging the crap out me. They whine, they paw at the door to go outside and then again to come in. They bark at everything...and nothing. They start in on me around this time every day in the hopes that I will give up and give them lunch. That's not very likely to happen considering it isn't even 10AM and they ate breakfast a mere 5 hours ago. Yes, in dog time that's ages ago but if I feed them now they will be all over me around 2 because they will be "starving". Ugh.

The worst of it is the barking. Oh dear Lord above - the barking drives me crazy! Maddie, in particular, loves to bark at one of the cats. For some reason it's only one cat and she leaves the other two completely alone. For her part, Lucy, the cat, does growl and hiss which only makes herself seem more appealing. So, to recap: I have hissing, growling and barking going on a good portion of the day. It's enough to drive a person insane.

Now this part is interesting - at least, I think it is. The dogs drive me nuts all day long. All. Day. Long. But come sundown, when the light begins to disappear the dogs become strangely still. You would be hard pressed to even know there were dogs in this house. Where are they? Curled up in big puppy balls on the couch fast asleep. Apparently they wear themselves out during the day with all their craziness.

They also wear me out. Underfoot all day long, driving me to the brink of sanity and then POOF! Like magic they become these very sweet, sleepy dogs. I forgive their transgressions of the day; much the same as I do with my children.

I call what the dogs seem to suffer from "reverse sundowner". With older people who suffer from sundowners syndrome, they seem to be fine during day light hours and then as the sun goes down they lose their minds. With my dogs, they are seemingly whacked out of their minds all day and fine at night. It's kind of wild, actually.

And it would probably intrigue me more and inspire me to research it more if they weren't so busy driving me batty. ARGH!