Sad and Scary

DH and I took The Kids for their walk yesterday afternoon. If DH goes with us, then both Kids can go at the same time. I can't do the two of them together anymore. Honestly, since the fall, and with a couple of other instances - mostly involving "K A T S" - I don't know how I ever managed the two of them together as well as I did. Something very sad and scary happened yesterday. I couldn't sleep last night because of it. And, yes, I am overly sensitive to these kinds of things. Instead of trying to process what was my first class in "Modern Standard Arabic," which, by the way cannot be processed, but more on that later, I spent the night just thinking about how frightened and lonely and hungry and scared the stray dog we ran into must be.

Pretty dog. Some sort of light-colored Shepard. Alaskan somethingorother, Malmute, Husky? I don't know. Very handsome though - with light gray and beige fur - and very light blue / gray eyes. Young. Obviously young. Not a puppy, but not full-grown, either. And thin. Very, very thin. I'm going back up to where we saw him / her this morning with food. DH says he thinks that it is probably someone's pet that just got out. He always tries to make me see things like this from a much different angle than I do. No. I doubt very much he was someone's pet that just got out. And if he [we'll call him "he," but since, again, everything happened so quickly, I didn't take proper notice of the hind-end of the dog to determine whether it was a he / she] is someone's dog - that someone doesn't deserve him. Why didn't he have a collar on? And why was he so damn thin?!?

No. Unfortunately he is just one of millions of dogs that someone probably got as a little puppy and then decided that once the puppy got a little bigger that it was too much work or something and the dog got "kicked to the wayside." Why!!? WHY??? There are far too many people that should be on some sort of list as not ever being allowed to have pets!!! We have lots and lots and lots of stray cats in this part of the world. No one - well that's not entirely true - we do have PAWS - does anything about the situation. Dogs, too. After I did the post about seeing stray dogs at a mall, a local blogger brought to my attention the stray dogs down by the Holiday Inn - and now I've seen them there, too. They are here. And, of course, with no one doing anything about the situation it will only become worse with time. No way to stop the population of them growing.

What was scary was that once again, all of the sudden, a dog just appeared. No warning. No barking on his part - no noise of him coming. I tense up immediately. The Baby, no doubt, senses this. She starts going ballistic. Then The Boy realizes what is going on and he wants in on the action, too. If I would have had both of them - by myself - I would have never been able to control them. I was having a hard enough time controlling The Baby; DH had The Boy. It was ten minutes - no I am not kidding - of both Kids doing all they could to be freed from our clutches to get to this poor stray dog - and did the stray dog high-tail it off to wherever he had come from? No. He kept following us. It was an actual, physical work-out, just pulling and tugging The Baby to get her to come with me instead of trying - with all her physical might - to get to the stray dog behind us. DH, with The Boy, was experiencing the exact same "work-out."

I hate to think of the fur that would have flown if my two Kids would have gotten to the poor stray. Why they have it in for some dogs, and not for others, is beyond me. Yes, they are socialized. They play beautifully with other dogs - IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT. Outside of that "environment," however, oh my gosh - it is a completely different story. Is it my fault - because I do get tense - that they - my Kids - feel the need to protect me? Probably. How do you control that - the fear of the unknown - unknown as in what might happen? As we continued along - with our two Kids doing their best to NOT continue with us, but instead, go back to - good grief - who knows what my two Kids were wanting to do - I found a stick and grabbed it. For one brief second I considered using the stick to beat The Baby [no - of course I would NEVER do that!!!] just to get her to behave. When the stray finally decided that he really didn't want to follow us after all and headed a different direction, I very calmly said to DH, "You know I would hate to have to ever beat a dog with a stick." DH replied, "But you would if you had to." Yes. I would. The stick is outside by the front door. It is more of a pole than a stick. A dowel. I'll be grabbing it again, today, before we head out on our walk. On second thought, there is a metal dowel in the garage that I used to carry when we'd walk around the golf course - where there were stray dogs. I'm grabbing the metal "stick" before we head out today...

My decision to not take "Modern Standard Arabic," this session of Adult Education has been made. I got the work out from last night and started to look at it - along with a simple page from the reading / writing class I took almost three years ago - and decided that I need to take the reading / writing class again. This is from last night's class:
I don't have a clue - not a clue - what these sentences say. I know one of them has the words "United Nations" in it, another has "father" but in the "formal" sense as opposed to the "informal" sense [whalid is the formal; abu is the informal]. The words "literature," and "Egyptian" are in these sentences somewhere, as well. The alphabet pages that I grabbed to use as a handy reference are of no help. Nonewhatsoever. It would take me days to try to decipher and translate the sentences, above, one letter at a time...