Grr.

Having a dog is almost as irritating as having a child – when talking to someone about your choices in care for the specific being, that is.  Almost everyone has something to say about child discipline, child rearing, feeding children, bedtimes, etc.  It is very infuriating at times, causes extreme confusion and indecision if I allow it to get to me, and usually isn’t very good advice anyway, especially if unsolicited.  I seek out my own answers, and choose to raise my child based on my own research and experience.

I have been doing the same thing with Gus so far, and though we’re not at “Dog Whisperer” status by any means, we seem to be doing okay with taking care of a puppy.  We give him a loving home, we feed him decent food, we discipline him and train him based on things we’ve read and things we enjoy, and we even sought the advice of a certified dog trainer to give us “expert” analysis of what we’re doing and advice for what might work better.  As far as I’m concerned, we’ve got it handled.  Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed and I complain to my mom, and usually that just results in her reassuring me that we’re doing fine.  I can then calm down, feel better about hitting a bump in the road and getting over it, and go back to being sane.  That’s why I call mom; she’s not pretending to be an expert at dog care (or child care, though having and raising four children qualifies as expert status, in my opinion), and she just understands that sometimes the best way of supporting someone is to simply support them, not offer unsolicited babble about what should be done.

Not very many people are like mom.

In the lunchroom today, which I usually avoid like the plague because I rarely emerge feeling anything but annoyed, I was asked by a colleague how things were going with our puppy.  I bet you can guess what colleague that was!  Of course, it was the dog expert, NP.  Henceforth, I will refer to him as “Dog Wiener”.  Mostly he let me just talk about what was going on with Gus, but a few times he interrupted to ask an obnoxious question or two like, “So, Craig is the only alpha dog in the house?” or “Wow, you’re really feeding him four times a day?”  The questions were phrased in such a way that I knew what was coming next was a lesson on how I should do things.  I just smiled and nodded mostly, because I didn’t feel energetic enough to tell him to fuck off.  I mentioned that we are planning on getting the PetSafe collar system, to keep Gus within a specific radius of our house, but we just hadn’t done that yet because of his small size.  Dog Wiener immediately said “Oh, yeah, you should get that at PetSmart.”  I told him that they have the exact same thing at many places, including the Devil Store (WalMart) and at Cabelas, which happens to be 15 minutes from our home.  He then “learned” me about PetSmart, and I didn’t catch all of his babble because… fucking A dude!  It’s PETSMART!!!  It’s a store!  I’ve seen it!  I know, not only because of the name but also because I’ve been there, that they SELL PET SHIT!  Is it really necessary to act like I’m either some retarded blond ditz, or someone that just emigrated from China?

Anyway, I passed it all off as typical for this place and the wieners that work here, filled up my water cup, and went back to my cube to mope (and blog) a little.  A few minutes later, I heard the little “bing!” that sounds off when I get a new email, so I maximized my Outlook to check it out.  Dog Wiener had sent me a message with the subject “petsmart”, and within the body of the email he simply left me two links: one to PetSmart, and one to Cabelas.

As if I couldn’t look that shit up myself.  I’ll make sure, Dog Wiener, now that you have provided me with the immeasurably useful and difficult to find links to two extremely common stores, to only ever get to these stores online by clicking on your links.

Or, even better, maybe you could just fuck off.