Let's Try This Again

Ooooof... Stayed away for a long time again, right? I think (part of) the problem is that I write far (faaaaaaaaaar) to much when I manage to drag myself back to the blog again - it's not meant to be a series of novels, it's a blog! Occasionally posting ten-page stream-of-consciousness discussion is pretty much the opposite of keeping a daily record of our failures and successes - so let's stop doing that, OK? (Well, at least let's try...)

Here's what's been going on, as short as I can make it:
*Monster's bitten someone... (I wrote a loooooong paragraph here detailing the whole thing, but this is supposed to be a short summary so I deleted it again.) My mother was watching him and he jumped up at a visitor and bit her on the arm. She wasn't injured (no broken skin or lasting marks) nor particularly upset, and neither she nor my mother can say if he was angry or trying to play when it happened. They had no difficulty stopping him and putting him in another room, however.

*Monster behaved oddly toward my great aunt, whom he knows from before. Suddenly he acted as if she were the most dangerous thing he'd ever seen... The behavior stopped once she was in the car with us.

*I'm trying to look over our routines now that we're back home again and get something of a fresh start, trying to build better habits. It's not going great so far...

*We're having an issue with a dog owner who lets her dog run off leash along a stretch of the path we walk every day. The dog is guarding the path and appears quite actively aggressive (threatening body language, taking up confrontational positions, reacting from quite a distance, and so on), and the owner is clearly aware of this - if/when she spots us (or others trying to walk by) she'll race to catch her dog and/or call out for us to wait at a distance while she gets control over him. The situation feels quite bad and I've chosen to turn back rather than walk past a couple of times now - but it's not so fun to have an intended two hour walk turned into a half an hour slink-away instead... Maybe I'm reading the dog wrong and it's actually all "talk" and no action, but to me it does look like it intends to act and I am not amused. Monster also clearly finds the dog disturbing, as he actually "hides" behind my legs as we're walking past, pressing against me and peering sideways at the other dog. Which is allowed to stare unblinkingly at us with stiff body language while we're walking by - apparently catching it is good enough. Why is it off leash!? Along a quite busy hike/bike path!? Feel free to point and snicker at the glass house I'm sitting in, but I don't feel the owner is being responsible.

That'll have to do, now you're basically up to speed. Let's see if I can get to blogging regularly from now on... See you tomorrow then!

Wait, what's this - no photos of me!?! I object! There, that's better.