I have a week and a half off over the holidays, like many in any college town.  I like the break from the usual routine — long enough to shake off the workaday and turn your attention to more important if less pressing things.  Life's rhythms change, if briefly.  The new year provides momentum, so it's not the aimless drift of ennui.  But time itself is altered by its ownership.  My time, for a brief time, is really mine.

With Le Parisien dropping in and other holiday treats, I've been putting off my usual ring-out-the-old rituals.  But yesterday I finally found myself alone at home with the whole day ahead of me and no plans.  Well, I shouldn't say "alone" — Jake had to work a double shift or something, but Oscar was home.  Before Jake left he told me his dishy older brother, Ryan, would drop in at some point to take the dog out.  Although any opportunity to see Ryan is welcome, I assured Jake I'd take care of Oscar.

I thought we'd have a low-key kind of day, with Oscar curled up under my desk as I took care of my year-end miscellany.  Ryan would drop by, fall in love with me.  We would have a bubble bath.  After which I would get back to sorting through my files.  Nice and easy.  With Oscar all the time resting peacefully under my desk.

It's not unusual for Oscar and I to spend time when Jake's away like this.  Aside from an occasional heavy sigh, Oscar — who is nine after all — seems comfortable and content in my company. 

Not yesterday.  The kid was a terrorist all day.  I mean ALL EFFIN DAY, tip to tail.  He started pacing back and forth the minute Jake was out the door. For literally two-and-a-half hours it was back and forth and up and down the hall.  When I suggested he give it a rest, he'd find a spot, curl up, and then five minutes later he was up and about again, back and forth and up and down the hall.

I took him out after a couple of hours of that, but it was bone-chillingly cold, so we jogged around a bit and had a pee, and that was that. We came back and he was still restless, and pacing around the apartment. It seemed like it could go on forever, and I couldn't get anything done.  If I went back to my room and closed the door he was banging his head on it, trying to get in.  If I let him in, he'd sniff around, maybe curl up somewhere, and then, after a couple minutes would be up and at it again.

He was anxious and manic in a way I hadn't seen him before.  At one point he came up to me and let out one of those growls that are preludes to a bark — it's not a mean growl, exactly — it's more like when kids are restless and grouchy and start ordering the adults around them about. 

I was like: "oh no you di'int."

I went straight to the doggy drawer and grabbed his doggy downers.  Pet-Ease is what it's called and it's an herbal mixture of chamomile, dried hops, ginger root, and the like, and it's supposed to calm them down when they're anxious.  I gave him a double dose. 

I would make a terrible parent.  I'd be like those parents in that PBS documentary on drugging your kids who took an ordinary hyperactive child and cracked him out on a cocktail of sedatives and antipsychotics so potent they produced permanent brain damage.  I've also been reading Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is told from the POV of an autistic fifteen year-old.  Some of the trials and tribulations described reminded me of Oscar, too, somehow.  I couldn't cope.

With Oscar out, I had a nice long skype session with my friend Csaba in Budapest, who has a geriatric Bavarian Mountain Hound he says he sometimes sedates because of old-age aches and pains, but Oscar is spry as a pup. Thankfully, after he took his meds, I got a couple of hours of catch-up in.

Unfortunately, that was interrupted when my netbook succumbed quite suddenly to some kind of virus.  I was chatting and trying to do some cooking at the time, and the recipe was on the netbook, too, and then everything was just up in the air, and that's about the time Oscar's drugs wore off.

So I took him out again.  It was dark by now, and we went for a longer walk along the Muddy River to the Museum of Fine Arts.  Oscar was absolutely incorrigible: eating goose shit like it was Foie gras, leaping into brambles and coming out covered from tip to tail in burrs. 

And that is how I spent the rest of my free day: in front of the fire, picking clumps of burrs and goose shit out of Oscar's golden coat, which had a happy side-effect:  by the time I was through, Oscar was sleeping like a baby.

A big, hairy, terrorist baby.