I think I’ve found out what the secret about life is… When you’re having a positive experience of some sort, you have to have a negative experience that brings you back down to earth, and most likely the negative thing will be much harder to deal with than the positive situation. As an example, this is how my yesterday was:
Work was as usual, nothing much happened.
As I drove home, I was listening to the Norwegian radio station P4 as usual, and they have this competition that I’ve tried to be picked out as a contestant for for ages. The competition is called “pop king”, and works like this: when you apply, you send a text message where you pick three of the letters in your first name. If you are todays lucky contestant, you’ll hear three songs where you must figure out which artist/group that plays. The names of the groups/artists will begin whith the letters you have picked out from your first name. The constestant with all three answers correct in the shortest time will be this weeks pop king, recieving a prize.
This week, the prize is a choice between a flight (I guess it is for a specific amount of money) or a flat screen, so they have made the competition a bit harder, by only playing a couple of seconds of the songs you have to recognize.
As usual, I sent a text message, but didn’t expect to be picked this time either, but I was wrong. They called me up, and my nerves started playing with me. But my goal all the times I’ve tried to be the contestant is to get the correct answer to all three songs, since I almost always can get the answers when I’m not on the air 🙂 I don’t mind that much about the prize really. Well, they played the three songs, and I kept repeating my letters in my head: r, s and t. The first song was with Tina Turner, so that came easy. I knew I’ve heard the other two a million times, but with a head working overtime, I couldn’t for the life of me remember who played them. Got to hear the three songs one more time, and the second one fell in place: Right Said Fred. The last one is a song I’ve never really liked, and haven’t taken notice of who’s playing, but suddenly it just popped into my mind: Scissor Sisters. Yippie, I did it! It all took 36 seconds, and if no one beats me today or tomorrow, I’ll have the choice between a flight or a flat screen! The contestant today couldn’t name one of the artists, so just one more to go tomorrow. But as I said, I’m pleased just to have named all three, prize or not.
Well, I was pretty excited because of this yesterday, but it’s funny how fast life brings you down again. Was out in the yard while Arkas was doing his business. I tried to rush him a bit, but he thought I called for him, so he came running and placed himself between me and the house, he was facing the road, unfortunately I wasn’t. I suddenly saw on his body language that he had seen something up on the road, I yelled no, and he stopped. When I was about to get him, he walked a few steps forward, and while I was trying to grab him again, I saw that there was a woman with two small dogs up there. I thought I had him under control, but I didn’t, and he ran off and up to the dogs while I was yelling no after him. Arkas have never been happy around other dogs, and my biggest fear is that he’ll do something terribly wrong and someone will demand that he’s put to sleep. While I was running after him, I heard the lady yelling no, I heard barking from all three dogs but didn’t hear any screams of pain. Once up on the road, while trying to get a hold of Arkas, I tried to look at his body language, and couldn’t see any agressive behaviour at all, but couldn’t take any chances. After a couple of runs around the woman, I grabbed him and pulled him out of the way, while asking the lady if it all went well. She said yes, but I told her to let me know if she found any wounds or something. She told me that this wasn’t my fault, but it truly was since my dog was off lead and not under control. So she agreed to letting me know if something was wrong, luckily I haven’t heard from her yet.
Okay, so nothing happened, at least not fysically. But I hate it when Arkas gets an experience like that. And just the thought of what kind of damage Arkas can have caused these two little ones just kills me. They might have been calm, great dogs with not a worry in life, but this one experience could have done serious damage about how safe they’ll feel when meeting other dogs in the future.
No more off lead for Arkas, that’s for sure. And I hope and pray that the two dogs are just as happy and healthy as they were before this experience!
