I didn’t punish Lion last night. It’s true, he’s been annoying me more than usual lately. But then, everything has. It’s a combination of work and the unknown about the sleep study I did last night. Is he really being annoying or am I being overly sensitive? My best guess is that it’s half and half.
Of course, Lion doesn’t know he’s being annoying. He isn’t trying to be annoying. He doesn’t wake up and look for ways to piss me off. He’s just going about his day like everything is normal.
I’ve said for years that I can deal with either work or home being stressful. I can’t deal with both. Since work has been stressful lately, any little issue at home is magnified. That’s not fair to Lion. On the other hand, I need to let him know if there’s a problem, preferably not in a snarky way. If I just tell him that X annoyed me without assigning punishment to it then he can try not to let that happen again.
What if I’m being unreasonable? What if being upset at Lion for not hearing me come in the other night is over the top? I think he should have heard. Between my making noise and the dog making noise, he should have heard. But what if that’s an incorrect assumption? Last night he had his nose buried in his iPad, sitting right next to me, and I asked him a question that he never heard. He accuses me of not listening to him when I’m on my iPad. Usually I hear him but sometimes I don’t and he’s right next to me too.
So, I’ve got some work to do. I think I need to count to ten, or a hundred, to run the perceived problem through my head before I launch myself at Lion. When I can form a coherent thought I can have a conversation with Lion about it. Together we can decide if it’s a real issue.