I’m Thinking Out Loud about spooky stuff, bad furkids, and running and walking with dogs today.

The vorteces
When I was in Sedona, Wendy @ Takingthelongwayhome asked me if we felt the vorteces. Not really. But . . .

. . . my IT was just every so slightly irritated when I arrived, and when I left? Completely normal.

My ipod, on the other hand, was seriously possessed. First it kept telling me storage was too full to take photos, despite deleting lots of stuff (including most of my photos). Turned out you need to reset your clock backwards, and those recently deleted photos (hundreds of them) will magically reappear. Then you have to delete them again.

But it worked! I regained 8 GB of space!

But wait, there’s more! After freeing up more space, suddenly the screen was black when I tried to take a photo. You couldn’t see anything. But it still took photos. So a lot of those photos? No clue at all what I was getting until I got it.

I don’t know what I did to cause that, and somehow I managed to fix it — yet I have no clue how I fixed it, either. Cue scary music!

It’s Coach FOMO
So I talked about Speed FOMO in my runfessions. The truth is I don’t have speed FOMO, I have coach FOMO!

Really I’m just envious of my runner friends working with coaches who are seeing great gains. Of course I realize that there is a simple solution for that.

I’m not sure that I want to commit to that right now. Life is still a little crazy with travel and family drama. So in the meantime, I’ll continue to be my own coach.

We didn’t know how easy we had it
Walking Lola and Chester, that is. Even if it seemed like a pain at the time. Harness them up. Hook up the leash (one leash that divided into two parts so that each had their own little leash) . . . and go.

Now it’s harness them up. Get Lola hooked into the hands free leash (often persuading her to be on the correct side to do so, even though that’s the side she normally walked on when she was a solo dog). Then get Bandit hooked into his leash.

Walk while manipulating leashes, sometimes doing the under and over thing, sometimes making sure Bandit leaves Lola alone so she can do her business . . . I’ve got a good system going now but it just takes longer.

At least I no longer have to carry a dog around on my walk!

The witching hour
Halloween might be over, but the witching hour is an everyday occurrence in our house. For those of you with furkids, have you noticed the witching hour? Both dogs and cats are vulnerable to it.

Gizmo thinks 3 pm is a good time for dinner, despite the fact that the earliest he gets it is 4:30 pm (and often much later). So he’ll start to stalk me and talk to me and if I’m not careful, he’ll go outside, eat grass, and come back in to throw it up. Or tear around the house after some imaginary mice. Or both!

Bandit has a habit of wanting to be let out constantly in the hour or so before dinner — he doesn’t actually do anything, mind you, but he totally gets antsy and by this point in my day I’m usually tired and it’s annoying.

Galloway is perfect for dogs
Almost perfect, anyway. When we first got Bandit, I did some running with him. He’s a sometimes high energy dog. At night, for instance, he doesn’t want to get up off his dogbed to go downstairs with Mr. Judy.

So we’d sprint a little here and there when I was walking him by himself. Lola, for all she loves to run around while playing, is just not a dog you run with. I think it makes her nervous about getting stepped on.

I stopped running with Bandit after a while because between long walks with him, my own half training, and often giving him more than one walk a day, I was getting exhausted!

On Monday, however, I decided to take him for a run. With no training whatsoever. He did really well, too — we ran/walked one and a half miles.I think he might have been able to go longer, but since he’s not used to it, I didn’t want to push it.

Galloway works particularly well for this. He got to stop every couple of minutes to pee, although I often had to pause my Garmin because 30 seconds is just not enough time for a dog to sniff and pee. So yes, it was a slow first mile. But it worked.

Did it work to calm him during the witching hour? Nope; not a bit.

Gizmo was a bad, bad boy
So the last time I was down at my parents? Mr. Judy got woken up early one morning by a yowling cat scurrying away and water spewing over our bathroom. Apparently Gizmo has been chewing on that water hose at the bottom of the toilet for quite some time.

It’s amazing how much water can spew out in a very short time. We once had a washing machine hose burst and while I got the water off fairly quickly, it had still seeped under carpet in the hallway, in our living room; it required industrial fans drying everything out for several days.

Luckily no carpet was harmed. And Mr. Judy was surprisingly calm about it — after the fact!

Talk to me. Tell me in the comments:

Anything spooky happen this Halloween?

Do you believe in vorteces?

Do your furkids have a witching hour? When is it?

I’m linking up with Amanda at Running with Spoons for her: