The Cone of Shame

Our dear Guinness is healing up nicely now.  The stitches from being neutered are healing so quickly and looking great, but the stitches on his back legs are taking more of a beating so they aren't healing quite as quickly (I was going to take pictures of where his duclaws were, but I wasn't sure everyone would want to see that!  Maybe after his stitches are out).  The incisions still look really clean and everything (not infected), but they definitely receive more abuse from Guinness so sometimes they look a little irritated.  And because Guinness is soooo hyper and soooo crazy, the veterinarian gave us some mild sedatives to give him, because we're supposed to keep him calm and mellow and inactive for 10 days (we're half-way there!) which is IMPOSSIBLE.  He usually isn't even calm or mellow after we're able to thoroughly exercise him... Let alone when we aren't even supposed to take him for a walk. So the sedatives keep him pretty doped up most of the time... When his pills start to wear off  he acts like his crazy self and is jumping all over everything, so then we worry about his stitches pulling or ripping... All 3 of us will be so happy when he gets his stitches out on Thursday so we can take the cone off and let him run around a bit!  

 

Not much else is going on... I've still been going to my weekly yoga class, and it's going well.  I'm still not flexible at all, but I think my balance is already improving a bit.  I bought my own yoga mat now, so I don't have to use the gym's mats anymore.  My class was yesterday, and today my abs are soooo sore.  We did a lot of core work.  Kevin started going to a CrossFit class too, so we're both quite sore on a regular basis.

Oh, and this week Kevin and I made probably one of the best dinners we've ever made... I recently purchased a cast iron pan, and I'd seen (on Pinterest of course!) directions for making an amazing steak in a cast iron pan.  We tried it the first time a few weeks ago, and the results were very "eh".... But those steaks were pretty thin and we made a few other mistakes, so they just didn't turn out great.  But this week... WOW.  It was amazing.  We were aiming for a medium rare cook on the steaks, and it definitely turned out more rare... but neither of us cared.  It was delicious.  I've tried making steaks many, many times on my own (everyone knows how much I love steak!), but they always turned out terrible.  It turns out the secret is a cast iron pan!!

Work has been NUTS, and I've been working a lot of really long hours on a really difficult and stressful project.  And this week my whole work group had to travel to Frederick, MD to meet with the HR department.  My work group is scattered all over the U.S., so it concerned me that they were flying us all in... I was thinking maybe we were getting laid-off or there was some other bad news!  It turns out that they were just really concerned about our survey results.  The whole company had to fill-out surveys on our job satisfaction, stress level, etc and the results from our group were SOOOO much worse than the rest of the company.  The rest of the company ranked most categories at about a 70-80% positive rating, and our group ranked most categories at 20-30%... so... that's quite a difference.  They had our whole group in a room, and at first none of us were saying anything because we were worried about repercussions (the surveys were anonymous, except that they knew what group we were with), but then we all started venting about everything and the HR people were SHOCKED at everything we have to deal with and everything we go through.  They even stopped being professional after awhile and just kept saying, "Oh my gosh, I feel so bad for you guys!" and "Wow, this is terrible".  So we'll see if anything comes of it.

I think that's about all that's going on here!!  I'll post again soon, after Guinness gets his stitches removed!