Feeding a dog canned dogfood is something that everyone should be allowed to experience. For the last five or six years Chelsea has eaten only dry dogfood — because of a liver condition, she can't process protein or sodium very well, so she has to eat special, low sodium food. As a result, eating has never been a particular thrill — eating what she's supposed to, that is. She's always been all too eager to snatch up someone's untended burrito, never making the connection between that and her stomach pains later.

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Gah, that was creepy. My family is out so I'm alone in the house. We're out of good cereals out in the kitchen, but we keep a few other cereals in the hallway by the bedrooms in the back of the house, so I went back there to see what we had. As I was looking through the cereals, I heard a noise in my dad's office, but since everyone is out, I assumed it was my dog, Chelsea. But it sounded like someone rummaging around through files, so I went into the office to see who it was. Oddly, there was no one there, not even Chelsea.

I then walked back out into the hallway, and I turned to find Chelsea standing at the end of the dark hallway, regarding me quietly.

Now, there's no reason for that to be scary — Chelsea is 15 years old, arthritic, deaf, and suffers from liver problems. In her current state she'd have trouble causing damage to a quadraplegic, masochistic doormouse. But to suddenly find her staring at me silently, almost maliciously, it felt just like a scene from a Stephen King movie, like Chelsea was about to make a leap for my jugular and I'd have to run and lock the door behind me in terror. It was totally one of those moments from movies where someone turns to see what's behind them, and it's nothing, and then they turn back and the bad guy is standing right in front of them and the soundtrack suddenly gets loud and you spill your popcorn.

I now have all the lights on.

Today I had restless sleep, and that often seems to lead to interesting dreams. Or perhaps it's just the waking up at odd hours that lets me remember them. I'd be kind of concerned to discover that these kinds of things are going on in my unconscious mind every night and I'm just not aware of them. Although it'd explain a lot.

This time I dreamt that I was wandering around some kind of university or apartment complex somewhere in the US, and I realized I was close to the apartment where Tony and his girlfriend lived (My awake self doesn't recognize who his girlfriend was, though apparently in the dream I was friends with her).

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Last night I went out with my parents and grandparents to Borders and then to Denny's. My plan was to go see The Corpse Bride with Giselle after dinner (along with the usual contingency plan of going alone if she proved as difficult to get ahold of as usual).

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I've been growing closer to Chelsea lately, mostly since I've stopped ignoring her existence altogether. It's really nice how she is always at the door waiting for me to get home from work now. One more little nice thing about working day shift.

Last night I had a dream where my subconscious apparently took that growing closeness to an extreme. In my dream, I realized I could communicate with her at a basic level. I sat down and asked her, out of curiosity, if she could catch me a mouse. She got up and started to walk off, apparently to do it. I stopped her and said that's OK, I don't actually want her to. She lied back down, but then started singing a song about mice.

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With my 25th birthday and everything, I've been feeling a bit of remorse about the uncontrollably swift passage of time. I know I'm not old yet, but I'm older than I want to be. Sort of a quarter-life crisis, as it were. But George Carlin says, "Life is a series of dogs." And I'm still on my first. It feels like Chelsea has been with me all my life, and that's almost true.

And sure, she's getting a bit old, but the fact is, if my first dog is still alive and well, I don't have anything to complain about.

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