8th September

 Been a bit better last few days. Stuffing my face a bit as well. Tsk. Ares is still a hole. I suspect that hole is always gonna be there now. Don't get me restarted on life and death.

I pushed back at work yesterday. For the umpteenth day on the trot I had to stop what I was doing, look at something else. Oh. Multi tasking you think. Yeah. No. It's got to the point where I have half a dozen projects none of which are completed, each of which has stopped, all to service the next ooh ooh ooh must do thing. The very opposite of planning and scheduling. I've lost track of some of the bits that are stalled from a month ago. So. I pushed back. Stop this. This is getting us nowhere, can't constantly be incompleting stuff and starting something new. Jesus.

Ho hum.

I think it has got to the point we need a proper schedule. Andy confessed to also being lost with project statuses. I think his madness has spread to the entire stack. Needs to be addressed. Sigh.

I'll say it again.

I need a long rest.

Thinking of Ares again this morning. Of people. But dogs in particular. How each one is so unique. I've known a lot of dogs over my time. No two are the same. Different personalities. Different quirks. If you spend enough time with them, you really come to know every nuance of them. It's beautiful - seeing this thinking, happy personality, manifested in a unique way. An individual snowflake. It also makes it devastating to me when that snowflake then disappears. Human, dog or otherwise. Something unique is genuinely lost for all time. By any definition, tragic.

So. A dogs mind. I see a lot of minor studies and debate about how smart animals are and yada. It seems in recent decades there is a new awareness that oh, animals in general are a lot more smart and personality laden than we thought - or in actuality that we cared to look or account for.

But what does that mean.

I'm not going to see Athena sit down and do a crossword.

I study shit. It's just... naturally what I do. Process. Sort. Try and eliminate subjective stuff. Repeat. Eliminate bias.

I've spent nearly 12 years around 2 mutts, at super close hand, almost always at their side, 24/7 for all that time. It's given me a lot of time to get to know them, to study them, to understand how they work. I've also spent a fair bit of time with other dogs. How each reacts differently, and yet the same in some ways. I think I could probably write a fair bit about how they think and how smart they are. The long story short, I'd say they are around a human 4 year old in many ways. Not so much in others. And in a few ways, like an adult human understanding. Very good communicators and being able to comprehend us - arguably up there with the very best other than us, and in some ways they are *better than us*. Their capability to read body language is off the charts. I have lots of info to back that up and close hand study yada. Will. Bandwidth. Concentration. Understanding. Some key points of a dogs mind ( or animal in general - particularly the bandwidth one ).

Maybe one day I will write it all down. I find it fascinating. Also the implications it has for other animals. I see a lot of what I have found transfers over to other animals to differing degrees. Cows for instance. Have some of the same traits. But definitely not as smart. But not unthinking either. Different personalities. Curiosity. Fear. Anger. Understanding of things they've not encountered before. Uh huh.

Anywho. Likely only interesting to me :p

My brother has painted his home cast gnomes up. One of them he's trying to get ballpark close to the one I did. Technique is off. I really want to go teach him how to paint them up in a fancy style. It's pretty easy. But I think it's something better that you learn from someone half doing it in front of you, which you then copy.

I seem to be on a bit of a mild crafting malarkey lately. Part of my heart definitely lies in noodling around making arty things. I suspect were it not for the usual demands of life and jobs and bullshit, I would have gone down a hand made artsy path when I was figuring out what to do with myself as a late teen. The capitalist world had different ideas for my peasant, cog in the machine, life. And I had no other help or influences to be able to change that fate, until arguably too late, the pattern is set.