My dog drinks bottled water and engineering healthy habits

Doggle gets his own oversized water bottle for long road trips.

I started using it to refill his water bowl because carrying his water bowl to the sink while he tried to weave around my legs was dangerous, and the shoving his head in the bowl while I put it down bit was just annoying. A big thirsty dog is a pest. With the water bottle, I can very easily fill it, distract him with a treat (or the fake-out of a treat) in one hand, and pour water with the other, and voila! No accidents, jostling or cursing.

It’s worked too well. He now assumes that any bottle of water is his and follows random bottles like a bloodhound. It’s amazing how easy it was to change his behavior. Next up: drinking straight from the bottle!

If only we humans were so easy…. (though maybe if someone else were training me, it would be. And according to Sheldon Cooper, we are.)

Back in March, I’d made a few tiny changes to my regimen, slipping in small changes that would be easy, and set me up to make better choices because I was already making good ones.

The next steps though, aren’t so easy to get around and I’m thinking that it’d help if I weren’t such an annoying pain in my own patoot.

For example: I need to start seeing various health professionals, start physical therapy and trying other kinds of health-related therapies on a regular basis to deal with my pain problems. What do I do? Nothing. For weeks. PiC’s the one who schedules the massages for me because he knows I won’t have time to, much less deal with the actual medical stuff.

It took months to make a few minutes to pick up the phone to schedule a few starter appointments with new people and then I had to reschedule three times. I still haven’t gotten in to see them yet. *sigh*  Next week.

The new strategy is to set my work schedule to be at home one day per week and block off a set time that’s not available for meetings or work. It’s just for me and appointments. Then I have to work around that.

I just know that I’m going to disrespect that time and let work bleed into it.

My problem, really, is that I function in two modes: 100% on work or off work. If I set aside an afternoon block, then I’m going to have trouble disconnecting at the right time. If it’s a morning block, then I’m going to have trouble disengaging from Lazy (I’m doing real life) Mode and going to work starting in the afternoon. Equally, I’ll hate having to work straight through the evening or I’ll just do it because I won’t be able to stop.

These things I know because I’ve had to do this on an irregular basis and it’s a struggle either way.