It's hard to live with a ghost and a dog.

Wednesday night I wasn't feeling well and Choo Choo was barking and barking and barking and no matter how many times I told her to stop barking she just kept doing it, and for absolutely no reason. And I felt nauseous and my head was pounding and I was irritated that I ruined dinner because I forgot I already added the Dijon to the sauce and I added it again so the chicken tasted like way too much Dijon and I couldn't eat it. And she wouldn't stop barking. So I reached down and I gave her rear a swat.

Please understand, I do not ordinarily spank my dog. Even in my irritation, I made sure to not actually hurt her. She didn't yelp or give any sign that it had hurt. She just got quiet, turned around and looked at me. Hard. With this judging look in her big golden eyes. And then she put her ears down, put her tail between her legs, and she went and hid under the bed.

She stayed there all night and only came out the next morning when I dangled her leash for walkies. But as soon as I let her off the leash once back inside, she immediately ran and hid under the bed again.

Really?

Well, my feelings were hurt at that point. I went to work miserable, thinking that if she was still mad at me when I got home that I would go buy her a treat at the store to win back her love. Yes, I know that bribing other creatures for their affections is the wrong way to go about it. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Apparently, though, she forgave me in the ten hours I was gone, because she greeted me as per usual with an excessive amount of yipping and licking and dancing on her back legs when I got home. The perfidy of women. Even dogs.

Geeze. Well, it saved me a trip to the store.

I don't even get it. Padawan gives her a swat at least three times a week for some bad thing she does. (Generally it's because she'll crawl up into bed with us and get right by his face before letting out a loud, particularly high pitched bark for no reason, waking him up. And it irritates him, so he swats her little rear.) But she does not get all huffy with him for it. She doesn't jump off the bed and hide. She just trots over to my side of the bed and curls up with me. Then she growls at him when he puts his arm around me. But she doesn't hide from him or act all offended. 

In fact, he spanked her just last night because she woke him up three times with her shrill barking, and we've both been feeling under the weather.  But she got her revenge. Apparently, she left him a gift on the bath mat this morning while he was in the shower. She knows better, of course, but I guess she was trying to make a point.

Which was lost since I was the one who cleaned it up and then I had to spray the mat with oxyclean and shove it into the washer. (Oh, I think I forgot to put it in the dryer before I left this morning. Balls!)

Choo Choo, it seems, is waging war. And she's not even the only one. 

Our Ghost/Alien/Mysterious Being is stirring up trouble. Wednesday night, before everything went bad, Padawan's mom came by to borrow Padawan's key because she didn't have hers and needed it because Little Sister had left and locked her out of the house. (Presumably Little Sister lost her key and borrowed Mother's.) A minute or so after Padawan walked outside to meet her, my cell phone went off. It was giggling.

Maniacal giggling is Padawan's ringtone. I couldn't figure out why he was calling, so I ignored it and went on my merry way. I was alternating between singing My Funny Valentine and Summertime while I was cooking dinner. He didn't call a second time so I figured he must have accidentally called me.

When he came back up I smiled and asked, "Why did you call me?"

"Huh? I didn't."

"My phone rang. It was your phone calling me."

He shook his head. "I didn't even take my phone with me." It was sitting on the table. He'd left it there.

But it had called me. Just then, my phone vibrated with a new voicemail. I listened to it. It was me. Singing. Alternating between My Funny Valentine and Summertime accompanied by the clangs and noises one would expect to hear while someone was making dinner. 

The phone called me on its own. 

Or Kane did. (Oh, that's what I'm calling our Other Worldly Visitor.)

There's also the incredibly irritating fact that whenever I come home or wake up in the morning all of the cabinets in the kitchen are open. But I'm not sure if that's Kane being a ghostly pain in my butt, or if it's Padawan just being too lazy to close the cabinets after he gets something. I could ask, but men have a tendency to call those kinds of questions nagging. Maybe I should just hire a spiritual median (isn't that what they're called?) to help me communicate with Kane. Then I could ask him to just make sure the cabinet doors are closed at all times when not in use. It's just creepy to come into the kitchen to find them all open. It's like The Sixth Sense, but creepier since it's happening to me.

Between Choo Choo's campaign to bark incessantly for absolutely no discernible reason and Kane's determination to creep me the hell out, I haven't been sleeping well and I think I'm coming down with something. Probably the same thing my coworkers have all been suffering from the last couple of weeks. Great. Just what I need. To become a Succubus of Viral Plague yet again.

Sudden thought: What if the reason Choo Choo is suddenly barking for no reason is because Kane, invisible to human eyes, is taunting her mercilessly? Oh, damn that troublesome Kane to hell and back again! It makes more sense than Choo Choo just barking for no reason.

Great. Now I feel even worse for spanking her.