Weekend adventures with Gypsy

If you live in Bangalore, you will experience this thing called "load-shedding". This is basically controlled, planned (but not informed) power cuts. Sometimes, this follows a routine, which makes life easy as you can plan around it, but sometimes, they appear random (I really need to make friends in the electricity department of Bangalore!). This happens because we don't have enough power for the 8 odd million people to use. Yeah, there really are that many of us.

This gets worse in the monsoons. This is because the rain just affects the wires or something like that, not sure about the specifics, but it does get bad in the months between June and September! Anyway, I live on the 5th floor in an apartment building. Now in ALL the apartments that are there, mine is the only one that has a dog! Shocking, I know. On the whole, the community kinda only tolerates the existence of Gypsy. They are pretty much fine with her, as long as she doesn't poop/pee on the premises and bark. Now, we've lived here for a while, doing pretty okay with these conditions.

Now that you've gotten the background, here is what happened on Saturday. There was no power. My dog INSISTED that she go out now. I tried in vain to make her pee in the bathroom, but that so didn't happen. So I decided to take a chance and make a run for it. We raced down the stairs and on the third floor, she peed! At least a bucketful or something close to that much!!! I immediately dragged her back home, grabbed toilet tissue, a plastic bag, newspaper, some Lysol and shut her inside. She started barking up a frenzy - obviously! She still wanted to go out!!

I raced back down the stairs, to find that the pee had dribbled two flipping floors! I ran down, lay the newspaper down to catch the dribble and ran up and cleaned! I spent half an hour cursing the power and just generally and cleaned! I went back up, a little tired after all the racing up and down to be told in a very snide tone by some random person "The dog is barking a lot, no?" I grinned and said 'Oh. Yeah." like she was telling me a fact and not trying to tell me to keep Gyp quiet. Whatever.

So we finally went the 5 floors down, went for a walk and then climbed back the 5 floors. At this point, I was exhausted! I ate ice cream and watched TV.

Sunday, was another fun day. Usually the power goes out at 5pm, so I like to take gyp out at 4, so that I can use the lift! This Sunday? No chance! I took Gyp out in the elevator at about 4:15pm, the power was out because it started to POUR, the lift got stuck! I was in there for about 15 minutes, before the rain could lessen a little and the security people could turn the generator on so that the lift can move to floor level and Gyp and I can get out. here's what I discovered. I'm not claustrophobic at all. My dog is!!! She whined, pawed at the doors, paced and then just started barking and wouldn't calm down fully till the doors opened!! Now I know. That she is claustrophobic.

This was my weekend adventures with my dog. Did you have some adventures?