More on dogs and dog owners

I'm a pretty chill (albeit sarcastic) person with almost no violent tendencies (unless someone cuts me off in traffic), but this weekend I found myself fantasizing about using a hammer to bash in the head of a living, breathing thing:

The weather was gorgeous. Friday afternoon Husband and I decided to walk over to pick up zaiki from the babysitter, since it's only 5 minutes away. Zaiki love walking home instead of driving, (a rarity among American children, I'm beginning to realize), so I try to foster that love for bypedal-izm by walking with them as much as I can. It's a nice little walk except that the most direct route takes us by the house with a huge and mean Rottweiler that barks and snarls at you when you walk by, not even close to the fence. Just being in the line of sight of that thing is all it takes to send it into a drool-filled snarl fit. Barking and snarling is all well and good, that's what dogs do, but the problem is the the fence in the yard is pretty flimsy, short, with gaps under it and the dog is usually left unattended. Zaiki are afraid of it (justifiably) and so am I. It was a matter of time when it got out.

So this Friday the dog wasn't there on the way to pick the kids up and we thought it was safe to walk back the same way. Unfortunately, it was there. Sonya and I were meandering a few feet behind and saw the dog duck under the fence and lunge at Kevin and the little Maya. I picked Sonya up and ran. Kevin was fighting off the creature with his knife, Maya was screaming when the owner came out and grabbed the snarling, growling beast.

It was horrible. The only weapon I had were my bare hands and they were holding Sonya. What could I do? I comforted Maya and carried her all the way home. Now for the past three days she's been saying she is afraid of "big wolves", won't leave my side and fell asleep curled up on my chest, shaking and crying.

I had contemplated taking my .38, going over and blasting that dog to hell. Only:
1. I may miss
2. I'll go to jail and, as a consequence,
3. My children will be left motherless
So we did the next best thing and called animal control. Twice as of today, but I'll keep at it.

The best (worst, really) part was the dog owner's reaction. If my dog attacked a small child on the street, I would not limit my involvement by shrugging shoulders, saying "sorry, it got out" and walking away. I would at least check to see how that child was doing and my apologies would be more sincere. What an asshole.
My suspicions from before that only uncouth ugly filth would own such a vicious and mean creature (and would let it run loose) were confirmed.

I am very angry at the injustice. We teach our children that all actions have consequences, that bad deeds always go punished, but in this case, there are no repercussions for the owners. I know life is full of disappointments, that zaiki will have their share of tears and fears, but I still feel that, as their mother, I have an obligation to protect them as much as I can, because they still can't fight their battles. They are so little...It's my job to make sure that justice is restored. In this case, I can't. And it makes me feel sad, helpless and angry. Have I mentioned I'm angry? And next time I'm walking past that house I'm carrying a hammer.

Chi-Squareds, Cohen's Kappas, T-Tests and Academic Unfairness

I am in statistical hell: I am taking a research methods course in my graduate program. I'm burning and little evil chi-squared, alphas, kappas and t-tests are prickiling me with their tiny pointy numbery pitchforks. Since when does a marketing communication graduate student need an in-depth knowledge of correlation coefficients? What kind of poppycock is that?!!! You have computer programs for that!

Ok, I have always been no-so-good sucked at doing math and math problems. And now, due to existence of SPSS, Excel and other awesome tools my mathy part of the brain athrophied and fell off. It's an atavism,just like a tail our ancestors had once upon the evolution. Actually, I'll take a tail over the ability to do math.
That's it: I need a long, bendy, grabby tail so I can take my children in public and not worry about keeping tabs on them. Just imagine: you are at the grocery store, both hands full of squirming/screaming babies, and you calmly reach and grab what you need off of the nearest shelf. How cool would that be! And then you could push your grocery cart without having to let go of either of your children.

But anyway, back to my statistical suffering: I have an exam coming up and studying for it is like reading transcriptions of a coded speech. I recognize the individual words, but the meaning escapes me. And then what's up with academian speak?! The more courses I take, the more I realize that just because you are a brainy academian doesn't mean you can effectively relay your knowledge to others. The goal of the majority of my professors has been to use as many GRE test words as they can to make it as difficult as possible to understand them. I actually believe it is a requirement for teaching to weed out faint-hearted students and also to make sure that they don't get questions. If you can't understand the topic, you won't have questions about it.

Seriously in need of wine therapy after this week.

To end on the upbeat note as usual: no mention of poop for quite awhile :)