The last day of the year is always crazy at work. Can we possibly get X done by the end of the day? Nope. What about Y? Nope. And Z is off the table too. It’s not like it’s a surprise. We’ve been planning for the end of the year for at least a month. We’re short staffed and we know what we can accomplish. Don’t spring new work on us at the last minute.

Luckily there’s no pressure at home to get anything done by this evening. As you know, Lion asked for a method of punishment. We tried it yesterday. I gave him short bursts of swats with time between to recover. I took a before picture and an after picture so we could compare them. His buns were quite red and bruised.

I’m sure he could have taken more than the 300 swats I gave him. I’m also sure he would have been redder and more bruised had I continued. It was the first foray into this type of swats. We’ve tried all sorts of combinations of swats. I think it’s best to start out slowly so we can see the effects before we move on. It’s trial and error. Hard, fast swats that lasted a long time yielded certain feedback. Rapid-fire light swats that became harder as we went yielded more feedback. Now we’re trying bursts of hard swats. So far the feedback is good. Lion “likes” this way best. He has made some suggestions. I should do more swats at a time and I should wait less time between bursts. I’m sure we’ll tweak things more as we go along.

The other thing that stopped me from continuing beyond 300 swats is that his buns were bleeding in some spots. I knew we had our football game coming up and I didn’t want to make the bruising/bleeding worse before the game.

As I whomped Lion 142 times for the points scored, he asked if he was getting redder. He wasn’t. With one exception, the scores were spread out enough that his buns were able to recuperate between swats. Even the two interceptions that our idiot quarterback threw were early enough in the game that the tenderizer side of the paddle didn’t have much effect.

Lion wants to do a round of swats every day. I get it. He wants it to become routine before we back off to just punishment. Practice makes perfect. We’ll see how far we get and what changes we make along the way.