My Christmas Wish

A friend of mine messaged me on Facebook today and mentioned that she was sad that the new newsfeed settings didn’t allow her to see my posts. She had missed out on seeing all of Jet’s hilarious antics on Facebook because of it. I explained a workaround for that to her and hopefully she will start seeing my posts again soon. She mentioned a funny story about her Dad in her message that made me smile from ear to ear. Her dad passed away earlier this year and it was good to see her relate funny stories about him that I could tell were making her smile too. This is what Christmas is for. It’s about making memories with the people we love so that when the time comes that all we are is a memory, they have some wonderful stories to pass on.

This year has been tough for all of us in its own ways, but I’ve finally come to a place where I have made peace with all of the bad things that happened this year. My son officially became an adult. He’s legally not my problem anymore and I can’t tell you how much it hurts to know that when Christmas morning comes for him, all of the childhood magic will be gone from that tree.

I remember waking up on Christmas morning after I turned 18 and feeling like it was the end of an era, like everything had changed and it was true. Everything had changed. I couldn’t sit there in denial of my status and I felt everything that I had loved as a kid just slipped right out of my fingers during that 18^th year of my life.  I didn’t get that magic back until I had my son and now that my kids are nearly grown, I wonder how I will keep the Christmas magic alive.

I miss Lucy still, all the time. This has been a hard Christmas because she’s not here to smile at me when I get home. I still cry when I think about her licking her chops while slowly parking her butt on the floor as I took a piece of string cheese out of the fridge. Or good grief, that hoodie we put her in last January because her belly had been shaved and it was so cold that you felt it seep into your very bones, so we refused to send Lucy outside “naked” and my daughter improvised with a short sleeved hoodie that she never wore. Dear God did Lucy ever look adorable in that hoodie. When I think of her in that ridiculous get up with a big goofy grin on her face, I can’t help but smile, even though I have to reach for the kleenex while I’m doing it. There are so many good memories mixed in with all of the sadness here.

The thing that saddens me most though, at this time of year, is not what I have lost or what I have gained. It’s that I have a unique perspective on the lives of others and sometimes I see them miss opportunities that cause me to sit back and shake my head.

Having children young is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, I’m done raising my kids and I’m not even 40. I can now go out and spend my days being wild and crazy and carefree while I’m still young enough to enjoy doing all of that stuff. On the other, I see all of my friends sitting around with their kids still young and still at home and occasionally, I want to smack them for being selfish and stupid.

Supposedly, maturity, and responsible behavior too, are things that comes with being a parent, but it doesn’t seem like these things always go hand in hand. Being a parent for me meant sacrificing a lot of things. I wasn’t always the perfect picture of responsibility, but I never dumped my kids off on my parents for weeks on end to spend time hanging out with my friends. The simple concept of not seeing my children every single day was enough to send me into panic attacks. The kids went with me if I wanted to hang out with my friends or my husband or I stayed home so the other could go out and have fun. Honestly, I wouldn’t have made it through those early years of raising children without a spouse to lean on and help take some of the pressure off.  When the right man came along, I knew him when I found him because he wanted nothing to do with anything that came between me and my child.

I was a single parent for about a year and it sucked! The hardest part of it was that my son had to go with me absolutely everywhere. In some ways, that was very good because everywhere I went, we were together. If he wasn’t attached to my hip, he was sleeping in his carseat or his stroller or at home in his crib and I was never more than three feet from him. I never left the raising of my child up to a daycare center or someone else. My friends would come over on weekends, sure, but when they went home, guess who stayed and continued to raise the kids?

You guessed it!

So to all of my friends out there this Christmas, those of you that are wonderful parents, and you know who you are, give yourselves a big pat on the back and hug your children tonight. Those of you that aren’t doing such a good job know who you are too, and you need to do better. You should be spending time with your child, not your new friends or your new boyfriend/girlfriend, or even me.

Your kids will not be children forever. The time you have with them right now is so precious and I would love to smack you upside your big fat head for squandering it.

Some day, that little kid that looks up at you with adoration no matter how stupid you are right now, is going to walk out the front door with all of his stuff packed up in his car and he’s going to hug you and say good bye and go out there and live his life and he’s going to do it without your permission.

I’m not kidding. He is going to do this. You will not like it and there will not be one single thing you can do to stop it.

All you will be able to do is watch him go.

You will want every single moment of this time that you chose to waste back and guess what?

Ain’t gonna happen.

For your sake, and that of these kids, I have only one wish for Christmas.

It’s that every parent on the face of this planet gets their head out of their ass and puts their children first, because Christmas is about them and for them. It’s about creating memories and making every single minute count, because we only have so many minutes to spend loving the people we love and our children should always receive every single speck of love that we can give them. This should always come before everything else.

So, I say this with all the love in my heart. Get your head out of your ass. Love your KIDS. If you are personally responsible for doing something that is preventing you from spending every single day with your child outside of having a court order that prevents you from doing so, you’re doing it WRONG. So stop being such a selfish douche!

Go pick up your kids and love them, because they deserve everything you have to give and more.

This is my message of love, to my friends and family, I know it sounds cold and harsh, but it really is motivated by seasonal feelings and a desire to spread love, joy and cheer. Maybe not to you, but to your kids? For sure.

Merry Christmas.

A Christmas Gift from the Geeky Gemini Girl

I think about marriage and divorce a lot. In part, because I am married and have been with my husband now for 20 years. Ours is the longest running, happiest and most stable relationship I know besides that of some of our friends’ parents. I have plenty of friends who are in good, stable and happy relationships, but they are still in the process of raising their young families. Bill and I now really get the time to spend with each other, being who we are and we’re finding that we still like each other after all this time. Right now, we really are the happiest couple I know, but that’s only because we have a slight time advantage on the others what with our kids nearly being grown and the stress of whether our kids are going to turn out like normal adults is off the table. Our relationship has also outlasted more than a few that we have encountered over the years. Several of our friends have gotten divorced, one just recently.

At the same time while I’m seeing all of this, I’m watching my brother and his girlfriend struggle with their relationship. They’re trying to figure out who they are as a couple while having all the challenges of being new parents and this is probably the most difficult time in any relationship. Many, many relationships begin and end in this phase. So, every time I see one of them say something on Facebook that lets me know that they are arguing, I think about my friends who have been getting divorced and the utter hell their children have been put through during the process and I think about my little niece, who is only 2 months old, living her life without either one of her wonderful parents as a daily participant in every moment and it breaks my heart. She deserves to have both of her parents, every kid does.

I doubt that my brother and his girlfriend are heading for a breakup, but being a writer, my mind tends to wander to the most dramatic outcome possible. So I do tend to see the worst, even if I don’t expect it to occur. I just wish I could express to them that I really get it. I am 13 years older than my brother, we have a generation gap between us, so I’m almost like another parent in some respects as far as he’s concerned. Often, what I say goes in one ear and out the other, but I remember how hard it was for my husband and I. We had kids first and got married when our daughter was six months old. We spent the first five years of our marriage figuring out how to be parents and we absolutely hated each other. We fought constantly and righteously for our causes and we were both right to stand our ground on the things we stood our ground on, but we were also both horribly wrong for being so stubborn about it.

That really was the biggest downfall of our early years in marriage. Bill and I are both bullheaded and as stubborn as they come. I’m just a little bit more stubborn than Bill, which meant that I usually won the arguments and Bill felt downtrodden a lot. It took so long for me to open my eyes to what I was doing to Bill, that I almost lost him and then when I opened my eyes and really saw who we were and how miserable we both were and was ready to make the step to not being that person anymore and choosing to be happy with what we had, Bill had such a hard time believing it that he almost lost me.

It took ten years of us saying to ourselves every morning, “I chose to spend the rest of my life with this one person. I hate who we are right now, but this WILL get better.” For us to believe it and for that dream to become a reality. And now, here we are, 18 years later and we are still very much in love, just as much as we were when we first met and we are very happy with each other and who we are and who we have become and the lives we have built on that foundation of constantly fighting with and for each other.

The difference between us and so many other couples out there that have chosen not to stay together, is just that. We made a choice.

Having a child is a choice.

Having a family is a choice.

Getting married is a choice.

Loving someone and making that love last through the ages is a choice, it’s not something that happens to you by some strange twist of fate. It’s something that you carefully select, place into the earth and spend hours every single day cultivating it until all of your hard work blooms into something so precious and so beautiful that people who walk past the two of you, when you’re holding hands in public, blush because they feel as though they just intruded on a private moment.

It also helps, if you decide from the very beginning that leaving is not an option. You have to make that promise to each other from day one that you are in this relationship for the long haul. You have to say to yourself that come hell or high water, you will stay, even if some days, you only stay because you know the person you married is a good parent and your kids would be miserable without them.

I won’t lie to you about this, the early years of any marriage are hell, especially when you’re new to parenting and most marriages don’t survive the stress that comes with evolving from care-free adult, to responsible parent, but if you really want it to, it can. You just have to choose it.

So my Christmas gift to all of the couples I know is the above gem. Marriage is not about true love or flower petals on satin sheets. It is about farting under the covers and staying with the person you are with, no matter how crazy they make you, because in order to find the truly good things in a person’s soul, you have to first see all of the bad and when we are changing and becoming something different, we are at our very worst. On the other side of that change though, we are at our very best and that is always worth waiting for. There are some days now, when I wake up beside Bill and think, “Good God, I love this man. How in the hell could I have ever hated him as much as I did back then? What was I thinking?”

And I know the answer, I was younger and far less wise and I was so stressed out by being a parent to two young children that I did not see what I had right in front of me and neither did Bill. So tell the person you’re with that you love them and try to remember how you got to where you are in the first place and don’t forget that it was love that brought you together and if you really love someone, it is most definitely enough.

Merry Christmas.

So this is Christmas…

My husband has been giving me grief lately, because he feels like he married the next John Grogan. The only thing I seem to post about on this blog are my dogs.

Well, let’s face it, I’ve had a rough couple of years in terms of my life with dogs. First, I lose my best friend and our first family dog. Then we bring home Mugen and he starts sewing us up and then we adopt Lucy and feel like the family is complete only to have her taken from us by cancer less than two years later. Along the way, we adopted Jazzmin because she needed someplace to go and when Lucy was gone, I was so horribly lonely without her that my husband decided we needed a third again and we adopted Jet. That’s a lot of doing with dogs in three years, so I have a lot to talk about when it comes to my crew. I apologize if that’s not what you were hoping to read on my blog.

I know I have bounced around from topic to topic over the years, but a lot of that was due to my going through a growing up phase. I had to figure out who I was as an adult, you see, and I grew up way too fast in terms of taking responsibility. I didn’t have time to sort through this crap along the way, I was too busy being a mom and taking care of a family to do that. So… here I am, having stopped talking about all of the things that I used to discuss here because I made up my mind on the issues and I never really explained why or how I got there.

I’ve made up my mind that our entire political system is nothing but a big fat scam. The guys on both sides of the aisle lie to us to get votes. They say they are going to give you this or that and make your life better, but they fail to tell you the truth: The only person that has the power to make your life better is you. The only way to make the world a better place is to stop being a douche and start donating to charity, real charity that actually gives money to help your cause, not some BS lobbying group. You should be smart enough to do your own research and know the difference between a group of people who are really doing some good, like say your local animal shelter, and a bunch of guys who are lining their pockets so they can afford to live the good life in Washington DC, such as the Humane Society of the United States, and if you’re not smart enough to figure that out, then you’re probably not reading my blog either. So I don’t discuss politics anymore. It’s a waste of time for both of us. Hopefully, you will grow and mature enough to figure out that the only way your situation is going to get better, is if you get off your ass and do something about it and if you want to change somebody else’s situation then you have to get personally involved. The government is NOT going to help the homeless guy on the street corner get back on his feet, but you can, if you want to. You just have to reach out and choose it.

I’ve made my decisions regarding technology and I’m not really interested in debating my choices on the internet anymore because it really does feel like it’s Apple vs The Geeks and guys, I dunno if you noticed, but I’m not really a “geek”. I’m geeky. I love Star Wars and Star Trek. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood involve sitting in front of the television with my dad watching Max Headroom. I used to know how to code over a decade ago. I couldn’t build a website now, even if doing so meant saving my own life. I do appreciate what it is to be a geek though because I married one and because I used to live that life, but somewhere along the way, my geekiness faded away and melted into motherhood. I haven’t given it up completely, but I can’t sit here and debate with you about why Android is better. All I can tell you is that I think that using an Android phone is a pain in the ass. The web browser has never been in the same place twice on any phone I have handled. The battery life kinda sucks and I could give two shits if the CPU is faster or the screen is bigger. I want the darned thing to go all day AND fit in the back pocket of my jeans. That’s what I want. If it’s not what you want, fine. Go buy the phone you want and leave me alone with the one I wanted, k?

Then there’s the whole “Mac” issue. I’m gonna say this once: If you do not use a Mac as your primary computer and you admit to your friends that you hate Apple products, do not offer to do tech support for them! I get so frustrated with people complaining about how difficult Apple products are to use, when they can’t figure out three little words that would make their lives easier: “drag and drop”. Geeks overcomplicate and over think things to the point of putting themselves through hell rather than attempting to use the most obvious solution to their problems. In the Apple universe, that obvious solution usually works. I can’t tell you how many complaint sessions I have ended by saying, “Did you try this really obvious fix that would have solved the whole problem if you’d just done it that way in the first place?”

I get it though, really I do. Some people don’t like things to be easy. That’s a personal preference though, not a standard by which the device itself should be measured. So, you go ahead and work out how you are going to put that square peg in that round hole and I will see you later. If you have a friend that needs help with their Apple product, send them my way. I will be only too happy to bail them out. It will be a hell of a lot less stress for everyone.

But that’s not what I really came here to talk about, this post was supposed to be about Christmas.

Guess I got a little side tracked.

Run Free Lucy.

‘I gather my strength and I start off and it feels good, like I have no age at all, like I am timeless. I pick up speed. I run.” – Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Many of you already know, that Miss Lucy is gone. I posted a longer version of the above quote on Facebook the day after she passed, but this is the part that stays with me when I think about the days after she died and when I think of what I know happened next for her. It doesn’t make it easier and I keep thinking that if I just believe hard enough that she is happy and she is free, it will get easier, but it doesn’t.

I have been reluctant to tell the story of how she died because I was saving it to publish in the novel I have been working on about Lucy. I came to a decision this morning that the story of my life with Lucy is not something I am ready to share with the world just yet. It is too personal and too private. My grief is too new and I don’t know that I will ever manage it well enough to discuss my girl on a casual basis without massive quantities of alcohol flowing through my veins. I also came to the decision that I need the closure that I know will come with writing about how we let her go. I hate how things ended. I hate it so much that I didn’t want to write this post, but she deserves a eulogy and I have put off writing it for far too long, so here goes.

On Monday, August 8, 2011, Lucy had trouble getting up and preferred to stay laying down. She was still able to go outside to the bathroom, but stairs were hard for her. We took her out front on lead to let her do her thing that day and I figured that she’d just injured her shoulder somehow so I chose to do conservative management and then we’d see how it went.

Tuesday, things were a little better and I thought I saw her improving until later that night. When Lucy was laying on the floor, I saw massive bruising in between her front legs. I called the emergency vet and we went in. He told me she was not bleeding internally, they ran her blood work again and her platelet count was recovering to a level that lifted my hopes a bit. He sent us home with advice to return to WSU.

Things were fine again until Wednesday morning. Lucy could not get up. I called the regular vet and got her in with them. Lucy’s regular vet was unavailable so we saw a different vet, whom we had seen before and I felt comfortable with. She examined Lucy’s shoulder, did x-rays and found no cause for the massive lump in her shoulder. They did not think it was internal bleeding and suspected that a mast cell tumor had formed inside the joint but were reluctant to do an aspirate. We went home again with pain medication and she went potty at the vet before we left. That was the last time we were able to get her to walk under her own power. That night, after I gave her the pain meds, she laid down in the kitchen tile and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe it was the pain pills, even though I’d only given her half the amount prescribed. She also refused her dinner.

Wednesday night, I slept in the living room while Lucy laid in the dining room floor and slept. Bright and early at 5:30 she woke me up with a few barks. I got up and offered her some of her dinner, which she refused. I asked her if she wanted to go potty and she looked away, so I brought her a bowl of water and she drank it down. I had my husband help me get her up when he came downstairs and tried to get her outside, but something was wrong with her back legs and she fell down. He asked me if I needed him to stay and I told him to go to work and that I would figure something out. Lucy did not get up from that spot again that day.
By 11:30 that morning, I knew. I looked at Lucy and I said to myself, “This is not the life I want for her. This is not the life we have been fighting for.”

I hated that truth. I hated it so much, but I couldn’t ignore it. So I sat down in the floor with Lucy and we looked at each other and I saw her love for me there and I saw how tired she was and my heart sank.

It was time.

I called my husband and told him to come home.

By 3 pm on August 11, 2011, Lucy was safely at Rainbow Bridge with all of the other dogs that I have loved. She went peacefully, in my arms while we stood around her telling her how much we loved her. There was not a dry eye in that room and the wonderful staff at the vet’s office hugged us and took good care of us and even shed a few tears of their own for our sweet girl.

It gives me comfort to know that Reilly and Duchess are with her and that my grandparents are watching over her, probably loving her as much as I did and still do. I was numb as we left the vet’s office. I couldn’t believe that it was over. I had wanted so much more than 21 months spent fighting cancer and wrangling with vets and debating over how to give her the best quality of life, but ultimately, that is what it came down to. There was no quality in life left for Lucy. Her spirit would have carried her so much farther than her body could.

I hate that. I hate that I held her in my arms and kissed her good-bye and that I had to choose for her. I now completely understand what a gift it was that Reilly chose his own time and that I didn’t have to make that decision for him.

I was okay for the remainder of the day, but the next day, when I picked up her blanket and her ashes, it was like someone had taken all of the worth and the beauty out of my life. She was everything to me and I have struggled with moving on. I haven’t wanted to admit to myself that she’s gone and when I think about it, when I really think about the fact that she isn’t here and that I won’t see her smiling at me for cheese… well I have a hard time reaching into the drawer to grab that stick of string cheese now.

What keeps me going, is remembering that some things will never change.

She will always be our pretty yellow dog. We will always remember our last summer together as The Summer of Cheese. We only had 21 months together, but no one can take that time away from us and we do not regret a single moment. They were some of the most wonderful months of our lives and I believe that they were the best months of hers. She was so easy to love, but she is impossible to forget. We are very blessed to have had her in our lives at all. I said it every day that she was alive and I still believe it now. Lucy was a gift to us from heaven. I pray that everyone has the chance to have that kind of love in their lives because Lucy made our world a better place to be and made us better human beings. I will always be grateful for her love.

Run free my beautiful Miss Lucy Girl, until we meet again.

Music Review: Evanescence

I don’t normally do music reviews, but I love Evanescence and I’ve been waiting for their new album for months, ever since I heard “What You Want” a few months back. I really, really loved 2003’s “Fallen” but I was so unimpressed with “The Open Door” that I didn’t even bother to buy it. I really felt like “The Open Door” relied too much on the success of “Bring Me to Life” and didn’t bring enough originality to the party. Even if this album was a flop for me, there is one thing about Evanescence that cannot be denied. Amy Lee has an incredible vocal talent. I don’t care who you are, if you disagree with me on that, go get your head examined. Her vocal talent should always be the showcase of an Evanescence album, that and it should always have a drummer that really enjoys his job and that powerful, throbbing bass or a piano thrown in there for some additional auditory interest. On this issue, the album does not disappoint.

I am not going to do a track by track run down here, what I will tell you is that there is more good here than bad, and there is some good to be had in every track on this album. This album is track for track better than “The Open Door.” The stand out tracks here are “My Heart is Broken”, “Lost in Paradise”, “The Other Side”, “End of the Dream”, “Oceans” and “Never Go Back” and the hauntingly beautiful “Swimming Home”. I love “What You Want”, but it’s pretty typical fare for Evanescence. Even so, this will be the song I am blaring when I’m blowing down the back roads at potentially illegal speeds in the middle of the night. This many winners on an album beats my usual requirements for purchasing an album in its entirety. It has to have more than four tracks that I will listen to all the time in order for me to spend 10$ on it.

If you go buy the Deluxe Version of the album from iTunes, it comes with four extra tracks, which, IMO are well worth the 3$ premium you pay to buy this edition of the album. “New Way to Bleed” by itself is worth the three bucks. “Say You Will” is a higher energy entry into the album than I expected. It’s much more upbeat and has a majestic, classic rock sort of feel to it. “Disappear” is not my favorite, but it’s still good stuff. My favorite of the four bonus tracks is “Secret Door”, but I’m a sucker for strings. Here, you can find some painfully beautiful harp, cello, piano and violin paired with Amy Lee’s vocals. It’s truly a beautiful piece and worthy of your time.

To make a long story short, I don’t feel like my thirteen dollars were wasted. I have purchased more than one album in my life that I listened to and felt like I’d just wasted an hour of my life. I’ve spent the last two hours listening and re-listening to the tracks on this one and I feel as though it was time well spent.

My recommendation?

Click on the album cover below and buy it.

Lucy Smiles

I took Jet to a fundraiser for Canine Cancer research today which also provided our local NaNoWriMo group with an opportunity to hold a book and bake sale. Jet is a 9 month old black Labrador Retriever we adopted from the humane society last week. He has almost zero obedience training and is one hundred percent Lab puppy. He zooms, he swoops and he bounces.

I’m pretty sure that Jet thinks he can fly.

I had originally planned to take Mugen to this event, because I would have loved to have taken Lucy and walked around with her in her “I’m a Cancer Survivor” scarf from WSU. Unfortunately, she is no longer a cancer survivor. She is at rainbow bridge now, waiting for the day when we can see each other again. So, it seemed fitting somehow that Mugen, the puppy she raised for me, be the one to go. This was not to be. My husband threatened to send Jet to power an evil super villain’s secret lair if I left him behind today. Since I like Jet and wish to see his powers used only for good, he came with me.

I arrived a few minutes late because Jet escaped his road harness twice while I was driving down the road and insisted that he knew how to handle a MINI Cooper on a twisty road and I had to pull off to confine the little stinker once more. After the last time that he slipped the harness, I gave up and let him ride shotgun.

I finally got to the event and got Jet out of the car. I stopped as I got him out and had him pee. I turned my back to get stuff out of my car and Jet took off at a dead run when I did not have the best grip on the lead. So I dropped my purse and Jet’s necessities bag on the sidewalk and took after his skinny butt. I chased him into a cul de sac, where Jet realized I had awesome cookies and came running back to me and body slammed me in the chest, knocking the wind out of me with his 56 pounds of amazing wonder puppy. So I remembered Mugen’s puppy class and I took a deep breath and I made Jet sit and wait while I caught my breath and got past being angry with him for taking off because he did come back and that is a VERY good thing in a puppy this age. At this age, Mugen would have been in the next county.

I finally got Jet to the NaNoWriMo tent and this is where he spied Harry, Dana’s sweet Lab/blue heeler mix, whom I wish I could have taken home instead of Jet, and Jet immediately knocked over the cupcakes that August had busted her rear end to make straight into the fresh cut grass. I promised August I will find some way to reimburse her for Jet’s poor behavior. I wanted to explain that Jet is truly a force for good, but didn’t get the chance before Jet pulled me over to see Harry for real.

After the meet and greet, everything was okay. Harry liked Jet. Jet liked Harry. If we’d had a fence, we thought they would have played well together. The whole scene made me wish I hadn’t left the pet play yard at home– not that it has any ability to stop Jet from taking off like a bat out of hell, but a girl can dream, right?

So we sat down for a few, then August and I went for lunch/coffee while Samantha took care of Jet. I was grateful for the break from the troublemaker and didn’t care that there was a line at the coffee hut.

After coffee was acquired and lunch was had, we headed off to go listen to the ceremonies and the benediction and prayer and walked the circuit for canine cancer. I thought of Lucy the entire time. I thought about how much she would have loved this day, I mentioned it to August and she just smiled and said, “She’s here.” and of course, I felt the breeze hit my face the moment she said that and I knew that she was right. Lucy was there with us.

So Jet and I walked the circuit with Samantha and Harry, with Jet pulling me around the entire way back to the NaNo tent.

We sold some more cookies, we sold some more books. Things were going quite well!

That’s when I got stung by a wasp as I offered to take both dogs’ leashes so the gals could finish packing up the tent and ended up dropping both leads. Harry was an absolute angel and stayed put, but Jet took off across the park like someone had lit a fire under his behind. So after getting stung (thank god it was a wasp and not a bee!) I took off after Jet and several folks stepped in to help me catch him. We got him back to the sound of many cheers and had an EMT check out my sting to verify that I was having a normal sting reaction and not an allergic one.

And after all of that, Jet and I went home and I didn’t even bother putting him back in the road harness. I knew he would slip the thing once we got on the freeway, so I put him in shotgun and he ended up sleeping most of the way home.

I cannot tell you, there are not words to express it, how much I miss Lucy. Today was very, very hard because of that. I thought perhaps that Jet would keep me so busy that I didn’t think about her, but today, all the time, every moment, I felt like she was right there with us and Jet did keep me busy for sure.

I don’t know how it is that I was ready for Jet to be in my life so quickly. I don’t know how it is that I am finding myself smiling more than I’m frowning and laughing more than I’m crying. I can’t tell you how I’m getting through the day to day without Lucy here, but I can tell you that today she was looking down on us and I can tell you that she was smiling too.

A Note on Humility

I got into a discussion on Facebook yesterday about immigration and why I am not okay with illegal immigrants benefitting from government programs. The response to that comment really surprised me, because one of the commenters was a green card holder and he found no problem at all with the idea that people who were not paying into the system were taking advantage of it, because the system was broken.

That thought outraged me. Two wrongs do not make a right, but I wasn’t sure how to respond because this argument feeds into the core of my political beliefs. I am a centrist, not a conservative. I believe in saving our planet. I recycle. I drive a car that gets 30 MPG. I conserve energy and reduce and reuse items where I can. I believe in social programs that give those in need a hand up, not a hand out.

I do not feel that our current welfare system helps those that are truly in need, but rather, it props up a class of people who are unwilling to help themselves. If you are genuinely down on your luck, I have no problem with you asking the taxpayers around you to help shoulder your burden for a little while. But it’s help. Not a meal ticket. You should be your own meal ticket.

When I think of all of these things and the general attitude of the blame game, and how it’s okay to blame one person for a war that he didn’t choose, that was brought to our doorstep and broadcast on national television, but it’s NOT okay to blame congress for making poor budget decisions and instead, we should discredit the agencies which are taking our lawmakers to task for their shoddy representation of us, I get sick to my stomach.

Unlike these self serving people, I remember where we came from. I remember the devastation. I remember the terror in my own heart and how I needed our president to respond by hunting those sons of bitches down and bringing them to justice and that is precisely what he did.

I disagree with many decisions that President Bush made, but on this one thing, I will never disagree. Hunting down terrorists and taking the fight to where they lived was the right thing to do for the American people. He prioritized OUR needs. He made me feel like we were in control of our destiny.

President Obama makes me feel afraid and uncertain, unconfident and unsure. There is no course to stay, because the course is erratic and involves spending more money than our country can ever make. President Obama inspires me to want to live somewhere else, because the America I see right now is an America that is not taking care of itself on the most basic levels. I feel like this nation is drowning in a sea of debt that it will never be able to dig itself back out of, because we simply do not make as much money as we’re spending.

That’s how I was feeling, until I saw images of Onagawa, Japan. It has been five months since the Tohoku Kanto Earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, devastated the Kanto region. Some areas will never recover and will never be rebuilt. In the grand scheme of things, politics and posturing do not matter. I don’t care what side of the aisle you are on, tragedy affects us all the same.

After seeing an entire city laid to waste, weather that city is in Japan, or in New York, how can you not find enough compassion in your heart to set aside differences and work toward the best interests of your nation? Why must we punish those who succeed for the sake of those who refuse to try? And why can we not help those people who genuinely need assistance when they need it? More worrisome to me, is why we find it acceptable for other people to take advantage of us, simply because it’s easy to do.

Just because it’s easy, doesn’t make it right.

Many of us remember September 11th and the feeling of unity that swept this nation afterward. It took some terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers in New York City to get us to put those differences aside long enough to agree on anything. The division between the political parties now is worse than I have ever seen it.

What will it take this time? How many people have to die before we get our heads out of our asses and see that what we are doing is not working? What will it take for us to see that the politicians we hired to do a job for us are failing *us*.

I pray that it will not take a tragedy of this magnitude for us to wake up.

My prayers and my heart go out to the people of Onagawa, who have lost their livelihood, their home and their lives as they knew them to a single force of nature and I pray that America will wise up and choose to no longer be a force for its own destruction.

Danny Choo’s Images of Onagawa, Japan after the Tohoku Kanto Earthquake.

Thanks go to Chuck Gaffney for posting this link on Twitter this morning.

…And Jazz Makes Three.

He had to give up his 11 year old dog.

I could tell this wasn’t a choice, there were tears in his eyes that he was fighting desperately to hold back the entire time we talked. No, this wasn’t a whim of a decision this guy was making because he was uncaring, uneducated or even just stupid. This was a guy that truly loved his dog, worked hard to do right by her and then something happened and his life changed, and this meant her life was changed forever too. Can you imagine parting with your dog after raising her and loving her for 11 years? She is loved by your children, by you. Of course you want to be there when her time comes, but your life falls apart for whatever reason, and suddenly, you have a choice to make and it’s the worst decision you’ve ever had to make.

You can put her down, when she’s still running around, chasing squirrels and being very happy, or you can re-home her.

What the hell kind of a decision is that?

Sadly, there are no resources for pet owners who are in these circumstances that allow them to keep their dogs.

So, he chose to re-home his girl and posted her on Craigslist.

I get told frequently that I am a glutton for punishment because I look at PetFinder fairly often. Mostly I check to see if there’s a dog that truly tugs at my heart strings, because I want to have three Labs.

Why?

I have no clue. There’s no good reason for wanting three. I’m very happy with two, but my heart just seems to be drawn toward the number three, so I look. For almost two years, I haven’t found anything worth writing home about. There was Snow, whom I loved, but it was not meant to be with her. I accept that sometimes, life throws us twists and turns and that at the end of the day, things work out precisely as they are intended to do and often times, it is absolutely for the better for us all.

Recently, I chose to stop looking for that third dog on Craigslist, because I decided I was content with my two and reading the stories of this person or that person dumping their dog for this stupid reason or that stupid reason really, really wore me down. This included one instance where I saw someone actually post that they were getting rid of the dog because she did not match their new furniture. I’d heard the story from shelter workers before, but to see it in black and white on Craigslist, that people actually do this thing was something else.

Really?

I mean… really?

I think you can understand why I stopped looking.

This is where my best friend enters the picture.

Jen looks at Craigslist when she’s got spare time. She looks for jobs for my teenage son who is having a really hard time finding a job in this economy. She’s really incredible actually, because she’s a busy full time mom of two girls. She’s home schooling and still, she finds time to check Craigslist for jobs for MY kid.

What a gal, right?

Sometimes though, when a dog tugs at her heart strings, she sends me the link to see if there’s anything I can do. I’m NOT some kind of animal rescue maven, but I have a couple of friends here who know a lot of dog lovers. I know which shelters you take your dogs to and which ones you avoid and I know how to put people in touch with the few dog rescues that there are on our side of the state. Jen’s only ever forwarded me links for two dogs anyway, so it’s not like this is a frequent occurrence. The first link got pulled from Craigslist before I could contact the owner, and this other link was forwarded to me just a few weeks ago.

It was for an 11 year old pure bred black lab who was in need of a home. They were looking at either rehoming her or praying that someone could give them another option besides having to put her to sleep. Jen thought I could help. I joked about it with her later and asked her if she thought I had some kind of magical dog rescue button and she said, “Well, actually, yes!”

We had a good laugh over that.

Really, Jen knows that I have a soft spot for seniors and in ultimate truth, the truth she does not share frequently with others, so does she.

This guy sounded desperate in his post. She could sense it. When I read his post, I sensed it too.

So, I talked to my husband, who talked to Miss Lucy and then I sat down and talked to Mugen. They seemed pretty okay with the idea. Lucy even gave us kisses when we asked for her blessing, so we took that as an omen and made a choice. We decided that if the dogs got along, we would adopt her.

As a general rule, I have very cruel words to say towards the people who dump seniors, but this situation is different. I’m not going to talk about Jazzmin’s previous owners after this. Please know that they are GOOD people. They got into a very crappy situation and they made the choice they could live with when it came to their dog. They chose to re-home her, rather than put her to sleep. It was a crappy choice to have to make, but I believe that these folks chose this, because they wanted what was best for her. I am sure that they will always wish that things could have been any other way. This is all I have to say about them and the situation that led Jazzmin to my door other than this: Jazzmin has been loved. She has not been abused, she is a confident and happy girl who loves to be around people. She is well trained. To be brutally honest, I got a hell of a deal on this dog. She may be old, but she minds better than Mugen. I’ve been working on the stinkerbutt for two years now and he *still* doesn’t have his CGC.

Lady Jazz could probably walk out with one in twenty minutes flat.

I know that it may seem silly, me adopting another old dog, because I have spent a lot of time on an emotional roller coaster ride with Lucy and I have posted about her and her problems a lot. I have struggled to make sense of my feelings regarding that, and I shared them with everyone I could and perhaps I did so a bit too loudly. I am scared that I will lose her soon, scared enough that I sit next to her and hold her and cry sometimes, but really that has not stopped me from enjoying every single moment of the time we have shared. Lucy has brought so much laughter and love into this house and into my life, that I do not regret adopting her, even after the roller coaster ride and the cancer treatment. No one in this family thinks we made a bad decision when we adopted Lucy. We’re all positively in love with her. She is a gift.

So, when I think back on the time that my husband and I made the decision to adopt Lucy, I think of all the things that I would have missed out on if things had gone any differently. No matter how hard it has been, I would never change a single thing. There has been so much more good than bad and when the time comes to speak of her in the past tense, I won’t remember anything bad about my sweet yellow girl.

That’s what led us to the decision to meet with her previous owner and pick her up on Sunday. I freely admit, this may not be the smartest move I’ve ever made, because we’ve committed to repeating a process that has brought me a lot of pain and a lot of sadness, but we’re doing it because I asked myself the question, “If I don’t, what am I missing out on?”

Missing out on Lucy being a silly silly belly belly girl is just about the worst thing I can imagine. There is no doubt in my mind or in my heart that my life would be worse without her in it.

After getting to know Jazzmin, I can’t imagine her doing anything except adding to the joy in our lives.

Go ahead. Call me a glutton for punishment.

So what?

I wear the label with pride.

Let’s Talk About Google+

This is the blog post I’ve been avoiding writing.

As a die hard Apple fangirl, I love everything about Apple. However, even I am willing to admit when Apple has gotten something completely wrong. Let’s face it, Apple’s attempt at a social network, Ping, blows chunks. I don’t use it. I want to use it, I think the idea of sharing the music that I love with other people via Ping is awesome, but it doesn’t connect to Facebook and to be brutally honest, it needs that piece of functionality. Ping is tailor made for the Facebook crowd and that’s where it should live, as an app for Facebook, not integrated into iTunes.

I would love to say that Ping has a brilliant user interface that is straight forward and easy to use. I would love to say that Ping has this cool feature or that cool feature that I can’t live without. I would love to point out that so far, the lack of stupid quiz apps and the lack of games that not only want to steal all of my private data, but also are designed to get me addicted to playing them so that I can sink large amounts of cash into them, is a huge bonus.

And while some of those things are true about Ping, mostly the lack of games and stupid quiz apps, the ones that matter, the brilliant user interface and the feature list, are not all that.

Google stepped into that little arena and filled in the gap between what I wanted Ping to be, and what Facebook is when they opened Google+ for public field trials less than a month ago. Google has really surprised me with Ping.

I have been absolutely unimpressed with Android. I don’t see the reason for the hype, I see Android as an also ran. It’s not a bad platform, but it’s not a great platform. I can’t hand an Android phone to a 90 year old grandmother and expect her to be able to make a phone call. I can do that with my iPhone, and in fact, I have run into many an elderly couple looking for cases for their iPhones in the Apple store. I almost never see them at the phone store. If your grandma has to call you for tech support every time she wants to send an email on her smartphone, you’re doing something wrong.

I like user interfaces that just flat out make sense. I do not want something complicated that is different for every single user, or every single device. If someone needs to use my phone to call 911, I want them to be able to do that without having to figure out which screen I put the “Phone” icon on. It should be obvious, and in your face. That’s just good design.

It also seems to me like Google had a plan for Android that isn’t working out for them in the way that they’d hoped and that Amazon is about to take the tool that Google gave them, and blow a great big hole in the side of the tablet market before Samsung can make another iPad knock off that is nowhere near as elegant and more expensive.

I can’t wait to see that fight, because I think Apple is braced for impact, and the Android tablet makers are going to get T-boned.

I feel completely differently about Google+ though.

Google has really put together an elegant product here, something that they could monetize easily by inserting Google ads and I’m not sure that would bother me too much.

What I love, is that I can choose who sees the content I put up on Google+. I maintain control of my material, so if I want my parents to see it, but not every person I know, I can just include the “family” circle in my post and not allow any other circles to see it. I can make new circles too! I don’t have to live with the five they gave me. I have circles for people that I’ve met via the Internet, by the internet forum that I met them on. So I have a MINI circle and a Dog circle and an IRC circle. I can also choose to add people to multiple circles. So if I have someone in the MINI circle that I am closer to than the guy I just met on the forum last week, I can add that person to a “Friends” circle in addition to having them be a part of the MINI circle, so they can see the posts that I make available to a more personal group.

You can get as complicated or as simplistic as you want with the circles. There are no hard and fast rules for how to make one, it’s entirely up to you. Facebook has a similar feature, but it’s hard to maintain if you didn’t start out using it from the get-go.

By contrast, maintaining your circles on G+ is a snap. Say, for example, you end up getting out of a particular hobby. In my case, I just got out of fish keeping. I liked the hobby and it was a lot of fun, but it’s not something that I choose to do. So, I don’t want to read about it every day now. If I had a bunch of people in my circles that did nothing but talk about fish keeping, I could go to the circle for the fish keeping friends, and with two clicks, cut the entire circle loose simply by opening up the circle and choosing “Delete this circle”. Not only does it delete the circle entry itself, but any friends that you have in the circle that you may not want to keep for whatever reason, are also removed from your circles and will no longer be able to see your posts.

It’s just that easy to maintain.

So far, I’m impressed. If an iOS app is approved for the service, I can see myself easily gravitating away from Facebook to using Google+ instead. It’s much more streamlined and more geared around what I want to do with it and how I want to use it, rather than being geared on how the developers think it should be used.

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg here. Those are just the major features that I have used so far. There are also hangouts, which I have not tried to use yet. I also haven’t really talked about Sparks, which is kind of a cool way to aggregate news articles on subjects you’re interested in, because I haven’t delved into how it works too deeply just yet. They’re not that relevant anyway.

The control that Google+ gives the user over their own content is the star of the show.

I still have a few invites to Google+ left. If you’re interested, let me know.

The Internet

I made my first friend on the Internet when I was 14 years old. It was over a service called Quantum Link, which later grew into a little company, that I know you’ve heard of, called AOL. Chris lived on the other side of town from me, and it was odd to actually meet someone from your local area in a chat room. We exchanged phone numbers one night and called each other once a week or so and talked on the phone. We met at the mall downtown a couple of times, mind you this was in the late 80s and early 90s. I don’t think my parents thought there was a chance I would meet a pedophile over q-link. So Chris and I met. He wasn’t a creep. He was everything he said he was and I was nerdier than I said I was, which he already knew and was okay with.

I have nothing but happy memories of my friendship with him. When I think of him, I think of him meeting me at the entrance to the mall with his arms wide open to hug me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. He introduced me to one of my life long loves, alternative music, he’s the reason I know who Tony Hawk is, otherwise, I probably wouldn’t care. When I look back on that friendship, which lasted until I got married and relocated out of state, I smile. Our feelings for each other were completely platonic, but our friendship was very special to me. He was someone who taught me the importance of being myself, of loving what I love and doing what I love. My parents always encouraged that, but Chris showed me why it was important and how something that I thought was optional because other people might judge me this way or that way, was actually not optional at all.

Chris and I never reconnected. It’s been 17 years since the last time I heard his voice. Not even through the internet have we found each other again. We’ve certainly had plenty of avenues opened for us though, IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace or Facebook. Dude, if you’re out there reading this right now, I miss you and would love to hear from you again. I really want to know if I’m right about what you think of Green Day.

Thinking about him this morning came about from a conversation I had on twitter about Google+. Everyone is talking like Google+ is going to be the next Facebook and it’s so amazingly awesomely awesome. That brought up conversations about how Facebook was the new MySpace and I pointed out that I’d never used MySpace because I didn’t understand why it was cool to have a web page that looked like 1997 was calling and wanted its web design back, when the year on the calendar said, “2007”.

That got me thinking about the evolution of the Internet and how this service or that service appeared and changed the game, which got me thinking about larger concerns, because this is where my mind always wanders. “What will they say about Facebook in twenty years?”

This train of thought led me back to us and our place in all of this.
Wait a second and dial that thought back a notch or two. I wasn’t thinking about the whole human race. I’m talking about those of us that are Generation X.

We are living in interesting times! My GOD! The things we have seen!
We have watched the world transition from being primarily dependent on transportation to keep things moving, to being primarily dependent on a computer network to keep things moving. You’ve all seen that episode of the IT Crowd by now, and if you haven’t, here’s what I mean: Jen Introduces The Internet

The panic that ensues here isn’t that wrong! Can you imagine what would happen if the whole of the internet just up and went kaput!

Well, of course we can! Gen Xers know that everything would be just fine because we would go back to 1985 for a few hours and we’d plop down on our butts in front of the television and reminisce about The Transformers and GI Joe, then whatever geek was responsible for cutting that major pipeline would find a work around, and we’d go back to Facebook and Youtube.

I’m not sure that the Millennials, my children, understand a world without the Internet. The internet has been there for as long as they’ve been alive.

And the more I look back on my life and how I got my first computer when I was 13 and I signed up for my first internet service at age 14, the more I realize that I am very much like my children. I am one of the younger members of Gen X, my husband is also a Gen Xer and is 9 years older than me, and he remembers the 70s. I was too little to go see Star Wars in the theater then, so his perspective on this whole scene is even more unique than mine. He actually understands how the technology came to life. He watched as the internet was built, which was something I did not see.

Either way, I think I know what they will say about Generation X when we are old. I suspect it won’t be that different from what was said of my grandparents: “Man did they live in an interesting time in the world.”

And we really are. The internet has changed the world and we have been here to watch it evolve. The 20 somethings and Something-teens take it for granted because it’s always been there, but we got to see the thing that made their lives what they are, be born.

How cool is that?