Miss Lucy Girl

It started at the end of August. I hadn’t even thought of adopting a second dog yet. Mugen had been home for just under a month at that point, and I had no idea that anything this heart wrenching was going to happen. I was wrapped up in chocolate Lab puppy dreams and sweet puppy kisses.

I didn’t know anything at all.

Read more »

The Morning Routine

The morning routine in this house doesn’t get deviated from, even on weekends. This is why I was up at 6:30 am this morning. Mugen must be let out, must have breakfast and must have a play time while I read my forums and drink my coffee.

It will take me 20 or 30 minutes to write this post in between sips of coffee and finding where Mugen’s lost his wubba this time and tossing it for him, but it wears him down so he will take a short nap in his crate while I shower… and then the fun begins.

Read more »

Three Months Gone.

Reilly,

It’s been almost three months since you left and I still miss you every single day. It gets hard every time I see another big black dog. It’s hard to drive my car because I’m used to having you breathe in my hair when I zip through the bends. The kids miss you sneaking into their bedrooms to sleep on their beds and I miss your nose pushing into my hand to wake me up every morning. Daddy misses your doggie bounce and wiggly butt.

Read more »

Death Wish

I know that not everyone wants to know this, but it is important to my story. See… I am PMS’ing this week. My PMS is brutal. My husband wants me to get on medication for it, except they can’t put me on medication for it (I have adverse reactions to birth control and all those warnings that they say women shouldn’t be or do when they’re on the pill… I do or am almost all of them).

This is Mugen’s second run-in with me on PMS.

Read more »

Walking Away

There has come a time in every relationship that I’ve had with most of the people I know… where I have had to walk away from them for a while. Either they create too much stress for me or they say things about me to my friends and family that are simply not true. Perhaps they are well-meaning and try to help when I complain about my problems, but instead they say things that go completely against my grain and I just smile and nod and then don’t bother to return their phone calls.

I know this sounds petty and childish, but it’s really not. The truth is, sometimes friends grow apart. Sometimes things change and the really great friend that you once had isn’t such a great person for you to be around anymore. I have a friend who refers to these people as “toxic individuals” and it’s a really good phrase for them, especially because I think that the moment a relationship with another person becomes toxic, that’s it. It’s over.

Read more »

Mugen the Amazing Puppy Monster

So he’s home.

I thought I would need more time to recover from Reilly’s passing, and I still miss him horribly, but it’s hard to be sad when you stand at your kitchen counter typing and there is a brand new little baby licking your toes.

When I talked to his breeder, I expected to have to get on a waiting list. She ended up with two more puppies than she’d planned for this summer and hadn’t been able to find forever homes for them all at the time that we’d spoken. In other words, I got lucky. If I had waited a couple more weeks to contact her, she would have found perfect homes for all the puppies and I would have been out of luck. Maybe it was fate.

Read more »

Facebook Sucks

The last few years have been very cathartic for me. I have had to say good bye to a lot of things that I loved from the time that I was very small. My grandmother passed away last summer, just ten days before my birthday. I had to haul ass to get home to talk to her just one more time before she left and she didn’t even get to say good-bye to my children. That was how fast I had to move just to be with her. After I said good bye to her, I said good bye to the house where I grew up. The yard was overgrown, but the trees were still there and I could still see the scars on the old maple where my swing used to be. I never knew how my grandfather managed to get the swing put up there, or if he made my dad do it. When I was a kid, it didn’t matter. But then, in that moment all I could see was that the swing was long gone and the remnants of my childhood hung in that yard like ancient material, too strong and durable to give way, and at the same time so delicate and fragile that a single touch would rend all to dust.

Read more »

The Teenage Song of Despair

As a parent, I have tried very hard to make sure that I do not buy my kids clothes that I will be embarrassed about later. Still, somehow, things manage to find their way into their closets that makes me stop in my tracks in the midst of my morning routine, stare at them, and say “Oh no… you are NOT wearing that!”

At least three times a week, I say this to my daughter, who comes out of her bedroom wearing some tank top or otherwise sleeveless contraption that she wore in the 6th grade. Since she will be starting high school this year, those 6th grade tops really do not work for me and I keep trying to find them as they come down the chute and dispose of them, but somehow they keep passing me by. This morning was a shocker though. I never have to have this lecture with my son, but today he changed all of that. This morning, my son was wearing these pants that have a hole very near the crotch area. I stared at him and shook my head and said, “No, you will not wear those pants out of my house.”

Read more »

The Essential Pieces of Me

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks playing with graphics software for the Mac. Yeah, I know, there’s Photoshop, but I really didn’t want to shell out 800$ for software that I was going to whip out and futz around with four times a year when a mood takes me to redesign my blog logo. That’s really where this all begins… with my blog graphic.

Read more »

Of Dark Alleys and Childhood Romance

I woke up in the middle of a dream this morning. Somewhere amidst the sound of my daughter knocking on my bedroom door with extreme urgency and the dog whining and nudging my hand to get me out of bed, I remember seeing a face in my dream that I haven’t seen in my dreams since I was in Junior High. I briefly exchanged assurances with my daughter about how I would give her a ride to school since she’d missed the bus and then I sat up and felt like smacking my forehead to see if that would cause brain function to restart.

For the love of God, why was I dreaming about Wil Wheaton?

Read more »