Puppy love

I admit, the older I get, the more I enjoy the occasional opportunity to just...sit. No TV...no video games....no books or food or drink or distractions. Okay the computer is a distraction, but it doesn't count if I'm writing, right?

I sit here on my deck as I write this, taking advantage of the nice weather to enjoy myself and the coming twilight. I worked hard today (a rare thing for me I suppose...at least when it comes to WORK), then came home and worked on the lawn until a few minutes ago, when I grilled a late supper and decided to bring it all out here and, for a brief moment, enjoy the back yard I just spent my evening mowing.

So much of life has been stressful these last few months. Bailey's last month and death seem to have bled into an equally stressful period with work. Days have been long and tempers have been short, and overshadowing it all are health problems I've been having since February that just aren't going away. Doctors said it was my medicine, then they said it was allergies, and the current theory is that it's stress (which I believe more). In the back of my mind some sick part of me hasn't ruled out brain cancer or an aneurism, but the docs have at least been good at assuring me that isn't the case.

You know, I really do believe it's stress. In the quiet moments like this where I can be alone and peaceful, things don't seem to hurt so badly. Hell I can almost remember what it's like to be myself again.

I know the last few posts have not exactly been light and fluffy. All I can say is that not a lot of my life has been light and fluffy lately. Still, simple things like watching a storm blow in while night slowly comes give me hope things will get better soon.

Sorry if that sounds cliche. It is, at the very least, honest.

In other news, as I said in my previous post, we are getting a puppy very soon...hopefully next week sometime. Apparently I want my stress to stick around....

I kid...but in all honesty, though it was a huge fight between Brandi and I on which dog to get (you could not have gotten two more different opinions on what kind of doggy we wanted for our house and family), in the end she more or less won out by showing me pictures of the two cutest balls of fluff I have ever seen....one of which we put a deposit down on this Saturday.

She is a Cocker Spaniel - Poodle mix (I refuse to use the term 'Cockapoo'). Yes....she is one of those dogs. Apparently they don't call them mutts anymore. They are now 'hybrid breeds' and fetch twice the price of either of the parent breeds...usually because one of those parents is a poodle and that cuts down on the shedding. Amazingly enough, our new ball of fluff we invested in does not shed, which I suppose is a handy optional extra. Throw in an offroad package and bucket seats and you have yourself one fully loaded foofoo dog.

As she is a baby, and isn't trained to do anything but look cute (a skill at which all puppies excel), I have been doing frantic net research on puppy training, specifically of the Teach Them Where Not To Pee variety. After approximately 3.5 minutes of research into this subject I contacted my supervisor and asked for the two days after we pick her up off of work.

Apparently this is rather involved training...not for the light of heart. No matter how often or vehemently you explain to your ball of fluff the many differences between the toilet and the carpet, they will look at you as if you just said the smartest thing they have ever heard, and if you're lucky they will wait to pee on said carpet until you turn around. So it takes patiencce, it takes the ability to wake up every couple of hours to run outside, it takes a keen enough eye to see if they just whizzed on the grass at 3:30 AM (and the willpower to care at that point)...but most of all it takes confinement. Yes, you are not only protector and loving provider for your puppy...until it learns the finer points of 'holding it', you are also the prison warden.

This is not all as easy as it may sound. Your ball of fluff still has that innate ability to look like the cutest thing you have ever seen in your life....and if that doesn't get your attention it always has high pitched whining to fall back on.

But judging by the large number of housetrained dogs in the world, I do assume it is eventually possible, and with love, attention and approximately 300 bags of dog treats, I hope to watch as our very own ball of fluff grows into a happy, intestinally normalized foofoo dog.

Well by now it's fully dark and it's just begun to sprinkle, so I'd better wrap this up, lest my laptop short curcuit on parts of my anatomy I'd rather not mention.

This was fun. Maybe you'll see me around here slightly more often in the near future. Until then, may life find you well, and may you find no wet spots in your carpet at 3:25 AM with a foofoo dog looking up at you innocently.