Inane Chatter

Thank you, everyone, for your comments, notes, flowers, thoughts, texts, and phone calls.  It was really sweet of you, and we appreciate it.  We’re doing better.  Fewer tearful breakdowns (although we had one yesterday – the vet sent us some of her fur wrapped in a bow and her paw prints on cards, along with personal notes from most of the staff who knew her), more funny memories.  In the aftermath, we’ve found that we’re transferring all of our attentions and worries to Riley, with lots of running and walks, and constant concern over how he’s doing (“Does he look sad?”  “He always looks sad.”) and whether he’s eating enough.  He sleeps upstairs now, on his dog bed, and we (maybe a little more me than we) keep finding excuses to take him places with us.

We’ve put away her stuff, for the most part, but we still have it all.  Her dog bed stays downstairs for Riley during the day.  Her toys are still scattered all over the first floor.  Her leash and collar are still hanging in the hall closet.  Her food bowl is with her medicine in the cabinet.  We will eventually throw out the medicine and the plastic food bowl and the chewed up toys, and we’ll box up her leash and collar.  I don’t know when.  I’m not in any hurry.

Roxy died today.  It’s blunt, but it’s true, and it sucks.  It was this morning.  It’s only been a few hours, but they’ve been the longest hours I can remember.  How is it possible that it’s still today?

I should stop telling people when Roxy is doing well.  That only lasted about two weeks.  Around the middle of last week, she started to slide back into her lethargic wobbly Roxy personality, and by the weekend, she was having accidents in the house every few hours.  She was really thirsty, so she’d drink a ton, and then she wouldn’t tell us she needed to go out.  Annoying and worrying.  We called the vet – turns out the thirst (and subsequent constant peeing) is a side effect of the wonder drug she started three weeks ago.  But that led us to another question: if this is just a side effect, why didn’t it start three weeks ago, when she started that drug?  So tonight I called the vet again and asked if there’s any way we can tell if she has an infection or if this is just a side effect.  They wanted a sample (of course), so I chased after Roxy with an old flat tupperware container and raced the sample out to the vet this afternoon.

They just called with the results.  Good news: no infection.  Bad news: there’s glucose in her urine, which is a sign of diabetes.  We have an appointment Saturday morning now to have bloodwork done to see if she really has diabetes on top of her liver issues (hepatocutaneous syndrome is what’s going on with her paws – all related to the liver) on top of her epilepsy.  If she has diabetes, we’ll have to give her insulin injections twice a day on top of all her other medicine.  That’s going to be tough.  Of course, the vet said that when there are other diseases involved, dogs often become insulin-resistant.  I don’t know what happens then.  I’ll know more on Saturday.

I went shopping a couple of weeks ago and bought the CUTEST dresses.  I wore the sheath dress to the ballet with Emily in March (so I guess the shopping trip was more like a month ago), and I think I’m going to wear the other one (which looks better on me than it does in the picture, if I may say so myself) to a coworker’s wedding in a couple of weeks.  I love dresses.

I am so completely exhausted.  I skipped yoga.  I shouldn’t have, but I got home and told John I was going to go, and his “oh, really?” sounded small and slightly disappointed, and that’s all it took to change my mind.  And the best part is that it’s only just after 8, and there’s no reason I can’t go to bed RIGHT NOW.  I can climb into my nice comfy bed and read my book until I fall asleep and I’ll still get a good night’s sleep…why am I still here?

P.S. Riley’s fine.  His paw isn’t bothering him at all anymore.  No more limping.

Lots of yardwork this morning, followed by errands.  Hooray for Saturdays!  I don’t think anything we did this weekend furthered our plans, except where making our house beautiful helps, but not everything can.  I’m not being intentionally vague about our plans.  They’re just still very plan-y plans.  Long-term.  Here’s the gist: we want to move.  Away.  Far away.  Like to Europe.  It wouldn’t be permanent (probably), but we’ve realized we don’t need that much stuff, and we don’t like doing what we’re doing (9-5 jobs we don’t really care about, not enough free time, looking forward too much to weekends that are too short).  We’ve realized this over and over through the years, but recently we decided to do something about it.  Why wait?  What have we got to lose?

There are a TON of things that we need to do first, the biggest of which are selling the house and finding the right kind of jobs (like the telecommuting kind).  The dogs are the other complication.  They could go with us, but Roxy’s health problems make that difficult.  Not impossible, just difficult.  We have a long, long, LONG list of stuff to find out, stuff to do, stuff to figure out, and we’re working through all those things.  We just haven’t put a real timeline together yet.  Are we trying to go in a year?  This year?  We still have to figure a few things out before we can tell.  We’re working on it, it’s just sometimes a little frustrating that we can’t drop everything and go now.

Silly dog #1 has hurt himself.  John thinks he may have just landed wrong when he jumped off the couch (guiltily, I’m sure).  We’ll give him a day of rest and see how he feels tomorrow night.  He doesn’t react when I mess around with the paw he’s favoring, so maybe it’s minor and will wear off.  I hope.

Silly dog #1 had an eventful evening.  He chased a giant bumblebee around the yard, caught it in the grass, pawed it to death, and then rolled around on it.  His version of a victory lap, I guess.  Then he came in, wolfed down his dinner, and threw it right back up.  Now he’s resting.  Ridiculous animal.

Guys, did you see this?  I heard about it a few days ago, but didn’t watch the video until today.

How cool is that?

I just acted as middle-person for a crib hand-off (from friends who are moving to friends who need a crib), and I was struck by how restless I am.  Those guys are moving to Oregon (like, tomorrow), and I have a coworker who’s counting down the days until she never has to come back to work again (she’s not planning on returning once her maternity leave is up).  I’m envious and restless and eager to get moving with our own plans.  Let’s go already!

Hi.  Remember me?  How’ve you been?  Roxy’s doing a TON better.  We took her to the dermatologist for a follow-up almost two weeks ago, and they did a biopsy on her paw.  We’re still waiting on the results, but because she had a couple of stitches, they gave us some pain medication for her.  Within one or two doses, all of a sudden we had our Roxy back.  She’s bright-eyed, her ears perk up, she pulls on her leash when we go for walks, she begs for food when we eat at the coffee table, she tries to steal my peanut butter toast in the mornings, she runs off the deck first thing every day, she meets us at the door when we come home – this is our dog.  Does this mean she’s been in pain all this time?  What kind of pain and where?  The vets have checked her out and haven’t found anything that seems to bother her.  If we keep her on pain medication, are we actually helping her or masking the problem?  We’re taking her back to have the stitches remove next week, so I’ll be asking those questions, and we should have the results of the biopsy Monday or Tuesday.

I think my yoga instructor played music from The Neverending Story tonight.  Okay, she didn’t, but the music shedid play reminded me of Atreyu galloping across the plains and flying through the sky on the luck dragon.  That movie is never going to leave me alone.

I worked from home today because the guys came to replace the HVAC system (and because it was my turn – John stayed home when the painters came).  Now we have a brand new furnace and A/C!  Very exciting.  And they’re pretty, as these things go.  Shiny, anyway.  Unfortunately, I now have a giant, horrible, throbbing, not-at-ALL fun headache.  To go with my stuffy nose and watery eyes.  They ran the heater for a while to make sure everything was working correctly, so it got really hot and stuffy in here, and I’m tempted to open the windows because it’s so pleasant outside, but I think that would be a mistake.  A HORRIBLE MISTAKE.  And I’m not that dumb.  Today.  Ask me again tomorrow.

I flaked on Jess and her mom about the 5K tomorrow because I feel crappy.  It’s not so much about the 5K as it is about not being very good company and being away from home when I feel crappy.  Nobody likes to be away from home when the highlight of your day is the 15 minutes spent feeling slightly less crappy because you were standing under wonderfully hot water in the shower.

I think staring at tiny letters on a screen is not helping my headache, so I’m going to stop.  Also, I need to congratulate myself on finding the end of the work day.  Is it stupid to drink wine when I feel crappy?  Because I think I would like some wine.

On my way out of the office, I sneezed as I stepped off the elevator.  My eyes watered, and my nose tickled because I was suppressing a second sneeze, and I could swear people were looking at me like I was Patient Zero.  Dudes, it’s allergy season!  Besides, I didn’t sneeze ON you.  I didn’t even sneeze AT you.  Maybe I should have.  Next time.  Watch out, starers.  I’m coming for you.

Slowly, with lots of wheezing and sniffling.

Like a zombie.

And just as terrifying.

I skipped April Fool’s Day this year.  I mean, I was there for it.  I was awake and active in the world or whatever, but it completely slipped my mind until fairly late in the evening, and I wasn’t aware of a single prank.  This morning, John showed me the Firefly one on Reddit (which I can’t find right now).  That was a good one, if mean.  Oh, and I saw the Google Nose thing after I got home last night.  I don’t mind missing it.  I don’t usually do April Fool’s.  It makes me wonder if that’s how April is going to go, though.  Am I going to miss every other day?  Or rush through the whole month?  Maybe I’ll just view everything through my congested fog.  That’ll be fun.

I think I might be getting sick.  I can’t tell yet if it’s just seasonal allergies, but since John just got over the flu, I’m a little nervous.  My head is a little (not a lot) congested, my throat is sore enough to hurt when I swallow, the lymph nodes right under my jawline are swollen, and I think I had a fever for a little bit during the night – I woke up freezing and shivering and went scrambling for socks and warmer clothes and more blankets.  Everything but the fever could mean allergies – that stuff happens to me every spring.  And fall.  And at random times throughout the rest of the year.  I was planning on running today, but I think I’m not going to.  We have a 5K with Jess in less than a week, but I gave up any hope of a good race a few weeks ago.  Running today wouldn’t help that much, and a day of real rest might.  So I’m going to do nothing.  Almost nothing.  I might go to the library with John.  Maybe.

I’m off to DC for work this morning, and I didn’t want to get up early enough to go to the gym for a real workout, so I decided to make it a yoga day.  I don’t feel like what I did counts as working out since I didn’t do it for long,  but it felt nice.  It was quiet and peaceful and full of stretching.  And I think I needed it to balance out the very stressful dream about traveling to Peru.  We were packing to get ready for the big vacation, but I couldn’t remember the name of the town or area in Peru we were going to, so I couldn’t look up the weather forecast, and I didn’t know what to pack.  I was scanning my email for the details, but all I could find were pictures of goats, and none of them were captioned with the name of the town.  Very stressful.  Then John’s alarm went off, and I bolted upright, arms flailing, totally startled awake.  I hate alarms.  I needed yoga.

Now I’m eating my breakfast of granola and yogurt, listening to the yoga station on Pandora (which is great until the ad breaks – jarring), and glancing at the clock to see how much more time I have before I have to get in the shower and get moving (not much).  But that way leads to rushing and stress, and who needs that?

I have decided to stop feeling like I’m behind on everything.  I’m not behind on the internet; now I’ve got lots of wonderful things to catch up on.  I’m not behind on reading (now that I’ve finished my book club book); I’m reading at my own leisurely pace.  I’m not behind at work; I’ve just suddenly got two jobs to do, and I’m keeping up as best I can.  I’m not behind on blogging, either.  It’s not like I can go back and post something for all those days my mind was elsewhere.  I’m where I’m supposed to be, and that’s okay.

Yoga class was nice last night.  Can you tell?

I want a brownie.  Ooh, rice pudding.  Hey, can you say ADD?  I have the attention span of a gnat.  A gnat with ADD.  Who drinks a lot of caffeine.  Except I’m tired.  I don’t want caffeine.  I don’t even want to read.  I just want to sleep.  Why is rice pudding so good?

This week is going to be a good week.  And when I say good, I mean uneventful, quiet, restful, and not at all like last week.  Work will slow down from last week’s breakneck pace.  John will continue to get better.  No one is coming over this weekend, so I won’t have to race around and plan and shop and clean.  It’s going to be heavenly.