So this happened.
And yes, I have lost my mind.
But I’ll tell you, winter is coming.
Well, it’s basically here. Tonight they’re saying we’ll get flurries. The Spanish girl who’s staying here has been coming down every fifteen minutes to see if they’ve started. She’s here for a semester working on her PhD from Tufts, so I explained that one can see flurries out of a window, and as she has several windows in her room she doesn’t need to come down three flights to see the snow. Nevertheless.
Anyway, the cold and dark is upon us, and with it comes the gloom. The travails of the past eighteen months still weigh heavy and linger. With the season also comes more isolation. Nobody wants to go out when it’s cold and dark and 4:00 pm.
The kids will come through for the holidays and be a welcome disruption, worth the chaos, but destabilizing. The tenants will leave, and I’ll need to break in new ones.
But I’ll once again be doing it all with a friend.
Sure, a friend at this moment I want to throttle. The house training is not going well. She seems to think that all successful outdoor toileting must be matched with an indoor round. The more I successfully take her out, the more she repeats the act indoors.
I feel there’s a conceptual failure taking place here.
In honor of my new family member I’ve restarted Dear Goddamned Dog, only I’m moving it to a Substack like this one, because the spammers are exhausting me on the old website, and the anti-spam plugins are costing me a bundle I don’t need to be spending.
Alice got her first post today here.
Meanwhile, I’m covered in dog hair once again. My furniture is covered in dog hair. My rugs are covered in Nature’s Miracle enzymatic pet stain remover.
There are brand new tooth marks on the foot rest under my desk. I only know this because I felt some weird vibrations while I was concentrating on something as I worked, and I looked down to see a dog chewing on it.
But this is going as I write.
No time for tea. She slept way too much today. It’s going to be a long night.
You know, of course, that my love of beagles AND insightful, hilarious writing are thrilled with this, right?
Inevitable, whether we're dog people, cat people, bird people, or "other" people: Nature Abhors a Vacuum and it gets filled sooner or later.
Alice looks adorable. Welcome back to Wonderland.