Woo. Back.
Sixteen months since I posted! Holy shit. I got sick and the task of keeping up with my little blog filtered to the bottom of a dusty pile of Things To Do while I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Breathe. Breathe. Work, sleep, eat. Play with dogs. Maintain.
Yet dogmuse has been sitting here patiently waiting for...either my return, or an eternal slide into obscurity. Along with billionty seven other abandoned blogs.
I've turned off the comments. Here's something I didn't care for - the quid pro quo of "you leave a comment on my blog, I'll leave one on yours" and the general comment whoredom culture of blogging. It was getting to be awfully time consuming, reading all my regular blogs, commenting, reading comments, leaving comments on commenters' blogs, the little thrill of seeing how many comments one of my posts had received. Feh. I'll write this for me, not for comments. So there!
In February I got a very cool little puppy. Fiona is a JRT x red heeler, and I think will be a great agility dog. She loves it and is very focused in classes. I've also taken her lure coursing and think flyball will be a blast for her.My old computer died recently and I need to get the old one fixed and get all my photos off it. So, no photos right now. She is 26lbs, long legged, white with red spots, with a sweet, aquiline face and ears that can't decide whether to stand up like big bat ears or flop over. And, she is in heat right now. She'll get spayed in a couple of months, but because I've been learning about the risks (sure, there's benefits, but what we haven't been told is there are risks to neutering before the dog has reached sexual maturity; serious risks too) I decided to wait until she was about a year old. She'll be a year sometime in October (I don't know her exact birthday.)
I spent Christmas in NYC with my little brother, which was neat. Next Christmas I'll probably be on the Left Coast in California with aunt Jean and family. I should be thinking about buying airline tickets now, the way they are going up in price.
I did nanowrimo last November, and "won." Meaning I wrote at least 50,000 words of a...well calling it a novel is a bit generous...a story in 30 days. w00t.
The silver maple in front of my house is allelopathic. Meaning, it puts out a hormone into the soil that inhibits growth of most other plants. Which sucks. Not all silver maples do this, of course. Like people and animals, trees have their own specific genetic makeup. Can one DNA trees, I wonder? Even grass won't grow under the tree, and since the tree shadows most of my small front yard it stunts and kills most of what I plant. I've wasted a lot of money and time planting things that are struggling to survive. Maybe a rock garden instead, and give up on my plan for a flowering, butterfly attracting English style front garden?
I thought becoming a petsitter instead of a painter would be an interesting move. So I got a website, insurance, business cards, all that. Then, after building a small base of clients, realised that, fun though it was, I'd have to work from early morning to late evening, driving many miles and spending a third of what I made on gas, to make a fairly paltry living. In other words, I wouldn't be able to survive doing petsitting alone. On September 4 my insurance expires, along with my website hosting. I am renewing neither and continuing to paint. Sigh. Well I had to try it to find out whether it was an option, I guess. But I was going broke. Broker than usual, ha.
Other stuff, lots of it, has happened in the last 16 months. (Sometimes I wrote blog posts in my head, just never got them out here.) Some good, much bad. All in all it hasn't been a great year. But I'm continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
Yet dogmuse has been sitting here patiently waiting for...either my return, or an eternal slide into obscurity. Along with billionty seven other abandoned blogs.
I've turned off the comments. Here's something I didn't care for - the quid pro quo of "you leave a comment on my blog, I'll leave one on yours" and the general comment whoredom culture of blogging. It was getting to be awfully time consuming, reading all my regular blogs, commenting, reading comments, leaving comments on commenters' blogs, the little thrill of seeing how many comments one of my posts had received. Feh. I'll write this for me, not for comments. So there!
In February I got a very cool little puppy. Fiona is a JRT x red heeler, and I think will be a great agility dog. She loves it and is very focused in classes. I've also taken her lure coursing and think flyball will be a blast for her.My old computer died recently and I need to get the old one fixed and get all my photos off it. So, no photos right now. She is 26lbs, long legged, white with red spots, with a sweet, aquiline face and ears that can't decide whether to stand up like big bat ears or flop over. And, she is in heat right now. She'll get spayed in a couple of months, but because I've been learning about the risks (sure, there's benefits, but what we haven't been told is there are risks to neutering before the dog has reached sexual maturity; serious risks too) I decided to wait until she was about a year old. She'll be a year sometime in October (I don't know her exact birthday.)
I spent Christmas in NYC with my little brother, which was neat. Next Christmas I'll probably be on the Left Coast in California with aunt Jean and family. I should be thinking about buying airline tickets now, the way they are going up in price.
I did nanowrimo last November, and "won." Meaning I wrote at least 50,000 words of a...well calling it a novel is a bit generous...a story in 30 days. w00t.
The silver maple in front of my house is allelopathic. Meaning, it puts out a hormone into the soil that inhibits growth of most other plants. Which sucks. Not all silver maples do this, of course. Like people and animals, trees have their own specific genetic makeup. Can one DNA trees, I wonder? Even grass won't grow under the tree, and since the tree shadows most of my small front yard it stunts and kills most of what I plant. I've wasted a lot of money and time planting things that are struggling to survive. Maybe a rock garden instead, and give up on my plan for a flowering, butterfly attracting English style front garden?
I thought becoming a petsitter instead of a painter would be an interesting move. So I got a website, insurance, business cards, all that. Then, after building a small base of clients, realised that, fun though it was, I'd have to work from early morning to late evening, driving many miles and spending a third of what I made on gas, to make a fairly paltry living. In other words, I wouldn't be able to survive doing petsitting alone. On September 4 my insurance expires, along with my website hosting. I am renewing neither and continuing to paint. Sigh. Well I had to try it to find out whether it was an option, I guess. But I was going broke. Broker than usual, ha.
Other stuff, lots of it, has happened in the last 16 months. (Sometimes I wrote blog posts in my head, just never got them out here.) Some good, much bad. All in all it hasn't been a great year. But I'm continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
posted by Carina at 7:27 AM
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