One of those mornings...

We finished packing the moving truck on Tuesday with the help of some strong and handsome friends.  I'm lucky to be surrounded by such nice and good-looking people, particularly ones with excellent spatial reasoning skills.  You guys know who you are.

Wednesday morning I packed up the Jeep with the essentials that I would be taking South.  A suitcase of clothes, my KitchenAid mixer of which I am overly protective, my jasmines and lavenders, Pup and her accoutrement, and my backpack stuffed with the laptops, my stats book, surgery reference books, and cell phone charger.  I was prepared.

Except  DH had forgotten to pack a few things.

Thus I added two coolers, a Rubbermaid container, a pair of antlers, a set of downhill skis, a broom, and a tree stand to the interior.  I strapped the kayak to the roof.   I tossed the cable box we had to return, the non-functioning laptop we had to recycle, and the library books we had to donate into the passenger seat. I was prepared.

Except Pup and I had nowhere to sit.

So I rearranged the plants, tucked her bed on top of the pile of electronics in the passenger seat, and put my lavender in my lap. She could barely fit, but we were just going 30 minutes away. I knew I would be able to move things into the Jetta for the trip to DH's parents.   We would be fine.

Except we got stuck in construction on the interstate.

I was hot, I was sore, and I was wearing the same grimy clothes I had been the day before because of a packing error on my part.  I had just scrubbed the entire apartment. I hadn't eaten yet. I was gross and cranky, y'all.  I just wanted to get to our friends' house, shower, and change.

One of the boxes kept shifting when we went around corners causing it to bang into the window switches.  This meant that at various times the windows would roll down, and I couldn't get my hand under the box to roll them back up immediately.  Annoying, but not that big of a deal.  I had one last glass of sweet tea that I had squished into the cup holder.    It was the only thing holding me together - the thought of how wonderful that cold sweet liquid was going to be when we got to K. and J.'s house.

Except someone had fed Pup pizza and ribs the night before.

She chose the moment when we were stuck in construction and the back window was rolling down on its own to stand up on her little bed, look at me, and throw up.

Everywhere.  In the cable box.  On my plants.  On her bed.  On the gear shift.  And in my last glass of tea.

Ready for kids?

DH and I aren't yet blessed with munchkins.  I am still able to enjoy the bliss of sleeping in on weekends, the joy of spontaneous vacations, and the indulgence of indulging myself.

DH is gone on his annual President's Day weekend fishing trip, so it was just me and Pup last weekend.  She started my day bright and early 3 a.m. Friday morning by barking her pretty red head off to be let out of her kennel. I sleepily rolled over and opened the door.  She excitedly jumped on the bed.

And promptly threw up.

On my bed.

At 3 a.m.

I was displeased. She looked miserable, but I hardened my heart and put her back in her kennel.  It wasn't as difficult as one might think.  I changed the sheets and blankets, rinsed out the gross ones, and crawled back into my chilly but clean bed.  All was well until approximately 5:37 when she started barking again.

I wasn't taking any chances.  I let her out of her kennel and walked her around in the snow outside just in case she had to use the bathroom or, heaven forbid, throw up again.  She took this opportunity to make friends with the neighbors by barking at a rabbit under their window.  We're quite popular in the mornings, Pup and I.

Back inside where I snuggled up under the blankets, and she settled in at the foot of the bed for about five minutes.

Then she threw up.

On my bed.

Again.

I was out of clean sheets and patience, we were both miserable, and all I could think was "she's only a dog ... what on earth will I do with children ... I don't think I'm allowed to put them in a kennel."

Ouch.

I love my pup. I think she is absolutely wonderful. I also think she may be the death of me.

Since pup and I have become best friends, I have twisted my ankle, gotten multiple rope burns, and busted my lip on her head twice. She has tripped me, drug me down the stairs, and caused me to spill numerous glasses of tea on my lap. She has helped me fall down hills, fall down stairs, and just fall.

Last week, she broke my arm. It's a tiny itty bitty little break - no cast required - but a break nonetheless. She knows the command 'whoa' pretty well. Her release command is 'all right'; I had already given her release. She was hanging at my ankles, leash dangling from my left hand, when that albino squirrel came tearing by us. She particularly hates that squirrel because it throws acorns at her when she is on the deck. She shot after the vermin.

My arm went after her. Unfortunately for me, the Jeep door was directly in the path my wrist had decided to take.

Four to six weeks - surely I can survive accident free for four to six weeks.

"I've got a touch of hangover bureaucrat. Don't push me."

Pup has an internal alarm clock that gets us both up around 6:00 a.m. Unfortunately for me, it does not have a snooze button. Four hours of sleep, and we were up and back on the road.

I dislike the idea of bumper stickers. I can swallow one or two on a vehicle, especially if they are work or military related. I get those. I actually like it when a car has twenty or thirty on the back door. It’s a friendly notification that the two of us will probably never be friends. Then there are the cars with bumper stickers whose messages are belied by the driver’s behavior. I particularly hate those. I offer for reference the woman with the ‘hang up the phone and drive’ sticker who was talking on her phone and driving fifteen miles under the speed limit on a two-lane highway for about fourteen point seven miles. She was annoying me doubly – stupid driving habits and stupid bumper stickers. I muttered an ancient curse upon her back tires and passed at the first opportunity.

Usually I am in a hurry to arrive at my destination and blow by all the roadside attractions, but not this time. Pup and I stopped at every brown-signed tourist stop we passed. Jesse James’ birthplace – we saw it. George Washington Carver monument – we were there. Harry Truman’s birthplace – check. If there had been a sign for America’s largest ball of yarn, we would have stopped.

One of our first detours was John Wayne’s birthplace. It was a precious little white farmhouse draped in American flags. I loved it. The sidewalk was made of bricks donated by people from around the world, famous and not so famous. Someone had a van with murals of John Wayne covering all the sides.

While we were there, we met a group of bikers headed to Louisiana. I admired their bikes, and they admired pup. (She is rather pretty, but I’m rather biased.) We exchanged favorite John Wayne quotes. (Mine is from McLintock, in case you were wondering.) It was a lovely ten minutes.

My excellent sense of direction took us the wrong way out of town. We had turned down a gravel road (because all gravel roads eventually come to pavement or end thus bringing your lostness to a conclusion, though not always a satisfying one). We crested a hill and there it was, rural Midwest Americana at its finest. Cornfields on one side, beans on the other, a creek dividing the two, and a red-sided, one-lane, covered bridge awash in sunlight. We had stumbled on a covered bridge of Madison County. We took a break to stretch our legs and wandered down to the creek side. There was a man taking photographs of the bridge. He looked up as we came down the hill. He held up the camera.

“Do you mind?” I tilted my head quizzically. “May I shoot you two?”

I smiled and agreed. He snapped a few photos, and we chatted for a few minutes. Clint Eastwood, he was not. He was a very nice man shooting some of the bridges for a piece for a magazine though. We discussed pup (who was being a doofus and pointing dragonflies), and he gave me a tip on a good restaurant for lunch in a nearby town.

Iowa is better than I previously thought.

Hourly rate

I finished summer classes on Wednesday. While attempting eighteen master’s level hours in ten weeks was not my best idea, it doesn’t matter. Fait accompli. I grabbed my favorite boots, a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, my swimsuit, and a sundress, loaded pup in the car, and headed south. Nothing restores a girl’s spirit like a road trip. It was well after dark by the time we made it out of the city. It also happened to be storming. I flipped the wipers on high and kept driving. At one point the rain was coming down so hard the road lines were obscured. I toyed with the idea of pulling over under an overpass and sleeping the storm out but pressed onward. We drove through two tornado-producing storms on our way to the hotel that night. Two. Perhaps the overpass idea had merit.

We finally made it to our pre-booked accommodations around 1:30 in the morning. Pup was being a brat, I was exhausted, and all I wanted was a bed and pillow for a few hours. As I was pulling into the parking lot, I noted the room doors were on the outside of the buildings. In my past experience, that has never been a good sign. The lobby door was locked, so I rang the bell – five times. A rumpled man emerged from a back room rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“How much did you pay for the room?” he asked.

“I have no idea. DH paid for it online. Forty?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“It will be fifty five dollars then, plus tax. If you have a pet, it’s twenty more plus a hundred dollar room cleaning fee if she destroys something. You are on the second floor.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “She’ll be sleeping in the car.”

I grabbed my bag and the key. A wave of musty air hit me as I opened the door. A queen bed with two flat pillows took the majority of the space. A wall mounted lamp cast a yellow glow over a lonely towel, washcloth, and bar of soap resting atop a spindly brown table. The TV was directly from the 1960’s. I did some quick math and determined there was not a hundred dollars worth of objects pup could destroy unless she managed to maul the questionable mattress to a timely death. I thought about going back to get her but decided against since she was sleeping quite happily.

I have been on many a trip where a layer of road grime was part of the allure, but I desperately wanted to shower and brush my teeth that night. There was a tiny problem with my plan. The shower was still wet, the curtain was half pulled, and there was a special something floating in the loo. (Did I use loo appropriately or does it mean the entire bathroom? I’ve wondered that.) I looked back at the bed suspiciously. The motel did rather have the feel of a ‘rent-by-the-hour’ place.

I just would have rather they cleaned the rooms between the hours. I switched rooms, and pup upgraded from the car to the motel room – pet fee waived.

Water conservation

I’m watching the farm this week while the in-laws are on vacation. Really, I’m escaping from the city. There’s only so much pollution I can inhale at a time before I start to yearn for cleaner air and open spaces.

Yesterday I learned how to turn the pivot (or giant water sprinkler for those non-farmers out there) on and off. It’s a messy muddy job, but I liked it. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something, even if I was just starting a motor and moving some pipe around.

This morning, it started raining….hard. We had thunder, lightening, the whole shebang. BIL called to tell me to turn the pivot off. He said I could wait until the rain let up, but I was determined to get it done right away. I had just finished a session on water usage in the U.S. and developing worlds and didn’t want to waste any water we could keep in the ground.

Ran outside in my blue scrub bottoms, purple tank top, and green irrigation boots. Ready for a fashion show, I was not. I quickly realized that this was not the most protective attire for rain when everything was drenched in about twenty seconds. Decided to take the four-wheeler for two reasons. One, I was soaked and didn't think it was a good idea to get the truck wet. Two, I was pretty sure I would get the truck stuck and did not look forward to explaining to my FIL why the tires were buried in two feet of mud.

I was speeding down the gravel road toward the path I thought I remembered going through the beans and corn to one of the pivot parts when I realized I couldn't see. The rain was stinging my face and arms, the mud was splattering my eyes and hair, and thunder was cracking overhead. I wiped my face with my cleanest dirty arm and took a left.

Turned off the engine for the pivot and headed to the water pump. Corn is sharp. Dripping wet knife sharp corn attacking my arms like tiny razorblades was a job hazard I had never considered. I made it to the pump, hopped off the four wheeler, and lost my irrigation boot in the calf deep mud puddle. It was still pouring rain, my other boot was half full of water, my hair was dripping mud and rain, and the pump was shooting icy water at my knees. I hopped on one foot and tried to convince the boot it really wanted to be on my foot.

I pulled....and pulled....and pulled. Nothing. I gave one last huge yank, and the boot came loose with a disgusting schlepping sound. I would have celebrated, but I was busy summersaulting backwards into the other deeper mud puddle. I landed flat on my back, boot in hand. The mud wasted no time in letting me know that it wanted me to stay by oozing over my stomach and legs.

I struggled out of the mire still holding my boot, stood in front of the icy spray to rinse off a bit, flipped the pump switch, and clambered back onto the four wheeler. I made it back to the house and came in through the basement so I would track mud on the least amount of floor necessary. Pup came bounding down the stairs (she escaped her kennel, the brat), took one look at me, and backed up the stairs barking and growling. I caught a glimpse of myself as I was getting in the shower. (Clothed. I had to get some of the mud off somehow.)

I was a total combo.

Wasted days, sleepless nights

It was a day hot enough to make the devil sigh... or so the people up North believed. Sprinklers made slow passes over parched yards. Lawn mowers remained tucked away in garages, giving the neighborhood a much welcomed respite from their growls. Insects couldn't be bothered to flit from one wilting plant to another. Dogs took refuge under yawning oaks cooling their bellies on the moistened grass. As for me, I lazed in the hammock sipping sweet iced tea and wasting away the afternoon.

My companions were guilty pleasures, bittersweet daydreams of past and current loves, dark chocolates, a treatise on ethics, and a darling pup who loves me desperately in spite of my (many) flaws. We whiled away the day together...watched the clouds drift past and attempted to make sense of the past year. We were unsuccessful as most are who try to derive a logical conclusion from this wholly illogical life, but we were at last content.

Contentment is a rather rare and fleeting feeling these days. Too many irons in the fire, too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions. In the spirit of that old cliche, I was afraid to hold on too tightly lest it slip away and desperate to cling to it for the same reason. It did fade as the sun set; the day ebbing into night. My demons returned accompanied by the familiar foes of sleeplessness and uncertainty. I know it will be a long night. I would cease to fight if I did not believe that pain is what allows us to fully experience joy. So I continue.

Here's to the rest of you on this long night. May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for, may misfortune follow you all your life, but never catch up, and may you be a half hour in heaven before the devil knows you're there.

The girl who cried wolf

I am trying to raise Pup as a hybrid dog- both polished and raw. She goes to the city dog park during the week, and runs wild in the country on the weekends.

This weekend, she learned how to swim. One dainty auburn paw dipped in the pond. She looked up at me. I said 'all right', her command to go forward. She gathered herself up and jumped.

Forty minutes later I gave up any hope of getting my prissy city pup voluntarily out of the smelly country pond. I was pulling off my jeans preparing to jump in too when I had the eerie sensation I was being watched. I turned toward the woods.

A huge gray animal with pointed ears and a long fluffy tail came creeping out of the treeline. I froze. I had heard the howling the night before. There I was, stuck with my pants around my ankles and nary a shotgun in sight.

Pup scented the newcomer and bounded out of the pond, tail wagging. She bounced toward the wolf, and it bristled. It growled then snapped at her.

I was tearing my way across the field, hollering, and waving my arms. I was aiming for intimidating. I achieved crazy and ridiculous. Luckily for me, wolves are not good judges of appearances.

Pup yelped and scrambled backward, blood oozing out of her wounds. I started throwing everything I could get hold of at the animal- rocks, sticks, cow pies. (Gross, I know. Deal with it.)

The wolf ran for the woods. I scooped up my pup and ran for the house. She is doing fine now, just a few little scars. I am keeping a closer eye on the woods and a gun closer by my side.

I do have a question. If the Game and Fish Commission is firm that there are no wolves in this area and then one dies of unexpected lead poisoning, can the shooter be prosecuted for killing a non-existent animal? Or does this fall under the "tree falls in the woods" clause in the law?

Moving up....21 Stairs

I consider myself to be a pretty strong female. Biceps of steel, thighs of titanium, abs of sterling silver. My abs have recently been downgraded from platinum.

Twenty one steps at a forty seven degree incline. My new apartment is determined to prove me a weakling.

I have now made the trip up those stairs carrying a couch, two sets of mattresses, five pieces of heavy furniture (including the stupid armoire with a curved top so there are no hand holds), six ice chests full of food (frozen and fresh), and countless loads of books and miscellaneous materials that I am pretty sure I am donating before we move again.

I am sore in muscles that I knew I had but had no intention of ever using. I have blisters. I have tripped twice and skinned my knee when my darling pup wrapped her leash around my legs as we were headed up the stairs. I hate those stairs.

However, I love the new flat. Having an oven big enough to hold a full size cookie sheet is totally worth the sore muscles.

We came, we cried, we ate

Last week was a tough one -

Saturday started with one of my favorite breakfasts: biscuits and gravy. I can make a pretty mean biscuit - light, flaky, buttery. I can cook sausage with the best of them.

I make terrible gravy.

I know it doesn't seem that hard. Cook the sausage. Make the roux. Add the milk. Stir and cook. Enjoy the deliciousness. Except when I try to make gravy, there is far less deliciousness and far more squirrel food. Luckily for me, I was with my grandma, and she makes amazing gravy. My arteries are so pleased.

I graduated Saturday afternoon (you may call me Dr. Q now), then we headed back home to prepare for the funeral.

We had a cousins' slumber party one night. We met at my aunt and uncle's. L. and I attempted to make cheese dip. (I was unaware that it was a recipe requiring timing worthy of MacGyver. It was easier, however, than the subsequent scraping of the cheese off the microwave. Velveeta is sticky.) We then proceeded to eat an entire tray of apples and caramel in about thirty minutes. Stayed up late, watching movies, talking, getting pictures together for the memorial service. It was bittersweet.

E. and D. came over too (S.'s little brothers, our youngest cousins). D. fell asleep in my lap holding pup. Unluckily for him, someone had been feeding pup table scraps. She had some seriously smelly GI issues. He shouldn't have hugged her that hard, that's all I'm saying.

We took the boys flyfishing, saw my little brother get commissioned (Congratulations Second Lieutenant), said our last good-byes to S., and sent L. off to prom. It was a wonderful terrible week.

Howdy Neighbor

Woke up at 6:00 this morning (hooray for sleeping in!) to take Pup outside. She did her business promptly, and we came back inside. I padded to the bathroom, and shed my pajama pants on the way in preparation for a nice hot shower.

So there I was at the sink. Barefoot. Tank top and panties. Glasses off - in their case in the bedroom. One contact in when pup starts whining. I close my contact-less eye and squint at her. She makes eye contact and then starts to pee. Crap!!!

I scoop her up and race down the stairs. Shove open the screen door, run outside, and dump her on the grass. She barks happily and finishes doing her thing. I praise her extravagantly, and we head back to the apartment.

It is at this point I note my next-door neighbor standing right outside his door. My male, very conservative, Muslim, interventional neurologist neighbor.

Pup runs to him and wags her tail. I walk by, head high, and say good morning.

We have to move.

Adventures in Puppydom

Our house became a little more crowded this week. No, I didn't buy more clothes (though that would also have been a lovely way to spend the weekend.) We have a new puppy ~ Artemis. Artemis was the Greek goddess of hunting. I'm beginning to think we should have called her Ate (ah-tay)- the goddess of mischief.

I have learned a very important lesson after five sleepless nights. I am not ready to have children.

Pup is a bit more than a handful. More like a ten gallon bucketful. Miller, my lab, was easier; he was dumb. I'm pretty sure pup has an IQ to rival most MENSA members. She has figured out how to open both of the childproof trash cans, can unravel a roll of toilet paper in the exact time it takes me to put in my contacts, and today discovered how to turn on the TV. The talking people scared her, so she immediately set to protecting us by barking her head off. She loves to steal my Coke but is less interested in DH's Mountain Dew. Good taste. She is now working on opening the fridge.

I give her three days.