Are a bit exaggerated. But possibly just a wee bit.

I went from benign blog aversion to outright blog negligence.

To say that life has been a bit busy at Casa de Awareness is sort of like saying that the Osbornes might be little dysfunctional. I have simply had so very little time to myself that what I HAVE had, I have certainly not wanted to write about. I have been hoarding my moments of solitude jealously.

But I have been writing. I write eight hours a day, five days a week. And by the time I log into my own website, the words, they have run out. I seem to have used them all in pages and pages of exposition on the relationships between the cardiovascular and parasympathetic nervous systems, how to assess the nutritional status of newborns and the minimum number of fleas necessary to comprise an “infestation”. That last bit turns out to be more complicated than you’d think.  Who knew?

I have been to Detroit, MI, three times in as many months. I have been to Minnesota, South Carolina, Washington DC (twice), and New Orleans. I have spent as much time, it seems, on planes, trains, and automobiles, as I have spent in my house.

Oh.   And I have a puppy now.  A messy, exuberant, enormous, fluffy puppy.

Meet Chip:

After a long string of rescues, all over the age of one and well out of puppyhood, I had forgotten what it was like to have a puppy in the house.  A puppy who likes to chew things, and whose control over his bodily functions is, let’s say, a tad less than perfect.  As a person whose career requires them to occasionally sift through kiddie pools of horse entrails, I can’t really say that I am particularly squeamish.  But I can be accurately described as fastidious.  Fastidious + Young Puppy = Complete and Utter Insanity.

Between the time away from home, the puppy, and the general disarray of our current social obligations, life has been a bit challenging.  Which, you may feel free to define as “I occasionally want to sit in the middle of my completely upended living room and cry for no apparent reason, or for every apparent reason, or whatever.”

In the non-blogging interim I have made many discoveries about myself.

1.  I am not PTA material.  I lack the appropriate hair color, T-shirt, perkiness, and I fall somewhat outside of the unstated (but immediately apparent) age and weight limit.

2.  I am, however, completely content with throwing money at some problems.  Need 100 apples for the class for the Arbor Day lesson?  I’m your huckleberry.  If I can pick something up and drop it into the hands of a perky  ashe blonde, twenty years my junior,  in a school T-shirt, I will walk away with the warm feeling of school support inside. Yay ME!

3.  Pursuant to 1. and 2. above, I am not (and this comes as no surprise to anyone but me), child-friendly.  This is not to say I don’t like children – I do.  But I treat Harry as a little adult, and was quite perplexed to discover that this approach is generally not particularly effective in the outside world.

4.  I like yarn.  I like yarn a LOT.  It is my coping drug of choice.  I am rapidly approaching SABLE (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy).  I am beginning to develop a rather disturbing understanding of hoarders.  My life needs to get less complicated soon, or I will be filling mattresses with the stuff.

So.  There it is.  Nothing profound – my life has no time for profundity lately.  Profound takes thought.  Thought takes time.  Time, here in the downhill side of life, goes away altogether too quickly.

How about you?