Immortal Greyhound

Ten years ago I decided we needed a dog.

When the hubs got the airline pilot gig we were engaged and living with my dad. I had people around me all the time even when hubs was off flying a trip. Between all of us, we had a slew of animals. A couple of dogs (my dad's), a few house rabbits (our's) and a cat who had come to us from the fiery depths of hell (Satan itself). My brother and his girlfriend were always hanging around and they had a boxer puppy. Life was hectic and crazy and kind of fun.

And then we moved to Denver.

We moved into an apartment and all of a sudden I was alone four days a week. I didn't know anybody here and for the first time in my life, I was really, truly alone for the majority of the week. We didn't live in the best area and I thought that if I had a dog I'd feel safer, a little less lonely. I wanted something big, with humongous teeth and a fierce loyalty to me.

I'd seen ads for a few different Denver greyhound rescues and I thought a greyhound would be awesome to live with.

We were living in a third-floor apartment and only one of the rescues would place greyhounds in apartments, so by default we went with them. We spent some time browsing the available dogs on their website.

And then I found him.

He was a huge dog, pony-sized, and his racing name was Nodak Fiddler. He was a beautiful fawn color, with a dignified look about him. He looked nothing like the other greyhounds, especially the little ratty one sporting a dumbass look on her face. We called the rescue place. We told them we wanted to adopt Nodak Fiddler.

But of course somebody else had just adopted him. My beautiful, strong boy. It wasn't meant to be.*

We drove to the rescue place to pick one out in person. The dogs were all in a huge pen and when we went in we were swarmed. Barking, jumping, excited dogs. Pick me! Pick me! It was overwhelming. And then there she was. The scrawny looking one, the one I saw online and made a joke about. She came up to us sweetly, gently. Leaned against us. Gave us her best I-might-be-a-dumbass-but-I'm-really-very-super-sweet look. Okay. Okay, we'll take you.

So I wanted a dog in part to feel safe, no?

We get her to the apartment and she's all excited and happy and then we get to the stairs. Three sets of them. And she looks at us like, whatthefuckarethese? Her legs--legs that had carried her miles upon miles around the racetrack, legs that had won many races--no longer worked. She looked up at the hubs with her big brown eyes. He scooped her up and carried her up all three flights of stairs. And then back down and up again each time she felt the need to pee. And then he taught her how to climb the stairs by strategically placing each paw on the correct stair and nudging her up with a sweet cooing voice.

So much for fierce. I was hoping the criminals weren't watching this.

Also, so much for loyalty to me. She was smitten with the hubs. She tolerated me only because I knew where the food was when the hubs was out of town.

Eventually she got the hang of the stairs. After that it didn't take her long to adapt to house life. She claimed an armchair as hers and parked her ass in it for no less than twenty-three hours a day. She quickly learned the art of being naughty and she was very good at it. She loved to knock over the trash can and scatter coffee grounds and eat the egg shells. She'd somehow climb up on our dining table and stare out the window overlooking the parking lot. She'd howl like a banshee when we were gone, like somebody was murdering her.

She wasn't thrilled when the baby was born, but she dealt with him much in the same way she dealt with me. She wasn't thrilled with boat life, but she liked the daily walks and her encounters with all of the dipshit city folk who'd never seen a greyhound before. I've lost count of all the people who would ask me if she was a cheetah or a tiger. Yeah, 'cause I'd totally be walking my cheetah around town. She tried to prove her cheetahness by ripping the face off any labrador that came too close. She had a thing about labs.

We knew going into greyhound adoption that our greyhound would likely have a lifespan of only 10-12 years. She was three when we adopted her. When her tenth birthday rolled around we were both a little sad. She was officially in the lifespan range. Her eleventh birthday came and went. And then the twelfth. Last July we celebrated the big thirteen and she earned the nickname of Immortal Greyhound. She was healthy and showed no signs of slowing down.

Until the day she did. It was a couple months ago. She developed a limp and we attributed it to either her clumsiness or arthritis. We upped her glucosamine and helped her up and down our steep patio steps. And then all of a sudden she developed a mass on her shoulder. It doubled size in a week and she went from playing and dancing around one day to not being able to move the next.

We knew it was time. It turns out that she had osteosarcoma, a form of fast spreading bone cancer.

We said goodbye two weeks ago. It was incredibly hard and sad but it was the best thing we could do for her. The vet came to our house and our old girl was able to stay comfortable as she passed away in her own surroundings. It was as peaceful as it possibly could have been and I'm so thankful she felt safe and comfortable in her final hour.

It was a good run. I'm glad she found us that day in the kennel and decided we were hers.

*After a year of greyhound naughtiness we decided she was lonely and that a companion might relieve her separation anxiety. We called the rescue to tell them we wanted another. That very same day Nodak Fiddler was brought back to the rescue because his family couldn't care for him. We drove right on down and picked him up. Talk about the craziest of coincidences.
He passed away when he was ten.

Chaise

Racing name: EJ's Destructor 

Nicknames: Brindle, Immortal Greyhound, Chizo, Snax

Trot

Racing name: Nodak Fiddler 

Nickname: Ot

Chaise, sharing a bed with pal Mo. Trot is the big boy in the background. All are probably creating mass havoc in the afterlife. This trio is missed. 

Nesting

Writing is pretty easy to blow off, especially when you're a distracted homeschooling mom with ten million other things that need attention rightthissecond. I oftentimes feel guilty spending a couple of hours holed up writing when the dishes need doing and the dinner needs cooking and the iPad has been doing all the parenting. It's sometimes hard to sit down and write when I know my time could be spent doing something else. But would that be time better spent? I can spend an hour washing dishes and scrubbing toilets and cleaning up dog shit and I'll have real things accomplished, or I can stare at the blinking cursor, the blank page, the keyboard waiting to type the story. I can create something that is mine, mine all mine. But sometimes real life wins. More times than not, thankfully, writing wins.

Having a solid routine helps tremendously. I typically write at night, when the kiddo is in bed. This means I have all day to get the real life things done, the whole day to play mom. He goes to bed and I pour a huge glass of wine and open my laptop and it's like a sigh. Writing is relaxing, it's my end of the day, it's going to bed knowing another thousand words are on the page.

A routine isn't foolproof though. Sometimes I'm exhausted at night and all I want to do is crawl into bed. Some days the kiddo never stops talking, not even for a single second, and by evening my brain is pudding and I'd be hard pressed to recite the ABCs at gunpoint. Sometimes I start projects that cut into writing time at night. Sometimes I just want to hang out with my husband and not be reclusive writer person.

We inherited a thousand projects when we moved back into our house this summer. We'd been renting it out for five year and it turns out out our tenants were shits. Their dog peed all over the down stairs carpeting. Their cats shredded our stairs. Their kids were destructive chimps, swinging from the kitchen cabinets and slamming doors so hard that the knobs caved in from the contact with the walls. Weeds choked the tiny yard and several trees were dead. The place was a mess. I was bummed because all I wanted to do was work on my writing. I was in the final revisions of my novel, Sail Away Home. I was working on the query, the synopsis. I had a new book idea I wanted to get to work on. But instead, I had a million things to do.

And I fell into the trap. The I'm too busy to write, I have more important things to do trap. I spent most of the summer reviving my poor yard. Cutting down dead tress, planting new ones, staining the deck, building a huge wall between our house and the annoying neighbors. I'd go to bed exhausted, way too tired to write. Fall came and so did inside projects. Ripping up ruined carpet, laying down new flooring. Painting over butterflies and flowers in my son's room. Getting organized.

Now it's time to get back into writing. I want to start submitting Sail Away Home after the first of the year. I want to start writing my new book as soon as possible. But I don't need anymore reasons to procrastinate than life already has to offer. I need my to-do list down to a manageable size. I need the big projects complete so my mind isn't on them, but on my new book.

For the past week I've painted the master bedroom, the kitchen, the living room and a bathroom. I've replaced the carpet in the master bedroom. I still have more to go and I should be done in a week. It feels good knowing it will all be done and I'll be free to write in a couple of weeks. It's like I'm nesting, like one might do in the final weeks before a new baby is born. In my case, the baby is my next book. I'm getting everything done and out of the way so I can concentrate on the new baby, give it my full attention. Because this time around it isn't just about the new book. There's still Sail Away Home, and the business of trying to get it into print.

Here are a few pictures of my progress so far:

Ripped-out the carpet on the stairs. Did a paper floor treatment. Will blog a tutorial later. 

Paper floor in kid's room. Fresh paint.

Fresh paint and paper floor in the master bedroom.

Paper floor hallway

Bathroom paint

Kitchen paint. 

Writing for the win!

So the other day when I was feeling sickish and lazy, literary agent Janet Reid opened a writing contest on her blog, www.jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/. The contest was based on the Alot monster from this post: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

I thought about the contest for a bit, had a couple beers, and came up with the idea of a "dumbass" factory that makes grammar and usage and spelling bad. I had 100 words or fewer to work with. I wrote a poem. It's a poem a third grader might write if third graders swore and drank.

The next day I felt sick and blah and the amount of work my crappy poem needed was way too much to consider on a sick stomach. But after a day of ignoring household obligations by way of napping and reading, guilt began creeping in. So I finished the poem and hit submit.

I immediately regretted it.

It felt so, I don't know. Goofy. But I kind of liked it. I hoped it might get a laugh out of Janet, but I was sure I bombed the contest. I thought about deleting it at one point. Would anybody get my drunken, potty-mouthed, third-grade humor? Did I make a grammar mistake somebody would point out? But whatever. I stand by my words. It was from the heart, dammit! And actually, I'm totally not a grammar nerd and I normally don't pick on the grammar/usage/spelling impaired. Aloud, anyway.

So this morning I opened up the blog to the results. As I scrolled down, my heart sank. I didn't even get a mention, like a "Not a story, but kind of funny in a bad third grade poetry way." I read through the finalists, mentally congratulating them on doing real writing. They were all very, very good. And then the winner.

Wait. What? What the fuck? My...my little crappy poem about words blowing up the bad grammar factory...won?

Which means a few things, which is what the whole point of this post is about.

1. There are people out there who have the same sense of humor as me. This is terrifying, to be honest.

2. No matter what, NO MATTER WHAT: write. If you're sick or tired or don't feel like it, just sit yo' ass down and WRITE. Another nap sounded great, hell, throwing up sounded great, but I hacked away at my entry instead.

3. Submit stuff. Because you never know who might love it. I really thought I flopped. Sometimes, (most of the time), I think my novel is going to flop, but I'm still going to submit the beast. You never know who will like your stuff. I almost didn't enter this contest and once I did I almost deleted it. Winning was a humongous confidence boost. Big bad shark agent read a tiny piece of my writing and liked it enough to declare it a winner. It's enough to fuel me for awhile, keep me going. Every word counts. Every word makes us better as writers.

I heart writing.

Lazies

We've been down with a stomach virus this week and have been lazing around. Our laziness inspires this lazy post. Basically, I'm too lazy to cobble together a coherent thought, so here are pics of my dependents being lazy.

Doesn't get lazier. 

With Gramps on the beach.

Morning coffee

Too lazy to finish that bite.

Too lazy to shake off Shamu.

Dinghy fun

When we decided to move off the boat the kiddo was especially sad. The boat was the only home he could remember. The boat had always been his safe place, his play space.

 We decided to do something special for him and give him a little bit of boat life in Colorado. He was very attached to the dinghy. There was only one thing to do.

He loved filling it up with water and using it as a kiddie pool.

Sailing with Dad and a friend.

"oaring"

Propped up at my mom's house

Cleaned up with fresh paint

Dinghy bed!! 

The steps were our sailboat's boarding steps.

Liveaboard kiddo approved!

We packed the dinghy into the back of the moving truck and propped it against the side of my mom's house. I cleaned it up really well and painted it the same color as our sailboat. We recruited my stepdad, brother and mom's neighbor to help us finagle it up our stairs. That thing is heavy and awkward as hell. We cut plywood to fit inside to make a base for the mattress. The mattress itself is a twin foam mattress from IKEA, and it fits inside the dinghy perfectly. We bought four huge rubber chocks from Harbor Freight and those are what keeps the dinghy stable.

This kid has never been able to fall asleep on his own. He's always required us to sit next to him while he falls asleep. The first night in his dinghy was the very first night he didn't need anybody to stay with him while he fell asleep. You rock, dinghy!

The bonuses of being landlubbers

There are many benefits to being back on land. Three right off the type of my head: Mr. Washer, Mrs. Dryer, Sir Dishwasher. Oh how I missed modern day appliances. I have a real laundry room. In case that isn't clear, let me restate it: An entire room. Devoted to laundry. The machines don't take quarters. No strangers are washing their underwear in them. Oh yeah.

Biggest bonus: Clio. When the decision to move back to the house was final, I decided we should get a tortoise. Not a turtle, but a tortoise, something that would get huge and eat entire heads of lettuce in one sitting and follow us around the house. Something that wouldn't live in a tank of water and spend the winter hibernating. I wanted a sturdy brute of a tortoise. The real deal. In teeny tiny baby form.

Everything good is mail ordered

CLIO!

Peek-a-boo

Piglet

Old Lady and a baby

Clio is a redfoot tortoise. She'll get between 14-16 inches long. Right now she's about three inches. She requires multiple heat and UV lights which we never would've had the power to run on a boat. Score one for landlubbering!

Gymnastics

Aspen tree high bar 

Kiddo is a gymnast. He never had room to practice on the boat so when we moved into the house we decided not to get any furniture. He has rings, a trampoline and tumbling mats in the living room where normal people would put a couch. There's a high bar installed between two dying Aspen trees out back. Score two for landlubbering!

Homeschool chemistry. Or, the art of making beer.

Homeschool journaling. Or, the art of being awesome.

Beer. And a full-sized refrigerator to store it in. Score three for landlubbering!

flowers in my flower bed

Love my pretty flowers and dirty hands.

Sea glass stepping stones made from sea glass collected on sailing trips around Boston Harbor Island.

broken dishes sea glass

My Vanderwulf Pine. Planted in hopes that it will grow like a sonofabitch and block my annoying neighbors. Grow tree, grow!

Vanderwulf covered in an early snow.

My helper

I love growing things. We grow lettuce and hibiscus indoors for the tortoise. Kiddo keeps a pot of sunflowers. We have a big flower bed out front and garden areas out back. One day we went to Lowes and noticed a swarm of butterflies, moths and bees buzzing around a display of plants. They were butterfly bushes and without even thinking we immediately bought two. We got them home and realized we didn't really have a place to plant them. No matter. We'll just dig up a hunk of lawn. We planted those bushes right in the grass and immediately the winged creatures came out of nowhere for a visit. The bushes will come back every year. We lost some grass but gained a hundred butterflies. Score four for landlubbering!

Suburbia

This summer we moved back to the house we left five years earlier. It's a cute little house, two-story, with hundreds of identical twins scattered about the neighborhood. It's nestled in the foothills, nice mountain views, windy as hell, abundance of snakes, bears and other unsavory critters, including the kids next door. We have a Safeway, a teeny library without a single Stephen King or Barbara Kingsolver book (although if you want nine copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar you'll be all set), a couple of gas stations, a chinese joint, Subway, an art gallery (wtf? We don't even have a coffee shop), and, saving the best for last, a liquor store. At least there's that.

The 'hood

The nearest Target/Costco/Lowes/things-otherwise-essential-to-life are all about twenty minutes away on a good day. Which means being in the middle of a home improvement project and running out of fifty-cents worth of screws and having to make a forty minute round-trip to Lowes because you know what? You can't buy screws at a fucking art gallery. 

When the kiddo was a wee baby he hated the car. Actually, I'm not sure hate is a strong enough word to describe what he felt while riding in the car. We tried different car seats, we tried toys, we tried mirrors. One day, thirty minutes into a Target round trip, I got so flustered and stressed by the banshee screaming coming from the backseat that I cranked the stereo to drown him out. I was listening to an album by the Old 97's, and playing at that moment was a song called Old Familiar Steam. Once I quit hyperventilating, I realized something magical had happened. There was silence from the back seat. Worried I'd scared him to death, I turned off the music. He started screaming. I turned it back up, this time at a more respectable volume so as not to destroy his baby hearing. He calmed down. Okie dokie. Old Familiar Steam on repeat every single car ride it is then. No probs. And really, it wasn't a problem for the first couple of months. But he didn't get over his car anxiety until he was fifteen months old. That's fifteen months of Old Familiar Steam on repeat every single minute in the car. If we tried to talk while it was playing, he cried. Sometimes I'd drop him off at my mom's to run an errand by myself and I'd be cruising around for miles before I realized I was free to change the song. It was permanently stuck in my head until sometime around the time he turned four. 

Old 97's saved my life with that song. Music is magic. 

The baby was about three months old by the time his first Christmas rolled around. Jon was flying a trip the week before Christmas and I was doing the single-parent thing and trying to act like I was good at it, which, I assure you, I was not. It started snowing. Fat flakes, a thick blanket in the backyard to cover all the dog shit I could never manage to clean up. It was pretty the first day. But it didn't stop. It didn't stop until there were five-foot drifts against the side of the house. It didn't stop until entire cars were nothing but snowy lumps, the antennas sticking up in a surrender. It didn't stop until the airport closed. It snowed a little more for good measure, enough to keep the airport closed for days. I was trapped. No way in, no way out. The plows couldn't keep up. My mom couldn't come rescue me. It would be days before Jon would be able to get home. My baby wouldn't sleep, wouldn't let me put him down, wouldn't let me take a break from bouncing him on a yoga ball. The dogs were whiny. I'd never felt so isolated. 

And that's the thing about the far-off suburbs. It's a crazy isolation and for what point? It's living in the sticks and being surrounded by people. If I'm going to live in the sticks where every convenience is five repeats of Old Familiar Steam away, then I want to live on land. I want acreage, no asshole neighbors in sight. Our neighborhood is noisy in a way a neighborhood with houses stacked atop each other are. There are leaf blowers and lawn mowers and barking dogs and dirt bikes and annoying kids. It is never quiet even though we live in the middle of nowhere. If there is going to be noise and people then I want a city at my fingertips. I want places to walk to, convenient public transit, a hustle and bustle the suburbs can't offer.

Boston was deliciously noisy. Noisy in the way of purpose, a constant hum punctuated by sirens and honks. Yeah, it was totally obnoxious at times, but it was always expected. It's a major city. It would be eery if it fell silent.

Suburbia, the kind of suburbia our neighborhood is, is a place to eat and sleep. It's lawns to mow and square footage to clean. It's decent schools with all day hours. It's two labrador retrievers per house minimum, left outside to bark all day. It's Safeway and not enough checkouts open ever and cashiers who want to know your life story.

We've been back a few months now. The kiddo has made friends. I've made an enemy. There still isn't a hardware store. It's an adjustment, a major change. I'm not sure how long we'll last. We've been talking about maybe moving to the country, if there will be such a thing left in Colorado after the developers get though with it. A place with some land. A place to sit outside at night and look at the stars without hearing the neighbors laugh at their latest fart. This suburbia thing is for the nine-to-fivers, the Monday through Friday workforce that propels our country along. It's not for an airline pilot and the wife who's been milking the stay-at-home-mom thing for way longer than is socially acceptable. It's not for a kid who has no idea what sitting in a school desk from 9-4 is like. We need something more. A tiny sailboat was our something more until we grew too big for it. I'm thinking our something more next time around will include a barn. A big-ass barn but not for animals. Instead, a tiny little airplane. Maybe we'll have a dirt strip out back and teach the kiddo how to fly before he learns to drive. Maybe we'll have a trailer camper and use the mountains as our classroom. Maybe the house will be old and creaky and falling apart and give these hands something to do. A place where we can pour our souls. Living far out will be worth it for the freedom, a freedom suburbia will never be able to provide.

Meanwhile, there's a story in the suburbs. When all else fails, there is always a story.

Nice yard, neighbor. Trying to kill your kids with that death tramp?

Jon and our demolished deck. Next door neighbor's house in the background. We're that close.

The privacy wall Jon built. Neighbors went to work, came home to a six foot wall. I'm passive aggressive like that. I don't like them. 

Moving

Did I ever mention that we fell in love with our sailboat on Easter Sunday? We made an offer that afternoon.

Three years later, on Easter Eve, a man would come look at our boat. He'd fall under her spell. He was her next owner. What is it with Easter? 

We sold the boat, which actually took quite a few months by the time the deal was actually made and we had a check in hand. There was the whole ordeal of the new owner scraping together the money. The whole survey thing. The whole thing of him having to research needed repairs that the survey turned up. He had poor communication skills and fell off the radar for a few weeks, to the point where our broker was going to forfeit the dude's deposit and put the boat back on the market. Took forever and was stressful beyond all belief.

The guy looked at the boat on Easter weekend but it would be months before he actually decided to buy it. The boat was still for sale and would need to be ready to be shown to other potential buyers. It's really hard to try to sell a boat while its occupied by a messy little kid and a disgusting, drooling, pee-leaking dog. I'd spend all day cleaning, while trying to keep the kid from creating epic messes, while hoping the dog wouldn't eek out a greyhound fart in the mere moments before the potential new owners stepped aboard. I'd have to get the kid and the dog off the boat and entertain them for the hour or two it took the people to go through all the crevices of our boat. I was a stressed out mess. I lean toward neurotic and this was too much. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.

So I did what any thirty+ year-old would do. I emailed my mother in Denver and asked her if we could move in with her until we could kick our tenants out on July 1st, when our tenants' lease expired. She said yes, even though my 30+ year-old brother was also living with her at the time. Such bums, we are. She took in me and a kid and a husband and Immortal Greyhound. She's nice to a fault, that woman. At that point we weren't even sure we were going to move back to Denver permanently. We were tossing around the ideas of selling the house once the renters were out and heading to Chicago or Seattle. But still, she took us in and was way too nice about it. 

Shortly after that Easter weekend, I packed up the dog and the kid and headed West. I love road trips, especially with my kid. Seriously. He loves being strapped into a seat for twelve hours a day with nothing to do but watch movies and eat crappy fast food with the reward of a swim in the hotel pool at the end of the day. He's also a marathon-pee-holder, which makes him the ultimate road trip companion. We'd have little contests, he and I. "Hey, Chicago is another 250 miles. Do you have to pee?"  "Yeah, a little."  "So do I. Should we stop?"  "Uh, no. I think I'm good." Right on, little kid. Right on.

We made a detour in New York to visit Niagara Falls. We stuffed our faces with Cracker Barrel. We jumped on hotel beds and celebrated every state line as we crossed over. We made the mistake of overnighting in Cleveland, and hightailed it out of there so quickly the next morning that I failed to realize the back hatch wasn't properly latched. Immortal Greyhound was back there! I pulled off to securely close the hatch and then got lost in a shitty neighborhood trying to find my way back to the freeway. We made it to Denver in three days, picking Jon up along the way* somewhere in Nebraska. Nebraska is the only thing that sucks about road tripping, unless hours upon hours of cows and corn happen to get you off. 

Kiddo and Immortal at Niagara Falls

We got to Denver and moved into my mom's basement. Jon planned on flying back periodically to check on the boat. We checked on our house and all seemed well (oh, the surprises to come. Fucking tenants.). We got the kiddo signed up at a great gym. Have I mentioned he's a gymnast? Kid is seven and more muscular than most teenagers. Turns out his gym was more than great. He was invited onto the boys pre-team and is currently hard at work preparing for team tryouts in the spring. We settled in (as much as we could, living in my mom's basement) and decided that Denver wasn't half bad. We decided to stay.

Rocking the gymnastics abs.  

Sometime in May, Jon and I flew back to the boat and packed all of our shit. We loaded up a Budget truck, hitched our car to the trailer, and took off once again. Jon's a pretty good road tripper too, but he tends to lose his temper when the Budget truck shakes like a sonofabitch and has a major gas leak, undetected until somewhere in the middle of Bumfuck, Nebraska. 

Acting like he isn't homicidal behind the wheel of the moving truck.

We made it to Denver and moved our crap into a storage unit. Nothing to do now but wait for July 1st.

*bonus points of being an airline pilot: when your wife and kid embark on a huge road trip while you're out earning a living flying, you can meet them somewhere along their route in the relative comfort of a regional jet and opt out of some road miles. The kid and I have picked up Jon in Chicago, Omaha**, and Vegas, all three times while on totally different road trips.

**or was it Lincoln? Either way, it was Nebraska. cowsandcornandcowsandcornandcowsandcorn