Not Dead Yet

I bet one can tell a thing or two about how school's going by the spikes and troughs in my posting here.

I've gotten optimistic signs on a couple of my stories that are out looking for homes. Maybe I'll have good news in the next month or two. Or maybe not. The writing's not going so well right now, mostly because I'm working on schoolwork fourteen hours a day. Spring break's about twenty-nine teaching days away, after which I'll be shifting into review mode with my AP classes, so hopefully things will get better soon. And hopefully all my hard work will pay off. Some days, I swear I wish I knew how to phone it in.

I've been reluctant to send out "Spacelift." I just can't decide if it's ready or not. I did some pretty extensive revising since I posted the first draft under password protect here. I just don't have access to a lot of critters. There are places like OWW, of course, but I'm not in a position to reciprocate right now. So it goes.

I haven't been reading anybody else's blogs either. I think I'm about ready to dip my toes back into that sea. I hope people still remember me. :)

In other news, we lost Fraemie, our oldest dog, a couple of weeks ago. She was sixteen, and we knew the end was near, but it was still hard. I carried her downstairs that last morning, playing with her, and she seemed pretty chipper. We had been struggling on and off to get her to eat, but we seemed to have turned the corner with that. I fed her her breakfast, which she dug into eagerly, and went off to do some last schoolwork before getting dressed. A couple minutes later, I heard a weird noise coming from the kitchen. A couple days before she had accidentally pushed her bowl under the lip of a cabinet, and needed help getting it back out where she could eat. I initially thought the same thing had happened, and that the noise was her kicking on her bowl, trying to dislodge it. I walked into the kitchen to find her on her side in a puddle of pee, running in place. She'd had seizures before, but none like this one. We took her to the vet, where she went on to have another half-dozen or so seizures, showing signs of pain, and so we ended her suffering.

In a way that was my first experience of death. I've had (a very few) relatives pass away, but I've never been there as it happened. It was . . . well it was something that will stay with me.

This was much more my wife's loss than mine. She had the dog for a year before she met me. I was deeply saddened; she was devastated.

I was a bit disappointed that none of my coworkers asked about my emergency absence. I'd typed in my emergency e-mail that my dog was having seizures; nobody asked if it was okay or what had happened. Kids in a couple of my classes asked and expressed sympathy when they found out, but as far as the adults at my school were concerned, my unplanned absence was nothing but an inconvenience for them to deal with.

So it goes.

In happier news, today we are driving to Melbourne, hopefully to get a new puppy who was co-bred by the same breeder who bred Fraemie. She looks cute as hell in her photo. I'm really bad about taking pictures, but hopefully I'll get off my lazy ass and take a couple and maybe post one here.