Mother Nature is not kind. Today, she is allowing winter to make its last dying gasp (at least I hope its the last gasp!). We are, once again, blanketed with the white stuff.
Sigh...its days like this that I like to close my eyes and remember the warmth of the sun on my face as I traipsed through Paris with John, oohing and ahhing over castles and architecture older than the hills, eating baguettes, shopping along the Champs-Elysees, and massacring the French language.
Oh to be back there amongst your busy streets, chocolate 
croissant in hand, not a care in the world...
Instead of stuck here, sitting in a pod, watching snowflakes piss down from the sky as if there were no tomorrow.
Sigh...
I hear Paris is absolutely lovely in Spring. I bet it doesn't snow there this time of year. I bet it wouldn't dare.
I’m feeling good today. I think the initial shock of what was going on last week has settled in and become less of an emergency and more of an ‘okay, let’s deal with this thing’. Someone close to me was diagnosed with an illness that while serious, is also very treatable and curable, and now that the treatment is underway I think it feels a little more like there is forward motion. It’s a long road ahead, but at least we’re on the road now and not pulled off to the side. So I feel good about that and very positive about the eventual outcome. While I’m not so naïve I don’t expect there will be some bumps along the road, we’ll navigate those as they come.
To further brighten my mood today, as I was sitting on the couch writing birds landed right outside my window and began chirping and for those few brief moments, despite the snow dumped on us Monday, I felt spring in the air and the promise of brighter days on the horizon.
The puppy is doing well with my boss, though he says his dog may be crossing me off his Christmas Card list. He keeps looking at the puppy trying to figure out what she is, why she is and when she’s leaving. She has been renamed Bailey, which was actually the name of the dog I grew up with.
The writing is back on track after getting sidelined for a week and I’m nearing the end of the first round of revisions and pleased with how things turned out.
I’m thinking of changing the look of the blog too. I’m in the mood for something a bit lighter, more spring-like.
And I can’t get that song ‘grey skies are going to clear up’ out of my head. The only problem with that is that the second part I can’t remember, all I can remember is the commercial. So I have ‘grey skies are going to clear up, put on a Windex shine’ stuck on repeat in my cranium. Oiy.
I'm not sure where to begin this post. I'm not even sure if I want to, but I've posted every other up and down on this blog so here I go.
The puppy thing did not happen.
Or rather it did happen, but outside things converged within a few days of her arrival that made it impossible to keep her. I kept thinking I could figure out a way to juggle or balance or make things right, but I knew I was only fooling myself, especially when the final blow came.
I know that all sounds very cryptic and I wish I could be more specific but others are involved and its their business even more so than mine so I'll leave off the details out of respect for them. Suffice to say a family emergency that turned into a more long term situation that will require my full attention became the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
The puppy will likely have a wonderful new home with a friend whose generosity did not surprise me, but was no less appreciated either way. I feel good about where she is and I know it is the right thing. I don't regret the decision, just the timing of it all.
After this week is all said and done, I find myself on a road with a much different landscape than the one I started on just seven days ago. Strange how life can turn on a dime and leave you wondering what the hell happened. It's a little like walking through a door that should have led you into one room and instead dropped you in a foreign world where nothing looks familiar and no one speaks your language. You'd like to back up and return from whence you came but the door you walked through has moved and it's likely going to take a while to find it again.
Meanwhile, while I'm searching, my job is to support the one going through the worst of it and be there for them. It's a job I take on gladly and willingly and without hesitation. The door will be found or a new road will be taken, and by the end of the journey I can only hope to find myself a better person for having been through it and at least look back with the knowledge that I did the best I could.
This little girl is mine. I went to the breeders to visit her for the first time today and don't ask me how I got away without tossing her in my satchel and making a run for the car.
Ain't she cute? She was the calmest one of the bunch and had such a sweet disposition. 
When I picked her up, she just melted like butter in my arms, closed her eyes and started falling asleep. Usually when people do that to me I get annoyed, but this time I found it rather adorable.
This may end up being the longest two weeks of my life. Good thing the BF is taking me away this weekend!
Ennui (en-nui): A feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom. Synonyms: listlessness, tedium, lassitude, languor.
I can’t seem to shake it so I figured I might as well blog about it. Maybe it’s the times we are currently living in. The sad state of the economy seems to have most people walking on egg shells or feeling like a dark cloud is looming over their head, a perpetual Schleprock state of existence. Yet, no matter how much I try and outrun the cloud I can’t seem to lose it.
In the past five months I’ve watched the majority of our executive management at work leave, including my own boss and another close friend. Then another friend was let go a month after that. I’ve stopped counting how many people we’ve lost to lay-offs or those who jumped ship before the lay-offs occurred. I refer to my area of the office now as The Dead Zone with the sudden quiet of empty offices and missing podmates. We used to call our pod of four, The Fun Zone. It’s not so much fun any more.
Added to all of this was the stress created by months of waiting to find out if you were on the list of those getting axed, or if you were safe. It was like a bad version of Survivor where you didn’t know if you were going to be voted off the island or not. Then when you discovered your name did not have a pink slip attached to it there was the inevitable dichotomy of feeling relieved and guilty, because it meant someone else took the fall, likely someone you would have preferred to keep around. All of this was topped off with the news wage freezes were in effect for the year, putting the kibosh on the slim hope that maybe all your hard work from the previous year might result in at least a minimal increase to help offset the 6% cost of living increase. But no.
Worst of all is that somehow this has begun to bleed into my writing. Not so much my output, or what lands on the page, but the optimism I feel about my work eventually hitting the store shelves. With rejection after rejection coming in from agent queries, it is beginning to feel as if my feet are stuck firmly in the sludge with no hope of escape. I find myself more days then not staring into the future and no longer seeing or feeling a light at the end of the tunnel.
Normally, I’m a glass half-full kind of girl. I’m pretty good at keeping my spirits up and just ploughing through tough times. I rarely let anything stand in my way and if it does I find a way around it, through it, over or under it. I'm Solutions Girl. It's like a super power without a cape to go with it. But lately I find I'm running out of ideas where the writing is concerned and the bleakness that thought creates only seems to compound the original ennui.
My hope is that it’s just a temporary glitch. I’ll get back to my old rarin’ to go self in no time. Maybe the onset of Spring will improve my state of mind. In the interim, I will just hang in and chant under my breath, ‘this too shall pass…this too shall pass…’ And hopefully I will be right. I have to be. The alternative is far too unpretty otherwise.
But it hasn't all been bad news. I am going for a little puppy visitation this Friday. I found out I am getting a girl, though the right name still escapes me. I'll be sure and take plenty of pixs while I'm down there and post a few next week. In the meanwhile, here is one from the litter:
Mother Nature is not kind. Today, she is allowing winter to make its last dying gasp (at least I hope its the last gasp!). We are, once again, blanketed with the white stuff.
croissant in hand, not a care in the world...
