Two people I know from their blogs have lost dogs in the last few days, a third less recently, and another lost a cat. And then there was the cat that was killed in front of our house the other night. I look at my dogs, and remember how terrified I was when Zorro ran away, the first weekend we owned our old condo, and every time he had a seizure, which, I hesitate to write, he has been free of for almost two years now.

I’m told that Americans treat their housepets differently than most other people, what with many of us bringing our animals into the bedroom, hiring petsitters, coddling our furry friends, so I ask: how, after being awakened in the morning by happy kisses from a pooch who is sharing their joy in life, or waking from a nightmare to find a furry body full of non-judgemental comfort, who will rouse himself from a comfortable position and accompany you to the bathroom, without you asking, can you NOT consider a pet as part of the family?

There are times I feel sorry for my pair, and their apparent compulsion to be my dual shadows. If I go into my office, they trot after me; if I go to the bedroom, they hop onto the bed, and wait with their eyes shining in seeming adoration. If I stop in the hall, momentarily indecisive about where I was going, they stop, too, and circle my legs, or jump up for cuddles.

There are times they annoy me – when I’m in the middle of a project and they want attention RIGHT NOW, when it’s 4 in the morning and they need to go out, when I’m doing laundry and they decide the stack of freshly folded clothing is the best place to sprawl, but those are fleeting moments, solced with nothing more than a firm No, and a treat later.

Most of the time, though, my dogs are sources of entertainment. I watch Cleo try over and over to catch flies, or chase birds; I grin at the way her tail curls when she goes on alert and runs the perimeter of the yard. I giggle at Zorro growling at his meat, when we feed him, a ferocious beast packed in an eight-pound body, and laugh when he ducks his head, and play-bows, demanding belly rubs.

Cleo is almost four, and Zorro is not quite seven, so hopefully there’s a while yet before we need to worry about either of them dying from natural causes, but whenever there are workmen here, the gardener, the pool guy, the recent stream of plumbers, I’m terrified that one of them will get out, and get lost, or hit by a car. And if that happened, would someone stop, as the kid who hit the cat did, and read their tags, and knock on doors, or would they drive away in denial? It’s a thought better left alone.

Instead, I’ll enjoy evenings like this one: we watched a movie earlier, and each of us had a dog to cuddle during the gorey bits (it was Freddy vs. Jason), and then my actifed kicked in, and I went off to take a nap, with two furry guardians making sure I rested, and now Fuzzy’s in his office, and I’m sitting on the bed, and the dogs are taking turns visiting each of us. Later tonight, we’ll settle in for sleep, and so will they, only content when their family – their pack – is together.

I read once, that the mystery novelist John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson), has a sign above his desk that reads, “Weird Villain Liaison” because he habitually misspells those three words when he writes. I don’t have any habitual misspellings, but sometimes I’ll use a simple word, like “fork,” and it just looks wrong. Is it a sign of early dementia when basic pattern recognition fails to work, or just a symptom of being a bit distracted, having a mind that’s racing in several different directions at once? (For that matter, doesn’t that rather describe dementia in it’s non-clinical form?)

Words, not specific words, but the spelling and choosing of them, have been catching my eye this past week, as I’ve been having a feast of Laurie R. King novels. For the unfamiliar, she writes a series about a “retired” Sherlock Holmes and his young American-born protege-cum-spouse, Mary Russell. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Holmes’s adventures ever since I first came upon The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was quite young, and it’s a love affair that was only enhanced by the performance of the late Jeremy Brett in the PBS/Granada TV series from the eighties. (When I later found out that Brett played Freddie in the movie of My Fair Lady I thought it was cool that two of my favorite things – mysteries and musicals – had a connection.) As I grew older, my taste in things Sherlockian expanded to include some very cool pastiches, like The Seven Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer (the movie, however, was awful), and even some rather obscure fanfic that I picked up at a Star Trek convention once when I was nineteen.

But I digress.

It’s not the plots or the characters that are catching my attention at this moment (though, be assured, they are grippng when I am actually reading), as much as it is Ms. King’s use of Conan Doyle-esque style. All those fussy Victorian spellings are there, like “phantasy” instead of “fantasy,” and “connexion” for “connection” but the dialogue is a mix of British and American English, and while it can be jarring, at times, because otherwise the Mary Russell character feels like she was a member of Holmes’ universe from the start, it’s at least well-done, and reminds us that Russell is supposed to be from San Francisco.

Elsewhere on the word front, not recently read, but recalled from childhood, are Ogden Nash (I grew up being madly in love with the story of Belinda and her “really-o truly-o little pet dragon.”) even if he did resort to puns all too often, and Poe, through whom I met and fell in love with the word, “tintinnabulation,” as well as the concept of onomatopoeia, you know, those words that sound like what they mean, i.e. “squish,” “bang,” “crack,” and “slap”.

Words are my drug of choice, these days, chosen even over caffeine.
Is it any surprise when I tell you my favorite games are Balderdash and Scrabble?

Last night, I smelled Cedar in my bathroom, or thought I did, but didn’t say anything about it to Fuzzy, for fear of being teased. Besides, we’d been talking about saunas at work, and it might have just been my over-active imagination.

This morning, I awoke to a grey sky and was immediately ecstatic. The rain has returned! We’re really not beginning summer in March! When I walked into my bathroom, there was still a faint trace of something like Cedar, and there was condensation on the inside of the window over the sink. But, again, I didn’t think anything of it. Surely it’s been that way before. Hasn’t it?

Then tonight, when we got home from work, I was luxuriating in a bath full of bubbly minty water, reading the first chapter of my third straight Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russel book by Laurie R. King, when Fuzzy came in, and paused. “The floor is bulging,” he informed me, his voice sliding from its usual bass up past the tenor ranges. “That means there’s water under the linoleum.”

Now, it’s important to remember that we spent a small fortune and a week of plumber-enhanced hell, this winter, because of a broken sewer main in this same bathroom, and therefore we’re both a little paranoid (Fuzzy more so, this time, but only because I was blissed out by the bubblebath.)

Out Fuzzy goes, with his big clompy boots and a flashlight we got from the Winchester Mystery House last Halloween, and then, a bit later, in he tromps. “Are you done with the hot water?”

“What’s wrong?” I demand.

“Are you? Because you have to stop everything now.”

“The washer has to finish,” I remind.

“We may not have 14 minutes. Everything will be ruined. That bubble is getting bigger!” (It wasn’t, but some things you just can’t argue about.)

“What’s wrong?” I repeat sliding the drain stopper aside, and making the decision to end the bath.

“There’s a valve, and water is POURING from it. It’s all leaking under the floor. There’s mud.”

Having never really bothered to wade through the much and mire that was once a dog run for a wolf-hybrid and now serves only to irk me, I’ve never looked at the closet for the water heater. But Fuzzy has. Go Fuzzy. So he clomped back out, and I got out of the bath and into fuzzy pajamas. (The best thing about the rain is that I get to wear fuzzy pajamas.)

Eventually, I find out that the tpr valve has ceased to function, and he’s turned off the water heater, the gas to the water heater, and the cold water input to the water heater. He calls a water heater emergency service, and within an hour a guy in a white plumbing van is outside our door.

I would be a very happy woman if I never had to see another white plumbing van.

Ever.

So, Water Heater Fixit Guy tromps out back, and his flashlight dies, so Fuzzy gives him a Winchester Mystery House light of his own (we have a collection, apparently) and then a few minutes later (well, okay, half an hour later) the van leaves, and Fuzzy comes back, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” he asks.

Evil man.

Of course, I’ve already been researching the price of water heaters, and finding that they’re not terribly expensive. About $500 for a Really Really Really good 50-gallon (our size) one, before installation and accessories. We could do it ourselves, but Fuzzy’s not good at stuff like that.

“About a thousand dollars,” he tells me, handing me the estimate. “But we then have to get it permitted, because when they replace it, they have to bring everything up to current code.”

“How long does that take?”

“Two weeks.”

“You want me to live without hot water for two weeks?!?!!!!”

But before I could start cursing, he assured me that the permits happen AFTER the work is done. And that if we go with this company, they’ll have their white plumbing van outside the house between 7 and 9 tomorrow morning, and I’ll either be asleep or at the salon, and won’t even know they’re around.

I agreed to the estimate. Even though I think we could get a cheaper water heater from another source, I know we couldn’t get it by nine AM, and without my involvement.

I spent an hour looking at potential replacement bathtubs to soothe myself. Bathtubs, soaking tubs, which is what I want, are surprisingly reasonably priced, but I guess when you consider it, they’re just big pieces of plastic with strategically placed holes.

Fuzzy’s evening, however, took a turn for the worse. Cleo, our belligerent barking bitch of Beelzebub, took issue with him trying to take her squeaker, lovingly liberated from inside a plushie, and nipped his finger, drawing blood.

And, unlike every other time she’s done something wrong, she has NOT gone up to him to cuddle and apologize.

But…at least there was lovely rain today.

It’s fitting, I think, that I’m redesigning my blog tonight, because not only is it the beginning of a new season (I don’t mean the exact beginning, but, at less than a week into Spring, we’re still at the beginning) but it’s also the anniversary of my marriage to Fuzzy.
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We're running late today, for some reason. The alarms (yes, plural) were set but neither of us heard them, or, if we did, neither of us responded with any semblence of consciousness. When I actually opened my eyes to look around, the clock on the cable box told me it was a little after nine.

It was raining when I woke up, but since it was also raining when I went to bed, I have no idea if this morning's precipitation was 'still' or 'again'. It doesn't really matter, either way, I just like to know.

I was sitting here at my computer waiting for Fuzzy to finish another of his endless showers (I've often said he washes every body-hair individually, and I really can't be far from wrong about it) when the clouds broke, and now there's a gorgeous ray of sunlight cutting a diagonal path from the side window, across my desk, where it looks like light shimmering on a pool of water, because of the glass, and then out the front window where it passes on into oblivion.

It's just a ray of light, but for a moment, just a moment, my breath was caught somewhere between my lungs and my lips, and I was struck with the fact that no matter how bleak things can seem, whether politically, emotionally, fiscally, whatever, there is always hope.

If she reads this, a certain LJer who lives very (very) north of me, will recognize them, but these are the words that are in my head today, and while they are certainly idealistic, even, dare I say, hokey I'm choosing to keep them in the front of my brain: Even the greatest darkness is nothing, as long as we share the light.

If you're reading this, you have a login on the ETC blog/zine/collab/thing. This is to announce that I've uploaded EFICTION fiction archiving software, for the posting of longer stuff. It's very rough. If you know how to make icons, we could use some, for categories, and such.

If there's a category you want to add, please do.

For now, please note that you all have logins on the board, which can be found HERE.

Your login ID and password are your LJ usernames, all lowercase, for now. PLEASE log in and edit them, and change your profiles, or e-me and I'll delete them from the list. Any questions? EMAIL melissa@missmeliss.com, or contact me: ymedath @ AIM and YIM, and #1848713 at ICQ. Thanks!

So, I'm starting a new business, and I have my first client, and while on a personal level sharing a computer room with Fuzzy is cozy and sweet, if I'm going to move toward my primary source of income being generated from home, I think I'd do better in a space dedicated to that pursuit.

To that end, I informed Fuzzy today that it was MY house, not Mom's, and that I refused to have a guest room that we rarely – if ever – use when what I really need is a space of my own.

He thinks we should leave it as a guest room because we might have more company than just my parents, and I reminded him that we still have a sofa bed in the living room.

I therefore throw the question to all of you:

Tres cool.

New Mexico is now doing same-sex weddings, as well.

You're Mrs. Dalloway!
by Virginia Woolf
Your life seems utterly bland and normal to the casual observer, but
inside you are churning with a million tensions and worries. The company you surround
yourself with may be shallow, but their effects upon your reality are tremendously deep.
To stay above water, you must try to act like nothing's wrong, but you know that the
truth is catching up with you. You're not crazy, you're just a little unwell. But no
doctor can help you now.

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