Overwhelmed

Ohhhhh, I don't LIKE not being able to have the time to explain what's going on, and I don't like trying to blog under the threat of If You Dare Mention What's Happening, It Could All Go POOF!  POOF, I SAY!

What I can say is that I'm very very tired, and more than once I've caught myself wishing that God would send a car to hit me so that at least I could get a break from the madness.  Plus Ethel the car is on her last legs, and she's hoping for a quick death as well.

But alas, we have to keep going.

The part I CAN talk about is one of the main contributing factors to why I'm dead on my feet - I have my dayjob, I have my writing in the off hours, and I have my dogsitting gigs.  Since the end of March through tomorrow, I have spent 32 days dogsitting four different clients, versus 15 days not dogsitting.  Five of those days were double booked with two separate clients: my landlord's dogs Pepe and Pablo in one place, Basil Diva Dog at his house.  

(In my defense, I double booked those days at the beginning of this year, thinking there was no way that Basil Diva Dog was gonna live to the month of May.  Come on.  He was like this in August of last year.  His sister Ginger Puppy already departed in October.  No possible way he could make it to May.)

And yet he has.  He is still aloof, he can't climb stairs anymore, he stumbles over doorsteps, he's totally deaf, and it was usually 50/50 whether I came home to him covered in Code Brown because he doesn't always make it to a standing position to utilize the bathroom.  But he's still here.  And I'm weirdly admiring of that.

But double booked meant I'd have to get up at Basil's house, get him fed and outside for the day, go home to the Shabby Shack, run Pablo and Pepe two miles, get them fed, get myself cleaned up and sometimes fed, and then off to work.  After work, I'd come home, get Basil Diva Dog inside and fed, back over to the Shabby Shack to play with Pablo and Pepe for awhile, then back home to Basil Diva Dog.  For five days, I did this madness, and nearly died.  The irony is, the worst was yet to come, though it wasn't in the form of dogsitting gigs.  And maybe in a few weeks, I can talk about why.

Now I'm finishing up this Grand Tour De Bark at the Beagle House, the same place I started back at the end of March.  The beagles, who, much like Pepe and Pablo, think that 5:45am is a perfectly respectable time in the morning to get up.  It ends tomorrow, it cannot come soon enough for me.

Here is a rare picture of me and Basil Diva Dog.  It was nice weather on a Saturday, so I thought we should have a change of scenery in the backyard.  He slept, while I worked on my scripts.  Shortly after this picture was taken, I fell asleep, and the script pages nearly blew into the pool.  Pretty much says it all right there.