The last week or so, Maddie’s been spending a lot of time hanging out with me, and I’ve been happy to sit and watch a baseball game or whatever for a couple hours while petting her or scratching her head with a pen. It’s made me happy, too. And she’s been pretty much herself, though she’s obviously not as spry as she was pre-heat-wave-heart-incident, and doesn’t breathe quite so well.

But she didn’t seem like she was in pain, or anything, much as we fretted. Today while Jill was home, she didn’t seem to be doing well, and it went downhill from there: panting, loss of muscle control, everything. By the time we got her to the vet, she couldn’t breathe and it was clear she wasn’t going to get through it.

I can’t bring it all together still, the ten years, her last few months, still interested and princess-y, and seeing her there in her last minutes, all but gone. Writing this, I kept expecting to hear her wander in to jump on the desk and check out what I’m working on, and I’d say “Hey!” and scratch her head and explain what I’m typing about. Yet I’m relieved that we were able to do some good by being there when everything went bad, and could offer some kind of merciful end.

chill, wet, patchy days
as fall comes to Seattle
like July, or June

today’s sounders match
sun, cheering, aggressive play
zero zero draw

Slept in, decided to finally look into DSL service since my provider’s long, long descent into horribleness has led to me being having slow, vastly overcharged. This ended up taking hours, as trying to figure out which provider is least horrible is like trying to decide if you’re better off drilling a hole in your skull using a power drill and one or another sized bit, or if you want to go with a hand-cranked version. It’s all painful and horrible.

Then I went to go buy wine. Garagiste is awesome. Wine Outlet is awesome. Bringing home four cases of crazy, great, cheap wine almost redeems the day. Seattle rocks.

And now I’m going to make (not quite from scratch) ravioli and a nice tomato sauce. After which, I’ll sit down for my scheduled ~7pm appointment with the keyboard to write.

My pledge: I’m going to stop doing moon research and write the book, and not draft-1 of the book, I’m going through the last outline and writing all the chapter placeholders, all the gaps in draft-1. And I’m going to start pushing out snippets to prove it. And if not that, than the YA book, and if not that, then something. Word counts word counts word counts.

So:

“What do you think the chances are it blows out?” Megumi asked.
Shhhhh.
Megumi sighed. “I don’t know,” James said. “It’s why we’re running the test.”
Megumi made a face. “I know….” She said. “Okay. I think it’s a hundred percent.”
The two vendors looked over, and James’ eyebrows shot up.
“What?” Megumi asked. “No? You think it holds? Care to make it interesting?”

In the days after riding huge distances, my body has three reactions:
1. Holy crap I’m sore, what just happened?
2. To prevent you from doing anything that ambitious again, I’m going to go into sleep mode every couple of hours and render the brain powerless to motivate action
3. In case you figure out a way around that, I’m going to require massive calorie intake every time you wake and every few hours, so if you decide to run a marathon or something I’ll be prepped

I feel pretty good considering I biked over 200m Saturday and was criminally undertrained.