Stuff I Liked This Week, Everything Sucks Edition

You know what? I didn’t like anything this week. Nothing at all. It was a difficult week, a real dark storm front of a week. I spent a good deal of time in bed, blankets pulled up over my head, waiting for the week to be over.

Heads up, you are in for a few hundred words of whining. If you would prefer not to endure that, and really, who could blame you, take 15 minutes to watch this little documentary film about two animal lovers instead. It’s perfect. And okay, I did like one thing this week.

Here we go…

I missed band practice. I love band practice and even on a good week, it can be a real highlight. I missed it because I was completely sleep deprived. The reason I was sleep deprived? Julius had shaken me out of my screaming in my sleep nightmares. I read that nightmares in adults are fairly rare. In my case, they’re probably caused by stress and anxiety, not the other things like medication or weird food before bedtime. I’d had a cheese sandwich, and that’s supposed to help you sleep. Best part? It happened again a few days later. So that sucked.

Julius (my husband) went back to Austria. It’s complicated. And yeah, that sucks.

The days are collapsing. Yep, I have a happy light to keep the SAD at bay, but it’s not enough. I love Seattle, but when we get to the time of year when it feels like the middle of the night and it’s only 6:30pm, I wonder what I’m doing here. God help us, it’s only another three weeks until the days start to get longer again, but this is so hard. I have got to book a sun break vacation. These short days suck so much.

I could not find travel funding for a story. I sold a story I’ve wanted to write for a year now, but the tourism board has no budget to bring me in. I can still write the piece without going, but that’s not what I wanted to do, not by a long shot. Because I’ll be doing all the research by phone, it won’t have the sparkle it would have had if I’d been there in person. I went around and around on this and considered just biting the bullet, but the plane ticket alone will cost me half what I am getting paid. That’s before the rental car, food, time away from my regular gig… it’s bad math for a professional. It sucks that I wasn’t able to make it work.

Trump is the president elect. I’m really trying to take actions that matter, even if they’re small. I called my reps (Maria Cantwell’s response kind of sucked), I wrote some letters, and I made a fat donation to the ACLU. I also stopped using Amazon for my affiliate sales. Amazon carries Trump family products and I really want to support the Grab Your Wallet boycott. I make a little cash from Amazon — now, that’s on hold. (I did get certified to be a Petco affiliate, so if you’re shopping for gifts for new dog owners, please and thank you.) Everything about the results of the election suck and I am still kind of freaking out.

On Wednesday night, the back lock stuck and I got locked out of the house after walking the dog. On Thursday, the internet went out. Friday I had to scramble to meet a deadline because I had no internet for much of Thursday. Saturday, I knocked over the dog food, it was everywhere and Harley, he’s such a weirdo, he was all, “You’ll clean that up, right?” I was lucky, it wasn’t that much dog food, but it was still one more thing that sucked. I’ve developed a twitch in my right eyelid. I read that, like nightmares, this kind of thing can be caused by stress. And I’ve been so busy being glum, I think I missed a friend’s 50th birthday party. I suck.

December, like much of 2016 thus far, has sucked.

A year ago, I adopted Harley the Dog. Harley the Dog unequivocally does not suck. With Julius gone, I have taken to walking Harley again, twice daily, and that doesn’t suck even when it kind of does because it is rarely a bad idea to go for a walk, regardless of what the dog says.

Harley likes to hang out in the kitchen, he’s got a bed by the heater vent. If I walk over to him while he’s there, he’ll roll over on to his back, get this goofy look on his face, and give me Harley sign language for “scratch my belly, please?” That doesn’t suck, in fact, it’s adorable, and for a few minutes, it makes all the suck go away.

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I didn’t blog much in November, but I wrote almost every day. I am nearing a complete first draft of my book, Harley’s Year: A Dog in Progress. You can still get a copy of the draft in exchange for a donation to an animal welfare cause. ETA, maybe a week, ten days out? Might be two weeks. But I’m getting there. Sign up here.