a day in the life, Beagle, blogging, mental health, midlife, writing

Idle with bursts of forward propulsion

Sitting on the sun-flooded back porch, sipping coffee and enjoying the still humidity-less atmosphere, I see the Beagle approach. Shortly before he gets to my chair he lowers his head and barfs up some bile.

Next he surveys the little puddle and …

… licks it up.

Awesome.

This is all that’s left of it now. A wet spot.

Tucker is very proud of himself. Looks at me as if to say “that was the appetizer, now feed me”.

Well he has to wait. Apparently there’s a whole thing about switching dog food, but that’s not my domain… I’ll let the menfolk deal with that. 🙃

I have to write. I have nothing to write about. Well that’s not true, I have several projects on the go but I’m stalled.

One thing I’m working on is a story I want to submit to a contest. I wrote a 500 word piece about a year and a half ago which I redeveloped into a thousand word piece. I think it’s suitable for this particular contest of creative flash fiction. The story is almost done but I’m struggling with the ending. I finally managed to make it sound more plausible and sent it to a friend who approved. She read the first version and said the second one was better so I’m getting there. I re-did it again since then but I am still not quite happy.

The tricky part about this particular piece is that I’m writing from a male perspective, something I haven’t done much in the past. The contest deadline is at the end of June so I still have time… I’m going to send it to another beta reader, a male one this time, for one more set of eyes and then off it will go into the slush pile (maybe, probably, hopefully not). 🙂

I was going to head back to my mom’s this week as well but I found some sort of forward propulsion with the decluttering of this house. I took the bathroom apart, including the drawers and cabinets and purged the crap out of it. Then I tackled the bedroom; the only parts I didn’t deal with are his side. I just can’t seem to find a way to encourage order – he is challenged, which challenges me – so I left his stuff alone. My stuff in the meanwhile is so very organized, I no longer have to activate my brain cells to find something. I simply reach into the drawer and pull from the correct pile of like items what I need or want and that’s that.

Bliss! (I know I’m weird…)

Next up the craft bins littering the main floor of this house. The girl child has stopped crafting so it’s time to purge and reduce the amount of stuff that she’s clearly outgrown.

Point in case: there was a slime phase she went through but it seems to have passed. OFF with its HEAD!

And there are many paints she has that seem to either be empty tubes or dried-up tubes. OFF with THEIR heads! Also the sewing stuff can easily be reduced into a couple of containers instead of several smaller ones… ugh.

Then, I invited mom over for dinner on Saturday and will pawn off on her some of the things she offered to help me with, like legos. My brother out in Vancouver was really successful in rebuilding his Space lego from the 1970s and sold them to collectors – we don’t have a lot of old lego but I bet there are plenty of people who are looking for used kits or extra pieces… My kids have lost interest and although I’m still interested in lego (I find it very therapeutic to sort and organized a mixed pile of random pieces) there simply isn’t the space in this house to leave things out to return to the next day.

Also, puppy. Argh! Can you imagine him trampling through all my stuff on the floor? 😀

So there you go. A non-post about a day-in-the-life of a Canadian former hockeymom.

Off I go to do something productive with my day today.

Cheers!

20 thoughts on “Idle with bursts of forward propulsion”

  2. I believe a certain somebody asked me recently how many beagles I have, and when I replied fewer than one, she said, “My condolences.”

    No need for condolences. My stomach churned a little when reading about Tucker’s penchant for recycling.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  4. Not that you want the competition, but I am interested in a contest….though I might be too lazy to get anything done. Could you send me the name of the contest…of course I will understand if you don’t.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  6. What a funny little man. Lately I’ve been noticing more often that the guinea pigs are eating their poop pellets (not their cecotropes, but the regular poops), and they like to chew it for an extended period of time. Getting the full poop experience, I guess.

    Organization is a wonderful thing.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. Good work Tucker. Always good to remind our humans that it’s feeding time soon. Actually I suffer a bit from acid reflux, albeit around 3 am, so that seems like a good time to snaffle some gravy bones and wake up the parents too.

    I like to arrange all my beds, I find it therapeutic. Usually they are tossed around the garden but I still get comfort from it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      1. I tried a crate for about 2 days when I first arrived. Didn’t like it and kept the parents away all night with my prowling and whining. It worked though as I was allowed to have one of my 9 beds in their room. Now I definitely rule the roost. Should I impart this information to Tucker.

        Liked by 1 person

  8. It’s interesting you find it therapeutic to sort lego pieces. I sometimes like to do jigsaw puzzles and also find it therapeutic. I had a conversation with my son in law who thinks doing jigsaws is a total waste of time – like digging a hole and then filling it in again and I couldn’t explain why I liked it. But it’s quite a good way to distract your brain while you think about other things.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Share your thoughts!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.