Puppy Woes

Guess I should post one more time before the month is over.

I can't believe this is the last day of October! Weird.

'Tis been a busy week. (I'm not sure if that's even grammatically accurate, but I love "'tis', so there.) Sasha is a ball of energy galumphing through life with teeth barred and puppy eyes sparkling. She may be the bringer of sanity's departure around here. But I love her. (Now that I've recovered from buyer's remorse or whatever it was possessed me the first couple of days.) Especially in the morning, she's all energy. She'll bounce around obnoxiously for a couple hours (literally, she pounces and bounds all around the floor), crash in the middle of the floor and army crawl into a comfortable position to snooze, and start over with tormenting everyone and everything in sight. Especially Hershey. She's a brute to him.

We still have to find a kennel for her, and then a carpet shampooer for us. The whole only-go-potty-outside concept hasn't quite clicked yet.

Speaking of clicking, I bought a bag full of tasty puppy treats and a clicker with which to train her. We started this morning with sit. Another concept that hasn't quite computed is click = treat. She noticed the treats, realized I wanted her to sit, and started sitting pretty all over the floor and looking curiously at me out of the corner of her eye, totally disregarding the clicker. Yeah, this may take some work. She's quite intelligent, but her ADHD and the darker side of her personality take over a lot.

I really need to get a decent picture of the fluff ball to put on here.

Any way. My week.

Well, on Thursday we had to bring Sasha to co-op because leaving her alone with Hershey for 6 hours was not going to work. (He's still perpetually irritated at her. It's like how the cat treats him.) So I hid out in a back classroom no one was using, occasionally pulling in pals to ooh and ahh over the puppy, who was doing a remarkable job of looking perfectly innocent and sweet. Such a little actress. Mrs. Johnson was away with her youngest at a wedding, so I got to teach class. Thankfully the experiments were comprised mostly of water, though I had to comb my hair to get the comb electrically charged and felt rather like Rapunzel, only there wasn't just a cute chameleon watching me. While I was buy with science, Heather took charge of the puppy in her class of four.

When Mom came to get me to do routes, we brought Sasha home and headed out. When we returned around 2.5 hours later, both dogs were still breathing.

Friday through yesterday we girls joined most of the rest of the youth group at a camp a few hours NNW of here. 'Twas cold and gray most of the time, but in weather only. The youth retreat event itself was an adventure (a tiring one). Our youth pastor's wife deserves free hugs for a year and a bucketload of chocolate for the cabin in which she put me. It stayed clean and mostly quiet and we were drama-free. Lovely.

On the ride home, everyone in my van slept (except the driver, of course, though she was close).

We got back just before morning church let out. When everyone in the family was gathered, we had to drop off a paper Mom had forgotten about on routes that morning, then went to PetSmart for my puppy training tools, then McDonald's. As it was the 5th Sunday of the month, we had an afternoon service starting at 3, so didn't really have time to nap.

By the end of the day yesterday, it didn't feel like Sunday. We were home by 5 and watched a few movies and had a lazy evening.

This week I'm doing something new: Driver's Ed. Yeah, I'm freaked. It starts today. 13 days, Monday-Wednesday, or something like that.

So this is a really short post, I know, but it's taken me a good hour or more to get it finished because I'm busy keeping Sasha away from Hershey's new bone. I'll try to come back with something more worthwhile to write about next time.

The Beginning of the Holiday Season

I have an excuse for not getting back sooner: exhaustion. Up until Saturday, the week was normal. Church, co-op, a lazy day on Friday.

On Saturday, Mom and us girls headed out for a drive, just because. We headed up toward the Amish stores. On the way, we drove by a sporting goods store, and I commented that they sometimes had puppies. Mom (yes, I blame her) suggested we stop by to see if there were any puppies at the moment.

By now most of you know how the story ends. We saw yellow labs and some sort of Dachshund/chihuahua mix and something else I can't remember before we came to the truck where the lab/Aussie mixes were.

$40 for an 8-week-old, 1/4 Australian shepherd and 3/4 black lab puppy. For the last couple of months I've considered asking for a dog (even did at one point), especially now that I actually have some money. Suddenly, I was calling Dad and telling him to check out the message Mom had sent him: a picture of each of us girls with a fluffy black dog in our arms. And then he was okaying me to get one.

10 minutes later, as we drove away, me holding a puppy, I wondered, "Did I really just do that?"

Out of the four girls there, I couldn't pick one. Mom suggested I put my hand in the truck and call them over and take the first one that came. Only one came. The others kept playing and ignored me. That was easy.

Naming her was not so easy. It took a lot of time, but we eventually settled on Sasha.

It took about two days for reality to finally set in. Now that it has, I still wonder what on earth I've done. The first night, I started out with Sasha in a box in my room, but she wouldn't stop whining and it was late, so I let her sleep on my bed. She didn't stay still all night, and I got maybe two hours of sleep, between that and routes.

Sunday night she whined all night and I honestly didn't get a wink of sleep. By last night I was literally ready to cry I was so tired. We did everything we could to keep Sasha awake for the first few hours leading up to bedtime so she doesn't turn nocturnal. Then I pulled her box over to my bedside and keep a newspaper nearby. 20 minutes of getting a rap on the nose every time she made a noise made her quiet, and she went to sleep.

Ah, sleep.

(Seriously, on Sunday night we had our afterglow, and lack of sleep had put me in a very strange mood. Totally embarrassing.)

Now that I can think clearly, things are looking a little better.

Mom and Dad are convinced that by the time we get through her puppy stage, Hershey as a puppy will look like a field trip. She bites everything (even the shoes on your feet), she gets into everything, she picks on Hershey, she chases the cat.... The Aussie in her blood comes through in her intelligence. I'll be honest, how quickly she picks up on things compared to Hershey shocks me. We were living with a dog of slightly-less-than-average intelligence, and now we have one with high intelligence, as well as a saucy attitude. I'm scared.

So life hasn't really been boring, but I haven't done much else besides get a puppy. I made more laundry soap yesterday and managed to make an apple pie without Mom's help. I need to make another one today, because the last one is already gone.

Speaking of apples, I've become addicted to them lately. Mom got some a while ago from an orchard, and we've collected some here and there from paper route customers. But even with the three or four types of untreated apples from customers, I've found that only one doesn't give me any reaction at all. So I eat one or two a day now. I'd forgotten how good they were!

I can't think of anything else that's happened. Life progresses pretty normally.

As usual, I had something to share a few days ago but didn't, and now I've forgotten it. I suppose I'll try to come back in the next few days. I'll try to have pictures of my puppy ready to share by then. She hardly sits still long enough to get a decent picture.

Wait. I remember what it was! Last Tuesday Mom and I took most of the day to cook up a bunch of the apples we've collected. We finally turned on the Christmas music (normally we start in August, but not this year) and set to work. Mostly apple sauce and apple butter, but it helped me get into the holiday spirit. The perpetually gray skies and successive rainy days hasn't helped.

Now I'm suddenly remembering my week. My brain still isn't functioning at 100% capacity, if you couldn't tell.

During our drive on Saturday, after we got Sasha, Heather and I both got our first driving lessons. We start Driver's Ed in November (scary!). It wasn't too bad, though I was so nervous and tense that my shoulder got sore.

Also, last night, I saw northern lights for the second time in my life (that I can remember). Someday I might go someplace where they're bright and clear, but even here they're beautiful. There was a large patch of red and ribbons of white in a clear sky full of stars. Amazing.

So this week has been super crazy, and also a bit of a learning week for me.

I was doing so well for a while there.

I'm not even going to try to make an excuse for my negligence. Granted, the past couple of weeks were eventful, but I still had plenty of time most days to blog.

And it seems my computer doesn't want me to blog. Right as I started writing, it shut off on me.

Anyway. I'll stop making excuses and waiting to forget about blogging and finally do it.

Okay, October the 3rd.... Wow. A lot has happened since then. Okay, speed recap! (Ha!)

That was the start of the Revival Meetings at church. Well, I guess Sunday was. Sunday through Wednesday. That's my first excuse, though they didn't start until 7. At 5:30 Monday-Wednesday a bunch of us kids headed out to sell coupon books. We made some good progress, though I think we'll need to start looking for a new method of fundraising. Three or four other groups are selling coupons, too, and they get started a couple weeks before we do every year.

Because of Revival, we didn't have Bible study or Institute.

Thursday, of course, was co-op. Nothing special there. Well, at least, not out of the ordinary, but the whole experience can be very awesome. Mrs. Johnson needs an award for coolest science teacher. I rarely dreaded coming to chemistry, as much as I hated it, because she's great at making the whole thing fun and as easy as possible.

Friday and Saturday I was up early to go to work with Dad. Heather came with me on Saturday. We mostly worked in the back room, unpacking product and sorting and storing it in preparation for the remodel.

On Sunday afternoon, a couple of us Sr. High girls spent the day with one of the awesome ladies who works in the youth group. We made cookies and soup and listened to a 2-hour recording of the testimony of Darlene Diebler, a missionary who'd been in prison camps during WWII. Wow! What a powerful testimony. I think it also had something to do with one of the girls deciding at church that night that she wanted to be a missionary, which makes it doubly awesome and exciting.

I'm going to pause in my recap to say this: I truly do have an amazing youth group. Yes, we're all human. Yes, we most certainly make some terrible mistakes and we are very capable of doing stupid things (as I realized yet again this week). But I don't know where I'd be, or who I'd be, without the awesome people God's put in my life through this. I don't thank Him nearly enough for it.

So last Monday was normal. Just coupon books and Bible study. Tuesday was also normal, with Institute. On Wednesday and Thursday, we did the remodel at Dad's store: myself and Heather, Vanna and Mrs. Wright, and Abby S. and her mom were all there. That was exciting! I spent a good deal of my time organizing books in the Christian living, charismatic, parenting, and marriage sections. Oh, what fun! Seriously, trying to alphabetize that many books makes my brain ache, and it shut down half-way through so I couldn't remember where anything belonged. Not fun.

Also we'd called of co-op for the week because so many of us were not going to make it.

We didn't do a whole lot on Friday, except Vanna came over to spend the night so she could come to the church with us on Saturday to help prepare for the Chili Cook-off.

We arrived at the church around noon on Saturday. There were 7 of us in the group, though for a while only four of us were there working. Our theme was Italian, as we were doing pizza soup (it's become very popular in the youth group). Saturday was tiring in many ways, some of them not really related to the cook-off, though I really don't want to go into that. I did have a pretty decent headache by the end of the night, though thankfully it wasn't nearly as crowded as in past years. Must be because we did it two weeks earlier than normal and it came up kind of suddenly.

So a few of us wore (or drew on, in the case of one) mustaches, some had aprons, some had hats, and one was a mime. We had bread and soup with bacon bits, cheese, and olives as sides and decorated with a giant sign framed by curtains (shower curtains, no less), a checkered table cloth, candles, and peppers. It was fun, though I didn't really get around much and only had chili from one table.

Bro. Mark's brother and niece were the judges. That was fun. They judge chili, soup, and presentation. When Pastor stood on a chair to announce the winners, he did 3rd for chili, soup, and table, then 2nd for all, then 1st. When we weren't called each time, we got more and more nervous. He got to 1st place soup and called our table. Abby S., Heather, and Tonya marched up to get the prize (a gift card), and Pastor said, "How could you not give it to them? Look at them!" Then he told the girls to stay up there because we also won for presentation!

Yeah, I jumped up and cheered like an idiot.

$50 isn't really much between 7 people, but it was a nice way to end an exciting day.

On Saturday I also decided it was time to take a break from facebook. I have numerous reasons for doing this, one of them being messed up priorities. And, sad as it is, it's hard to do. But in 2 days I've already seen how helpful it'll be for me.

Sunday. Wow. I think I should write a book with all of the adventures I have early in the morning. Mom had 80 papers added to her routes this past week. (Being former walking routes, they're all condensed, so it only adds 20 minutes tops.) Sunday was the first time I'd done them, because I was working at Dad's store on Thursday.

So we're about halfway through routes, working on the new route. Everything's going fine for me never having done the route. Then we notice a fire on the side of the road. One of the leaf piles that had been raked (too far) into the road was on fire. Happening to glance back at where we'd just been, Mom saw a larger fire in at the end of the court we'd just done.

We got to call 911 and report it. Oh, yay.

While we're waiting for help to arrive (they told Mom she could go but she wanted to make sure it was taken care of) Mom started wondering how it could have happened, and then she wondered if we could have started the fires on accident. She didn't dare ask the policeman when he arrived if this was even possible. (Yeah, the policeman came a good five minutes before the fire truck cruised in. He got an extinguisher from his trunk and doused the larger fire. The first one had dimmed to smoldering ashes.)

We left to finish routes. When we were done, Mom quickly drove through the new route and a few other streets to see if there were any other fires, me all the time trying to assure her that I honestly didn't think it was our fault.

Mom later learned that she wasn't the only paper carrier to see fires that morning. Apparently somebody had been going through and lighting leaves on fire. Nice.

That brings us up to yesterday. It was a quiet day for me, because I wasn't feeling good. I ended up napping, and then opted out of coupon sales and Bible study. Not much to be said about yesterday.

I'm thinking a (not so short) recap is all I'll write today. Now that it's taken me almost an hour just to write this, I think it's enough for one day. That, and I really don't have anything else to day. I know I had thought of something to write yesterday, but I didn't even make a note of it and now I can't remember what it was. Oh, well.

The Songs Stuck in My Head

I still haven't finished that song.

Actually, it's more like four or five songs. A few weeks ago I sat down to collect and organize all of the bits and pieces I had accrued over the past year or more. I ended up arranging them a tack board (see the picture above) in hopes that if I had something visual to off of which to work I might have more success.

It didn't work, and I'm still where I was weeks ago.

For some reason, the words aren't falling into place. It's rather frustrating. But I'll try again and again until they do.

Mom and Dad took their missionary training this past week. We're now working on putting together our presentation, which includes a video. Mom commented yesterday that she wants me to write a song for Heather to sing at some point during the video.

I'm sure the song we could use is someone in that jumble of words on my tack board. If only I could find it.

I've always balked at forceful creativity in the past. Mostly from stubborn foolishness. I don't have an honestly decent reason. Lately I've been trying to train the creative part of my brain to work whenever, not just when I feel like it. I suppose this is a great opportunity to teach myself to just be creative at will.

It might sound silly, I know, but I used to think that I could only turn out something creative if I was in the mood and "felt inspired". I'm learning that all it takes is sitting down and doing it and I can usually find the creative mood in the process.

I have a favorite quote by Frank Tibolt: "Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action."

So I'll force myself to take action and finally get these songs out of my head and onto the page. Hopefully I'll soon be able to post them.

In other news, we have revival meetings at church this week. If yesterday is any indication, it's going to be a fantastic week. Also, because of meetings, we don't have Bible study or Institute, which means I get an extra week to study for the biweekly test we have in Ephesians class.

I know it's a short post, but I can't think of anything else to talk about at the moment. I guess I'll stop here.