Do I need a break?

Right this moment, yep. The dog has eaten enough snow in the past week to give himself an upset stomach. Fortunately for us, it’s not the vomity kind. Unfortunately for him, it’s the gassy kind. He is scared of his own farts, so as best we can tell, he genuinely tries to hold them in while he’s awake.

He loves napping in my home office when I’m sitting at my desk. I’m on a video call right now with some of my fellow Novelry peeps. We get together for virtual silent writing hours during the week. If I wasn’t on mute, they’d be able to hear him snoring.

THOSE AREN’T SNORES.

THEY ARE FOUL.

THICKLY, STICKILY FOUL.

They aren’t sharts; I’ve checked (not this morning, but definitely multiple times this week). The smell is just stank, and what doesn’t get vented winds up trapped in his fur, so now and again, when he’s awake and ambiently around in other rooms of the house¹, it seeps out, and Alexa and Siri are convinced I just start crying randomly in private for no apparent reason because Neither One of Them Can Smell.

I know they are, because they AreJustTryingtoHelp by selling these data points to pharmaceutical companies that keep pushing me ads for medications to treat Pseudobulbar Effect. I do not have Pseudobulbar Effect, and here’s why: a) I would be able to cry in public, and b) when I do cry in private, it is Always Because Something Stinks. For example:

the dog,

my favorite writing tool’s getting hacked²,

the current political climate,

my son’s turning twenty-one in this current political climate,

my mother’s being dead for ten years,

…and that it took me six days to write this blog post, which looks nothing at all like the original I intended, or its re-write, or its re-re-write before I tossed it and stared at laundry for a while, No I Wasn’t Crying It Was What Can Happen When I Sneeze I Blow Snot Out of My Eyes So Totally Attractive, Right?

I’m in public right now, virtually speaking. I’m fighting tears, thank you, dog, and when I was asked what my goal for the writing session was, I decided, screw it, a blog post is happening this morning, and my overthinking penguins will just need to cope. I will not care if they’re still unhappy with me for expressing so much anger in my last post.

I logged into WordPress, saw this daily writing prompt (“Do you need a break?“), and now here we are. Done!

1. Say, by the front door, staring at the neighbors through the side glass while being too close to the entryway vent, which blows warm air that wafts upstairs (and downstairs, if the door to the basement is open). Does bathing him help? No, because a bath won’t stop him from eating snow. ↩︎
2. Notepad++, which I have used for everything for years now. Even when I use an IDE for work or school, a specialized fiction-writing tool, or an Office suite component, I rough out my systems, code, character maps, invented languages, emails, Frustrations With The Universe, lions, tigers, and bears, oh, my in Notepad++ first, in the same way I used to use vi and XEDIT (the IBM 3270 version, not the little-x version used for Bethesda game modding). I uninstalled it after I learned about the hack, and will install a newer version once the dust settles, assuming my husband doesn’t convince me to go back to using UNIX for everything, or I text him from the side of the road somewhere deeper into rural Virginia to share pictures of the chickens and the goats I just picked up for the farmette and chat about the source I’ve found for wine grapes, What?It’llBeFunHoney!
   
   I roughed out today’s blog post in the new version of Windows Notepad. It made me miss the old one, which I used heavily before I switched to Notepad++. ↩︎