Yes, they will break our hearts.

 I am sitting on my small couch in my small cottage watching and listening to my small dog sleep.  Cooper does not sleep quietly these days. He's an old guy and as old folks do, he whines and whimpers and sighs and yelps in his sleep. He's curled up in his little bed, curled up like a comma. 

Everyone I know who has a dog is facing the same thing: death of our furry pals sooner or later. Cooper is probably about 16 years old.  My kids have dogs that are about 15 years old (talking about you, little Hannah) and 13 years for the Bebe. Brother Steve has Random, who is about 12 years old but suffering from a slow degenerative disease so he seems older.  I have many friends who have dogs older than 12 and some are in fine health, some less so.

The point is that every pet owner knows that the day will arrive when they must take action to let their pet go. We all know that our pets will most certainly die before us and yet we willingly adopted them knowing they would break our hearts. When our dogs or cats or horses were young, it was easy to put that knowledge in a box on the back shelf and ignore it. But at some point, sooner or later, we must take that box down, open it and face the grim truth.

Cooper is spry for being close to 16 years old.  Bebe was given a death sentence six months ago and she still bounces around like a puppy most of the time. Hannah plays the starlet card, being fussy and neurotic a lot of the time but youngish and charming when she wants, which is often. Random has slowed down considerably in the past six months but will bark like a two year old when anyone walks past his fence. These dogs have been loved and cared for and have given all of us so much love..... and they will continue to do so until we must put them in the car and take them to their final vet visit.  That we love them is no mystery. Neither is the fact that they will break our hearts when they die. But that's simply a small price we pay for the life we have had with them. We knew it going in, we know it now.

Here's my guy. Sleeping and happy. While I know he has maybe two more years, I am so happy he can make me laugh every day. 

Fearing Fire

And so it begins: next week we get our first heat wave of the year, temps here in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, climbing to at least 100 degrees by Thursday and into Friday. But read what is happening east of us, in Arizona and Utah:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/10/record-heat-wave-southwest/

Record breaking heat. It's only June. What is it going to be like in July, August, September? I already have a bag packed, ready to evacuate. It's not complete, it needs dog food and shampoo and a few other things but the fact that it's ready is an indicator of our need to be vigilant and a sign of our powerlessness in the face of fire. 

For those of us living in Sonoma Valley, every siren we hear creates a line of alarm in our minds. In 2017, the houses around my cottage burned.  The property fence 15 feet from my cottage burned. Last year we were evacuated for ten days during the Glass Fire and the fire came a couple of miles from my street. The danger is incredibly real and frightening.

People talk about grilling and barbeques in the summer. But unless you have a gas grill, no one in the valley lights their Webber charcoal grill past Memorial Day unless the temps are down in the 70's. It's simply too dangerous. I grilled a great dinner about three weeks ago but that's probably it until November.  It's a  huge part of summer that I miss but it isn't worth the worry and the danger.

Right now fires are burning in several southwestern states. Fire season currently has no "season." Because of increased temperatures, the season is every month of every year in every state west of the Rockies. Unless you live here, it's impossible to understand the severity of the situation and the fear that invades our lives. Most of us sleep with a window open near our bed just to be able to smell smoke if it comes near. 

Be careful out there.

The new job: what was I thinking?

 OK, I admit that the lure of getting out of the house and being involved in something other than myself was a factor.  Also, the simple fact that my boss almost begged me to come to work for her was a boost to my ego. And finally, money.  Money is always a carrot on the end of the stick.

But seriously, the first two days were nothing but hard, physical labor. Coming into an old hotel that had been operating the same way for 30 years meant digging through the detritus of someone else's kitchen and hauling bags of trash to the car and then into a dumpster. Broken and bent utensils, torn plastic containers, stained kitchen towels, jars of spices that had expiration dates of 12 years ago, same with oils and flours and dried fruits. Sticky, greasy shelves that needed a scouring pad to get them clean. Dozens of scarred and stinky cutting boards, multiple sets of cookie molds, plastic bags full of plastic bags. So much trash.

We sorted and tossed and cleaned. Then came the real test: baking in a Wedgewood oven that is probably as old as I am. The muffins in the back of the oven burned.  The muffins in the front of the oven were undercooked.  The shelves dipped down in the back so the coffee cake was an inch higher on one end. The shelves were also very unstable and I feared they would collapse mid-baking. 

The general manager put me in charge of doing most of the baking for the small hotel, which wasn't exactly what I thought the job would entail. Now we all know that I love to bake but baking for friends and family is an enjoyable task with good feedback and a sense of satisfaction.  Baking for 20 - 50 people at a time is a different animal. You need to bake a lot in order to get that many servings and the goods are gobbled down quickly with very little feedback and almost no sense of satisfaction. You are on your feet for hours, in a hot kitchen on a hot summer day and there is endless clean-up needing to be done.

I committed to this job for six months.  The first two weeks have been very difficult and surprising. But hey, it gets me out of the house, gives me new challenges and will generate some income.  I am approaching it as an experimental adventure: try new recipes, new techniques.  See what works, what fails. Bottom line, if you give someone a baked item, be it a slice of a quick bread, a muffin, a piece of coffee cake, 95% of the time the person will enjoy it, even it if isn't the best baked thing in the world. That's my goal: 95% happiness.  We'll see if I meet it!

Why I am not writing these days.

 There is no real reason, of course. I could make myself sit and start banging on the keyboard and produce something insignificant or self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing or possibly even something worth reading.  But right now, it simply is not happening.

What do real writers do when they hit this sort of a block?  One supposes they start banging on the keyboard with the hope of producing..... something. Anything. I don't have the backbone for that. Too lazy. So weeks go by and I have written nothing.

But part of this ennui and lassitude is perhaps born of my lack of discipline on a daily basis: I have no job, no schedule other than walking the dog, no structure.  For a year this was fine. From March 2020 to about January of this year, I was happy to be out of work, lazing about, behaving obediently within the safe Covid guidelines. Then things started to open up, opportunities for getting out and about began to appear. We could socialize a bit, safely. We could go out to dinner in an restaurant if we followed the rules. We could actually hug someone (gasp!) if we had both been vaccinated.

All those things are great, of course. But my days of doing nothing now seemed like pure laziness and slothfulness. My lack of a schedule, my lack of anything solid that would guide me to the next step now felt like a emblem of failure.  I felt like I had wasted an entire year on nothing. And had nothing to say about it.

This situation may change soon. I am going back to work this week, a part-time gig in hospitality, which I swore I would never do again. But it seems that unless I am doing something, I won't do anything. Maybe this little job will light the small fire that is necessary to get me out of my funk and will lead me to feeling at least productive again. And hopefully that will lead to picking up the proverbial pen and begin writing again.

So, to the two or three loyal readers of this small blog, I thank you for checking in now and then and quietly mentioning that I have been absent from the page for too long. Please stay tuned. Something might be appearing soon.  

In the meantime, you can listen to this.  Copy and paste if it doesn't link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaL_PhlYAJ8