Feeling better

Bela steals the bone from her doggie Get Well Soon bouquet.

Stupid people, cars and dogs

Last night, a stupid person came to my house, opened the back door and let Bela out onto the driveway to do the meet-and-greet with his dog. Bela was more interested in running out into the middle of the street apparently, and was struck by a car. I heard it--the whack, the cry, and ran out screaming to see her lying in the middle of the street. The car did not stop.

T. and I rushed her to the animal hospital. I sat in the back of the car trying to keep her calm and quiet, though I was probably doing a pretty bad job of it. Thick drops of blood were falling from her head onto my hands, clothes and the floor of the car, and her eye looked bloody and swollen. It was dark and hard to tell where the blood was coming from.

After several hours at the hospital, we learned Bela had a puncture wound under her jaw, and swelling that had caused her third eyelid to pop up over her eye. Preliminary X-rays showed no broken bones or fractures, but they wanted to keep her overnight. We left, hopeful that we could bring her home in the morning.

As of just a few minutes ago, she's eating and walking. But the hospital is keeping her a bit longer. She might come home this afternoon.

I've never wanted to hurt someone so badly as I wanted to hurt stupid person last night. I can picture myself hitting him, screaming at him. To make matters worse for himelf, we asked him to stay until we returned home, but when we got here, he was gone and our doors were unlocked.

But more importantly . . . I almost lost my best buddy last night. I'm thankful that she's still here and that perhaps after a few quiet days of healing, she'll be back to her old, silly self.

Me? I don't know if I'll ever go back to my old self.

An everyday moment of joy

Know what this is? It's the best kitchen appliance ever. So much better than a microwave or perhaps even a dishwasher. It's an egg and muffin maker. See the steam? It's steaming an egg and a veggie sausage at the same time it is toasting an english muffin

















And it makes these in about 5 minutes time:

It's the little things that make life good.

Convenient New Year's resolutions

Why make resolutions that you can't keep? This year, I'm making ones that are easy to achieve.

1. Write more letters and keep in better touch with friends. I'm terrible about this. I let e-mails sit in my inbox, unanswered, for months. I guess with the amount of e-mail I have to deal with at work, I'm on e-mail overload most of the time. I do like writing letters though. Real letters on nice paper that you place into an envelope. And S. and J. have so thoughtfully set me up to be successful with a membership to and stationary from the Letter Writers Alliance.

(Note: I've said nothing about answering my cell phone.)

2. I'm going to keep better track of snail-mail addresses. Each holiday season I frustrate myself because half my addresses are in my yahoo address book, the other are on envelopes and scraps of paper in various drawers. Most of them are out of date. This year, I sent three bottles of wine to my brother's old address. I spent days harassing the UPS and Wine.com people, then calling my bro to ask if he'd received the wine yet. Never again. I've already purchased a new address book. My brother's correct address is already in there!

3. Another convenient resolution: I'm going to the art museum more often. T. and I got memberships as a gift this year. I love gifts like that! There's a great Chuck Close exhibit there that's about to close. I've already seen it, but T. hasn't. It's worth seeing again.

4. Less convenient, but still not too hard: I'm going to the damn Portland International Film Festival this year! Every year, I hear about it after it's started, and half the films I want to see have already run. I vow to get the flyer that lists all the films, sit down with a big mug of tea, and make a plan for the ones I want to see.

So what are your resolutions?