We’ve rallied. My husband found another dog for us on Friday, and we’ve now had her the whole weekend. She’s as sweet as she can be–very loving and playful, and she’s been keeping us very busy. Since we never had a chance to name the dog that was our first choice, we decided to stick with Indy. We think it suits her.

I did manage to sneak in some writing today, after several days of not having any time to spare. I was sort of ‘out of the zone’, but not so much that I hadn’t been thinking about how I wanted to deal with the next part of my scene-in-progress. So…it struck me as odd how much trouble I was having with words. I wasn’t having trouble with the writing, per se, but I’d type my sentences, go back and read them, and words would either be completely off, like I’d have typed ‘hand’ instead of ‘hair’, or else I’d mistakenly use a word’s homonym. Unless it was the nap I had right before this mixed with the spike of caffeine from my can of RC Cola, I can’t say what might have caused this odd twisting of my thoughts.

Tomorrow is the first day of Spring Break–a full week of two little boys and one little girl puppy. May I snatch at any time to write and blog that I can…

We didn’t get the dog. My husband went to pick her up at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday, and the lady never showed up, so he called her. She started the conversation telling him the dog had gotten sick that morning with distemper. She eventually came around to the reality that she’d had to put her down.

Now this is awful in and of itself, and we are all very sad about it, but I can’t help but be appalled at how poorly this woman handled the whole situation. She didn’t call!–she told my husband she didn’t have our number, but he reached her at home, and we’d sent our phone number in an email and sent her an application for the dog that included our phone numbers. Not only that, but if she didn’t have the number, she could have just shown up to break the news. We were picking her up at a Petsmart that this woman works out of regularly. And then, my husband had to work the information out of her. She told him the dog was sick, and he asked, ‘So where do we go from here?’ And eventually–eventually–she worked around to it.

I hope she didn’t suffer too much.

It’s been almost a week since I blogged (or admittedly read almost anyone’s blog), and I’m happy to be back. I’ve just been absolutely swamped with a multitude of things and have barely spent time on my computer, let alone on the Internet.

Last Wednesday night we drove out to the country to see a dog we were thinking of adopting. Thursday I worked, Friday I hit the new BIGGEST IN HOUSTON Target one exit down from me and positively chocked full of stuff. Then I hurried back home to be the Mystery Reader for my older son’s class. It came out that I’d written a book, and the main questions they (2nd graders) asked after that were:

1. Does your book have pictures?
2. Why doesn’t your book have pictures?
3. Are you writing another book? Will it have pictures?

We went on in that vein for some time.

Then Saturday we had a birthday party and another visit to The Target (with my husband and kids for new dog stuff). Sunday was a girl’s shopping trip at the Houston Galleria, yesterday I had a sinus headache ALL day, but still managed to get some writing done (yay!), and then today I got called in to substitute at work because too many ladies were out. For those of you who aren’t aware, today is Johnny Appleseed’s death-day. We thought it was his birthday, but oops!, he was evidently born in September. We did apple-stamping and apple-counting, read the story of Johnny Appleseed, and had an apple snack. All very festive.

And tomorrow, we get our new dog. We’re currently thinking of calling her Indiana or Indy. Hopefully I’ll squeeze some writing in before I have to pick her up, work on Thursday, and attend my son’s school Easter Egg Hunt on Friday. Whew!