Hello friends! I hope you have been doing well. I’m doing pretty good on this end. Last week I worked mostly from home, mainly due to various appointments and a cold. My back and old wrist injury decided to flare up, too. Boo! This week was much better, but still feeling some fatigue. I’m still working from home half days and going into the office in the afternoons so I can keep an eye on Apollo, who’s been sick for nearly two months now. Our vets, despite multiple diagnostic tests and radiographs, haven’t been able to figure out why. We’re eager for our sweet baby boy to get better – though he’s nearly 12, he typically has a lot of energy and it’s been really hard to see him so lethargic and sick. His energy is thankfully improving – he has been wanting to play with his toys again, and last night we played fetch – but he still has really heavy nasal congestion. The last vet referred us to an internal medicine specialist and had some alarming hypotheses. After a quick Google search, I decided that I would not allow myself to look up anything else and just wait to see the specialist, which is less than two weeks from now. Hopefully the little guy is just getting over a respiratory illness and that his rebounding energy is a good sign that he’s getting better!

He’s started sleeping in our bed again – how can you keep a wheezing dog in his puppy bed on a cold winter night when he could cuddle with you instead? There’s no going back from this and he will now sleep in our bed forever. I love being able to snuggle with him, though in typical dachshund fashion, he takes up half of the bed.

The girls have been meowing a lot more at us, and it’s SO. CUTE. Mittens pretty consistently meows at me when I get up in the mornings. Moon Pie meows have been a little more elusive, but I’ll hear them once every other day or so (she meows more at Husband – I WANT TO BE EVERYONE’S FAVORITE). I have a bedtime routine where I say goodnight to the girls- Mittens will lead me to her room, flop on her back, and want belly rubs. Then Moon Pie gets jealous and hops into the room so she can get scritches too. But the past night or two, Mittens has been hiding in her cat tunnel instead of flopping on her back, and I DON’T KNOW WHY (but isn’t wondering why your cat is mad at you part of cat ownership? DO YOU EVEN OWN A CAT IF IT IS NOT PERIODICALLY MAD AT YOU?) I’m wondering if Mittens is mad that I’m leaving her to go to sleep, because Husband will say that she’ll sometimes start meowing when I go into my room. UGH. MY HEART.

Working from home with these two gremlins has been very interesting. In the mornings, they chase each other all around the house. Moon Pie is the quieter, more well-behaved cat – she has very concentrated pockets of mischief, but will spend much of her time lounging in a cat tower or on one of our dining room chairs. Mittens reminds me of Apollo in his prime puppy years – always on the prowl for trouble or something to gnaw on (our couch*, Husband’s guitar strings, my plants, yarn) before she crashes. Sometimes she joins me on my desk, which is really cute.

The pets are all getting more and more comfortable with each other. I still don’t feel comfortable leaving them by themselves for a full work day, but I can leave them alone for a half day without worrying too much about it.

What else? I’m still working on my February packet and reading The Breakup for my craft essay. I’m not going to lie, it’s a rough read – it’s well-written but it’s tough subject matter and it’s uncomfortably intimate, to the point where I feel like I’m intruding on someone’s therapy session. I find myself thinking, BREAK UP ALREADY, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD while reading it, which is terrible, because this is someone’s real life that I’m reading about. Sigh. But I have a to-read pile that I’m very excited about!

Ok. The top left, Door = Jar, is a literary journal I bought last weekend. The top right, Women, is autofiction for me to read for my writing program, and the bottom three are all purchases based on First Light Books recommendations! They curated a list of “No Plot, just vibes” books on their Instagram, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation was one of the recommended reads. Then last night I went to an event at First Light for the paperback release of The Nursery. They hosted the author, Szilvia Molnar (who lives in Austin) along with three other ATX-based artists/writers. Each artist read a passage from the book that they resonated with, then read, discussed, or performed their own work that connected with the passage they had just read. The Life is a book of poetry from one of the artists at the event – she was really funny and I really liked the poem she read.

The event was really interesting and The Nursery sounds like it will be an excellent (though tough) read. Afterward I was able to meet up with Husband to watch his friend play a show. I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but it just feels soooo good to live in a place with CULTURAL EVENTS and STUFF TO DO again (and with a beautiful skyline! I still don’t recognize it but it makes me happy everytime I see it).

OH YEAH! Before I go, here’s progress I’m making on my cardigan!

I’m working on the back side now! I can consistently go running in shorts and not freeze, so it’s definitely going to be too warm to wear by the time I finish it – but since the office is always cold, I can at least wear it there.

Ok, today is going to be a busy day, so I’d better get ready. I hope you all have a great weekend!

*We already had an older couch, but our girls are doing their VERY BEST to destroy it.