How did it get to be October? Of 2012?

Wow, time goes fast.

One might have hoped that I got all of my work done on my illustration project over the summer.  I certainly did...hope so that is.  I did not though.  Between being moody and adjusting meds, traveling, recovering from travel, dealing with two kids and an ailing ancient dog, and the rest of whatever happened this summer, I did not get much illustration done, to my regret and chagrin.  Granted, it's not like I have a paid period of time in which to do it, but I'd hoped for better.  Perhaps you have dutifully brought work along on vacations before?  How did that go for you?  I, apparently, did not have the necessary discipline to attack it, which is strange, since I should enjoy it.  Sigh.  I wish more of my behavior was rational sometimes.

My dog, as I mentioned is ancient.  He's going to be 16 in November.  I was walking him tonight in my fuzzy robe (or "housecoat" as my mom would've called it), smelling the crisp night air and enjoying the note of some kind of smoke I detected there.  I swear I heard a screech owl in the distance.  I don't think it was a warbly police siren.  My dog hobbled along, unsure of the terrain he couldn't see, crashing over low objects, back legs stiffly straight, to keep his patellas from moving and painfully popping back into the track so overworn in his knees that they'd long slipped out of position.  I've had him since mid grad-school.  I got him in 1997, a six month old puppy found with his sister on the side of a highway in the middle of Iowa farmland.

He's seen me through grad school and my anxiety and depression that were finally identified and treated there, graduation, my first full-time non-summer job, marriage, moving back East, my real actual job in my field of study, my first pregnancy, first child, first instance of post-partum depression, interim, second pregnancy, second child, second bout of post-partum depression, and the four years since then including children's growth and my mother's death, until this year, the first that saw the first significant span of real stability of mood in six years.  He went from being my only baby to an afterthought, for which I feel quite guilty, but not enough to have acted differently.

No wise conclusion tonight.  We took our time walking up to the corner and back and I didn't mind waiting for him.  So many times I've been impatient to get back to a task or tend to myself or sleep or something.  Tonight I appreciated him again.  I am going to miss him when he's gone.  It will be the close of an era for me in my life.  I wonder if that's how I'm going to mark my life.  Chldhood.  Childhood dog.  Finish college.  Grad school dog.  His era.  Then the era of the dog that witness my children make it to college or whatever they do.  Then the next?

I don't want to deal with another death.  I'm gonna snuggle him for sure tonight.