It's a bad habit: I have an assignment and I'm doing all I can to avoid its completion. Call it ADD, mental block, or whatever...I hate that I do this.
Today's distraction: the IQ test here. It's quick. Plus, it told me I'm way smarter than average. (I guessed on three of the questions out of sheer laziness, so...maybe not...)
Work avoidance + ego boost. All in all, a worthy timesuck.
So Rosie the Fat Beagle has a lot of nicknames. The neighbors call her The Slut because she hooks up with their dog whenever she gets loose. She is also known as The Illegal Beagle, The Bugle (have you ever heard a beagle bark?), Dope on a Rope, Fat Dog and Bagel. And while I've long suspected that she's not exactly an Einstein among canines, I learned recently that she is just plain...challenged.
See, we put the solar cover on the pool for the first time a couple weeks ago. She of the limited cerebral cells -- who until this point had been endlessly fascinated with the other beagle staring back up at her every time she looked into the pool -- noticed the change and gradually came to believe that the pool had gelled over into a great blue beagle parking lot. So she stepped onto it. The cover began to swallow her up just as I jumped in, clothes and all, to save my beloved but boob-ish pooch.
As the shaking and exhausted mass of doggie pudge emerged from the pool, the look that our only slightly less-than-human labrador retriever gave her said it all:
Dumbass.
Disclaimer: I am no fan of Joy Behar (of ABC's The View). But I have a writing deadline today, I usually have TV on for background noise, and morning news has devolved into late-morning drivel. This is how the ladies interruptus came to be on my boob tube.
A minute ago, I looked up long enough to hear Behar say:
"Know what I say? If you've got it, flaunt it. Or trip over it."
Ooh, a new guest: Paris Hilton. Unless the show has a segment telling me what she does, exactly, I'm tripping over to the TV to turn it off now. But I'm laughing.
Finally, a first post. Seems I spend so much time writing for money that I neglect to do it for pleasure...
Best to begin with a beginning, then. This morning, my seven-year-old presented me with a big good-morning, one-tooth-missing grin. The tooth finally realized it was time to make way for bigger things and got out of the way. A cause for celebration, which in a seven-year-old's world, is something like a dollar in an old glasses case.
Ahh, that tooth -- impossibly white and innocent and glistening with symbolism. It bulged close to the gum's surface when he was just five months old and burst through without fanfare at six. I cried that day because my baby was growing up.
And now my little boy is growing up. Endings and beginnings, sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another, distressing and exhilarating all at once.
Today I feel much like an old tooth.
