Time to Write

                I’ve almost finished my second official week as a cashier at Stop & Shop. I got my first paycheck today (though I have to take it back to get a few things sorted out), and I’ve got my schedule for next week (which consists of morning and one afternoon shift). I’ve pretty much got the whole cashier figured out. There are a few things I still need to learn, but I am still new.

                One problem I’ve found with working is that I don’t seem to have time to write. And before you say anything, I did say “I don’t seem” to have the time. Maybe it’ll change when I work during the day rather than at night. But the problem is that I seem to get home when my parents are home, and I feel like I have to spend time with them. Then there’s Grace to take care of, who is usually bouncing off the walls because she’s been stuck in her crate for five or six hours.  And by the time I sit down to write, my watch reads ten at night, and I have to shut off the computer to have any chance of falling asleep by eleven.

                As for the mornings, I could be writing then (are here are some excuses why I’m not). But I don’t get out of bed until eight-thirty or nine in the morning. That, I know, needs to change. Even then I still feel like I have a hard time getting things done in the morning. It’s as if I need those morning hours to get myself amped up and moving.

                I’ve got a bunch more excuses too.

                Grace for one. She’s active and looking for trouble for about an hour after we get up, and then she crashes in her bed, sleeping for the next three or so hours.

                Number two is my laptop. The battery is slowly becoming less and less happy about holding a charge. As a result, I may get two and a half hours out of it before needing to plug it in to charge for somewhere in the neighborhood of four hours.

                I could always write at my desk, where the laptop can charge. But then I’d have to move Grace into her crate, and she just looks so peaceful lying there in her bed. I don’t trust her not to get into trouble if she wakes up and I’m not there.

                See? Excuses. If I had more time, I’m sure I could come up with a dozen more.

                There are always reasons not to write. I’ll always have something I think I should be devoting my time toward.  That’s exactly how I felt when I was at school and why I loved workshop classes that gave me a hall pass (so to speak) to write. And when I didn’t have workshop classes, I consoled myself by saying that I’d have all the time in the world to write once I graduated. So I would work on something else that needed to get done before writing. I would work on a history paper, a thesis, or a literature paper. I would study or read for class. I wouldn’t write.

                Now my excuses are lacking the time amidst the puppy, family, and work. I need to stop letting those excuses keep me from writing. I want to write, I really do. I just need to make a schedule and stick to it.

                I need to pick one or two hours a day, put the dog in her crate in my room, and sit at the computer with the wifi turned off. I need to make myself stare at a blank Word document and force my fingers to move over the keyboard until the screen in front of me is no longer blank. I need to make myself write again because I love it when I do. I love writing and getting lost in the story and characters. I miss it.

                And so the point behind this post is really simple. I’m sure you’ve all figured it out despite my convoluted and repetitive writing. I need to quit making excuses. I need to start writing. 

A New Game

            I foresee Grace not eating again this morning when she bolts past her full food bowl, into the living room, and pounces on her Nylabone toy. She growls and tosses it across the floor. Her muscles quiver in all the excitement as she darts around the room.

            “Grace, enough,” I say.

            I know exactly where this is going: this slight bouncing will lead to an all out energy explosion with Grace running on the couch, down the hall, and into the kitchen. She’ll jump on me and nip if I don’t get the leash to control the situation in time.

            I step toward the end of the six foot leash, and Grace bolts. I get my foot on the end of the leash before she can pull it away from me. But she doesn’t calm down. Grace leaps at me, jumping up and biting my t-shirt. I dodge her teeth as I grab the leash.

            “No.” I yank the leash hard, and I hear the metal of the training collar chink as it slides. “Sit.”

            I pull a handful of times before Grace parks her butt on the carpet. I don’t see any sign of malice in her brown eyes, only excitement. She’s not being bad on purpose. She just has a lot of energy and doesn’t know where to put it.

            Still, I’m annoyed. My puppy may be wound tighter than a spring; however that doesn’t give her the right to jump and nip.

            “Heel,” I order.

            I march into the kitchen with her at my side, and I stop suddenly. Part of me hopes she doesn’t sit, despite her training to the contrary. But Grace sits, and she looks up at me with her big eyes so full of energy. She just wants something to do.

            An idea pops into my head. Grace’s trainer suggested something at one lesson to focus her energy. I’ve never done anything like it before with either Grace or my first dog. What’s a better time to try than now?

            I put Grace in her crate, head downstairs to the garage, and grab five milk crates. I placed them in a straight line in the backyard before remembering that I need her favorite outside toy, a red octopus that squeaks. I find it in the toy bucket and then toss it under one of the crates.

            Anticipation pools in my stomach, making me feel lighter and infusing my muscles with a shot of adrenaline. I can’t wait to get outside. This is going to be fun.

            I head back inside to grab Grace.

             “Let’s go,” I say.

            She scrambles out of the crate, through the kitchen, and to the back door. She almost flies down the stairs to the garage, and I tug on the leash to slow her down.

            “Easy,” I tell her.

            We step on the porch, and Grace spots the milk crates.

            I ease the tension on the leash. “Find toy, Grace. Find toy.”

            She trots over to the milk crates, sniffing the hard black plastic. After pacing the line twice, her nose hones in on the middle crate. She keeps sniffing it, and she doesn’t seem to be interested in the other ones.

            I smile proudly.

            “Good girl, Gracie-Gray,” I say.

            I flip over the crate and toss her the red octopus. I watch her leap onto the toy, her teeth clamping down on the squeaky head. I’m not sure if she realizes that she’s supposed to use her nose to find the toy yet.

             And I don’t think she realizes the implications of this little game. We can train to track a scent during competitions to see which dog is the best tracker. Or we can enter the world of search and rescue dogs, responding to emergencies all over the country and world. We may also just keep this little game of ours in the backyard. It may end up being just a little game we play whenever someone has more energy than the house can handle.

            “Come on, Grace,” I say. “Let’s do this again.”

            I put her in the garage and reset the milk crates for another round. I feel excited when I bring her out a second time. I knew I could do a lot of things with my dog. I never thought I’d actually be doing them. 

Lady Grace of Louisiana

                I believe I owe an explanation as to the name of this blog. Specifically, I’m referring to the reason why I call my dog Lady Grace of Louisiana. It’s not a very long story, so I’ll do my best to keep it as short as a puppy’s attention span.

                The Sterling Animal Shelter has a connection to Virginia and the south, just like I do, and that’s the reason I liked it right away. The shelter accepts dogs transported north from a shelter in Virginia and another in Tennessee and then adopts them out. Due to overpopulation in the south, this prevents hundreds if not thousands of dogs from being euthanized yearly. My personal assessment of the Sterling Shelter is that a majority of their dogs and puppies are transports.

                I asked the shelter volunteer about Grace’s history when I adopted her, and the information I received was that she came from the shelter in Tennessee. She was transported north the week before with a group of puppies ranging in ages from three to six months. The assumption, therefore, was that Grace was born in Tennessee.

                “Why don’t you name her Lady Grace of Tennessee?” Dad joked.

                I laughed him off. “That’s too big a name for a little dog.”

                A few days later I looked at Grace’s rabies certificate before I went to get her a dog license, and I noticed neither the address for the vet clinic nor the shelter which owned Grace at the time was located in Tennessee. Both addresses were in Louisiana. From there, I figured Grace was probably born in Louisiana, rescued there, and then transported to Tennessee and then Massachusetts with the hope that she’d be adopted.

                “How about Duchess Grace of Louisiana?” Dad asked.

                “I like Lady Grace of Louisiana,” I said before turning to the dog. “What do you think, Grace?”

                Grace ignored me as she chewed on her squeaky toy. 

Grace (6.5 months) looking very regal.

From Squeaky to Crazy

                The ribbed, light green ball lying on the floor holds Grace’s attention even though it’s pinned beneath the toe of my sneaker. She never breaks eye contact with it, as if blinking would cause the ball to disappear into a black hole. Her muscles tense until she looks like a statue. Her brindle colored front legs are stretched out in front of her in a play bow stance, her flat, black ears perk forward toward the ball, and her black and brindle tail curls toward her spine.

                I remove my foot from the ball and kick it down the hallway.

                Grace gallops off in pursuit. Her black nails claw into the green carpet. Her back paws leave skid lines as she catches up to the ball when it bounces off the closed door at the end of the hall. Her teeth clamp down on it hard enough to produce a squeak, and she runs back toward the living room.

                She chews on the ball as she runs, and the high-pitched squeak hits my ears in a regular beat. Each squeak seems to be getting Grace more and more excited. She pounces on the ball and then throws it up in the air to pounce on it again. She starts growling at the green toy before bouncing back and forth in front of the toy.

                Suddenly the playful bouncing becomes an energy explosion. Grace bolts down the hall, and then she bolts back toward the living room. She takes a running leap onto the L-shaped couch and scrambles across the faux leather. She pops off the couch to take another run in the hallway before hopping on the couch again. This time Dad manages to grab her mid-stride, wrapping his arms around her stomach and snatching her out of the air.

                “Sit, Grace,” he says.

                She struggles a bit, but Dad forces her to sit. He makes her look at him as he rubs her chin and neck. Then just as quickly as the explosion began, it ends. Grace collapses onto the floor and falls into a deep sleep. She’ll be out for two hours now.

                The dog trainer says this energy explosion is a puppy thing. He explained it as air being let out of a balloon, that last bit of craziness before she’s completely out of energy. He recommended keeping a leash on Grace so she’s easier to control when she does go a little crazy. I’m behind that idea, but I’ve also made a change myself.

                Squeaky toys have been officially banned from inside the house. I no longer get to hear that high-pitched sound from the floor or to see Grace becoming more and more excited about the small green ball on the carpet. Yes, that does mean I have to take her out for a high-intensity game of fetch in the backyard at least once a day. But I would rather do that than have a puppy explosion once a day.  

Adopting a New Puppy

                I had more boy names than girl names picked out when I headed to the Sterling Animal Shelter in search of a puppy. Almost all of the names came from books, which isn’t much of a surprise for a writer, and they tended not to be the kind seen often in veterinary offices. No Rex, Fido, or Daisy for me. Instead, I had Mycroft (boy), Atticus (boy), Talbot (boy), and Sookie (girl).

                So it figures that I’d end up with a girl dog that didn’t have the personality to justify the name Sookie.

                The Sterling Animal Shelter is located on a back road in Sterling, Massachusetts, at the very end of a driveway with trees on either side. Thick green leaves prevent passing motorists from seeing the buildings from the street. Barking from the dogs in the outdoor pens at the kennel can’t be heard beyond the end of the driveway.

                To the right of the parking area sits the administrative building which houses the cats and is where volunteers process adoptions and sell pet necessities. Left of the parking and across from the administrative building is the veterinary office where the onsite medical procedures are done such as wellness exams and spaying and neutering. The final building at the shelter, at the very end of the driveway, is the dog kennel.

                The dog kennel consists of a long, white building with chainlink fence forming pens on the front and back of the building. An overhang covers all of the pens so the dogs can be outside for exercise and fresh air no matter the weather. The building itself isn’t very deep, the pens the widest part of the structure.

                I had two puppies in mind before I even stepped out of the car and onto the driveway in front of the dog kennel. I saw them on the shelter website the week before, and I scanned the pens for their faces. They weren’t in the first pen, but the three dogs in there did catch my eye. Specifically, I noticed the black dog in the group. She had brown markings on her cheeks and charged the fence to be the first to receive attention. The puppy climbed over one of her lighter colored pen-mates before having the other climb on top of her.

                I want to check that one out, too, I thought briefly as I walked along the fence.

                I focused in on a blonde puppy, and my heart skipped when I recognized her from the website. She stood far back in her pen, on the concrete pad next to the kennel building and away from potential adopters. Her ears laid flat against her head. She avoided looking at anyone and refused to come near the fence. I got a chance to meet her inside her indoor kennel, and she ignored me, staring through the chainlink door instead.

                Well, that was one puppy crossed off the list. And I had already convinced myself she would make an excellent Sookie.

                The second puppy I originally had in mind was housed with what I took to be a littermate, a black, white, and brown male. The male struck me more than the black female. His coloring reminded me of my first dog, Max, and I asked the shelter volunteers to see him outside in one of the outdoor pens. The volunteer who brought him out handed me some treats, and those ended up being the only way I could get the dog to come near me. Even then he took the treat only to walk away and eat it.

                By the time I decided he wasn’t for me, another couple had adopted the black female I originally came to see. That crossed the second puppy off my list.

                The kennel at the shelter still housed a number of dogs, even though that number decreased by the minute. A handful of puppies were adopted while I surveyed the dogs, and I began to feel a small fog of disappointment form in my stomach. The whole hour and a half trip up to Sterling would have been in vain if I didn’t come home with a puppy, and I won’t end up getting a puppy for another month because of all the things that’ll be going on in the house in the coming weeks.

                I took another walk through the kennel to check out the puppies one more time. The black and brindle I noticed when I arrived again caught my eye. She’d been with a lighter colored puppy in the indoor kennel earlier, but now she lay all alone on the raised bed. She didn’t seem to mind, though, as she chomped on a squeaky toy shaped like a mallard duck.

                I let myself into her kennel, and the puppy turned her attention to me. She jumped on me, her tail wagging.

                “Off,” I said as I pushed her off.

                She jumped again, and I pushed her off again. We repeated this little dance of ours several more times until she decided to keep all four of her paws on the concrete. When I crouched down to pet her, she licked my hand and wagged her tail. Her eyes made me ask the volunteer if I could see her outside. She looked at me with more love than I thought possible at a first meeting.

                “Sure you can take her out,” the shelter volunteer said as she picked out a leash and choke chain collar. “But I’m not sure how good she is on the leash.”

                In fact she wasn’t good on the leash at all, and I discovered that as soon as I took her out of the kennel building. She leaned against the choke chain, coughing and wheezing as she tried to get at the dogs still in the outdoor pens.

                We rounded the corner of the building to the short side where the other dogs were out of sight. I knelt down and touched the puppy’s chest, effectively getting her to stop choking herself.

                “Take a chill pill,” I told her. “Relax.”

                Her tail never stopped wagging as she leaned her chest against my knee and looked up at me.

                I felt excitement at the prospect of training this puppy. Obviously she needed to learn how to walk on a leash, and she probably didn’t have any obedience training. That meant I would get to train her and mold her into exactly the dog I wanted.

                The final test for this puppy, a test both of the other dogs had failed, was in the outdoor pen. I led her into it, closed the door, and let her off leash. She wandered away for a moment to sniff the gravel and the toy and for a potty break. But then I called her to me, and she came. She followed me around the pen, a few feet behind my heels.

                I felt unsure about her. She passed all my little tests of temperament and training, but she wasn’t the puppy I imagined bringing home. I had my mind so fixed on the blonde female puppy that I couldn’t see a black and brindle puppy as my own. I also couldn’t see having a dog as reality. I’d only had one dog in my life, and I didn’t think I could love another dog as much as I’d loved him.

                Then the adoption process happened. I signed all the forms, listened to the instructions of the shelter volunteer, and loaded up our new puppy supplies into the car. I settled into the back seat of the car and looked into the rear at my new puppy, cowered against the back of my seat.

                “I don’t like Sookie,” Mom said from the driver’s seat. “What are some other names?”

                I kind of agreed with her about the name. Sookie just didn’t seem to stick with the puppy. So I scrolled through a number of dog-naming websites on my smart phone, listing off names like Roxie, Duchess, and then Grace. I rolled the name around on my tongue, glancing over the seat at the puppy curled up against the seat.

                Grace.

                That sounded like a good name for this six month old Labrador/Terrier mix transported up north from a Tennessee rescue organization. That sounded like a good name for my new puppy.  

                “I like Grace,” I said.