Big News Sandwiched Between the Small Talk

There has been much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in my life the last couple weeks. And I should probably add coughing to that list.

I came down with whooping cough just over two weeks ago, and have spent much of my life feeling like I was in a dream during the course of it. Why would that happen? My best guess is that the excessive coughing led to an overall shortage of oxygen, and my brain paid the price. I don’t know.

In that state, I found everything annoying and soul harrowing. I spent useless work hours combing Facebook and rolling my eyes. I wrote blog posts that would have cost me all the people in my life had I published them. A look from Richard put me in tears more than once. (Poor guy. I really am the world’s worst sick person.)

However, as of today, I am feeling much more like myself. I’m so relieved to finally be coming out of that cloud. Now, it’s back to work, and back to real life again.

Speaking of Real Life…

We are days away from having a permanent address again. The lucky city that gets to hold us is none other than Los Angeles, California.

I have mixed feelings about this. For one, I was really looking forward to simplifying our life when we left Dallas at the end of September. Well, moving to LA to be closer to “the scene” doesn’t exactly scream Walden Pond. We will be living downtown, near Beverley Hills, so the traffic is absolutely horrendous. We drove less than a mile to go to dinner last Friday, and we took a premature turn in the process, which more than tripled our travel time. I felt trapped.

However, in my heart, I am hoping that once we actually move and get settled in, I will find the city to be a magical place. It will definitely be a change of pace for this country girl. (And I am country, although I didn’t know it until about 6 months ago when I was looking at a map of the United States, which had stars noting all the big – not major – cities in the country. There were ZERO stars in all of South Carolina. Talk about a paradigm shift – I thought I’d grown up in one!)

Richard has already played the hero (in spite of my Alien impersonation) and mapped out all the nearby places so I will have a running start on settling in. I told him that all I need is a grocery store, a thrift store, and a library within walking distance, and I’ll be fine. He padded the results with a few Red Box and restaurant locations, too, so all of my bases should be thoroughly covered.

And the Best Part Is…

One of the major pluses to settling down again is that my dog gets to come home. She has been at my sister’s house for 5 months, and I have missed her sorely. I keep having these dreams where I go to get her and she doesn’t remember me or doesn’t care. In fact, after one such dream, I woke up and told God that if my dog didn’t love me any more, I didn’t want her anyway.

That was the moment I realized the true value of my relationship with her – I just want her to really, really love me. Although I’m glad that she has bonded with my sister and seems to be doing fine, I also secretly want her to whine, molt, and be an insomniac in my absence.

So, after these recurring dreams where she doesn’t want me anymore, I’ve worried about what to expect when she comes home. But I had three different assurances last week that have me very hopeful. (Besides, my sister just had her spayed – what is there to be compete with??).

One was a commercial of a soldier and her dog after she came home from being deployed, and one was a video of a lion hugging its rescuer after being reunited after a long time apart – both of which made me cry in my oxygen-deprived state. The third was a friend that told me that the dog she lost to her ex after a divorce still went hyper-crazy when she saw her again after years of being apart.

With that settled, now I just have to figure out HOW to get her here. I’m in California and she’s in Oklahoma.

Anyway, that’s one piece of a big puzzle at the moment. It will be interesting to see what 2013 has in store for me and my family. I don’t even bother trying to guess anymore. It’s been such a weird, unexpected ride these last several years. A few months ago, I started a sentence with, “When my life settles down, I’m going to....” And then I abruptly stopped as it hit me: I’d better stop expecting that to happen, and start doing everything now.