Sudden Hiatus, Explained

The past week has been a tumultuous one.  On Monday, I was laid off from my job with little to no hope of returning.  About a quarter of the company was laid off due to the extremely weak global market in our industry combined with pervasive mismanagement across the board.  Still, I valued and relied upon my job to support myself and provide a home for myself & my dogs (all three of us have chronic medical conditions).  It came as a shock that I was eliminated simply because I lacked seniority; I had expanded my job (which was extremely easy and only took a few hours of the day) to tracking all of our parts & raw materials orders for purchasing (which in addition to working with vendors involved working closely with the project manager & project engineers).  Basically they got two positions filled for the price of one.  If they truly intend to salvage and save the company with financial cost being the bottom line (and the reason so many were laid off), they would have been wise to keep such a hard-working and valuable employee.  Ah well... like I said, the company is badly run from stem to stern.

Okay, enough about that.

Wednesday was a deeply saddening day.  I wrote about Rusty, the older German shorthaired pointer that I would be fostering to determine the severity of his health and/or behaviour issues.  Thankfully once his very long nails were clipped he got around much better with only moderate osteo-arthritic stiffness.  However, upon examining his teeth I found that he was much older than the 9 years we were told when we rescued him last May.  I estimated his age to be anywhere from 12 to 16.  His back teeth were worn almost to the gumline and the front were ground down considerably so that he had a difficult time chewing dry food.  His most notable symptom was that he was easily disoriented and when confused would stand there and cry pitifully unless someone was there to talk to him & calm him down.  Even after spending several days with him (during which I was home most of the time), I don't believe he even recognized me; I was merely a reassuring presence when he became frightened and confused.  Because of the severity of his dementia we made the decision to have him humanely euthanized.  While that is always a heartbreaking decision to have to make, his quality of life was so poor that giving him a release from that constant suffering was the most compassionate gift I could give him.  RIP sweet Rusty.

The rest of my week was consumed with Thanksgiving and the weekend was mostly spent cleaning, reorganizing and decorating my home for Christmas (my favourite holiday).

Last night I went for a run with R. for the first time in a week.  I really surprised myself by running 10 minutes with only a 3 minute rest, then running a quick 7 minutes followed by a nice long cool down walk!  While I've given up the C25K program, I plan to still run twice a week (with R. or Gatsby or both) and then do yoga, Zumba, and bike around town the rest of the time.