The Garnet and Yvonne Blog Challenge Day 1: NEW!

My friend and fellow writer Yvonne have embarked on a 31 day blogging challenge.  Each day, a new topic.  Today's topic is "new."

"New" is not the word I would use to describe the beginning of any of the past few years.  They felt more like a continuation of the same pattern than anything resembling a glimpse of horizon or the crack of a new door.

This year is different.  It didn't dramatically click into a higher gear at midnight on the 31st, of course.  Most changes brew and steep for so long that we don't notice them until they've arrived and smack us in the face.  Of course some changes just up and smack you in the face, but that's a topic for another day.

I began 2013 with two dogs.  I spent nearly all of 2013 with three dogs.  I began 2014, again, with two dogs.  Through the third dog, Foxtrot, I built new friendships with women I may not have otherwise gotten to know.

Fox brought a lot of newness into my life from the day I met him at the airport in Las Cruces, NM.  He was also covered in diarrhea, but I digress...

Fox wasn't an "easy" dog.  He was like an adult human who was raised by wolves.  Or a adult dog  who was raised by alligators and needed to be sent back to puppy school.

At first we didn't always understand each other and became easily frustrated by one another's incomprehensible behaviour.  I've said to many people that Fox's "saving grace" was his exceptionally good temperament even when his manners bordered on barbaric.

The relationship that we shared was a very special one and for the first time in my life a dog taught me more about people than he did about dogs.

You don't have to understand someone or why they do what they do to love them.

Judging a dog harshly for doing something that doesn't make sense to you is pointless.  So is judging a person on the same grounds.

Most of the time when someone does something that bothers you or doesn't do something that you wish/think they should... it's not about you.

Sometimes I'm a hermit.  It's my way of limiting the stress in my life so that I can be healthier and as a result happier.  It isn't a personal slight.

Sometimes Fox would do something like dig a hole into the yard next door to chase a stray cat at 3am and then get too scared to come back though the hole he'd just dug and pace around whining pathetically.  At 3am.  Even though I had to climb onto my shed, over the fence, drag something next to the fence on the other side so I climb onto it and boost his lead butt back into our yard, and then climb back over the fence myself.  At 3am.

I was extremely irritated, beyond tired, and the entire situation was so frustrating I wanted to cry.

But you know what?  It wasn't about me.

Foxtrot stole my Kindle.

Check out Yvonne's Day One - "New" post here!

Hooray!  Dani, my sister in awesome rapid biopolar illness had joined the challenge!
Read her Day One - "New/Nude?" post here!