Time For My Monthly Apology!

Well, here we are in May and it has been a whole month since my last post on this blog. You know. The one where I apologized for not posting for a whole month and promising not to do that again. Y’all know about me and promises by now, right?

 

 

So, news! Welp, on the book front, no news is usually good news. I’m still plugging away at Book Four of my Five Nights at Freddy’s Fanfiction. It really shouldn’t be taking me this long, but I have made so many continuity errors in the first three that I really desperately wanted to be able to finish this book and get to go over it a few times before beginning to post chapters, but…well, I’ve decided that really isn’t very fair to all the people who were told WAY BACK IN DECEMBER that chapters would be resuming soon…and then were told the chapters would start after I finished Tooth and Claw, which happened in MARCH…and then were told last month that new chapters would be any day now. I mean, technically, future days ARE ‘any’ day, but that’s still not cool. So my new assistant editor and I made an executive decision that the first chapter will premier on the first Saturday of June, ready or not. For readers, this is hopefully good news. For me, of course, it’s a freaking panic attack, but whatever. What doesn’t kill me makes me a better writer, or something like that.

 

Oh, and meet my new assistant editor.

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This doubles as a photo of me, for all of you who are curious as to what I look like.

 

We embarked on The Great Dog Quest of 2018 shortly after the new year, signing up on several adoption websites, contacting rescue organizations and scouring every shelter within a hundred miles of the Smomestead, and can I just drag out the old soap box for a second here to ask when in the HELL it became common practice for shelters to demand a home visit before adopting a dog out? Seriously? The last time I adopted a dog was more than ten years ago, in another state, and I thought it was bad enough that they wanted the entire frigging household, including any other dogs and/or cats to come out to the shelter and ‘meet’ the prospective pupper before they would condescend to allow us to take it home, and I mean, yeah, sure, I sort of get that they might want to make sure everyone’s on board to minimize the chances of bringing the dog back because ‘things didn’t work out’, but come ON with that nonsense! Leaving aside the whole issue of co-ordinating all the humans to make time for that, my cat thinks it’s traumatic enough to be carried from one room to another; you want me to put it in the car and then bring it into Barking Smelly Hell and have some strange animal zoom in out of nowhere (remember, he’s blind) to shove its nose in his face, all as a test of how WELL he’s going to react? Do you even cat, bro?

But as bad as that is, do you not think it’s just the slightest bit invasive to have a stranger come out to your damn HOUSE, clipboard in hand, to make sure you’re not running an underground dog-fighting ring in the basement? I mean, I’m assuming that’s the reason, although if I WAS running a dog-fighting ring out of my basement, I’d be smart enough to either have someone else do the adopting or have a ring-free house for the inspection. This literally does nothing to prevent animal abuse on that level, all it does is put people off shelters, especially when you add in the fact that most shelters in my area are charging between 150-300 bucks for the adoption fee. You get to inconvenience me OR overcharge me; you don’t get both.

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Okay, rant over, but seriously, support your local shelters, like the one that saved this girl’s life so that we could find each other.

Huge shout-out and never-ending gratitude to my friend, K., who fought an epic battle with ninjas and dinosaurs and some very disappointed regular people who also fell in love with the sad-eyed girl in the above picture when it was posted on the shelter’s website. She had to spend a few days in quarantine before she was available to adopt, and I was determined to take her home the very minute I possibly could. The shelter’s doors opened at 10, so on the day she was released for adoption, my father and I hopped in the car at 5 in the freaking a.m….

Did I mention the shelter was three hundred miles away? Yeah. I really loved her sad, sweet face.

So anyway, we set out before dawn on the last leg of The Great Dog Quest of 2018, and promptly hit every stretch of road construction between here and there (as well as missing one exit entirely due to a heated debate on the subject of Patronuses, because my dad and I are both huge nerds). When it became apparent that we were not, in fact, going to get there when the doors opened, I had a small crisis. On the one hand, what were the odds that a crowd of people were sitting on the steps outside the shelter waiting to adopt that most particular doggo? Slim. Very slim. On the other hand, everything else was going wrong, so what were the odds of one more thing? High. Very high.

Fortunately, the aforementioned K. lived literally minutes away from the shelter (it was she who, knowing of The Quest, sent me the dog’s mugshot in the first place and even went on her own time to meet the doggo and see if she was really as sweet as her picture indicated. Spoiler: She was), so I called her and begged her to go down and, if there was even one other person with designs on my dog, to assassinate them stealthily and hold the door until I got there.

Off went K. to the shelter, but she soon reported back that there were just too many people there to assassinate and not even places to hide the bodies anyway. There were so many people, in fact, ALL OF THEM WITH DESIGNS ON MY DOG, that the shelter people organized a grudge-match to determine who got to adopt her. There was a maze and seven sacred trials and a sphinx and everything…okay, one of those things is a lie, but the point of the story is that K. went to muthafudging BAT for me and she marched out of that shelter with a piece of paper that said, IOU 1 (one) Doggo, a gud gurl, to be redeemed the following day, and the reason she had a piece of paper instead of the gud gurl in question is because the shelter people forgot to spay her during the week she was being quarantined.

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Worth it, but oh my God, shelter-people, get it together.

 

So, immediately after arriving in the town after the battle was over and the blood mopped up, my dad and I fueled up at the skeeziest gas station I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a few) and then turned around and drove five hours back home, dog-less. K. collected my dog the next day and, as we had plans to meet up the next week anyway, went on to foster her for me until she could deliver the dog to her forever home. So really, this story is less about how I acquired my dog and more about how my friend K. is a goddamn hero. I’m buying that woman a cape.

The dog’s shelter name was, as most shelter names are, purely arbitrary. Animals are more likely to be adopted if they have names. Her papers said she was a stray, so as far as we know, she was named straight out of a dictionary or maybe named after the street where they picked her up. We had a few discussions and tried a few things out, but the name that stuck was Dobby, because she’s very small and has big ears and sad eyes, and is a little pathetic, but very fierce.

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How fierce? She killed and ate the rest of this dinosaur. Yes, we have frequent dinosaur attacks here at the Smomestead. You seriously even have to ask?

So everybody, send out some positive energy to help welcome Dobby to the Smith Family! And all bitching aside, please support your local shelters. Donations, volunteers and foster families are always in desperate need.