Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day

I don’t know about you, but when I try some new life hack, I like to see results in under 24 hours or I lose all motivation. Let’s face it – a gin and tonic works in 15 minutes, chocolate is immediately effective and cheese is the gift that keeps on giving.

Cleaning up our habits is more of a slog and waiting for results can make the whole process a little touch and go.

Those of you who want to know how things are going are going to have to wait a few days for me to integrate and summarize any initial progress because not only has the ship not sailed, it has barely even left the harbor.

Give me a minute, I’m working on it.

In the meantime let me tell you about Darby, my new puppy.

Darby likes to go on hikes and she runs like the wind. It looks more like hopping – and here’s a video so you can see for yourself.

I have to keep her on a lead because if this monkey got bit by a rattlesnake she’d be toast. A coyote could snatch her up in a New York minute, and I’ve seen hawks circling, mistaking her for a little bunny. She weighs around six pounds and they might just carry her off.

Darby likes to sniff just like any other dog but there’s something a little sad – she can’t pee on anything. She doesn’t have the ability to express urine or stool voluntarily. It’s part of her birth defect.

I give her teeny amounts of miralax to soften her poops because if I don’t she screams in pain when she goes. This means she leaks poop a little bit. If she weren’t the cutest thing you’ve ever seen this would be intolerable, and if she were big she’d be in diapers, but as-is we just clean up after her and a few times a day I squeeze her over the sink or the potty and she empties her bladder and some stool comes out like one of those Play-doh Fun Factories or soft serve ice cream.

When you have a special needs animal you do what you need to do and that’s that.

Well…on today’s walk she was very interested in the animal smells on a certain tree. I am such a ridiculous empath that I decided that it was just super sad that she couldn’t mark her surroundings like all the other animals. So guess what I did??

I bet some of you can guess.

I held her up and squeezed her on the tree so that she could drop some urine and mark the tree too! Most exciting is that we got it pretty high up the tree so other dogs will think she’s bigger than she really is.

Isn’t that the best?

Here are some pics…….

I can’t wait to take her back tomorrow so she can figure out that she marked the tree. I hope it doesn’t go to her head.

I hope you enjoyed the Darby story and while I’m not going into Maria 6.0 just yet, I will tell you that it’s 8:40pm and I am NOT in bed. I am writing this on the couch, upright…..which is a big deal given the fact that I almost had to crawl up my front steps on my hands and knees this evening just to make it inside the house.

I drove home soooooo tired that after I fed everyone, all I wanted was to throw myself down onto my bed.

New habits take time so here I am toughing it out on the couch.

I watched the season finale of Only Murders In the Building and resisted the urge to stream The Voice. And now I’m going to read.

Signe, if you’ve made it this far, I didn’t manage to not look at my phone last night and it cost me an hour of sleep and my 7a.m. wake up fell to pieces (insert swear word). Tonight, I’m going to try harder. I’m still a little pissy because the no scrolling at bedtime rule feels completely oppressive but a goal’s a goal so I’m going to recommit. It doesn’t help that I have to keep my phone by my head because I am always on call but whining about how hard it is is unattractive so I’ll stop with the excuses.

My iphone watch just told me to stand up so I raised my hand over my head and jiggled it a little to simulate a change in elevation. I normally wouldn’t cheat but my watch and I are having an argument. First of all, a big thank you to my son-in-law for gifting me this watch for my birthday. It’s so fun and I would never have bought it for myself.

But honestly, who does this watch think it is? I ran down the battery so yesterday I wasn’t able to wear it for very long and today I got an earful. My watch noted that I’d been “taking it easy” (um, no I started running yesterday). It said in condescending type that I needed to close at least one circle today. Yeah well, sez who.

My goal actually is to be the person my watch wants me to be so I don’t want to bag too hard on this tiny little wrist coach but when it tells me to breathe I can’t help but wonder what the eff it thinks I’ve been doing. Sarah what do you make of the breathe command?

I’m going to obey my watch and stand up……..and walk straight upstairs and get into bed. I’ve had enough of this day and after twenty minutes of reading I’m going to see if there is any way I can go to sleep and hit my 7a.m. wake-up goal for the week.

Take that you stinkin’ watch.