These are my tiny baby pubpies.

This is Mayday. Her hobbies include endlessly chasing anything that you're willing to throw, biting Odin, moaning irritably when disturbed, and literally trying to drown you in her saliva.

This is Odin. He enjoys being the laziest puppy in the world, except when overcompensating for his lack of testicles by humping Mayday and eating the paper things off muffins.

I have two sad furries. Mayday just got spayed, but poor little Odin got shots, neutered and had his dew claws cut off. The poor little guy doesn't know how to sit anymore. I want to just put them in my pocket and make them feel all better.

So, as I mentioned previously, I am not dead.

I work six days a week, nine hours a day which, to some of you, is child's play, but to lazy, diseased me, can be Hell sometimes. I like my job as a tax preparer 90% of the time (and to the 10% of you who think it's H&R Block's fault you owe money, you can fuck off) and I like the people I work with. This has become the most consuming part of my life, and I often catch myself sharing stories of irate tax-payers or the old lady who passed out in our doorway with people who don't give a damn, anyway.

I had a brief "reprieve" from work last week when I was sick in a way I haven't been since I was a kid. You remember, violently heaving and shitting away all your vital fluids while your mom brought you Pedialyte and bullion? Yeah, that was me, except my mom was absent and Sean was helplessly unaware of my needs. Bless his cotton socks, his was patient with my inert form smelling up the upholstery, though.

The other major change in my life in the past x months was the addition of a new dog to our little family. He's appropriately been renamed Odin, a name initially reserved for my first-born son (plans change, uterine tingles subside). He's from Mayday's litter and was re-adopted from a family who couldn't manage a dog his size any longer. You'd never know the two of them were related, or even the same age, though, as Odin is white with brown patches, twice as big, and already acts like an old man as Mayday does her best to eviscerate him at any given moment. I'll post some photos of him when looking at a computer screen isn't an incredibly painful chore. He's a good dog, but needs a lot of training and hurray for me, I'm doing it on my own.

Sean's been in Florida since last Saturday on some kind of an airplane trip. I don't get it all, it's for work. He hates it and to be fully honest, I revel in that a little every time I have two Tasmanian devils crashing into my legs. My insecurity always rears it's head during these times but Sean's been great about consoling my wounded ego and telling me all the things I need to hear to quit being a horrible shrew.

My family life is weird. Shannon (whose ever-increasing belly is one of the many reasons my want to reproduce has vanished) and I have figured it out: at any given moment, only one of our parents is present. After my parents separated when I was 17, my dad fucked off for about five years. We didn't see him and spoke to him only on special occasions. As two "Daddy's Girls", we were shattered and grew to hate him to compensate. Recently, however, every time my father returns home from his job in the middle of nowhere, he calls and we do something. Alternatively, my mother has essentially vanished, only occasionally coming around to tell us of her latest debauchery. And debauchery it is! When your 20-something daughters are appalled at your behavior, it's time to take a look at your life.

So that's where I've been. And you? What's new in your life (she asks, as if she hasn't been stalking your blogs this entire time)?

Puppy-training is a go. Thank God, her cognitive abilities seem to lean more toward the border collie side, and not the dalmatian side, because it's going swimmingly. She's already learned to cry to get taken outside, and only had two accidents since she came home yesterday (one of which was entirely our fault for ignoring her clear signs, the other a poop which appeared as if from nowhere). Last night was a nightmare though, with whimpering and digging at the bed, but still I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far. I'm a proud puppy mama.

The job hunt isn't going as well. I'm city folk - I don't need a license, because I could always take the bus except, uh oh, Cold Lake hasn't discovered mass transit yet, save for a brief experiment with a handi-bus (that's a good story - evidently the bus cost $3 and there were no bus stops to speak of. It was like a secret club to know where the bus actually stopped.). So now that I'm back here, I'm fuuuucked unless I find something very close to my house, which is on the air force base so employment options are fairly limited to the Canex, the daycare or the gym. None of these are driving me wild with desire. Sean assures me that I can go ahead and devote to puppy-training for a while, so that's pretty choice.

Minus 35 is not a temperature conducive to fun puppy training. The poor thing can't even go for a walk without her little feet freezing off.