Sometimes, when I go to bed, my brain keeps trying to think of things I should take care of. Some nights, I just tell it to shut up, and it does, and I go to sleep, and if it’s important I’ll remember it in the morning.

Tonight is not one of those nights. I have been trying to tell my brain to shut up for quite some time, and it is not obeying my demands. I got up and wrote down things I need to take care of tomorrow, including taking a payment to the dentists’ office (quicker to drop it off than mail it) and exchanging the jeans I wore once before the seams started pulling in a rather unfortunate location (no, I did not get the wrong size; there seems to be a fluke in manufacture).

Not even my clever going-to-sleep trick is working. I would tell you about said clever trick, but that’s beside the point and rather confusing to explain at any rate.

The point is that I have decided that I have a goal for August.

I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you. I have a goal, and I will complete it before the month of August ends. It’s demanding. If it wasn’t, I could tell you more about it. But this way, I retain the element of surprise AND the possibility of evading the acknowledgement of a crushing defeat if I don’t quite reach it. Which won’t happen, but it doesn’t do to be unprepared.

There will be smaller goals associated with this large, demanding, quite-honestly-rather-frightening-and-makes-me-want-to-cower-in-a-hole-rather-than-think-about-it goal, and those I will very likely talk about and, (*gasp!*) even ask for some accountability on, but the end goal? The thing I will announce that I have accomplished by September First in the Year of Our Lord’s Grace 2010?

That will remain a secret.

And now, I bid you all good night.

Why is it that, when I’ve set a timer to remind me to do something (anything from taking dinner out of the oven to checking the laundry), I have this crazy ESP and I check how much time I have left when there’s less than a minute on the timer, but if I haven’t set the timer, there’s no way I ever remember to go back to something?

WHY?

I don’t get it. I’m not saying I’m going to change my system, because obviously it works, but it doesn’t make sense.

Wait a minute, didn’t I just post something yesterday? Craziness!

It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you, dear readers of my blog. All 20 of you. It’s just that lately, most of the things that have been going on have been either stunningly mundane (stunning in the sense of inducing unconsciousness, not dazzling) or really rather disgusting. It’s just how I roll, yo.

Granted, I don’t have kids yet, so there are folks who can out-disgusting me with one hand tied behind their backs, but we do have a dog. A dog who, we are getting more and more confirmation, has a sensitive stomach. It makes me glad that we made it a habit early on not to feed her much people-food, because I can only imagine what that might do. When she was a puppy, Shiloh balked at eating the dog food we tried to give her–she would eat it, eventually, when she got desperately hungry, but it was clearly not what she wanted to do. When we switched her to a formula without corn, wheat, or soy (the most common dog allergens in foods), things improved dramatically. Not only was she more eager to eat, but her… erm… other body functions, shall we say, became healthier and more regular. She still loves an occasional treat that contains wheat or corn (like MilkBones or a few pieces of popcorn), but having drastically reduced her intake seems to have made a big difference.

We never had her tested for allergies, but the results seem to have been working, so I can only be glad.

As I’ve mentioned, the past six months or so have been rather hectic. During that time, I’d estimate that I’ve spent almost a month away from home–almost all of it out-of-state–and Matt has been gone for about three weeks, including youth group retreats and overnights, our vacation, and camp a few weeks ago. This week will bring him up to a month away, as well. That’s aside from our erratic schedules on a day-to-day basis. Normally, most days I’m home doing housewifey or writing things for at least 30 hours of my “work week”, and the other 10 are spent out and about. Recently, that ratio as often been reversed. But not always.

It makes for a very uncertain schedule, and the stress has, from time to time, been wearing on all three of us. Matt and I tend to show that stress in different ways than Shiloh does. We have the liberty of sleeping in from time to time, and shooting things in video games to decompress, and reading for a few hours to get away from reality a bit. Shiloh has fewer options. Yes, she sleeps. But mostly, her body chemistry gets out of whack, specifically in her sensitive GI tract. In early June, that began to manifest itself as intermittent diarrhea.

We went to the vet when it was clear that things weren’t clearing up in the normal course of “the dog ate some random plant and gave herself the runs”, and the meds they gave us seemed to help right away. For about a week, things were looking good. There were no surprises for us in the office. Shiloh was eating eagerly (we’re pretty sure her appetite was off because her tummy felt bad–I don’t like to eat when my stomach hurts, either). And then it returned, getting progressively worse.

Another trip to the vet revealed an overgrowth of a normal canine digestive bacteria–usually stress-related. We got another round of the anti-diarrheal medicine and another package of doggy probiotics, which promote healthy GI bacteria levels. We have accepted the fact that at some point it might be necessary to keep her on the probiotics (at about a quarter the dosage she’s gotten for the problem-solving) long-term. They’re little chewable tablets that she seems to enjoy, so it wouldn’t be much of a hardship.

Of course, since I’ve always been one to want more information rather than less, I have been looking at the various options, and have found the following:

• Probiotics tend to work best when they’re species-specific, because each species has different normal intestinal bacterial growth. So adding a human or feline probiotics supplement, while it may help, will not be AS helpful as a canine formula. Good to know.
• The probiotic our vet has recommended for Shiloh, and which does seem to have been working, is Iams Veterinary Formula Prostora Max. This is available through vets and a few online outlets, but not most pet stores–and, oddly enough, our vet’s price is $20 cheaper per package than the online price, even before shipping.
• I had been underestimating Shiloh’s weight for quite some time, it seems. She weighed in at just under 65lbs on her first vet visit, and two pounds more for the second (at least the intestinal problems have not caused a weight loss). This puts her firmly in the “large breed” category, which means that although her current dog food isn’t BAD for her, a diet that is lower in fat and higher in protein will probably be beneficial, and maybe easier on her stomach as well. We’ll be trying her on a large breed diet as soon as we get to the end of this bag of food.

So that’s where things stand with the dog. She just took her last probiotic tablet this evening with dinner, so hopefully things will continue to improve. I’ve been working on getting my schedule back to something more normal, and I can only hope that Matt’s absence this week isn’t agitating her. She misses him, I can tell, but she hasn’t seemed stressed out.

I’m sure, if I’m wrong, that I’ll be cleaning more bits of carpet in the next few days. Fingers crossed.

See, I’m not sure anyone really wanted to know all that. But here I am, posting about it, because it’s a big part of my time and brain space lately. Glamorous, my life is not. :)

I actually wrote this on June 14th. Well, as long as we assume that “this” means everything in this entry after this paragraph, which I am writing today (July 19). Which means that even though I am posting it now (more than a month later), I am still behind on keeping anyone at all up-to-date on what’s going on. I can say, however, that thus far my predictions about how the summer would continue have been pretty much spot-on. Last month’s news is better than no news!

It’s been an appallingly long time since I posted an entry here. In my defense, I did predict that busy-ness would overtake our life before I went dark a few months ago. (No, really, I did. Except now I can’t find the entry. Drat! I still maintain that I predicted it.) What I didn’t predict was how very busy I would be.

You see, stuff with Matt’s job sort of blew up a little bit, with the end result being more responsibility for him to shoulder in the middle of an already very busy semester. Thus, my job search was aborted before it even really began, and I have spent the last several months being the wifey-est wife you ever saw. I have even been doing the dishes. Sometimes. I have also been cooking and cleaning and chauffeuring and running errands. I did pretty much all the research for buying the car we added to our family, and then took care of all the ensuing complications that having a new-used car presents.

I planned our vacation (we stayed in Pagosa Springs, CO, and explored a big portion of the SW corner of the state) and did a lovely job of it, if I do say so myself. Four or five days after we got back, I flew out to the east coast to surprise my brother for his 30th birthday and had a nice time visiting with family at the North Carolina beach. And I got a tan. Sort of. As much of a tan as I ever get. Seriously, my freckles are closer together. I swear.

June 4th was our fifth wedding anniversary, and at some point we’re planning to go out to a nice dinner to celebrate. We’ve just been too busy so far. We did cook ourselves a nice dinner that night and had a movie date at home.

Otherwise, I’ve continued with the usual church activities, both worship team stuff and preaching stuff. I also went to a women’s conference with some of the ladies from Bible Study last weekend, which was well worth it. I’ll be chewing over some of the teaching for some time, which is a good thing. I’m also preaching this Sunday, which means sermon prep will take up some of my time this week.

Life isn’t going to get less busy any time soon, either: this weekend a good friend is coming to visit for a few days. I’ll be serving as camp nurse (i.e. I get the first aid kit) and cabin mom for one of the senior girls’ cabins at the church’s weeklong camp up in Wyoming for the week that bridges June and July. My cousin is getting married two weeks after that, and I’m looking forward to flying to Atlanta for the wedding. In August, one of Matt’s sets of parents will visit us for several days, then taking off on a driving trip for several weeks before they fly home, and my parents will be visiting a few weeks later, around Labor Day.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what’s happening, but I doubt it will be any less busy. Maybe one day I’ll actually have time to look for a day job, even if I won’t subsequently have a calm enough schedule to keep it. We’ll see.

In between all that chaos and traveling, I’ve hardly done any writing at all. I’m also behind on several projects that I expected to have made progress on by now. It’s frustrating and a bit discouraging, but thus far I haven’t given up. With any luck, I’ll be able to establish a better schedule that will allow me to get all the housewifey things done AND take care of my own projects without killing myself. Hope springs eternal.

I think it’s about time for me to stop babbling for now. I’ll see what I can do about posting more often. Life is still very busy, but not as insane as it has been for the last few months.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up with some funny stories about my time at the DMV. Which is where I’m sitting as I type this. Unfortunately there isn’t a wifi network here, which means I’ll have to remember to post this when I get home, but we’ll hope it doesn’t take long to finish up here.

Once again, hope springs eternal….