• No More White Screen of Death

    This is how I know I am grieving:

    I plunged myself into blog re-design work. 

    And pretty much both yesterday and today, I have consumed myself with little else. 

    And I re-published some previously un-published into drafts about old drama.

    That is also how I know I am still angry.

    This is also how I know that while July 8 was a red-letter day for goal-setting, it was not exactly necessarily a forever-turning-point.

    Regardless.

    I had to write something so the dreaded pet-dying post was not at the top of this page anymore.

    I told someone in fits and starts the saga that I write about sometimes involving said individual I proclaimed may not matter so much on July 8 anymore, and it really kind of sounded a little fantastical as I told the story. 

    And, well….. yeah. I suppose it is.

    My DIY MFA books have mostly all appeared now. I have a pile of them to get through and I’ll confess…..Modern Library Writer’s Workshop is awfully dry. It’s good but it is taking more time. 

    I am also not 100% convinced that dark is the way to go for feminine theme design. 

    And….y’all, I really, really, really can’t get over either exactly how useful Gemini is in WordPress theme customization, and also: block design is a whole thing that I really cannot get used to.

    What happened to the days of going into “editor” and breaking the stylesheet, and thus the whole actual website, just because of one random stray character that can’t be tracked down because in doing so, the whole WordPress installation has to be re-installed because literally, the whole interface is a white screen? 

    I think I have it down, but honestly, it’s only because of AI’s help. Can’t be helped. Supposedly it is more user-friendly but block design is not intuitive at all. 

    I started breaking WordPress themes as early as 2012 and goodness, times have changed. 

    But also: AI has changed. I can upload just a screenshot and Gemini can tell me what to do, and what would look better on my blog. 

    And, 99% of the time, I agree with Gemini. I know, I know. 

    So, for now, the blog is what it is.

    However, this much I can say: the days of purchasing themes is over in this household. There is literally no need, because whatever I want, I can build for myself. 

    And, I do not want the cutesy little 2017-2022 low-key feminine theme style blogs either., with busy headers and sliders and excerpts. I am becoming more minimalist in my real life, and that is translating into my blog design, as well. 

    I do still want feminine in my design. And I’m actually conflicted on going back to Isabella Script for my header. We’ll see if that one sticks. 

    It was also a “wait a minute” moment to move away from Montserrat as the body font. 

    And yes, I am aware of the pitfalls and evils of AI. I realize we need clean water and undeveloped farm and other lands. I know, I know. 

    But what I can say is, I decided Sunday night or Monday morning to start re-designing my blog, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and it is done. I did in about 18 hours what would have once taken me 100 hours or more to do, and back then I still wouldn’t have been 100% happy with it. 

    Just saying. 

  • Things They Don’t Tell You When A Pet Dies

    Life changes when a pet dies. In our case, our dog Trixie died yesterday.

    They don’t tell you life changes, beyond the immediate, obvious loss. But, it does.

    There’s probably twenty ways life is different this morning than it was before yesterday in our household.

    Like, this piece of posterboard lying on the kitchen floor, right now, that I just took a photo of.

    Until this morning, this posterboard was lining the bottom half of the window next to our front door. It was there because Trixie barked at her own reflection in the middle of the night. Abby doesn’t do that, so we don’t need the posterboard anymore.

    Like the fact that I went in yesterday afternoon and cancelled four autoship Chewy subscriptions that we no longer need.

    I knew we’d all be sad for a while. I didn’t know that would translate to neither Jared nor myself sleeping very well last night. I didn’t realize we’d miss church today. I didn’t realize Jared would still be in the bed at 11:30 AM, which is very unlike him.

    I didn’t really anticipate the vacuum left by one less pet. When you have five pets in the house, and then suddenly there’s only four, on paper it doesn’t feel like the air should be that different. Trixie was not a barky dog. But, there’s vacuum. The house feels different.

    And yes, there’s the petty math I did….. There will be, at minimum, $170 a month more in our bank accounts every month without the grooming, without the medications, without the vet visits, without the prescription food.

    But nobody told me that without Trixie around, we’d be scrambling to figure out exactly what Abby needs, because the prescription food was for Trixie, not Abby. We just let both of them eat it, and now we will need slowly transition Abby to a new senior food.

    No one tells you that your absolute first instinct is to say “never again” to a new pet in the house, but that you might go looking at Petfinder.com anyway, only to say “never again” when looking at photos of different pets available for adoption. But you go looking anyway, knowing you just won’t ever be able to do it.

    No one tells you, though maybe they should, that the other pets will mourn. That maybe you do need to return the blanket that accompanied Trixie to the vet for her final visit right back to the spot it was between the chairs on the floor, vomit-covered and all, so all the other pets can explore the scents and figure out what happened.

    No one tells you that Abby will return over half a dozen times, instantly upon going outside every time, to the last spot Trixie peed in the yard yesterday morning.

    No one really even tells you that you probably won’t need the puppy pads anymore— that while Abby will use them, she will still bark when she needs to go out. Trixie was the one who really needed the puppy pads. I picked the used ones up after Porter and Jared left for Trixie to go to the vet and put down new ones, and the new ones are still there, completely pristine because Abby goes every time she goes out, and barks when she does need to go.

    No one tells you that conversations have to be had, and decisions made, about what to do with leftover medication. My inclination would have been to trash it all, even the unopened stuff. Jared told Porter we would at least see if the animal shelter could take any of it first.

    No one tells you that your adult child who was firmly not a cat person, whose beloved childhood pet died yesterday, will suddenly, still saying he is a dog person, cling to any cat that enters his space.

    No one tells you that suddenly your house that was really a house with too many pets is all of a sudden more reasonable. One dog and three cats sounds a lot better than two dogs and three cats. Even if it feels heavy to say so. Even if the adult child who belonged to the recently departed dog said himself that until yesterday our house was overloaded.

    No one tells you that even the cats will sniff around, knowing things are different now.

    No one tells you that the children’s lives will be practically different, too— that we won’t need baby gates in front of Porter or Oliver’s door anymore, because Trixie was the main instigator behind eating the cat poop out of the litter boxes. Turns out, Abby isn’t that interested when there isn’t a leader in that particular activity.

    No one tells you that cooking will be different. There won’t be that constant presence waiting for you to drop something, immediately underfoot.

    Nobody tells you that loading the dishwasher will be different, even though Trixie hasn’t been able to lick the dirty dishes since we moved into this house in November of 2021 like she could at the old house. It never once stopped her from hopefully trying every single time the dishwasher was open for the past four and a half years.

    No one tells you how different the first walk outside will be. Walking one dog out to go potty is way different than walking two. It has been years since I got tripped up in their leashes; Abby and Trixie had their own rhythms and walking patterns. Walking just Abby out was where the tears came.

    It wasn’t until I took Abby out by herself that I remembered exactly how nervous she gets outside. I always see it, but Trixie was there to offset Abby’s angst. Abby is on hyper-alert going outside now.

    And she always, first, goes to sniff the last place Trixie went, even though Abby usually prefers the other side of the walkway for her own business. Till yesterday, anyway.

    And no one tells you, that even with all the ways that life will, admittedly, now be easier, and cheaper, that there is a heaviness that one less soul in this household has left behind now that Trixie’s lightheartness is gone.

  • All Dogs Go To Heaven, This One Especially

    Trixie Price 2012 – 2026

  • Oh, Trixie…

    This little girlie is slowing down.

    Trixie turned 14 at the end of May. She has surpassed in her longevity all of all our wildest expectations; this is the dog who had major surgery for bladder stones in 2019. She has been on some form of prescription food since then.

    Porter was pretty sure she wouldn’t last long after her left for his first year of college, and here we just sent off his proof of rental insurance for his apartment for his third year of college.

    I know Porter wanted to stay in Athens this summer. But I am glad he and this girl have had each other.

    She is his dog. She arrived to our household just when Porter needed her, in 5th grade. He desperately wanted a dog to cuddle and Abby refused to stay in his room at night with him. Trixie entered Porter’s life after his autism diagnosis and his IEP were in place, but before the astoundingly kind, fiercely loyal friend group he found for himself in middle school.

    We were pretty sure we were sending Trixie off to the great rainbow bridge on Monday: she had terrible diarrhea and was breathing super fast. We all said our goodbyes before Jared and Porter swept her off to the vet, just not knowing.

    At 14, with a grade 4 heart murmur, you never know.

    But, she had a fever, and antibiotics, probiotics, a canned food later, no more diarrhea and we presume no fever.

    She isn’t eating much. Jared finally got her to eat some low sodium canned salmon last night, just to see if she’d eat anything. Tonight he managed to get her to eat a little of her prescription canned food with some salmon mixed in, but not much.

    Which brought me to realize: Abby and Trixie are 13 and 14 years old. We have been buying $100 bags of dog food since 2019….. maybe, just maybe, that gave them a higher quality of life. And being used to super low sodium means we can’t inundate their systems with off the shelf Alpo or Pedigree cans now, either. But there is a world in between, and maybe these girls have earned some yumminess beyond their normal small daily blueberry handful. Maybe worrying about getting just the right prescription food is beside the point anymore.

    We love our girls. This part is hard, though. ❤️

  • The 2026 Writer’s Retreat

    I am writing this post on notebook paper, old-school journal style, sitting in the Savannah Convention Center while Jared finishes his GAMEIS Conference. We had to be out of the hotel by 11 AM and the conference doesn’t end until noon.

    I have this gorgeous view for the morning, sitting by a massive wall of windows in a corporate seating style rocking chair I turned toward the window. The weather and the River Street view are both gorgeous.

    It has been such a fun week with Jared in Savannah! We stayed in Room 404 at the River Street Inn and had a stunning street-level view even though it was the fourth floor of the building. I took some photos around the room.

    Housekeeping kept me supplied with very yummy coffee and half and half all week long. I brought my tumbler from home and made double cups every morning, so my coffee stayed warm and lasted for hours.

    We slept in and hung out in the room on Tuesday morning. When we finally got out midday for our walk, we ran into someone Jared knew from Carrollton. We walked up to Reynolds Square where the John Wesley statue is and walked a few blocks over in a little square around the blocks, for a little photo walk for me. Then we went to The Broken Keel at the hotel for lunch.

    After lunch, Jared surprised me by telling me he really only had badge pick up for the conference for Tuesday, so we got in the car and headed south to St. Simons. We managed to find parking right in the Village, right in front of Go Fish Clothing. It was a beautiful afternoon if hot, and I was shocked it was not crowded despite being just after the 4th of July. I had fun with my camera around the Pier.

    It’s always an emotional exercise to go to St. Simons with Jared alone these days, just us. Not sad, just wistful and I turn inward. I associate St. Simons so strongly with my family— I can’t remember many 4th of July’s not spent there growing up. We went for whole weeks; sometimes two. And it wasn’t just my parents and me, it was my mom’s whole side of the family.

    So, sitting on the Pier Tuesday afternoon for that brief time with Jared in silence I felt an intense, indescribable peace; a zen of reaching across time. I particularly thought of my Nannie and GaGa— GaGa has been gone since 2007 and Nannie has been gone since 2015. I do miss them so.

    When we left the Village, we drove the back way down Mallery Street, so familiar to me from my teen years, to Demere Road and stopped for Waffle House. An odd choice maybe, but I’d had chicken already in the day and do not eat seafood and wanted to watch my sodium.

    Then we hit up Walmart in Brunswick for some snacks so I could avoid eating out Wednesday and Thursday for breakfast and lunch.

    Then it was back to the River Street Inn. Jared and I are in the middle of watching the show Severance and we hooked my phone up to the room TV to stream the show.

    Wednesday, I slept in after Jared left for the conference. I got out a little before 11 and found excellent parking right in the Bull Street Library’s parking lot just in time for my noon appointment with Ethan at With Love Tattoo. Ethan touched up the camera tattoo behind my ear.

    When I had the tattoo done in 2020, I didn’t pay close attention to the proof and she put the viewfinder under the shutter button. But Ethan made a brilliant adjustment to make it a proper dial knob rangefinder by adding a tiny box line on the opposite side of the camera from the original shutter. It is so cute!! And we decided it was best to just go over the whole thing after he made the addition. It looks and feels just like a brand new tattoo!

    I went back to the hotel and had my mini-writer’s retreat on Wednesday and Thursday; I brought SARK’s Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper and The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop by Stephen Koch and Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars for reading. I journaled and I blogged and I wrote in Scrivener. I did some of Byron Katie’s The Work. It was glorious.

    Room 404 was the perfect setting for this sort of endeavor. The marketing person for the hotel came by with someone to measure the windows for replacement. She had been with the hotel for 25 years and she said our room was one of her favorite rooms. The noise of East Bay Street set the scene. The whole setting was balm for my soul this week.

    A very kind vendor treated Jared and me to dinner at FraLi Gourmet on Wednesday night and it was beyond yummy. I had a four cheese ziti. Then we went back to the hotel for more Severance.

    Room 404 was quirky— the battery in the door lock was dying so it clicked. It added to the ambiance, as strange as that sounds.

    Thursday, I continued my writer’s retreat but decided to get out midday to Hayley Black Vintage, right next door to the River Street Inn. I found the cutest pink costume necklace from the 1990s that Hayley said she found in California. Her prices were shockingly affordable for a River Street adjacent prime real estate vintage shop and she had the cutest things! I found her on Facebook and she ships! The necklace in the photo with the tattoo above is the necklace in question that I couldn’t leave without.

    Then more writer’s retreat.

    About 3:50 Thursday afternoon I left the room to take the ferry across the river to wait on Jared…. I caught a waiting ferry! We were to go on a dinner river cruise and the boat picked us up at the Wyndham. I found my sweet spot that I have made my convention center home where I sit as a type this into my phone, after sitting here writing this post in my notebook. It really is a stunning view.

    On the boat, I learned to play Black Jack! And I wasn’t terrible at it! There was Chardonnay and some fabulous biscuits and mac and cheese for dinner. The Mac and cheese was really great.

    It came a downpour on the way back across the river. We watched the storm coming our way; the lightning was terrible while we waited for the ferry. The lightning was close, too close, while we got on and off the ferry in the downpour.

    Monday night we had stopped in at River Street Sweets for candy to take back to the boys, and in that downpour in the dark we stopped in again for more candy as I had raided the boys’ stash in the week. My feet had to be washed immediately on getting back to the room as I was wearing Birkenstocks and my feet got soaked in unavoidable dirty River Street puddles on the way back to the hotel. I took the hotel hair dryer to my Birkenstocks this morning; they were still very damp.

    Getting to the Convention Center this morning was a breeze; Jared loaded the cart with our bags and I took them out to wait on the valet while Jared checked us out of the hotel. And the Convention Center uses the same Metropolis parking as is used in downtown Decatur so I didn’t have to do anything to park except update my card info when we arrived this morning.

    And so, the writer’s retreat has been a massive success. A much needed vacation and respite; I go home ready to get back to real life. Our children have done a phenomenal job taking care of themselves, each other, the pets, and the house while we have been gone. We have raised incredibly responsible young adults and it is a new, slightly surreal feeling to find independence apart from children.

    That’s a post for another time.