All Puppy, All The Time

It’s Puppy Central here at Casa Gresham this weekend.  We drove up to West Memphis to meet The Puppy Express on Friday (Luanne and Faye have been driving around the country the last 3 weeks delivering pups, so their 40 foot RV has been dubbed The Puppy Express).  After dropping Callie’s siblings in Dallas, Portland, Washington State, Kansas, Wisconsin, they headed down south to bring us our baby.   This is Callie with her brother Jack.  Total cutie pies.

In the name of puppy proofing the house, the laptops have been put away over the weekend.  Normally, I’d have expected to feel like I was missing an appendage, but our hands have been full–literally.  Callie is a champion snuggler and snoozer.  I think sleeping is her favorite activity!  It has been absolutely amazing what a good puppy she’s been.  We’ve only had one accident inside (must be some kind of record!) and she’s just been super well behaved.  She slept from midnight to six last night without a peep.  Daisy hasn’t been quite sure what to think–but she’s mostly been good.  I think she’ll get used to her as Callie gets older.  We have been forcing Daisy to stay in the living room and be social instead of slinking off like she did when Angel was a puppy.  It seems to be helping some.  Hubby and I were astonished at this the other day.  How cute is that?  Incidentally, Callie makes a great foot warmer.

I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to fall asleep curled up with a puppy the last couple of days for naps.  I really don’t think I’ve slept well at all since Angel died–I’ve just been so tired since then.  Not that I slept with Angel at night, but she used to curl up with me on the sofa and it’s one of the things I have missed the most.  Callie may possibly be even more snuggly than Angel was, which is saying something.  It’s been bittersweet having her here–she’s an enormous puppy.  12 weeks and 24 pounds.  Angel was only 40 pounds full grown and was also white, so it’s a little trippy to see Callie out of the corner of our eyes.  But we’re happy to have her.  She’s going to be a wonderful addition to the family.  We’ve nicknamed her Little Bear (as her feet are enormous and she’s going to be the size of a small bear when fully grown…and she looks like a polar bear cub).

There’s been no writing and very little reading since we brought her home.  I’ve been slowly working my way through Stephen White’s The Program, which is a little slow but quite good.  I’ve been thinking on WOaP a bit, letting my subplot marinate.  Pot and I were talking last week about how that’s one of the reasons my work tends to sag in the middle.  I generally have a pretty decent overall action/plot arch, but I need a solid supblot of some kind to sort of carry the middle–particularly with this story, as the middle would otherwise be only the relationship and her settling into her new life in her new WITSEC location–which is interesting to me but not so much to others.  I’m still not there yet–not ready to write it, though I could probably start and easily get through the first hundred pages.  But I’m really trying hard to stick to this whole plotting thing and have a good solid idea of where this story is going before I begin.  This is all probably not that interesting to y’all, so I will be preparing some other posts for later in the week.