Achilles (The Dog)

My sleeping puppy, Achilles. Don't let the picture fool you;
she's huge. She still lets me win when we wrestle, though.

I spent this morning being relatively productive. I got up a little later than I would have hoped—I had to cut my yoga workout—but I managed to sort lots of laundry, play with Achilles (our ginormous Greater Swiss Mountain puppy, now fully grown and weighing 112lbs), and catch up on the blogs I follow. Achilles is currently staring down some squirrels in the backyard who are ever-so-threateningly stealing the birdseed from the supposedly squirrel-proof birdfeeders. Sorry, finches. No luck today. At least the squirrels leave the suet alone for the crows and woodpeckers. I think they know better than to mess with them.

Achilles is absolutely hilarious. First off, she makes the funniest noises. She grunts and woofles and snorts much like a pig, and sometimes I swear she almost talks. Of course, she also barks a deep, rather intimidating bark (she does weigh 112lbs, after all), but she's scared of strangers and other puppies half her size. Whereas most dogs, you know, stand in between the "intruder" and the rest of their human pack, Achilles will hide behind our legs whenever someone new comes over.

Aaaaaaaaand I love that dog. She just came over and shoved her nose at my face so I'd give her a kiss. She's so darn cute! Between Achilles and my youngest (autistic) brother, who daily asks me if I love him and will I take him to Sonic for lunch so he can have an Ocean Water, I think my heart melts at least once every hour. I'm such a heartless *ahem* to everyone else, but my youngest brother and my dog know exactly how to get whatever they want out of me. I think they're the only ones in the world who get to see my sweet side, these days.

We spent Memorial Day at the lake with some friends. It was a lot of fun, as always, and I kept my tattoo covered whenever I was in the sun so the colors wouldn't fade. I also couldn’t go swimming, so the Virginia humidity and 93° heat was nearly unbearable. Of course, I'll take sweating in the sun any day over the crappy weather in New York. Just after a week down here, I'm already much darker than I have been in a long time. I hated how pale I got living in the Northeast. For the record, I do use sunscreen…I just happen to be a quarter Slovak and 1/32 Native American (or some measure to that effect); thus, I tan pretty well. I walk past a window in summer and get a shade darker. It's fabulous.

Well, no more time to blog until (possibly) this evening or tomorrow. I have a warrior meditation I did the other night that I would like to blog about, but I'm going to follow it up with a tarot reading first. In the meantime, I need to buy some more running clothes and test-drive some Toyota Camries. The car I've had since I was sixteen is fading rather quickly. The last trip down from New York with my entire life piled in the backseat and the trunk seemed to have taken quite a toll. Ergo, time for a new (well, new for me) car.

Until later, then, blessed be :)