Oh my god. Are you guys sick of me yet? I'm sick of me. Whine, whine, whine. I feel like I've been sick for months. And now Cal. And now Lucy.

If you follow me on Instagram, you saw that we took our hang-dog hound to the vet on Friday. She'd been limping off and on all week (we all figured it was sympathy pain since Cal had been home sick), but she clearly wasn't getting better, and it seemed best to have her seen rather than not. We figured maybe a pulled muscle (she can play hard), but her diagnosis is a bit more complicated than that. Our vet showed us her x-rays, and it was, frankly, disheartening. She has degenerative bone disease. So where bone should look smooth, like polished wood, hers look like jagged mountain peaks. Both front legs. We didn't see the back.

She's been in tons of pain, apparently, (Our vet gave her a pat on the head, saying, "See? All this time they thought you were faking and you've been stoic.") so our goal right now is to get her as comfortable as possible. She's been pretty mopey all weekend, but maybe? Maybe, moving a little better. Poor little girl. She's missed her Violet desperately, and now this.

So we hunkered down. Out of town three weekends out of the last four was more than plenty for us, I think. We're all in various stages of recovery, so I brought out the big guns and made this soup. (I just picked one at random, and it worked.) It was a huge hit! Definitely moving it into the rotation. Perhaps on a daily basis.

And yet, my mind is active. Isn't that the funniest thing? I feel like my subconscious is filled with tiny bubbles, ideas that keep rising to the surface, like champagne effervescence. How do you know which ones to follow? How do you know which ones to let stream off into the air and when you should take a sip? Time will tell, I suppose.