frea_o | Nano Day 17

Today I saw my parents off to London. They’re going to Brussels first (Dad has a conference he attends there and Mom’s come along a couple of times because she adores Europe), but they’ll be hitting up London later on, which means their four children are spread out for Thanksgiving. Mom has been beside herself with excitement. London is probably number one on her list of places to visit, so it is incredibly neat to get to see her live her dream.

In sadder news, Dad pulled me aside before they left and said, “If Joey stops eating, I want you to take him to the vet. If he’s in pain, you’re going to need to tell the vet to put him down.”

Being an adult and responsible for this kind of thing sucks.

So a little back-story: Joey was left on our porch when I was a sophomore in high school. He’s a German Shepherd/Chow Chow, which is the largest dog we’ve ever had/will ever have. When they left him on the doorstep, they left us his kennel, his toys, a list of his shots, a note telling us his name (which was Jawls, that got changed to Jolly and then to Joey, which I’m grateful for because having dogs named Jolly and Moxie would be waaaaay too cutesy), and that he was housebroken. Mom took a look at him and said, “Oh, he can be [my brother]’s dog!”

My brother likes dogs, but he’s not really a dog person. And right after we got Joey, I started going running to get in shape for ROTC, so I’d take Joey with me. Now Joey sees me and lights up because “YOU’RE FINALLY HERE TIME TO WALK.” He’s such a funny dog, too. He’s so vocal and he gets so excited about walks, so much that we couldn’t use the word walk even in a sentence without him freaking out. Or we used to, he’s mostly deaf now.

So I really, really do not want to see him go, even though he’s old and you can tell he’s in pain. When my dad pulled me aside about it earlier today, I couldn’t look him in the eye. Dad knew I was crying, but I have this thing where I don’t want to look at others when I tear up. I know the dog had a great life. He was the second of our rescues, but he was the first one that found us rather than the other way around.

Anyway, back to happier subjects than, you know, my dog possibly dying while my parents are out of the country. Today was St. Louis’s “Evening of Scribing Recklessly,” which is the local version of the “Night of Writing Dangerously” event that Nanowrimo puts on. I hopped a ride with a friend of mine, so I was there for the whole event. Seven hours. I sat next to somebody who works in a morgue, which was fantastic because at one point, I was like, “So if I have three corpses in a jungle climate for a month, what’s left to horrify my main characters?”

And then we had to do a bunch of metric conversions that involved bone density and bones falling off of bodies. It was awesome.

Given the nature of this story, though, it’ll be like the one realistic bit of the whole story. Maybe.

Oh, right, sorry, Chuck fans. I’ve taken a look at my schedule and I’ve decided to push off That Which is Greater until I finish my current WIP. The reason being that I’m booked up on another writing project in December and this is a Secret Santa work due then.

- Frea

Word Count: 29,873 words
Current Project: Secret Santa Chapter 5
Project on Deck: Secret Santa Chapter 6