This is my family.

Family portrait. (A rag tag bunch.)

Originally uploaded by This Year’s Love.

This is a photo I took in March and it was such a lucky shot. I love it to pieces, even the fish are included in the background!
Judah is the larger dog, Israel is the APBT, Omaha is obviously the cat. Aren’t they beautiful?
The fish are all goldfish–a large (chubby) chocolate Oranda named Milk Mud, a calico fantail named Bealltainn, a red ranchu called Reiko and a feisty calico Oranda dubbed Stabler after Detective Elliot Stabler on Law & Order: SVU.

Lately I’ve realized that I don’t daydream anymore. Isn’t that odd? I used to always get lost in my thoughts and fantasies. That was before I got a dog. And that was all I obsessed about until I got her. I wanted a dog for SO long and only got one when I was already eighteen. It wasn’t easy at first but now it’s so natural I couldn’t even begin to imagine life without her. I would simply die.
Before I got a dog I read romance novels non-stop. I would take out twenty books at a time from the library, my messenger bag overflowing, barely able to close. I would read them all within a week. I had a lot of spare time.
I haven’t read a book in years. I used to write all the time. I used to be able to at least start a story. Now I can’t think of a darn thing to say. I never date, I’ve never been hit on, I’ve never been kissed. Eight years ago when I was twelve/thirteen that really bothered me, or at least that’s what the pages in an old diary say. I can’t picture myself ever thinking or saying those things.
I never bothered trying to get a boyfriend or even a date and it’s not like anyone was beating down my door to get at me! I don’t find myself attractive at all so I don’t expect anyone else to, either. And I’m fine with that!
I prefer my singleness, my spinster status, if you will. It’s comfortable. I have my dogs, my cat, and my fish. I love them all. I would rather spend my day with the dogs than with anyone else on earth…well, except Gerard Butler or Michael Phelps fresh from the swimming pool. But let’s be realistic!
I recently read in a magazine (specifically Redbook) that people who were told to fantasize about spending the rest of their life with someone, to daydream about who it would be and what would happen made them more creative. I used to think about it ALL THE TIME. So I decided to try that technique to attempt to be more creative and start writing something.
Within ten or fifteen seconds of letting my mind wander I start thinking about a guy who hunts. He would hunt deer and other wild game so I could feed my dogs raw meat. I would be able to get more dogs. I pictured butchering the various animals, bagging them up into different meals and then pictured my pack of dogs devouring it all happily. And then ten minutes have gone by playing out this daydream and I’ve pretty much completely forgotten the guy and it’s all about dogs.
Is that healthy? I don’t know. At least I admit what I actually think about.