While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures

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When Cubbie was a younger pug, I took him everywhere I went. He was my constant companion, a rotund, game-for-anything, kindhearted creature with an infectious grunt.

I took him to bars. I took him to restaurants. I took him to stores that were cool with dogs. I took him to ice cream shops that were cool with pugs. Each week for four years, I took him to the bank to make a deposit and get a bone. At the mere mention of the word bank, he’d pounce off the couch, run for the door and hop into the passenger seat of my car. It was our Monday morning ritual.

I took him to our wedding. I dressed him in a tuxedo and a top hat. I tied a little white pillow to his back and asked him to carry our rings. He obliged, as he obliges to most things most of the time.

I took him to the top of a mountain in Colorado and to the bottom of a valley in Idaho. I took him to Graceland. I took him to Chicago. I took him to the Oregon Coast and let him run without a leash into the Pacific Ocean, the memory of which is so fresh in my mind I can still smell the salt on his fur as I smuggled him past the front desk in a no-dogs-allowed hotel.

I can still see the wild look in his eyes when, after spending three weeks on the road, sleeping in a tent with me, I let him crash on a pillow in a queen-sized bed. King Cub.

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Storytelling live tonight in Ybor

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Everyone and everything is celebrating birthdays this month.

On April 10, I turned 31, as did my beloved pen pal in Toronto with whom I’ve exchanged snail mail for nine years. (Wait. Nine years? Is that right, LZ?)

Two days prior, my Irish twin, Heelya turned the big 3-0.

On April 24, this little blog turns FIVE. FIVE. Yeee haw, Lancelots! I stuck it out for five years, during which time I received more fan mail than hate mail. Success! Thank you for your loyalty, kindness and honesty. I plan to commemorate the milestone by turning the Best of Lance into a book. I’m putting this goal out there so you hold me to it. You guys are good at keeping me on track.

I’m an Aries to a fault: fiery, quick tempered, spontaneous and hyper. I start things and fail to see them through.

My blog however, is a Taurus. And like a true Taurus, it’s stubborn, sensible, down to earth and determined, which is perhaps why it’s still around.

For five years I’ve used this space to air confessions, fears, accomplishments, and of course stories.

Which brings me to tonight.

Tonight I’m stepping up to the mic (again) for Creative Loafing’s Story Time event in Tampa. The theme is birthdays in honor of the newspaper’s 25th anniversary. (You noticing a pattern here?)

I’ll be reading something new, that is IF I can sit still long enough this afternoon to write it. I’ve been swamped with work these past two weeks, so I can’t totally blame procrastination, though without pressure I fail to work to the best of my ability. Typical Aries. Lance would have written a story two months ago and immediately laminated a copy at Kinkos in preparation for the event. I’m not even sure if I have printer ink.

Anyway. Special thanks to Mothership, who’s in town this week and currently at the library with Henry. They’re at a different kind of story time; the kind that involves dancing to Raffi with bean bags.

Oh, and about the picture. That’s me up there, running amok in Colorado on a hot summer day. I was 25 and on the brink of making major life changes. I’m posting it because it kind of, sort of, ties into the theme of the story I haven’t written yet that I plan to read tonight. Hell, I’m such a fickle Aries, it might not tie in at all. ♥

CL Story Time: Birthday Edition starts at 8 p.m. at the CL Space, 1911 N. 13th St. #W-200, Ybor City.

Hope to see you tonight!

Pregnancy Confession No. 4

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[I've always loved dogs more than babies.]

I'm an unabashed dog lover.

When I see one, my heart leaps. I get younger. My mind quiets.
My instinct is to nuzzle the dog. To let the dog nuzzle me.
I know not all dogs are people-lovers, as all people are not dog-lovers.
But it doesn't matter. I turn to mush. Dog putty.

I want to curl up in a ball on the floor,
surrounded by fur and paws and dog saliva
and not communicate with people.
I know this sounds disgusting to non-dog lovers, but it's how I feel.

Give me a yellow tennis ball and a chocolate lab
and I'll be out of your hair for hours.

My affection for dogs is pure and addictive.
I'm like a boy at a monster movie,
cupping a supersize Coke, guzzling and burping.

No need to come up for air.
In the presence of dogs, I boil down to my purest self.

Most four-legged animals make me feel this way.

I wish I could say the same for babies.

Babies and I operate on a different level.

My insides don't turn to apple sauce and cherry cobbler
in the company of babies.

It's an honest admission from a pregnant woman.

I'd rather watch a two-hour Discovery Channel documentary
on the mating habits of otters
than tune into some TLC reality show
about 25 screaming kids and their tummy-tucked mother.

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The joys of being a post office groupie

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I’m sitting on a futon in my living room.The pug is curled up beside me, snoring. He woke up about five minutes ago and burrowed out from under the covers of the bed, where Joe is currently (still) sleeping (in).

By June we’ll have a baby in this house, which means I now regard my husband’s sleeping habits with bitter sweetness.

The pug and I are on a futon because I sold our brown couch Thursday for $80 on Craigslist. (Yes, the brown couch my men are asleep on in the photo to your left.)

Over the course of nine months, I managed to save $1,092 in a mason jar to purchase a plush new sofa with an enormous seat and an equally enormous ottoman.

I told Joe it was important that I have a soft place to land as I get fatter and more pregnant. So, Merry Christmas to me.

But that’s not the point of this post.

As evidenced by the title, I’m here to espouse the pleasures of penpalship.

That’s right. PEN PALS.

Do you have one?

Chances are you had one many moons ago. It used to be that teachers encouraged the old-fashioned art of letter writing by hooking students up with pen pals in cities far from yours. Of course this was prior to email, which I’m also a fan of but for reasons completely separate from why I adore ACTUAL HANDWRITTEN MAIL.

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The tent diaries 6

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“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday’s post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota.

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note.

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose.
—

The tent diaries 4

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Look at the pug’s face! Just look at how awe-struck he is standing at the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs in mid-June, his paws sinking into snow for the first time in his pug life.

After spending two weeks in the Midwest lavishing in the company of friends, good food and pillow-top mattresses, the pug and I started craving solitude again. Part four of this cross-country gallivant marked our return to brazen adventurousness.

Granted, I did stay with my cousin Erik and his wife Rebecca in Littleton, Colo. long enough to develop their cinnamon toast habit and to take a trip to Fairplay, a tiny town in a central Colorado founded during the Colorado Gold Rush and the setting for Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s scrappy/brilliant Comedy Central cartoon, South Park.
—

My pug gets better mileage than your SUV.

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An ode to my pug’s paws:

I haven’t met a dog fanatic who hasn’t expressed joy over their pet’s exquisite paws.
My pug’s paws are works of art. The black pads, all circular and button-like, get so rough I want to exfoliate my face with them. They feel like the old upholstery buttons on my parent’s scratchy couch. 
Whenever we go for long walks, I’m grateful for the pug’s durable pads. They can endure sticks and stones and random sharp sidewalk debris. Honestly, the pug’s paws are better equipped for outdoor traversing than the shitty flip-flops I wear every day.
Sometimes he will get a thorn stuck between his pads, and rather than howl and whimper with his paw in the air, he will soldier on – 27 pounds of pug marching onward into the neighborhood with a limp so slight passing dogs barely notice he’s lost rhythm. 
The paws themselves smell like corn chips. Many dog’s paws smell this way. I know it’s disgusting and you may think me vile for it, but I love to sniff the pug’s paws. Like a kid with a runny nose seeking out his favorite germ-drenched blanket, the pug’s paws fill me with a fuzzy warmth that coats my heart in cashmere and aids in the flow of serotonin. 
And the fur! The fur looks like wood grain on a two-by-four leg of lumber cut from an ancient oak tree – so straight and so smooth when you pet with the grain, and so course and so stiff when you pet against the grain. 
But it’s the pads that impress me most. It’s the pads that I envy when I look at my own fleshy feet. 
When the pug and I camped across the country, he stepped on many a wicked thorn, nosed around in many a pricker bush, popped a squat on many unforgiving cacti, but no pointy plant was too sharp for his dime-sized paw pads. 
His paws shatter toy breed stereotypes. They are as rugged and rigged for outdoor adventure as the paws on a Bernese Mountain Dog. 
If it weren’t for my pug’s vacuum-sealed face, he’d have soared over sand dunes in Bandon Beach, Ore. with the ease of a heron.  
If it weren’t for his asthmatic lungs, I’m certain he would have combed the The Rockies like a mountain lion hunting elk at dusk.
If not for his diesel engine pulmonary system, combusting externally in the North Carolina heat, I’m confident the pug’s muscled legs would have carried him up the Blue Ridge Mountains to the top of the Grove Park Inn, where together we would’ve sipped tea in high-backed Adirondack chairs facing the sunset.
And perhaps if his sausage roll body had been a little less eggplant-shaped, we’d have frolicked the Ozarks like Maria and Captain Von Trapp. 
If the rest of him would keep up, my pug’s paws would outperform Firestone Tires. 
—
PS. Photo of my courageous pug after he lumbered his way to the top of a red rock formation in Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. 
PPS. When the pug is not ascending sedimentary beds of sandstone, he slumbers on top of Joe’s head in a queen-sized bed in St. Petersburg, Fla.
PPPS. Note: I purposely did not mention the pug’s trifling dewclaw.