It has been chaos around our house today. This morning, Home Depot dropped off a truckload of materials at 8:30AM. Shortly after that, our neighbor knocked on the door and (I thought he was going to get all neighbor-nosey and ask what we were doing to the house), he told me that since I’m such an animal lover, he thought I’d like to know that there’s a great big german shepherd loose in our backyard.

Personally, I think our neighbor planted him. I think he caught him and brought him our way and let him go around our fenceline, because he knew I would be all rescue-like and save the dog’ish, I was a veteranarian in another life, you know.

So, big beautiful powerhouse nearly knocked me on my butt a few times, and he reminded me so much of our Chloe in her younger years. I was in love. I found myself wishing for just a moment that Chloe wasn’t fixed, and that she didn’t have such horrible arthritis in her hips. :winking:

At the same time we were wrangling the big bad Harley dog, our contractors arrived to start rebuilding the room we gutted. Hi-ho, Hi-ho! It’s off to Lowe’s I go! They needed more materials, and I made myself another shopping list.

Meanwhile, the police showed up to tell us they couldn’t do anything. That was nice, for them to stop over just to let us know that! Animal control doesn’t work on weekends. Apparently animals in our area that get out of hand, lost, wild, rowdy, dangerous, hurt or abandoned are free to do so without the aid of any kind of authorities from 5PM Friday until 8AM Monday morning. In all actuality, our animal control doesn’t do anything at all to save or rescue animals around here. They will catch nuisance critters that get where they’re not supposed to be, but everyone is free to treat their pets absolutely crappy around these parts. That’s good information to have, huh?

Anyhoo, I was told that I was free to let the dog go, dragging part of the lead he snapped in his escape behind him, into traffic, or to go stomp on or harass others and even young children, if he was so inclined. That was perfectly okay by them. Wonderful. It’s so great to know nobody really cares about critters, you know? I wonder what people think they’re here for, our own amusement? Are they cash cows? I don’t get it.

I grabbed the vaccination code from his tag (that’s all he had on him) and had to wait for the county to open to get an address. I finally found someone who could help, and got Harley’s addy (he was about 2 miles from home), left with my Lowe’s shopping list to find Harley’s parents and get more stuff from the store.

Harley’s parents weren’t home. I went to all of their neighbors houses, and one neighbor lady left them a message telling them we had Harley. Then I went shopping. When I got back, Harley was all lonely and sad, so I sat outside with him to keep him company and pet him. Then it started to rain. And I sat in the rain with Harley.

Then Harley’s mom came and got him. Yayyyyy!

Then my hubby left for work.

I did work on a few illustrations, got the preliminary sketches done and sent them off for the first proofing.

Then the contractors left for the day, we grabbed some dinner, cleaned up the yard a bit, and now. Now it’s almost 8:00 and the day is over.

How the heck does this happen? I feel like I just got up 20 minutes ago, walked through some sort of a time warp, and now I’m ready to get my pajamas back on!