I just spent several hours updating the pics in my posts. It sucks that every so often, my pic-hosting site changes the URLs! I must have spent 3 weeks fixing all the URLs on the Plant Traders database. That's what I get for volunteering to set something like that up! I should shut up and be grateful, though. My first pic-hosting site went defunct and didn't warn me, so I lost all my pix. Oh, they later came back and offered to let me BUY my pics on a CD-rom. BUY my OWN pics!!! What an insult!

Anyway, it's been months and months since I posted. The ordeal we went through with Mark's health was so stressful that I just didn't have the energy to sit and think, so posting was of no interest to me. Add in their Lucy... ah Lucy...

Last post was about losing Remo. The house was so terribly quiet (with all my kitties gone, too...) I just couldn't stand it, so about 2 weeks later, we found an ad in the paper for some Shepherd puppies. We drove out to Polk, NE and took one look at Lucy and fell in love. We brought her home that day - she was a tad under 8 weeks old. Everyone knows how stressful it can be with a new puppy under the most benign of circumstances. Well, within 3 weeks, the whole saga of Mark's health problems and hospitalizations started. I was running back and forth between hospital and home to let Lucy out and spend time with her. If only we'd known what was coming with Mark's health, we would have held off getting a puppy and my stress level would have been at least a LITTLE better! Of course, there's a lot to be said for petting and hugging and smooching with a puppy and it probably does have some stress-relieving benefits. I'm just not sure the peeing on the rug and chewing everything in site doesn't offset that WAY in the other direction!

So here are a few pictures of Lucy as she's grown over the last several months. This first one was within a few days of us getting her. She did the usual "play-hard-crash-hard" thing that puppies do...

They grow so darned fast... Here's the little lady sitting in her Daddy's recliner. He was gone so much at this stage, I think that she laid there because she could smell him...

And here's a fairly recent pic. She's turned into quite a beauty, though she still has a lot of that puppy demeanor. I can't wait for her to be more mature and laid back...

In my next post, I'm going to try to document the chain of events during the first few months of this year (and last couple weeks of last year...) As it all unfolded, I really intended to write it down to have a record of it because as time passes, you forget the details. It's still all pretty fresh in my memory, so I want to get it down somewhere for future reference. I'll spend the next couple of days organizing my thoughts and get started on it soon...