flipped the switch

Who turned off the global warming? Suddenly it's 5 degrees. Suddenly, the house is really really cold. When the temp was hovering around 20-35 degrees the radiators were doing a good job of keeping the house around 70-72 degrees all over. Now that the temp has drastically dropped and stayed down, upstairs is hovering around 70 and most of downstairs is too...but there's a drastic thermal layer at knee level where the temperature seems to drop to, oh, 40 degrees? Yeah, and I can actually feel the cold air flowing in through my swiss cheese 100 year old windows. Looks like I'm gonna have to really figure out what to do. Some windows we can shrink wrap, but others we'd like to be able to open and close the shade, so we need to figure out another way to seal them up.

I don't know why, possibly because its just a major change, but not having a dog anymore makes me feel like I'll somehow have more time to do things around the house. We are still feeling the reverberations of Ash's absence in major ways and I'm trying to keep positive about it. I do believe he stands a good chance of finding a home. I try not to think of the alternative. His absence is felt here in many subtle ways. Lack of constance activity, no clackety-clack of his nails on the floors, no loud baby-waking racket from his controlled falling up or down the stairs, and the kitchen and dining room floors are no longer magically free of dropped food bits. Andrea was cooking dinner the other night and I head, "Ahhh! What's all this?!" as she stepped on a dropped piece of mushroom or carrot or shredded cheese. Now she understands why Ash was always hovering around her legs while she cooked.

I find myself reflexively chastising Ash when I hear random house-settling noises, only to realize that there is no real noise and no dog causing it. Just a passing car or a rattling pipe. I think I'll slowly be cleaning up the remaining evidence of his presence, storing what's in good condition or memory worthy, and throwing out or donating everything else.

On the other hand, there are as many times every day when I feel liberated or relieved. It was a poor choice on my part to adopt Ash when I did, or even at all. My responsibility to care for him has influenced and even directed many of my past decisions and I shudder to think how my life may have been different had i not adopted him. We both benefitted, for sure, but we both also suffered as well. To not have that one additional, very large, responsibility looming over everything else is amazing. Andrea and Felix and Ash were not the only ones who were being held captive in our house. All of my travel decisions, living arangements, etc, have all been somewhat dictated by how Ash could be fit into the equation. Finding someone to house/dog sit, finding a place that ALLOWS dogs, and has a place he can be safely kept when I'm away, finding a place to kennel him, paying fines for barking complaints, losing damage deposit due to property damage, strained relations with neighbors, roommates, spouses, and family. Even as recent as Felix's birth, we had to work around Ash's special needs. We actually took Ash to the hospital and he stayed in our car while Felix was born. I brough him back home when my parents were able to come up and watch him, and obviously on the day of the birth of their baby's baby, the last thing they really wanted to do was stay at home to take care of the dog.

Anyway...I think it is due in large part to the drastic change in our family that everyone is feeling like we're in a new stage, like a new family paradigm is arising...

My last living grandparent, my grandmother, is having some medical difficulties. Should something happen that requires me, or me and my family, to make a trip somewhere, I can now do it. Arranging time off from work is easy, not much of an impediment. Now the only thing keeping us from going somewhere is our own resources and time, not the added difficulty of finding someone to be our surrogates at our house.

It feels like a new day. I hope it is like a new, better day for Ash as well. I miss him terribly, but I also feel tremendously relieved.