Perhaps....

...hate is too strong of a word for the puppies. I've discovered that once you accept they are going to pee every time you aren't looking, and that Butch is just as content to sit immobile in the grass for 15 minutes when it's cold and wet and dark as he would be to actually, you know, poop, and Seamus is constantly sampling the furniture to see if anything tastes as good as his turkey and rice diet, and that they are really more irritating than anything when Puppy Fight Club starts up, they aren't impossible to deal with. Seamus's bark is pretty evil, though. And I'll be happy to see them picked up, but probably not as happy as my poor befuddled Spencer, who is starting to wonder if these little dudes are here to stay, and if they are, then what's up with all the rasslin' they do....

Kyle's birthday party was this past weekend. For reasons of my own that have nothing to do with him, I'm not referring to him as SuperKyle anymore. I won't elaborate, but let's say that a kid who's hoping to live a couple more weeks so he can actually turn 10 shouldn't have so many people dumping the burden upon him of being an inspiration, when all he wants is to play with his friends and not hurt.

It was a pretty cool party, though. But it did bring things to a new level of real. So even though I have all sorts of new music to enjoy these days, I find I'm falling back on Neal Morse's "Testimony," Spock's Beard's "Snow," Transatlantic's "Bridge Across Forever" (no one heals the existential wounds like Neal) and Green Day's "American Idiot," since those albums were largely my personal soundtrack to the last few weeks of my younger sister's life.

I'm sitting at the beginning of what looks to be a week filled with the kind of emotions people usually like to avoid. But I know that in the not too distant future I've got the promise of some good extended-family times. Those times will be a much-needed stress release by the time they arrive.