I'm having a not-very-good evening.

To start out, I'll need to tell you what happened on Tuesday. Tuesdays are extra-long days for me. I get up at 6:00 a.m., leave the house by 8:00 a.m., have class on and off all day until 9:00 p.m., then I have an hour commute (depending on the traffic), so I usually get home by 10:30 p.m. This last Tuesday was typical, and I got home by 10:30. I opened the sliding-glass door leading to our backyard to let the dogs come in, but only one dog came in. Jackson (our newly adopted German Shepherd), came bounding into the house, dancing in circles for his dinner. I hollered for Tucker, but he didn't come; that is never a good thing.

I walked onto the deck to find that the bottom of three boards in our privacy fence had been chewed off to form a hole just big enough for Tucker to squeaze through. Of course I panicked, left a message at the animal shelter, then drove around looking for him. I just knew that someone would find him and decide to keep him for themselves, or maybe he was hit by a car and lying on the side of the road all alone without me, his mommy, to rescue him. (Yes, I can get a little dramatic when it comes to my animals. But he's my baby boy!).

After a terrible night of sleep, the shelter finally called at 7:45 the next morning to say that he'd been there all night! Thank goodness! I bought some boards to replace in the fence, but I decided to wait until Mr. Air Force got home to put them up (because I would probably do a really craptastic job).

Today, I came home to find that Tucker was once again missing from the backyard. Luckily, this time he had not gone very far. Unluckily, he had broken a board leading into our neighbor's backyard and was having a hay-day playing with their daughter's toys in the sandbox. Our neighbors are military and they PCS'd to Hawaii, and their house is vacant and for sale. Once Tucker came back through the hole, I put some cement-blocks against it to keep him from going through it again (hey, it worked for the other big hole he created). After dinner this evening, I turned the dogs back outside to have some fun. When things got eerily quiet though, I knew something was wrong. They had somehow taken out two whole boards from the neighbor's side of the fence and were both in their yard romping around. They are aware of how many cool toys are in the neighbor's yard-- why wouldn't they want to destroy our fence to get over there? Right? sheesh.

I ordered them to bed early, then tried to figure out how I would fix the fence.

This is the part where self-pity comes into play. My husband has been TDY for almost two months. They always, always tell you that when your husband is gone, everything that can break will break. We've had other mishaps this month while he's been away, but most of them I've been able to manage a quick-fix until he can really fix it. I know that two months is not a long time for him to be gone in the military world. In the fall, he will go for his first six-month deployment. While I am not looking forward to it, I know there are plenty of brave and strong women out there who make it through much longer deployments than that. I am very blessed in this life and wouldn't trade it for the world, but tonight I had to cry a little bit. I couldn't find anyone who would help me with fixing the new disaster, I missed my husband, I'm pmsing to boot, and I just needed to cry a little bit. Realizing that these two months are just a small taste of what the six-month deployment will be like made me cry a little bit.

And then I reminded myself that there are others who have done this before and have had to deal with much, much worse. I mean, it's just a fence. And hey, I fixed it all by myself-- power drill and all! So, I told myself to get over it, I popped some tylenol and now I'm drinking a big glass of extra-chocolate milk.

On the bright side, I got to see this little beauty today... Isn't she darling?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need some more chocolate in my milk.

Goodnight =)