I’ve installed a new theme for my website today. The front page is far from finished, but it is up and running 🙂 And hopefully, those of you who read these posts from Facebook, the new mobile version is a bit more fun to read from 😛 still tweaking, but I’m excited to use this setup. The editor for this particular theme is freaking awesome. Light years ahead of anything I’ve ever used before, and I get to keep the same platform with WordPress to build it in.
Jojo was actually buried today, not yesterday. My mom tells me that my dad took the day off work and built something for him; sounded like a little dog house mixed with a mausoleum. Makes sense to me; using his hands to build things has always been one of the major ways he expresses himself, and Jojo was his dog just as much as he was my mother’s.
I was talking with Liz about it tonight, and the reason that Jojo’s death has been on my mind so much isn’t just because it was so sudden and tragic; it’s because Jojo was the first dog my parents had after *I* had my own dog. When we were growing up, the animals were always outside animals. That separation means a lot, actually…they weren’t a part of my life like it was having Cooper, who was always with me every minute of every day, practically.
Jojo was my parent’s first pet where that was true. At the very least for my mom. He’d recently been with her all the time. He went down to the Bay with her for work, slept with her during the day, he went with her on her trips out to the river…he was that kind of pet, the kind that Cooper (and now Coco) is to me. It’s…man, it’s a very special kind of bond. They become an inseparable part of your life in the most wonderful, comforting kind of way. And now my parents have lost that kind of pet for the first time…or, again, at least my mom has. My dad was very, very close with our last dog Laser. And Jenny. But this time, it was both of them, my mom and my dad.
So…I’ve been very sad these past three days. Just very sad. Heartbroken for my parents. Imagining their pain, and imagining myself losing my own dogs, which will happen some day, and how painful and emptying that will feel. They’re wonderful, incredible creatures, dogs are, and it is one of the great cosmic injustices that they don’t live as long as we do.
My book continued to sell today. About as much as yesterday, which was about half of what it did the first day. That is actually as expected. Maybe even a little better. We’ll see. My “also-bought” products started populating today, and it was nice to see that they were almost all perfect comps for my own book, at least cover-wise, so that’s encouraging. My book is definitely something a little different, both in the age of the protagonists, and the focus of the plot (being not a group of soldiers)…but there are plenty of other SciFi books out there in that vein. We’ll see what happens. Hopefully it’s a little different in the RIGHT way.
Tomorrow, I’m up on time, and I’m going to be doing some writing before getting my Netflix work done. Wish me luck on that. I continue to plod ahead, step by step.
Goodnight!