My Social Media-less Life

I hope you all don’t mind that I’m not putting pictures in my blog posts lately. Most posts with pictures tend to get more eyeballs, but when I do a blog on my computer, I don’t have any pictures that I can upload quite so easily. So words will have to suffice.

I thought for sure I would be spending most of the two weeks my roommate is out of town at home… and then the One Big Exception to dog-sitting (who is also a dear friend) needed some help and was willing to hire for a part-time dog nanny*.

*In this case, I simply call it that because I stay the night with the dog, so when she gets off her overnight nursing job of 12-14 hours, she can come home and go straight to bed since I have already taken the dog out for his morning potty. She never asked for that, but she certainly appreciates it, and ultimately, I do like helping people.

The watching of the dog is not hard by any means but leaving at a decent time of night to let him out one more time before bed, and then waking up and trying to be gone before she gets home so we don’t have to play “musical cars” can be a bit taxing on my sleep schedule. And her job is 5-6 days a week.

Thankfully, my bestest friend is also a big help, if not with the dog specifically (which she does do that when she can), then with the moral support of yours truly.

Why am I bringing all this up?

I’m learning to take the “plot twists” of life and enjoy them. Not all plot twists are fun at first, but fun can be found in all plot twists.

I quit pet-sitting at the end of March. Since then, I’ve watched some animal almost every weekend (not every weekend, mind you, but very nearly) and almost all of them were the few people I didn’t tell I was quitting, either because the Lord directed me not to (like the One Big Exception) or because I knew those I didn’t tell hardly ever ask for help.

And all of them decided to go out of town in June.

To be fair, none of the times overlap and I was very clear about that with all of them. But they are still going out of town and that leaves me with only a few nights to sleep in my own bed in June: tomorrow night and this coming Saturday night.

Fun fact: this is what I would call a “not fun” plot twist.

Of course, my mom would be very clear that at least I get paid for all of this and I should be grateful for that. And I am.

But that doesn’t make it more fun. That just makes me have to work a little harder to find the fun.

And I do… or at least I try.

The One Big Exception lives in an apartment complex with an outdoor pool and hot tub and that is always one of the coolest things about anywhere I stay. So my bestest friend and I took advantage of the mostly open Sunday afternoon and went swimming before my “dog watching” began.

That’s something fun out of what could otherwise be a hard situation for me to grapple with.

There’s also a fancy coffee maker in the “club house” and free coffee is always an acceptable form of fun. Even if it’s in my less favorite form of hot.

When I stay with the dog down the street from my house, I like to sit outside because they have a nice deck and patio furniture that I make use of while the dog roams the backyard.

When I stay with another of my friend’s dogs, I like to sit on the couch with them and let them go in and out of the back door while it stays propped open… most of the time. That might be different this time because it will be so close to July…

Another family’s animals I will be with this month… I haven’t been with them in 3 years so I’m excited to see what kind of fun things will come about with this “new iteration” of pet-sitting. But I do remember how much I loved sitting in their family room and reading a book while a lot of natural light came in through the almost floor-to-ceiling windows.

So regardless of how much I might need to “put my social life on hold” for the animals I watch (because keeping things alive is the number one priority for sitting), I enjoy the art of slowing down that being with animals allows me to do.

Because slowing down in this fast-paced world is an art… and one I need to make sure I do more of as I get older, and time seems to go just a little bit faster each year around the sun.