A Walk Around the Blogs: Inside My Thoughts

I know, I know, I skipped last week. That’s because, for various reasons, I did not really read any blogs last week. I barely got my own posts up. However, that does leave me with two full weeks of great blog posts to pull from for this week.

This week’s theme is “Things I’ve been thinking about, too.” And mostly, it’s a reminder that you don’t want to live in my head.

I am a sports fan. Hockey is my favorite professional sport, so I’m pretty happy right now, but I am also a big football fan- enough so that I follow some of these last minute trades, free agency signings, and rules changes. (No more Tuck Rule!) But as much as I love football, I have to agree with Money Beagle– Don’t Ever Ask An NFL General Manager For Money Advice.

I have written a few times that one of my “secrets” for having time to “do it all” (especially as it relates to blogging) is that I value my time and prioritize. Could I have sat down last Saturday and put together a round up even though I hadn’t read anything all week? Yes. But I didn’t, because there were other ways I wanted to spend my time. Len Penzo (who freely admits I’ve been doing 100 Words On longer) had a great entry in his 100 Words series this week: Why Time is More Valuable than Money.

There’s a lot of change going on in my life right now. Most of it for the good but at times of change, I’m always rather introspective, and while I am an optimist by nature, I always make myself look at the worst case scenario and deal with my fears. Acknowledging those fears always makes me feel better. It turns out, the same is true for Buck Inspire, who last week wrote about his Greatest Fears. He felt better just getting it down on paper.

At work, everything is in flux. Everyone is stressed to no end. Another round of layoff is coming (notices go out next week) and almost no one feels safe. And when I’m feeling work stress, I almost always turn to What Your Boss Really Thinks. This week, she wrote about How to Confront Bullying at Work. And while we haven’t had any accusations of that during this time, it did remind me of how important informal chains of command are. One of my roles is to be the outside manager. If a staff member has an issue they don’t feel they can go to their boss with and doesn’t want to go to HR, they can come to me.

And finally, in the new to me category, we have the blog A Young Pro. He as a post about Finding Your Passion. Considering this weeks 100 Words On Your Money post was about a conversation over on the Your Money boards about passion and finding passion in your life, it connects very strongly with where my head had been this week. I will always believe that living my dream life is better than working my dream job, but it’s never had to have passion. (Though you also shouldn’t feel like you’re inadequate if you haven’t found your passion yet, or if it changes.)

When it comes to the dogs, I haven’t been thinking about quite as many different things, in fact, we’ve kind of been pretty focused on health issues and food. But so have most of my pet blogging friends. It’s like a hive mind. Seriously though, it’s great to have a place to share what we’re going through and know that others really do understand.

We’re going to start by sending our best wishes out to lovely little Bella of Bringing Up Bella. She’s developed a mystery limp, but her mom and dad are doing everything they can and taking her to a neurologist. Here’s hoping for a good news update soon.

In the new to me category, over at Bark and Chatter, adorable little Finn just when in for routine surgery but naturally, while there, other things were discovered and needed to be dealt with. He came out with three different incisions, poor little guy. He was Down for the Count on Friday, but here’s hoping he’s back to his happy little self soon.

We have also been obsessing over food, what with Howie’s kidney failure and June’s suspected pancreatitis. It turns out, we will need to feed Howie prescription kibble because we just can’t make anything quite so low on phosphorous. He also has to have very limited protein. Not that we were going to do raw feeding anyway, but the restriction on protein really means that neither of the classic raw models (BARF and whole prey) would work for us. Still it was nice to see Lindsay at That Mutt give a nice rundown of raw dog food. (It helped me feel good about our feeding plans.)

At Dog is God in Reverse, Kari gets to brag about feeding four very different dogs the same food. It’s not actually a brag. They had to go to a lot of work to find a food that would work for all their different dogs. When we just had Moree and Smokey it was hard to find one food that worked for two dogs. I can’t imagine trying to figure it out with four.

But finally, on a happy and fun note, because really, the point of our dogs is that they bring us joy, is this great story from Tales and Tails about The Battle For Couch Occupation. It’s hard going up against a dog who is better than you are at getting what they want, and Bunny, she’s the queen. I wouldn’t want to match wits with her. At our house, it’s about bed space. We’ll make poor Larry move because we know he’ll just get right back up once we’re settled. Junebug actually gets gently lifted or moved along the bed to where she’s out of the way (the joy of having a hound much smaller than a Greyhound). Howie on the other hand is never moved. C and I will jigsaw ourselves around the old man when he wants to be on the bed.