Terry, I very much relate to your grief as I lost a dog on Wednesday. We'd only just taken in Jasper, a rescued chihuahua, in February. He was 8 years old and helped himself to an unreasonably large portion of something dogs shouldn't eat in large portions. After a rough night, he seemed like he was going to be fine, but wasn't with us anymore when I got home from school. We also have another dog, and a cat, who both now walk around the house looking for Jasper, or at least that how it seems. He was a good little dog and I miss him very much.
School has kept me away since August. I am teaching a new class this year. In addition, I have 4 sections of chemistry totaling 98 students and every time I give a quiz or test or we do a lab, I spend the next few days grading. And for some reason, they chose this year to discontinue the teacher aide program in which students could get credit for helping me in whatever way I needed. Alas. I have spent what little free time I've had over the past three months doing some reading (though I'm still very behind) and going through edits on my story after it was submitted for upload to the archive. I had no idea how long that would take. I'm nearly done now and expect to send it back to the editor in the next day or so. I will be happy to have that project completed in time for November, when I will tackle 50,000 words (at least) on the sequel (which I'm even more excited about after working on the original the last few days. I worked on it in July, but the muse was more interested in something else - a totally unrelated story that also sits partially finished).
The way the school year goes, I'll get into a groove here in a few weeks, just in time for November and once the semester is over, I should have significantly more time since second semester is always a breeze.
