I’m coming to end of the next Garrison Gage book, though my writing productivity took a bit of a hit the last few weeks. There’s a good reason for that. I took on a new office assistant, and I’ve had to spend quite a bit of time training her. You see, she’s not so good at typing, editing, filing, cleaning, or really anything most office assistants might do. But boy, is she cute. Her name is Rosie:
She’s a 10 week old Irish Setter. I think she’s about 15 pounds there, so as a female she’ll end up about four times that weight. When I started writing full-time, I promised Heidi and the kids we could get a new puppy. Belle, our Boston Terrier, is still with us, of course, though at 13 years old she’s starting to slow down quite a bit. Our first two dogs were both Humane Society mutts, usually the best kinds of dogs, but this time I had my heart set on an Irish Setter. When Heidi I visited Arlie Winery last summer, on one of our trips to the coast, the owners had a couple of sweet Irish Setters wandering around the property. I said that if we ever got another dog, I think that’s what I would want. My wife found a fantastic and very conscientious dog breeder up in Washington state, one who raised mostly Golden Irish, which are half golden retrievers and half Irish Setters, and for a while that’s the way we thought we were going, which would have been perfectly wonderful, but they ended up having a few pure Irish Setters available and it seemed like fate.
So after a quick, one-night trip to the Puget Sound area, which included a lovely stay just outside of Olympia and a near-perfect evening stroll through the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, we returned home with a new member of our family. She’s been handful, of course, but as I told a fellow writer who said dogs were too high maintenance for him, and he’d stick with cats (we love cats too), dogs offer their own special kind of rewards usually commensurate with amount of attention and effort you give them.
I’ve never had a puppy before, so I’ve had to do a lot of reading. Even Belle was a year old when she came to live with us. So this has been quite the learning process. While Rosie has certainly thrown a wrench into my productivity lately (and just when I thought I was getting a handle on this whole full time writing thing), she’s also provided something more meaningful to focus on rather than … well, you know. It’s been a heck of a year, and we’re barely halfway through it. Stay safe out there. More soon.