In lieu of diamonds, gold, and platinum reminders we'll still shine bright.

It's been a while since my last blog post. I feel pretty tired and stretched thin as this month hasn't been a good one so far.

- My dog Tracker died on Saturday, the 8th. He was a calm, attentive, humorous, human, caring and intelligent companion. I know a lot of people say their dog is more like a person than a dog, but Tracker really was. He was incredibly smart, and very expressive. You might remember him as the prettiest of princesses.



I first got him as a puppy, and trained him to be a guide dog for my community service project senior year of high school. He came with me to class a lot, and went practically everywhere my family went because he had to get acclimated to being in different places and situations. He was the most obedient and attentive dog of the batch, and when he went back to the guide dog group for his second year of training we were sure he was going to graduate and become a big part of someone's life. He did pass the training perfectly, but unfortunately they dropped him because he had an ear infection; the dogs have to be in perfect health to go to a blind person. Since then he became our family dog, and a highlight of every trip I made home. We took him to a dog beach in San Diego every year for labor day weekend, and he absolutely loved running into the water, swimming out and finding strings of kelp, and dragging them back to shore.

He had liver failure which had been diagnosed back in November right before Thanksgiving, and was looking better up until the first week of the month. He quickly got so bad and ended up in so much pain they had to put him to sleep. I cried a lot, even though I couldn't be there with him, and also because of that. I'm going to miss him a lot, and I'm sure it's going to hit me again when I get home and realise he's not there to greet me. He was a great dog.

- On my way home from a Christmas party this Saturday night my car broke down. I was coming back on the 5, from this party in Orange County, when smoke started billowing out from under the hood of my car. The radiator had cracked and blown antifreeze all over the engine. I pulled off the highway and was luckily able to get ahold of my friend Jeremy who was just then leaving the party, and was luckily able to crash with him for the night. Yesterday we attempted to patch my radiator and make it back to his house to replace the radiator, but it turned out whatever happened had stopped the radiator fans as well. This meant I got maybe ten minutes from where my car had ended up when it was a smoking mess again. I towed it from there to my mechanic, who I knew was closed on Sunday, only to find out he was closed on Monday as well.
This led Jeremy to offer me his car to use until then, only his car was stickshift, which I have no clue to drive. I spent about an hour and a half at ten pm last night learning to drive stick, then driving nervously home the whole way, including an accident on the 105 which slowed traffic to a crawl and put my skills very much to the test. I just about collapsed when I got home.

That's how my December has been so far. I don't know what Christmas, New Years, and Christmas break has to bring. I'm not hoping it's much, much better. I'd simply settle for normal at this point.