After involving my blog readers in the Jojo drama, it’s only fair that I give you an update. I’m typing this on my laptop with Jojo lying next to my leg and with her long little body under my elbow. It’s exactly two weeks today when this all started. We’ve been told that it will be at least four weeks before we’ll be able to know what’s what.

She needs to be confined, so we now have a play pen here in the family room. Before the playpen, I went looking for something that would work. Regular dog crates don’t due to my having to reach down to pick her up. I was pulling in to the All the Best pet store in Bellevue to find something suitable when I noticed that the business next to it, Relax the Back, was discarding some boxes. One of them seemed to be about the same size as our three-by-four foot dog beds. It was also only a foot tall. When I asked the manager if I could have one of the boxes and explained why I needed it, he said yes immediately and even loaded it for me. With the top cut off, leaving a small rim inside to keep Jojo from climbing out, the box has turned out to be perfect. After a lifetime of sleeping in our bed, she seems content to be there, cozied up next to our bed if not in it.

Jojo has been on steroids, and I have to remember to make sure she gets plenty of water. And let’s just say that dealing with an incontinent dog is … well … challenging. But so far, we’re making it work. Mary, our other Doxie, has been having some sibling rivalry issues. She’s understandably needy right now, and doesn’t want to have much to do with Jojo. So we’ll see. We’re hoping to have a healthy little dog back again in the future, but right now we’re playing a game of wait and see.

At the same time I’ve been caregiver-in-chief, I’ve also been working on the first stage of editing for Credible Threat with my new editor, who is terrific. I’ve learned a couple of things about her in the process. When she had no idea what a “Florsheim Wedge” was, I unmasked her as a non-golfer. For you other non-golfers out there, a Florsheim Wedge is what golf-cheaters use when they kick their ball out of an impossible lie rather than using an actual club. My editor also wanted to know how the AI in my Ali books, Frigg, had ensnared a new human supervisor, Stu Ramey. That told me she hadn’t read either Man Overboard or Duel to the Death. I told her she’d need to read one of those because I wasn’t telling her. (I want other new readers to go back to earlier books as well.)

My progress on the edits has been slow but steady. My use of hyphens is abominable, and she has dutifully fixed them all. At this stage it seems feasible that we’ll be able to skip the copy-editing step and go straight to production, but then again, maybe not.

When I hear from caregivers dealing with loved ones’ serious health issues, I always admonish them to take care of the caregiver, and it’s time for me to take a little of my own advice on that score. Taking care of Jojo is good for about 3,000 steps a day, plus a lot of heavy lifting. If my frozen shoulder was still frozen, I wouldn’t be able to do this, so here’s a big shout out from both Jojo and me to our personal trainer, Dan Kritsonis. “Thank you.” My step goal for the year was to pass the 6,000,000 mark, and I did that, yesterday, by 300 steps. But now that we have the playpen, it’s important for both Bill and me to get back to walking.

And tomorrow, we’ll have a dog sitter come to look after our puppies while we go out for lunch to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary. The anniversary itself is on Saturday, but with a houseful and more of company arriving for our annual Christmas party, we thought going early was a good idea. And now, in honor of that, I’ll end with a tiny trip down memory lane.

I’m not one of those people who believes in long engagements. Bill and I met in June of 1985. On October twelfth he asked me to marry him, and I said yes. We got married December twenty-first. A few days after popping the question, Bill came to the condo in downtown Seattle that I shared with my sister. My sister’s son, David, his wife Mary, and Mary’s daughter, Celina Rose, were all there visiting, too. Bill and I decided we’d go ring shopping. We rode down in the elevator, walked across the street to the Jewelry Exchange, picked out rings, rode back up in the elevator, and were back in the condo less than half an hour later. “What happened?” someone asked. “Did you change your minds?” “No,” we said. “The rings are all picked out.”

At that point, Celina, burst into tears. It seems that she had spent day after day accompanying David and her mother while they shopped endlessly for engagement rings.

The rings we chose that day in less than thirty minutes have served us well for thirty-four years. Ditto for the guy I picked out in practically the blink of an eye—Bill’s not bad either.

Tomorrow we’ll leave “the kids” at home and go be just “us” for a while, celebrating the joy of spending so many years of being second-time-arounders.

And yes, take it from me, love really is lovelier the second time around.