The problem is that the work I thought I had dried up just days after I quit. And while I’m thanking my lucky stars I can rely on The Husband for financial support during these lean times, I’m not sure where to turn for mental support. I read. I blog. I watch the news. But none of it feels quite as good as being engrossed in a stimulating project that requires many hours of mental acrobatics.

I know I’m fortunate to suddenly have a windfall of free time and I’m certainly enjoying that part of things, but I feel a little desperate housewife-ish. I comb through back issues of Real Simple to find easy solutions for little problems in the house. I’ve reorganized the medicine cabinet, figured out how to properly store the lids to my pots and pans, and taken a toothbrush to the grout in my guest shower.

But while my house is clean, my mind is restless. And the longer I remain trapped at home the fewer ideas I seem to have, which is death to a writer. The challenge, then, is that I no longer have to find places to fit stimulating “me time” into my days, but instead I now have to justify it because I’ve developed a guilt complex over not bringing money in. I feel I don’t deserve to spend money on movies, museum admission, or a visit to a neighborhood I’ve yet to explore because I’d be asking The Husband to pay for it. And the craziest part is that he obviously doesn’t care. He wants me to do things that enrich my live regardless of who’s paying for it…especially if it’s something as cheap as a $15 museum admission.

So why do I keep finding reasons to hold myself back?

–Posted by C.

Among the perks: a thirteen stair commute,  being able to work in whatever I slept in, and setting my own schedule. But the biggest one of all is something I hadn’t even thought of: no more sitting at my desk watching the second hand on the clock spin as I wait for someone to get back to me. If a client is lagging, I just ratchet the volume on my Blackberry up to loud, shove it in my purse or pocket, and take a break. How liberating to shed the tethers to my computer keyboard!

That said, my new career certainly has its drawbacks.

On average, most people are productive about 3 1/2 hours out of the work day. The rest of their time is  spent shoe shopping on the Internet (often as they wait for that email or phone call), gossiping at the water cooler, or surfing Facebook. I, however, must be accountable for my time. Which means I have to work about twice as much as the average person to get the same paycheck. I also need to spend about two hours of every day looking for more business, and that’s more time I don’t get paid for.

But the hardest thing is the lack of co-workers. There’s nobody to distract me with a quick glimpse at CuteOverload.com or the sad-hilarious story of the terrible date they went on the night before. I had an especially great group of colleagues at my last job, and I’m already missing them. However, if they’re really only productive for 3 1/2 hours out of the day, I guess they shouldn’t be too difficult to reach on GChat.

–Posted by C.

When my mother used to lie about her age, she was always claiming to be 29, as if it were the holy grail of numbers. This all ended on my parents 20th wedding anniversary, when my younger brother used his newly developed math skills to deduce with horror that, if she was really 29 years old, my mother had gotten married when she was nine.

To this day, though, my mother jokes on her birthday that it’s great to turn 29 again. So what’s so fabulous about being 29? So far, I have determined the following:

• You shall receive new revelations about your adult self which you will then be able to act on because of the new found confidence you’ve been working on throughout your 20′s.
• You seem at least a tad bit closer to figuring out what you want to do with your life.
• Thirty suddenly seems like a terrible number.

29 is like the 4 o’clock of your youth… on Daylight Savings time. The sun has not yet begun to set  but the shadows are certainly lengthening. Suddenly, you begin to look at clothes and wonder “is this too young for me?” Or you look in the mirror and suddenly see someone who looks a lot like your mom or dad did when you were a kid. And yet it’s a great time because you’re finally starting to get comfortable after the mayhem that was your early and mid 20′s. The trick is to settle in without settling. And that, dear readers, seems to be the lesson 29 aims to teach.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

–Posted by C.

There is a debate in the canine world over whether it’s humane to crop a dog’s ears. In fact, the procedure has been outlawed in the EU over protests that performing an elective cosmetic procedure on a dog — who has no choice in the matter — is cruel. But while I’ve certainly seen “home crops” that left dogs with painfully mutilated ears, I feel that there is a right way to do the procedure. After all, is not spaying and neutering also elective? Where is the problem with canine overpopulation — with dogs or with humans?

However, although I understood where she was coming from, I really wanted to lay into this woman because of the way she voiced her opinion. It happened at the dog park when my pup and I were the only ones there. The woman was walking her dog on a path about 50 feet away from me when she began yelling about how my poor dog had his ears chopped off and I was a cruel b*tch and was going to rot in hell for what I did. Then she proceeded to take her dog to the other end of the park and glare at me while making comments to people who were just arriving, which was dumb because two out of three of their dogs had also had their ears cropped — they were simply older dogs whose ears were standing erect. I wasn’t sure if I should confront the woman or just let her look like an idiot. I ultimately decided to begin venturing over there to show her I wasn’t afraid of her and then just go with the flow. If she decided to confront me then, at least I would have the opportunity to shut her down in a responsible way. If she shied away from the opportunity, then I had won.

She left.

Then a giant pit bull with cropped ears came over, licked my puppy’s face and initiated a fun game of chase. Neither of them seemed to feel abused. In fact, I think I was the only one feeling that way.

– Posted by C.

I’ve basically reached a point where although my freelance projects don’t yet match my income, I’d rather take the financial loss as a long-term investment in my career. The trick is going to be to create a schedule for myself and stick to it, now that I’m legitimately self-employed. It also means that I have no excuse not to make other investments…like business cards. How exciting! The only cards I’ve ever had were for my last job in L.A. and, as I worked for a large corporation, I had no say in what they looked like or how my title read. Now I get to start from scratch!

Designing my business cards really strikes me as a metaphor for the launch of my new career: they have to be carefully stylized and every word must count. As I look forward at a future that is essentially a blank slate, I’m suddenly filled with the energy to paint it brightly and broadly. While there’s a lot of work ahead of me, there’s also a whole world full of possibilities. And I am so happy I finally got up the guts to shed my security blanket and step into the rest of my life.

–Posted by C.

Being that this is of course a news organization, we journalists are doing what we do best in the wake of this injustice: speculating. Has The Awesome Microwave been taken by upper level management because theirs sucked? Was it taken home by an underpaid employee who couldn’t afford an equally fantastic kitchen appliance? Did fairies steal it in the middle of the night?

So far, security is keeping mum on the Mysterious Microwave Swap and it seems unlikely that they’ll review any surveilance tape. It looks like this incident will go down with other workplace whodunnits (such as The Case Of The Missing Toilet Seat Covers and Who Stole All The Plastic Silverware), leaving us newsroom grunts to settle for half-frozen Kashi meals and dream of better days gone by.

–Posted by C.

As much fun as it is, it feels strange and surreal to have a third personality in our home with us. No more rushing out to the gym in the morning; he needs to be walked, watered and fed first. No more sitting through movies uninterrupted. He’s wining and fidgeting and he’s just so damn cute that all attention ends up on him.

I guess I’m getting a taste of what it might be like to have a kid, which is weird…but also good because it reaffirms my suspicion that a dog is just about as much as I can handle.

Even though he’s been a perfect angel so far, he’s still a handful just because we haven’t quite learned how to communicate yet. I wish I could explain to him in a way that he’d understand that we’re his new family. Getting in the car or going to a new place doesn’t mean he’s going to end up alone with nobody to care for him. I wish there was a way to let him know that for the rest of his life, he’ll always be well fed and cuddled and played with until he’s too old to do anything but spend lazy afternoons in the sun. And what sucks the most is that when he’s at his most vulnerable, when he’s crying and shaking and whimpering, the best possible thing I can do for him is to ignore him.

As his first 24 hours in his new home draw to a close, he’s curled up on the couch in his favorite spot, half laying on The Husband and snoring. Something tells me those sad little moments will soon be few and far between…and that maybe we’re not so far from understanding eachother at it may seem.

–Posted by C.

After I recovered from fits of convulsive laughter that nearly caused me to crash my car into a tree, I began to wonder what kind of a person walks her  cat. While I understand that we Americans have become so spoiled that the obesity epidemic has extended to our pets, there is a plethora of less embarrassing options for helping your cat pinch an inch, like diet kitty food or extended playtime. Walking a cat just seems like an uneccessary humiliation.

Then I remembered one instance in which I had occasion to put the family kitty on a leash. This particular cat not only thought he was a wild animal, but he considered it his mission in life to out-perform our dog where guard duty was concerned. One night, his vigilance led him to tangle with an enormous raccoon, with whom he became locked in a fight to the death. When all was said and done, it was score one for Mr. Kitty and zero for a very embarrassed raccoon. However, our cat still needed to be quarantined in case he’d been exposed to rabies, and since he looked upon his litter box as though it was the puke-covered bathroom at CBGB’s, it fell upon me to take the cat outside for some supervised defecation. As a very sensitive 11-year-old, I surely wasn’t going to be caught dead walking the cat, so I did so in the back yard. The moral of the story: walking kitties, even out of necessity, never has to be done in public.

I mean, even the cat was embarrassed by the situation. Why else would he have been rushing along the sidewalk? I can just picture his mortification at the thought that the cute little Persian across the street might peek through her window and see him on a leash…like a DOG! Horror of horrors! Cats are like preteen girls; they want nothing to do with their caregivers unless they’re being fed or otherwise entertained. Thus, it’s a terrible indignity to parade your kitty on a leash.

So, Crazy Cat-Walking Lady, I beg of you, for the sake of your own dignity and that of your cat, please ditch the halter and exercise Fluffy within the confines of your own home. And if you feel the need to harness an animal, for God’s sake woman, get a dog!

–Posted by C.

Meeting a truly amazing guy is one of those events girls dream about, hopeful that it will happen and yet fearful of ‘what if it doesn’t’. Maybe it was the new outlook, maybe it was coincidence, but I met one. Of course, it couldn’t be quite so simple: he lives 1200 miles away. Talk about craptastic. I already know that for it to work in the future, I would be the one making the big move. I’m undecided on how I feel about this, but strangely I didn’t immediately rule it out.

I find it very intriguing that women of my generation haven’t lost the hope for finding true love. We listen to the horror stories, we experience extreme jerkiness, yet somehow we won’t give up on love. Does adversity strengthen our conviction in refusing to settle for anything less than we deserve?

posted by D

It seems as if authorities in Ontario, Canada have put two dogs on death row because they believe them to be pit bulls. Not only can they not be proven to be members of the breed banned by the town, but the dogs themselves did nothing wrong. Apparently, one of them had puppies and that was reason enough for officials to decided to kill them both. How sick is that? And how terrible to place a blanket distinction on a breed! While I’ll admit that there are plenty of vicious pits out there, often it’s because their owners are just as mean as the dogs themselves. Not only that, but I don’t think people even realize how many of the friendly, goofy little guys they’ve interacted with are at least part pit.

To me, discriminating on the basis of a dog’s breed is tantamount to canine genocide. If the dog hasn’t done anything wrong, leave it alone. And if it does bite someone, sure, take it away but also make sure the owner has hell to pay for not only injuring a human being, but for ruining his dog’s life.

Why am I so angry?

My puppy’s a doberman. I know people are going to be scared of him. In fact, my husband’s brother was attacked by a “hot” dobe and it’s going to take a lot to convince him that his kids are safe around my dog. I understand the concern and I know that, even when the owners do there job, there’s a chance that the dog is just going to snap. But talk to any vet and they’ll probably tell you they’ve been bitten badly by labs, toy breeds and other “safe” breeds many times for that very reason. Not only that, but breeding is a huge part of the equation. Crack down harder on puppy mills, backyard breeders and dog fighting and 90% of your problem is solved.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that this story really upset me. It’s another instance of over-legislation being used for political gain and/or to make an example out of someone, with the punishment falling on two innocent creatures who can’t possibly understand why such a terrible thing is happening to them.