Diary of a Network Geek

We went shopping today.
Hilda has always been a nervous dog and she’s never been as well socialized as she should or could have been. I blame myself, really. I should have been walking her and bringing her around to my in-laws and whatnot much more than I did. So, I’ve resolved to change that some. She’s only two years old and that leaves us plenty of time to work out all the bugs, so to speak. Toward that end, we went shopping at PetSmart today.
Hilda needed a car-riding harness, since the one I bought her last week was far too small. And, based on the two or three dreadlock-like tangles she had on the side of her face, I thought we should get a brush again right away. She’ll need to get used to that again, too. I’m sure it won’t be long before she’s primping and preening like the little doggie princess she is. And, we got her two tennis balls to chase and catch. Though, I have to admit, the returning part of fetch seems to be a challenge for her this afternoon. She still does catch amazingly well, though, which was always fun. And, finally, we got the longest tug-toy they had in the store. Hilda has always loved playing tug-of-war. For a little dog, she’s really amazingly strong. She’s only 45 pounds, but she can almost pull me off my feet!
The other dogs made her a little nervous, as did the two or three small children wandering around the store. The H.O.P.E. dogs all started barking at her when I went to see the ladies at the volunteer table. And, I found out that H.O.P.E. most likely won’t have anything at all on Sundays anymore at my closest PetSmart. Some kind of behind-the-scenes political kerfluffle. Thankfully, I’ve not gotten that involved, so I have no idea what was going on. Unfortunately, that may slow down my volunteering there. But, with things the way they are in the rest of my life, that may not be such a terrible thing right now. Well, like so much in my life, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
At the moment, though, I have to go work on the laundry and play with my dog. Have a great weekend!

I have a lot I could write about.
If only I felt comfortable writing about it. Too much drama in my personal life and too many scary situations in my business life to really feel comfortable talking about here. So, why am I posting? I just can’t help myself.

I got an e-mail from The Writer’s Almanac this morning, as I do every morning, and it had two interesting birthdays in it. First, there was this about Hans Christian Anderson:

It’s the birthday of Hans Christian Anderson, (books by this author) born in Odense, Denmark (1805). Although he was most famous for his fairy tales, he never thought of himself as a children’s writer. He wrote novels, plays, poetry, and travel essays, many of which were at least as successful as the fairy tales. Although Europeans and Americans loved his work, he was scorned in his own country during his lifetime; Søren Kierkegaard once published a scathing essay about him. He never married, and when he became ill late in life, he went to live with a family on the coast near Copenhagen. He had breakfast in his room one morning, and was found in bed a little while later, dead, holding a love letter someone had written to him 45 years earlier.

That was interesting in and of itself, to me, because I never think of the writers of fairy tales as being “normal” people who might have had lives that included pain. In particular, when I think of Hans Christian Anderson, I think of the movie that starred Danny Kaye. How could you associate that with unrequited love?
But, what was really interesting was the birthday note that follow later in the e-mail:

It’s the birthday of the Italian writer Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, born in Venice (1725). He spent the final years of his life as a librarian in a cold and drafty castle in Bohemia, and he set out to write his memoirs because, he said, it was “the sole remedy I believed I possessed to avoid going mad or dying of sorrow.” He left 4,000 pages of manuscript behind, some of which was later published under the title The Story of My Life.

What an interesting contrast. Two lovers. Two very different lives. Two very different kinds of love. I never would have thought of these two very different men ending up the way they did. Perhaps it is my own life that makes these stories resonat so with my own life right now. I do not know.
To be honest, I feel lonely. I’m thankful that I have my dog back, because she eases some of that pain. But, it’s different. So different. Am I lonely enough to write 4,000 pages about unrequited love and loneliness? No, probably not. But, it is a feeling I understand these days.