Thanks to Janet Reid’s blog, I found this gem of a website with real 911 calls.

Some of these had me laughing almost to the point of tears…although if I had to actually answer these calls in the middle of fielding high-stress real emergencies, I’d probably lose it. 

911 dispatchers are customer service saints.

Today I progressed from notes and random passages for my next novel revision to actually writing a new first chapter.  I’m getting excited to see how this revision shapes up because there are some bigger, bolder things going into it.  Definitely some influence from Donald Maass’ book to keep pushing the envelope, upping the stakes. Some of the changes are things that, deep down, I knew were weak links.  This will be a drastically different novel in a lot of ways, but the core remains the same.  Hopefully this revision will be The One – not only The One to get picked up, but also the book that this story was always meant to be.

The dog pictures are in!  I’m slowly narrowing them down to the ones I want to order to frame for my house.  I’m priced out of ordering all of my final 27 (out of 124…that’s not a bad start!), so there’s still work to do.

One day, I will have a privacy fence.  The boards are being dog-eared and prepped for installation.  Someone asked me the other day if it was for me, the neighbors, or the dogs.  I don’t know the answer to that question.  I think we’ll all be grateful for it once it’s up (except, perhaps, for my farmer neighbor, who is afraid it will shade his garden.  was my fence plan the reason that he gave the tree in his yard a crew cut this summer?).

The awesome photographers who took photos of the dogs last weekend posted a few on their blog.  These are the first that I’ve seen and I can’t wait for the rest!

Miss you, Peanut.