"How the hell are you?" she wrote.

"Miss you," another wrote.

"Why don't you ever update?" my daughter asked.

"Are you OK?" someone else asked.

I dunno. I should have an answer. But I don't.

I haven't been writing because any time I pull up the blog I see that I haven't written since February and I don't know how to fill in that gap without writing a novel. I'm not sure I want to relive parts of it either.

I'm suffering from having people read my blog too. It's better and easier to write when it's confessional, but then people in my family read it and I want to curl into a ball. There are mutterings in the back of my head that are better left undisturbed -- or rather, they don't mind coming out into the light to play, but I can't quite handle the reactions they bring up in people I share my house with.

Simple updates are these:

Hobbes, my diabetic dog. He's lost a lot of weight and developed cataracts from the high glucose levels. It took him all of four days to go completely blind from the onset of his first cataract. He's also had neuropathy in his face which caused half of his face to go slack. He's a mess. He makes me cry in frustration because I cannot get his elbow callouses to bleed on cue when it's time to run another blood glucose curve. For dog his size he should be on 8.5 units of insulin twice a day (17 units total). Currently he's on 20 units of insulin twice a day (40 units total) and he still has never registered a single blood glucose test in the normal range. (Yes, my meter works just fine.) He clearly has no pancreas at all. I was getting ready to euthanize him in June, when he suddenly rallied and started eating and putting on weight. (He likes Dear Butcher's ground mixed meat on top of his kibble with a heaping handful of baby carrots on the side.) He crashes into walls in the house, falls off the bed from time to time, and sleeps a lot, but when he's awake he's happy and playful and we'll keep looking after him until he stops eating again.

Bagheera, my lovely black cat. Bagheera was a Christmas present from Dear Butcher a few Christmases ago. He got into cat fight about two months back -- cost me $300 I didn't have at the emergency vet. Sigh. But he healed up fine. Took him to my regular vet for his yearly shots and a check up. Now I've just discovered a growth at the site of his rabies injection. Vet is very careful not to mention the word sarcoma, but I know about rabies injections in cats. I'm supposed to report back to her in two weeks as to whether it's growing. Sigh. Hopefully it's something else. Hopefully there won't be any advancement in diameter.

Neo, my eldest daughter. What an artist. We finished up her year of homeschooling and now she's all set to start up at the public high school in the fall. She went to classes this summer at California College of the Arts where she blew them out of the water. This fall I'll be taking her down to CCA every Saturday where she'll participate in a figure drawing class for high school students. She's a good kid still. Very proud of her.

Saul, you all know Saul. Saul is doing great, fantastic, wonderful, and well. He's still at Cornerstone, the program run by the county that works for him. He's got a good therapist there and is working through a lot of his anxieties. We had an IEP in April that was borderline awful -- my district wants him to come back to the Middle School here and there's no room for him in the Cornerstone Middle School program. But, we actually came away with a good solution. He's being retained next year so he can continue with his therapist, so he's repeat fifth grade. However, once a week he is going to try coming up to his home district's middle school so he can start transitioning into classes. I don't think the Friday thing is going to work AT ALL, but I'm willing to try it if only to say, "Look. Now we have proof that he's not ready to go into large classes."

Phebe, my youngest daughter, went away for a month-long sleep-away camp. She loved it. *Loved* it. She rode horses and swam in a lake and made me a lovely little ceramic pot and slept in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and wants to go back next year.

Me, the blogger. I dunno how I'm doing. Once I got Saul established, I basically fell apart. Right now I'm working on putting all the pieces back together, although I'm finding that some of them don't fit quite right. There's a lot of bruising and rough edges. I went to Kaiser for a check-up and told my doctor that I wanted to see someone in mental health -- I can't sleep and my mind keeps racing. I'm going to this decent enough guy, nothing special, but decent. Every time you go, they have you fill out a magazine survey: Give yourself three points if you've been sad more than five days out of the last week, one point if you've been sad any day during the last week.

I'm sitting in his office last time, saying that I broke out of some of my paralysis and attacked the house. Threw out bag after bag of garbage and sorted through every room. Took me about a month to pull the whole thing together, and I'm still no quite done. He looks at his computer screen. "Yes. I was going to comment that you are different this time. You've gone from a 21 to a 7."

"What?"

"Your score. Last time you were an 'over twenty', now you're a seven!"

Oh good lord. Stop looking at the computer screen and Look At The Patient. I fucking hate Kaiser.

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In other news, I got an email last night from a friend asking me if I'd run for school board. I only have a few more days to "pull papers" to get my name on the ballot. Yeah, with California's budget the way it is? With the HUGE cuts that are coming down the pike for public education AND public mental health (Saul's program) AND county services (Saul's program), now is the time for me to sit on the school board? Oh, I think not. I'd either be throwing things from the podium or sobbing into my shirt at every meeting. Would make for good cable access television, but it's not for me.