The Latest Rendition of "The Dog Ate My Homework"

I really have been trying to get back into a regular blogging routine. Where once I was posting five times a week, lately I have been lucky to get in two. It seems that there is always something that comes up. Each thing, in and of itself, sounds perfectly reasonable. But as a list, it begins to resemble the kid telling her teacher why her math assignment is late once again.

My list thus far has included: "I had to take my grandmother to the hospital." "My parrot had a heart attack." "I was up all night at the newspaper."

See what I mean? Well, this week, I was resolved to get back on track. Ah, but wait. Are you ready for the latest, greatest excuse?

"The dog scratched my eye."

On Wednesday night, for once I got home early on a deadline night from the newspaper. I was going to get a good night's sleep, and spend the next several days catching up on things, including blogging. It was 10:30 p.m. - Sabrina was already fast asleep; she wakes up at 3 a.m., starting work at 5 a.m. in Santa Rosa. I crawled into bed, and as I was lying down, my lab Ripley flopped down next to me in the dark, closer than I realized. Suddenly I had an excruciating pain in my left eye. She had unintentionally stuck one of her nails directly into my eyeball (not the lid, the eye). I capped my hand over the eye and drew my breath in sharply and audibly, loud enough to wake Sabrina up. "What's wrong?" I was barely able to talk. The pain was incredible. I wasn't sure at that point what I would find when I uncupped my eye.

After a few moments, time enough to get my breath back, I went to the bathroom to look. My eye was tearing, and very red. But what was alarming, was that I could actually see what looked like a rip in the white of the eye. We called Kaiser - and then what had been an early night turned into a late one.

I was lucky, and it ended up being only a few scratches to the cornea, with no damage to the eye itself. There were particles of dirt from Ripley's nails in the eye, so the nurses did a 20-minute saline/water rinse to clean out the eye, I was given antibiotic eye drops for the next five days, and painkillers to help me sleep for the next couple of nights - REM sleep is the hardest, because your eye moves rapidly, so the painkillers help alleviate that.

But here comes the excuse part. I was told to rest my eyes for at least a couple of days, not reading or spending time on the computer. I managed to get through all of Thursday, only cheating by checking my Blackberry. By the end of the day, my eye was tired.

It's feeling much better today, after a second night's rest, and so I am daring to sit down at the keyboard.

Really, though. Enough is enough. Could we get through just two weeks without a trip to a hospital or an emergency room? Barring any more unforeseen disasters, I truly will be blogging on a more regular basis!