It’s Friday morning at 6:47 and while I’ll concede that this is not a particularly early hour for those who work a “normal” sort of day, I haven’t worked anything resembling eight (or nine) to five since…um…well…ever. Most days, I sleep til nine or so, do a couple hours of work without leaving bed except to get coffee from the kitchen, and then shower, breakfast, walk the dogs and go back to work. We’re usually awake til 2 AM.

Today however, we’re up early, and while most of our early rising is for good things (like vacations) or at least neutral things (like business trips), being awake before dawn THIS morning is necessitated by the fact that we have to drop Zorro at the vet between seven and eight, it takes twenty minutes to get there in zero traffic, and neither of us has been in morning traffic in months. Years even.

He’s only having a dental, with this stupid abscessed tooth on the “must be removed” list (and probably others), but between the epilepsy and the heart condition, there’s a fifty-fifty chance he won’t survive the anesthesia, hence our worry and distraction over the past weeks.

And now…we go.