Day 12: Huge Turtles, My New Chair, and 85 pages

Wrote just about five pages today; I credit my new office chair, which my husband put together for me yesterday, for the extra productivity. The chair is very comfortable and grounding; I wriggle around less than I did on that awful folding chair. A lot of what I wrote was dialogue between one of my main characters and a crazy new-age hospital chaplain (who I think I need to make a little bit crazier), which takes up more space in terms of lines. Some of it is decent, I think, though it will need fine tuning.

It rained here all day, sometimes very heavily. My husband left for work at eight this morning, and called me on his way to the train to tell me that he'd seen a really big turtle right outside of our building. I put on my kickass Target rainboots and went out to see the turtle, and it was indeed enormous. It looked just like this, except you have to imagine it wet. I suspect it was a female, on her way to lay a nest somewhere a bit away from the small pond at our apartment complex where I think she lives. I hope she made it ok.

Whenever it storms really hard, I look at Perogi, and I think about how glad I am that a sweet dog like her has a warm, dry place to live and lots of soft things to nap on. It's a feeling of being pleased that I can offer her a good life, the kind that she deserves. When I was little, my parents felt this way too, I think. They would always say things like "isn't it nice to have a warm home to live in when it's nasty outside," and I would never really understand what they meant; I loved to play in the rain and snow, and had no idea what it was like to not be able to be warm and safe. To use an awful cliche, I think you have to *be* out in the rain to know how nice it is to "come out of the rain." How will I teach my own children about this luxury that they have?