This post is real.

Dawg and I planned the last post together. We did not break up. We are very much together, and happily so.

The words in my post were crafted as I sat on the couch, channeling my inner sadness. My inner insecurities. Conversations we’ve had. Feeling the pain of hurdles and challenges we have made it past and conquered.

Recently Dawg and I had a conversation in which we joked about us breaking up over him leaving his socks on the floor.

Socks on the floor can be replaced by the toilet seat up or dishes left in the sink or clutter being left on common surfaces or [insert something that might annoy a person]. The funny thing is, none of these things annoy me.

I am a kid at heart. And I’ve already been through the trauma of trying to live the perfect married life and failing miserably at it because I wasn’t happy.

But even with my kidlike spirit (which, I’m sorry to say, is what allowed me to post that devilish April Fool’s Day tale to the Internet in the first place), I value the importance of communication with my partner in life. We have made the pact that we are together for life, without the piece of paper that for other people is extremely necessary, but we’ve both had before and it did not end well at all. We are very serious about going on life’s journey together, which to us makes it quite laughable that we’d break up over me being mad about socks on the floor. My mom, Bdogg, Britt, and Robin have all been here, they know how we live: like teenagers putting off the chore of cleaning our room until a parental unit yells, or until we run out of clean underwear.

Things are different now that I have a new job. We are both busy. We don’t get a lot of time together. And sometimes it does feel like we’re not connecting on things… and then we say something to each other and we talk it out and we smooth things over and we move on with life.

Nothing about what I said about Dawg is directly true. He always calls, unless there is a reason why he can’t. He always greets me and the girls. He may go right to the bed, but he’s waiting for his Squishy Poppy (that’s me) to join him so we can talk about our days or take a nap together. The only time he has ever thrown Twitter off him is when he’s asleep and she bites or scratches him and he doesn’t even know what he’s doing.

Dawg is a good man. A very good man. When he read over the post ahead of its publish, his statement was “wow, I sound like a douchebag.” Since then he has been telling me over and over that he loves me and that we’re never breaking up. That’s who Dawg really is.

I do hate feet, but I find Dawg’s feet charming. I’ll even touch them. I think it’s hysterical when Twitter finds pleasure in carrying Dawg’s socks around.

I have had fear like any rational person would, about uprooting my entire Vermont life to try life in NYC. About walking into an already existing and highly complicatedly complex world. If I wanted simple I would have stayed on that couch in Vermont continuing to watch a big screen TV to pass the hours, but I didn’t do that… I chose the harder, more rewarding path.

How many times have I said I love it here? How I love riding the train? How I love my new job? How I love living in the apartment with Dawg and our furbabies? Many. I love him, I love his family, I love his friends, I love his “bad habits”, I love him when he acts like a boy and does silly things, and he always loves me, my family, my friends, my “bad habits”, when I act like a girl and do bitchy things.

I mean everything to Dawg, and he means everything to me. This is true love. True love with communication. A formula for success, as you all knew it already was.

It’s all good here.

Please accept my apologies if you felt the heartache in my post and were angry when you found out this was a joke. That post was a work of fiction, written based on life experience.

Whenever I can I perform acts of kindness for strangers. A period of unemployment certainly helped to remind me of my love for this action, and I am grateful that my new job location allows me to have almost daily opportunities to help people I will probably never see again.

If I helped you today, even just through my words, please pay it forward to someone else in need. Thanks.

If you haven’t noticed by my barely around existence mixed with “zomg I’m tired / I’m on a spaceship!” tweets, I’ve returned to the working world.

I’ve been there two weeks now and I know that I deserve this job but I wonder every single day how the stars quite aligned this time around. I love my new job. It’s a *dream* job to me.

Twitter is not taking it well. (Just to clarify: I mean the cat.) She doesn’t understand why Mommy now gets up before the heat turns on instead of letting her wake me up when she hears it turn on. She doesn’t understand why I leave every morning with Dawg now. She doesn’t understand why I am gone for 12 hours every weekday. She doesn’t understand why I’m in a rush to give the girls their treat but then I’m ready to collapse and zonk out.

It broke my heart the first few days, but I’m mostly over it now. She is bonding better to Dawg than ever before, so there’s good to come out of this. Also, we have a new game that we play where she goes under the bed covers and I race my hand over them so she can attack my hand from underneath. I <3 that game.

I won’t be speaking about my employer because you will all know who it is. There are people in the desert of third world countries who know my employer. So, I’m keeping it hushy in this space. If you know me on LinkedIn or if I gushed at you about my good news in email or text, well, then, you know already.

I love everyone at my new job. And everyone at my new job thinks I’m a nice person because they encourage me with their niceness to be the nice person I am when I’m not backed into a corner like a caged animal.

But I continue to love all of you too. I think about you a lot despite my quietness. Doing my best to maintain the fun sites, doing my best to keep my Buy-Her commitment to write tech tips every other week now that I have a job, plus write one review a month. Doing my best to have quality family time despite getting home at 7pm and going to bed at midnight then waking up again at 5:30am.

Doing my best, period.

The end, bye.