Talking about feeling like a statue, I recently learned in working with my new therapist that I struggle with social anxiety. I originally thought this was because of my introversion, but she explained to me that introversion is more so about the fact of, like, where you recharge and you recharge alone, and social anxiety explains the stress that I feel in social situations, especially in large groups. And I was out at our teeny tiny little local bar with my partner two or three weeks ago and there was an older woman there. She's probably like, I don't know, pushing 60? I don't know, 60, 65, and I know her casually, she lives down the - ooh, lives down the street, but, yeah, she was saying like some kind of inappropriate things all night, like subtly raunchy things, innuendos, and trying to get a reaction out of me. Which was weird.  She had explained to us a few times throughout the night that whenever her husband agreed to go to the bar with her, he said they would not be dancing that night and I told her, you know, "You are grown independent woman. You don't need your husband's permission to dance if you want to dance. So go dance," and later on in the night, we're literally getting ready to leave. Like, I've got my jacket in my lap and I'm, like, mentally preparing for the transition to go home. She pulls my jacket out of my lap and then immediately grabs onto my wrists and pulls me out onto the dance floor, tries to get me to dance, and as somebody who's introverted with social anxiety, I really don't enjoy dancing outside of my own privacy. It really, really, really stresses me out and definitely kind of puts me into a fight or flight mode. So initially, I tried to fight and get away, and she had such a grip on my wrist that I could not get away from her, like, and this is an old woman so, yeah, it was really stressful for me. I really didn't appreciate it, and she had me out there for probably a solid, like, minute to two minutes, in front of all these people, you know, which just made it worse for me.  And I, like, wasn't dancing at all. She was dancing while holding on to my wrist, and I was just standing there and trying so hard to keep my arms…

Something I am grateful for is that I got a new dog this week! I was at work, and I work kind of near an animal shelter. So pretty frequently, we'll see, during work meetings, the volunteers walking dogs around our building. And for some reason this dog really caught my eye, it was - it looked like a lab, but it was really tall. So I wasn't sure what kind of dog it was, but I assumed it was maybe a lab or a golden mixed with something else. So I went over to the animal shelter and, originally, I was just interested in looking at the cats, maybe petting some dogs. But I started to think about it more seriously, so I put my name in and they don't hold dogs for anyone, but they told me that this dog would be available on a certain day. So when dogs are brought in by Animal Control, there's a period of time that they're kept at the shelter, just in case the owners show up. They obviously check for a chip right away and if they're able to contact someone they will, but otherwise they just keep them for a while waiting for the owners, possibly. And this dog seemed really taken care - well taken care of. It was neutered and has some training at least, so they were pretty surprised when no one came to get it. Shortly after we adopted, we looked all over Michigan on different websites to see if somebody had lost the dog, but we weren't able to find anything. But anyway, I saw this dog, was interested, filled out the paperwork. Eventually, when the dog became available, I brought my partner over there and he was interested in getting a second dog, but feeling a little bit cautious because our first dog is really reactive. She will play with other dogs and it's okay, but she has to know them pretty well. The first, you know, few minutes of her meeting a dog are scary enough that it's not something we do super often. She's never actually like bitten a dog or anything, but she really snarls and with smaller dogs it's worse, so we just try to avoid that altogether. But larger dogs, it tends to be okay. So we were hopeful that they would get along, and after maybe five…