Stop feeling stuck

Finally got some time to clean.  I reorganized a bit and it feels pretty good to get things under control again.  When I get busy and stressed, which I pretty much am always busy which has the potential to make me stressed, things like cleaning the house and organizing my life goes by the wayside.  Between work, training starting again and my social life, I feel like I rarely have time for myself anymore.  Good thing and a bad thing.  One one hand, I was in a rut of having a lot of time to myself.  Did that for years.  But I am also the kind of person that when I don't have time to myself to decompress and what not I get to feeling a little overwhelmed.  So it has been good to have the morning off to do some much needed cleaning.

Life has been good.  I am ramping up training again and I'm on the fence about that.  It felt SO good not to have to worry about it for a while.  That is probably a hint to my life.  I ran into Sandy from CCI the other day.  She was my trainer when I was raising puppies at CCI and she remembered me.  She has a program  now that she raises and trains service dogs on a smaller scale.  We got to talking and I told her that service dogs were really where my heart was and I would love to get back into it.  I think that having obedience under my belt is really important but day after day of the same thing is driving me a bit crazy.  Service dogs feel like I am actually helping someone.  That's the reason I like rescue.  Anyway, we got to talking and she told me that she's open to having someone take over the training side of her organization more because she'd like to do more traveling with her dogs to crisis points and such.  That would be an incredible opportunity.  Downside, not paid.  Upside, networking.

This really reminds me how much I need to get a puppy that can be a really solid dog again.  Whitman is wonderful and I love him dearly but he will never be a demo dog and he'll never be service or therapy dog material.  That's fine.  But that's what I want in a dog.  So I need to decide if I am going to start looking at breeders to get a really bomb proof puppy or if I am going to get involved in a program like CCI as a puppy raiser again.  I've thought about it and doing CCI would really be what I want to do.  There's no guarentee that I would get that puppy back, that's not really the point, but it is such a wonderful program and I got two incredible dogs out of it.

Sometimes I feel stuck but I need to remind myself that I'm only 27 and still young.  There is still so much time for me to do the things I want, even if I'm not 100% sure what that is.  I recently read The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths by Pat Brown, furthering my education into the creepy criminal mind and true crime, and it actually really inspired me in a way that has nothing to do with my crime obsession.  She was in her 30s when she became interested in the criminal mind and profiling.  Her career didn't really get started in that until she was in her late 40s.  But she made the decision that it was something she was interested in and something she wanted to do and went after it.  If you have the drive and the belief that you can do something and go for it you can do it.  Maybe finding that out later in life is a blessing in some ways.

So I need to stop feeling trapped.  Wherever I end up, go or stay, it was a choice on my part.  You choose to do something and you choose not to do something.  Either way it is a choice.  That's the beauty of life.  I say it over and over again.  Why don't I listen to myself?