When Girlfriends Chase Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

meet this coordinator, Melissa Cresswell, at a Starbucks in Capitol Hill. Apparently Melissa has recently started her own business and doesn’t have her own office yet. That’s fine by me, because, at this rate, my options are running slim. It’s Melissa Cresswell or nothing. (Of course, there’s always the off-chance Martin Short could play the part…) Anyway, I don’t really want to settle for nothing. That hasn’t been panning out so well these past six months. You’d think I could actually get a significant amount of planning done in six months’ time. Not so much.  
    I sling my purse over my shoulder and open the front door. “See you later, Schnicker!” I call out to the best puppy on the planet, who’s still munching on the rawhide stick I gave him a minute ago. “Mommy loves you!”
    Sophie thinks Schnickerdoodle is spoiled, and she’s probably right. I found him some years ago, an abandoned puppy outside of the hospital where I work up on Pill Hill. (It’s really called First Hill, but with three major Seattle hospitals up on the big hill, it gets its funny medicinal nickname.) Sophie says I have a bleeding heart, and she’s probably right. I see a stray dog, and I think he needs a home—my home, naturally. I see a box of kittens outside a Walgreens, and my first inclination is not to scoop up one, or two, or three, but to take the entire box of fuzzy fur balls home.  
    That’s what happened with Schnickerdoodle. I was leaving the hospital one night when I saw a shaking little white and tan puppy in the parking garage. After I had loaded him into my car, I thought, “You look just like a Schnickerdoodle cookie.” And a love connection was made instantly.
    All right, so maybe Schnickerdoodle is spoiled. Not just because he gets his walks at least twice a day, every day, and not because Conner and I buy him a lot of toys and have even given him the third bedroom in the house (yes, it’s the doggie room), but because Schnicker gets to have his mommy home more often than most full-time employed moms.
    I’m a social worker/caretaker in the healthcare field, and I work part of the time at the hospital, and part of the time on the road, going door-to-door to various homes. It’s a great job that I’ve had straight out of college. The hours are flexible, meaning I’m able to be at home often—like today, on a random Wednesday. It also means I’m able to hang out with Schnickerdoodle often, or create seating cards, or watch daytime talk shows that rot my brain. (Honestly, I don’t do the latter that much.)
    It’s also a great gig because I meet so many interesting and fun people. They’re all really old—veterans and elderly people with disabilities. They’re usually really sweet and sometimes a laugh-and-a-half, and they always have such sage advice, even if they might start off with a life lesson and end up recounting what they think they had for breakfast that morning. But hey, they’re adorable, and I love what I get to do. And it feels really good to be able to help someone out who really needs it.
    For instance, one of my patients, Vick, is a double amputee. He fought in a world war, or maybe it was Korea. It was a war that was a long time ago. He won some medals, and he shows them to me every time I visit. He’s a funny old man who loves to tell me knock-knock jokes when he’s not telling me how he and his best platoon buddy performed raids so bloody that not even the movies can depict.
    He needs help bathing and going to the restroom and other things like that, and I’m one of the lucky four caretakers or nurses who gets to help him out. Conner’s amazed when I come home to tell him how my days at work are. Sponge-baths, shaving, diaper-changing, and then there’s making meals, sometimes feeding, and reading or knitting together. Really, there’s almost no limit to what I do as a caretaker. One day it’s watching television for hours on end together, the next I might have to