“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.” – Walt Whitman

It’s eleven-thirty. Only 30 minutes remain before the day turns over at  midnight.  Tonight is tranquil. I am sitting on my sofa writing on a wooden desk with Happy, Buffalo, and Mango sleeping around me.

I failed to get this note started some 20 minutes ago due to a sudden demand from my stomach. I haven’t had dinner since taking a big bowl of rice coupled with a much bigger bowl of shrimp and cabbage salad at 2:30 p.m. I had the feeling I could eat a horse after spending nearly 3 hours at a spa.

I stepped down, walked to the fridge, opened it and closed its door after a quick glance. I decided to warm the leftover rice and have it with soya sauce to save time. My puppies had woken up, with Buffalo and Mango sharing some rice I put on my hands for them.

They love jasmine rice but I don’t satisfy them often to keep them from diabetes. Second, one of the eight dogs I had in the 2000s passed away from this disease in 2014. The vets then noted to me that rice, which my ex-husband and I fed him and his family day in and day out, could put dogs at a higher risk of the disease.

Overall, today – Tuesday, June 09, 2026 – is the second day I managed to keep my day on track though it hasn’t run the way I had planned.

For instance, there has been no desperate urge to retreat beneath the blanket and play global chess matches on Duolingo. For less than six months this year, I have gone from having zero command of global chess tactics to accumulating more than 3,000 matches – 3,507 to be exact – under my three Duolingo accounts.

What matters is I have ticked all the items in my to-do list planned for the day before the stroke of midnight.

A Second Round?

I got startled when Happy jumped to the sofa behind me by himself. My almost-8-kilo son always asks me to scoop him up whenever he sees me step onto the sofa. With the courageous jump, does he mean to tell me: “Mom, you see I’m doing alright now!”.

This morning, Happy was unwell. He ate the breakfast – which comprised of Royal Canin kibbles and boiled chicken – and his stomach failed to retain any food. The last time he vomited was at least six weeks ago.

I hadn’t put Happy under my radar yet. He was still running, barking and acting as my houses’ chief of police as usual. About one hour later, I gave him some 150ml of formula milk for dogs mixed with warm water, and he drank it up. I thought his stomach seemed doing fine.

But I was wrong. He just threw up all the milk almost as soon as he consumed it. Your stomach was truly upsetting, baby!

Happy has been part of my single life since he was two months old, exactly 61 days old. I adopted him one day before his two-month birthday on February 28, 2022. I chose to have a puppy with the hope that his presence would help ease my depression.

Probiotics + Yogurt
When Happy was about 1 year old, I noticed it was easy for his stomach to get upset when I failed to feed him on time. I wished I could do so but my work schedule in an office sometimes troubled me. I believed this morning’s vomit resulted from the fact that Happy was fed breakfast around 8 a.m., or 12 hours since his last meal yesterday.

This morning, I had a spa session scheduled for 10. I was running late. Before swinging to the spa across the street, I handed my cousin a vial of Enterogermina and asked him to squirt it into Happy’s mouth soon after I left home.  He nodded his head. I also asked him to call me if Happy vomited again. And he nodded his head.

Enterogermina was effective in soothing Happy’s troubling stomach – the pet shop owner advised me from day 1 to use it in case Happy’s stomach was unwell. With no call from my cousin while I was at the spa, I assumed Happy had been alright after getting Enterogermina.

I returned home at nearly 14:00. My cousin greeted me by saying Happy had vomited for the third time. That stressed me out as Enterogermina seemingly hadn’t worked this time. I asked if he had given Happy the oral probiotics supplement. “I forgot to do it.” – he said.

I hated the way my cousin communicated. He always assured me that he had understood my sayings or messages whenever I asked him to do something. I offered him a paid job as my personal assistant to help me take care of my homes after I lost Strawberry and needed someone to help me take care of the puppies while I was swallowing the pain. And most of the time, he just forgot to do things or did things differently from what I had asked him. He repeatedly made me feel as if the last thing he would do was to put his heart and soul into the works he was engaged in.

I almost scooped Happy up and called the trusted taxi driver to take him to the vet hospital. Three consecutive vomits in six hours signaled something serious inside. A week ago, I returned from a spa session and ended up rushing Mango to the hospital right away, which marked the start of the worrying and sleepless week.

I was just fully relaxed yesterday and now history seemed repeating itself. Has the storm come back for a second round?

As the Enterogermina vial was still on the dining table, I squirted it into Happy’s mouth without a delay. I was nervously awaiting his stomach’s reaction. 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 15 minutes. 20 minutes and 30 minutes. It seemed like the probiotic had succeeded to settle his digestive system.

Ah, I had sugar-free yogurt in the fridge. It is one of Happy’s favorite snacks. I ran upstairs to take yogurt and offered him one third of a serving. Happy licked all the yogurt on his plate. And no more vomit at all since then.  I could finally exhale a sigh of relief.

I felt assured to offer him food about an hour later. I asked my cousin to help me watch him and let me know right away in case he would vomit again. Happy prefers to stay downstairs during the day while I am upstairs most of the time. I prefer not to share the living space with my cousin, whose living style is an ocean different from mine, to keep my soul calm as much as it can.

No reports from my cousin since Happy ate food I gave him and the subsequent meal in the early evening. I couldn’t believe I was able to stop the “storm” right in my doors thanks to using a combination of Enterogermina and yogurt. A repeated lesson learned for me!

Thank you for giving me your like to my first entry yesterday. That first like came as a real milestone to my journey. It means to me that my writing did reach someone on the other end of the screen, and you may have connected with my story.

Many thanks to you, those who have read through this line, for being with me on this journey. I’ll see you in my third entry, written on Wednesday, June 10.

Have a wonderful day wherever you are!

 Lavender Papaya

[2. Tuesday, June 22, 2026]