It’s never a bad idea to count to ten in response to temper. That practice has pulled me out of a lot of situations that could have been a lot worse. Often it’s not the tense circumstances that get me into shit though. It’s usually just day-to-day, casual discourse.

Yesterday an older woman, on the portly side, looked at my dog’s swaying belly and asked me if she’d had puppies recently. My response:

“Nah she’s just an old girl so she’s hanging kind of low.”

I swear to Christ the woman cocked her head to the side like a spaniel and then looked down at her own hanging breasts, and then back at me with no small measure of disgust.

Maybe I need to learn to count to at least five and assess the landscape before responding to anything at all.