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Neville now heartworm-free
Wednesday, October 14 2026
[REDACTED]
It was a gorgeous day in the Hudson Valley, with temperatures that bordered on hot. I could tell things were unusual because all the irritating airborne insects were back and the ticks that had appeared on my torso on previous days had retreated to wherever they spend the warmest weather.
While I was sitting at my workstation in the laboratory, I heard Charlotte barking like a crazy dog down near the gulch between our place and Crazy Dave's cottage. Her barking had a quality to it that suggested Neville was also down there. So I ran down there and of course Neville was there. By then he was wagging his tail and trying to sniff noses with Luna, the grey, black, and white Australian shepherd who lives with Charlotte archnemesis Brigette (who is more of a brown). Luna, being a complete spaz, wasn't being particularly pleasant in response and was monotonously barking in Neville's face. As I was fetching Neville, I heard Crazy Dave's wife (who is, I think, a professional social worker) call for Luna to come home. She also blew that high pitched whistle that Dave blows. That seemed to work, though I had to carry Neville back homeward as far as the greenhouse to reset his wandering inclination and make him start climbing the stone steps up to the north end of our house. Neville was still not supposed to be exercising for fear of dislodging chunks of heartworm from his post-vermicidal heart, but I am no longer worried at all about this happening.
Later in the afternoon, Gretchen sent me a message saying the results were back from Neville's blood test and he is now officially heartworm-free. But the vet said that we should still be restricting his movement for another week. That itself was a concession on his part; technically he should be movement-restricted for as much as four additional weeks. But evidently that is only for dogs who have been severely infested. As for me, the only restrictions I will be imposing on Neville's exercise will be the ones that Gretchen is present for. She is often a stickler for following procedure exactly, even when it's clearly just theatre. (Interestingly, though, she doesn't have any desire to adopt habits that insure that safety is always the outcome. For example, despite my many attempts to get her to always look under the car for cats before driving off, she seems to regard doing this as somehow silly, even though she herself once killed a cat by crushing her head beneath a tire.)
During some phase of the afternoon when Neville was out sunning himself in the driveway, I heard him barking his quiet "woo woo woo woo" bark. So I went out to see a strange car in our driveway. It was a beat up old sedan dragging a piece of plastic from beneath the front bumper and it was driven by a young hispanic man. He'd apparently just delivered a package (some titanium carbide drill bits to replace some I'd worn out this summer on my cabin deck project). I know the various drive-share and delivery services require a certain quality of car, and so I'd assumed any such "make money driving your own car" services were the same. But evidently there are services that do not car what car you drive. (This also explains a shiny yellow sports car that appeared in a our driveway a week or so ago; driving such a car for a delivery service is particularly foolish given their fuel demands and reliability issues.)
This afternoon I took Charlotte for the usual walk down the Gulleys Trail and then back on the Stick Trail. Again, I worked on all four stone walls I passed, and again I brought the firewood hauling backpack to retrieve some pieces from the ad hoc bluestone mine. Those relatively small backpack loads over the course of a week add up to about the limit of what I feel comfortable hauling to the Adirondacks in one trip with the Chevy Bolt.
For dinner, I made my usual Wednesday spaghetti, cooking broccoli with the pasta and chopping up the onions, mushrooms, and tempeh into little bits as I fried it so it would form a nice crumble in the marinara sauce. Later, after dinner, I took a bath to wash away all the sweat accumulated from my many bluestone gathering forays.
I managed to get Neville outside to piss before he could pee into anything I would then have to wash. I also reduced his evening medication down to half of a 600mg a gabapentin tablet and no trazadone. (For months now he has been getting a whole 600mg of gabapentin and 100mg of trazadone every morning and evening.)
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