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all the bad news we need
Wednesday, February 24 2016
Rain fell for much of the day, and by this evening there was even a fair amount of thunder and lightning, which is highly unusual for this time of year. (I suspect there isn't usually enough energy in cold winter airmasses to generate huge electrical potentials.)
The weather wasn't suitable for gathering firewood, though I took the opportunity to improve my firewood gathering toolkit. I didn't ever again want to find my chain in need of tightening without the tools to do it. So I found a surplus half-inch spanner in my tool drawer, cut off the box end, and then used grinders to whittle the steel stump into a flat screwdriver that fit my particular chainsaw's chain tightener. Despite how small this tool was, it wouldn't do me any good unless I always had access to it when using the saw. And the only way to ensure that was to find a way to stash it in or on the saw such that it would both remain securely attached and could also be easily removed for use. My solution to this challenged was solved by a bit of electrical tape and a rare earth magnet. The loop of aluminum tube forming the front handle had been crimped flat at the bottom and attached to the saw with a couple steel screws. I could stick a powerful magnet onto one of those screws, securing the screwdriver tip of the wrench-screwdriver, which would otherwise be within a concavity in the handle near those screws. Then all I had to do to keep it from flopping around was to wrap some electrical tape around the handle tube over the concavity, forming a loop to support the tool's other end. I also used some polyethylene foam so the sticky part of the tape wouldn't make the tool difficult to extract. Here is what the chain-tightening tool looked like after I was done making it:
Our friend Michæl (of Carrie & Michæl) will be in Los Angeles for the next week, so this evening he came over to drop off his dog Penny, who will be staying with us during that time. Michæl also stayed for a simple dinner Gretchen made from fried tempeh and rice linguine. Gretchen self-deprecatingly described the meal as "hippie," though it wasn't flavored by either cumin or burnt rice.
After dinner, the main vet at the Hurley Vet called to discuss the results of the analysis of the tiny tissue samples removed from Eleanor's enlarged lymph nodes. The vet who had extracted those samples had called us that night and said that in her somewhat-uneducated opinion, they looked benign. But, according to the main vet, the results from the lab were more troubling and were possibly consistent with lymphoma (a kind of cancer). But this vet tends to be a bit of a Chicken Little; he famously once had us take Eleanor to a canine cardiologist in Troy for a murmur that was too subtle for anyone else to hear. In any case, Eleanor is going on 14 years old, and we're not the sort of people who would put her through surgical hell for six more precious months of life. If she has lymphona, our plan is to treat her for pain and swelling but not to make any heroic interventions. But it's still possible that her problem is entirely the result of an infection. Once we learned that her lymph nodes would shrink quickly given a course of antibiotics if and only if they were the result of an infection, we decided to put her on them without further tests. Gretchen will be picking up those antibiotics tomorrow. And if they fail to make the lymph nodes shrink, we have all the bad news we need, and the plan is to switch to making Eleanor comfortable for however many months she has left.
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