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fourth quilling
Friday, August 5 2016
One of Gretchen's friends [REDACTED] is taking some time off work and staying in Stone Ridge while battling various demons. She's having an affair with some woman she met in alcoholics anonymous and fallen off the wagon after eight years of being clean. Now she snorts so much cocaine that she's developed an abscess in her nose (and depleted her life savings). And her marriage to her wife is, of course, ruined. Today this friend came over for a visit and ate homemade ice cream with Gretchen out on the east deck. I came out for brief periods in among meetings. Later, Gretchen and the friend went over to the brick mansion so Gretchen could show it off and also meet up with someone from Craigslist who wanted the old hot water heater. This time, the guy actually showed up and bought the water heater (the price was $75). He was so appreciative that he later emailed Gretchen a photo of it saying it had "saved" him. (As we know from recent experience, a new hot water heater installed costs nearly $1000.)
I spent much of the afternoon migrating some code I'd written from using Guzzle to cURL as an HTTPS client. Guzzle is a big sprawling library that requires a package management system, whereas cURL is pretty much built-in to PHP. I'd used Guzzle on the recommendation of the third party whose services I was integrating, but today I learned that Guzzle isn't compatible with the older version of PHP on our server. And then it turned out that making the API calls weren't much more complicated in good old cURL than they'd been in new-fangled Guzzle. As a plus, I could get rid of that vendor directory and its 100+ files.
I'd taken a 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse to help me through the afternoon, though it didn't seem to pack quite the punch I remembered from recent weeks. I might have to cut back my use of it so I don't acclimate to it too completely.
In the middle of the night, Gretchen kept hearing Ramona barking off in the forest, but whenever she tried to go get her, the barking would stop. It's impossible to find a dog in the forest if they won't come when called (which Ramona won't do if pursuing an animal) and won't bark either. Eventually, though, there was enough barking for Gretchen to track Ramona down. When Gretchen got back to the house with the dogs (Neville had been with Ramona of course, though he hadn't been quilled), she revealed that Ramona had been quilled yet again by a Porcupine (this was the fourth time; the last time was in May of 2014). The quilling didn't seem too bad; and I was able to yank two quills out immediately, leaving seven visible ones in a centralized cluster on her lower lip. But after that, there was no getting the other ones. Ramona struggled in my arms so violently that she left a big scratch on my upper left thigh and a mild hematoma on my penis. It looked like we were going to need the expensive after-hours services of a veterinary professional.
Since Gretchen had retrieved the dogs from the forest, it was my task to take Ramona to the emergency vet (the one near Miron's liquor). I took both dogs, of course.
The emergency vet injected Ramona with a sedative, and though it made her sleepy, it wasn't enough to get the quills out. They had to knock her completely out, a more expensive procedure. Meanwhile, Neville and I were hanging out in the waiting room with Diego, the friendly three-legged cat I first met after Eleanor was beat up by a raccoon. Diego was delighted when Neville came up and sniffed his face, though he seemed a little disappointed to be ignored (at east by Neville) after that.
The cost of tonight's adventure came to $500. Had I known it was going to cost that much, I would've tried harder to get those remaining quills out myself (though there was also one I hadn't seen somewhere in Ramona's mouth). By the time I got home, the sun had already risen in the northish east.
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