Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   Neville's face this morning
Saturday, September 23 2017
In the night at about 5:00am, we were awaken by the sounds of our dogs barking. Ramona was nearer (though she's also louder, so perhaps not) and she was barking the way she does when she's responding to another dog barking. The other dog in this case was a much quieter Neville, who actually sounded like he was barking at something specific (although I'm less familiar with his different styles of barking). Gretchen was tired of hearing it, so I went out to try to find them. I took the firewood-gathering path down to the Stick Trail, which I crossed and went out to the edge of the escarpment to look down into Chamomile gulch, shining with my flashlight and hoping to hear the dogs. But they were now silent, and there was no use looking for them in the darkness if they weren't making any noise. I went back to bed and waited nervously, unable to fall asleep until the dogs returned. Eventually I heard the sound of two different dogs come through the pet door, though I never heard the enthusiastic shake that Neville does after coming through the pet door (a shake that includes the percussive thwocking sound of his big loose lips flapping against his teeth).
Much later, well after the sun had risen, I was on the couch out in the teevee room when Gretchen expressed a sound of abject horror. What the fuck had happened? Had North Korea been nuked overnight? But no, it was that Neville's muzzle was full of porcupine quills. Evidently the rukus last night had been Neville having his first porcupine encounter. (I don't know if she's learned her lesson from the three or four times she's been quilled, but Ramona apparently hadn't participated.) Gretchen managed to pluck quill out of Neville's face, and I got a couple out too. But he had at least 30 more to go, and there was no way he was going to put up with the removal of those without sedation. If he was going to have to go to the vet at all, we decided it was best to have all the quills removed that way.


Neville on the bed this morning. Click to see a wider view that includes Gretchen.

Gretchen quickly arranged for me to drop off Neville at the Hurley Vet. I walked into the waiting area with Neville, who looked both adorable and pathetic with all those spines sticking out of his face, and of course all the other people there with their poofy little dogs with imbreeding-related problems were all very curious.
On the way home, I stopped at the post office to buy a money order to drop into an envelope Gretchen was sending to one of her former prisoner-students, who is now at the prison in Fishkill. I'd never bought a money order before and didn't know you couldn't buy one with a credit card.
Back at the house, Gretchen and I took a nice walk with just Ramona up the Farm Road and the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then back via the Stick Trail. It was the first time since her hospitalization that Gretchen had walked on a trail (as opposed to the Farm Road). She certainly wasn't 100%, and our walk was slow. But she did okay, and was only best by one emergency defecation. (She's been shitting as much as ten times a day and is now down to less than 120 pounds, the lightest she has been since she was something like 14 years old.)
Back at the house, there was a message on the answering machine saying Neville's face had been dequilled and he was ready to be picked up. Gretchen decided to come along for that errand, the first time she'd been in the Prius since I drove her to Northern Dutchess Hospital back in early September. Neville's dequilling ended up costing us nearly $400, which is about twice what I remember one of Ramona's dequillings costing. They tend to over-medicalize everything at the Hurley Vet, for example slicing into Neville's gum to try to get the remains of a quill that probably should've been left to find its own way out. They also prescribed a course of antibiotics, which is completely unnecessary.
This afternoon, I focused my attention on the TinyMCE templating system I'd been working on off-and-on for over a month. Today I made great progress, integrating CodeMirror code editors in three different places, and implementing all the pipes and tubes for storing and retrieving necessary data via AJAX. [REDACTED]


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