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another worrisome lump
Wednesday, January 28 2026
Over the past couple weeks, a weird growth appeared on the underside of Neville's muzzle near his chin. I haven't wanted to feel it, but Gretchen has been feeling it, and she hasn't like what she was feeling. Over the past week it is has grown quickly and now is visible and black mark. Today we had an appointment with the Hurley vet to have it looked at, so of course we also brought Charlotte. Because we only had one leash in the Forester (the Bolt's battery needed charging), we decided that I should bring Neville in first and then send a message to Gretchen when we were leaving the waiting room. There were a couple other dogs in the waiting room at the time, which seemed like it might overstimulate Charlotte.
When the vet checked out Neville's lump, she didn't immediately think it was cancer, which was a good sign. But it didn't exactly feel like a lump of pus either. But it was behaving a little like an infection in that it was suddenly leaking some sort of fluid. It was a possible it was a tooth abscess or a salivary gland infection. The vet took a few samples to be professionally analyzed and prescribed a course of antibiotics should it prove to be an infection. Then the vet tech came in with the bill, and somehow it was over $400. Gretchen grumbled a little, particularly at the "OSHA compliance fee," which is exactly the sort of junk fee you can expect from a vet office that starts saying on their answering machine that the messages miight be used for training purposes while referring to employees as "team members." (Yes, the Hurley vet now does these things.)
Gretchen expected a quiet day at the Golden Notebook today, so she brought both Neville and Charlotte. Though Charlotte is a little high-energy to be a bookstore dog, the main thing keeping Gretchen from taking her in the past was the fact that the front door didn't latch and could be pushed open if not dead-bolted (that is, whenever the store was open for business). But that door has since been fixed.
I'm always a little fascinated with large amounts of snow and find little projects to do in it. When I was kid, I would build beasts and buildings from the snow, but I'd also make elaborate path systems for the chickens. Today I dug a path to the woodshed (as our indoor wood supply is rapidly depleting) and then made another path connecting the woodshed to the dog house, which another path already ran to (since Charlotte likes to carry fun things to lick out to the dog house to work on).
I resumed work on my I2C bootloader project, using the serial logging capability to closely investigate where exactly the code was reaching. In so doing, I found I could reliably switch to the bootloader and begin writing a new sketch with it. It would crap out after 128 bytes, but I confirmed with a hex editor that the first 128 bytes were indeed correct. So then I turned to ChatGPT, providing code and logs and asking what might go wrong. Again it confidently gave me code to implement, which I did on the off-chance it would work. But if anything, it seemed to be making my system work worse, not better. I should know better, but I do it anyway.
This evening I made spaghetti with a side frying pan of Impossible sausage, somewhat-dehydrated mushrooms, and onions. The episode of Nathan For You that we watched tonight was the one where Nathan fakes a video of a little pig saving a drowning baby goat, a video that actually went mega-viral back when the series was being produced (in 20212 or 2013).
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