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Neville trolls the neighbor dogs
Tuesday, March 24 2026
The weather today was cool but sunny, and this was enough to get the dogs sunning themselves in the driveway. But then they wandered over to near Crazy Dave's cottage and Charlotte started monotonously yipping at Dave's dogs the way she does. So I walked over there to get her to stop and also to get a sense of what the canine social dynamic was. I found Charlotte on our side of the shallow (but cliff-faced in places) gorge separating our place from Crazy Dave's. She was barking and could not be convinced to stop. This was evidently due to her horror at seeing her brother Neville blithely walking around near Crazy Dave's cottage while his two dogs (it seems he's down from three to two) kept circling around him. One of them, the grey-white Australian shepherd who is not named Bridgette, was barking directly into Neville's face, only inches away. He or she seemed openly hostile but unwilling to make contact. Brigitte, on the other hand, seemed more ambivalent and excited, occasionally sniffing Neville and whimpering but rarely barking. As for Neville, he was wagging his tail like a happy dog does and peeing on every landmark he could given his limited urine budget. Then he would scratch the ground aggressively with his hind legs, often flinging dirt, leaves, and perhaps even stones into Dave's dogs' faces. It was comical to see how unperturbed they were making him. He also appeared to sense that whenever the grey-white dog came charging at him, the key was to advance, not retreat. This gave Neville complete control over the situation. He was, in effect, too charismatic to bully. I tried to get him to come back so Charlotte's barking would stop, but things had to play out according to his leisurely timeline. Eventually he climbed up out of the gorge and only then did I get Charlotte to stop her barking. I should mention that Crazy Dave was there the whole time, but he mostly kept out of sight on the other side of his cottage so as not to have to engage, which is exactly what I would've done had I been in his position.
Starting at some point yesterday and continuing all day today, I had another weird health-related issue. This time it was pain located in the tissue atop several ribs in the center of the left half of my rib cage (that is, on my left chest). This tissue would be tender when I touched it, but it wasn't aggravated by breathing or much by moving, suggesting the problem, whatever it was, was confined to within a several-millimeter-thick layer of muscle. I wondered if perhaps it had been bruised. But I hadn't remembered anything happening. Maybe a dog had violently kicked me in the night while I was sleeping? I looked at the skin and it might've been very slightly reddened. But it didn't look like a bruise. I've had other freakish issues like this, beginning in my mid 30s. Maybe they're age related or just flukes of entropy.
At some point I went to the Chamomile Wall with the big 18 inch Kobalt electric chainsaw to cut up some fallen trees. But this wasn't a firewood salvaging operation. A couple old bigtooth aspens had callen over the course of the last couple years, including one back in the fall that had partly landed on the wall itself. I wanted to further break down these trees to facilitate their eventual removal, even if they are not sources of good firewood. Usually æsthetics are a secondary or even tertiary concern, especially out in the forest. But the wall itself is an æsthetic object that is growing in response to my obsessive artistic compulsions, and I didn't want the fallen trees to detract from how it looks. I was only able to remove a few of the smaller fallen trees from the wall area, though I managed to cut the trunk of the biggest fallen aspen into segments that might be movable, especially if they ever dry out (which may not actually happen for a member of the genus Populus; see my experience with huge chunks of cottonwood). While I was at the wall, I also added more rocks to its structure near its west end. (I've been building this end thicker and taller after having sketched it out with a low line of rocks some days ago.)
Gretchen has heard good things about the teevee series the West Wing from friends such as Kelly and Brian, so she wanted to try watching it. So after Jeopardy! tonight, we watched the first episode. It's important to note that I am not really into shows featuring lots of frenetic action in crowded, sprawling offices. I don't pay enough attention to follow along, and so I become increasingly alienated from the plot. I also don't appreciate swelling soundtracks telling me how I should feel (a feature that dates the show to the late 1990s and which is less common these days). That said, there were brief parts of the show that I found interesting. But I have a feeling Gretchen, who genuinely enjoyed it, will be watching it mostly by herself. One additional point: it's sad to see a depiction of the White House that, despite its flaws, has good people working in it trying to do good things. Knowing how the White House is now, with its collection of lickspittles, sociopaths, hacks, and chameleons, even seeing a fictionalized depiction of it as a more traditionally American political organization is depressing. How far our country has fallen!
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