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big block of red oak
Wednesday, August 5 2026
Early this morning I somehow managed to get Neville into the Bolt to take him to the Hurley vet for his first heart worm treatment. (Charlotte hates it when she doesn't get to travel with Neville.) The heart worm treatment is involved and requires sedation, so I was asked what would be the protocol if his heart were to stop during the procedure. I thought for a moment and opted for them to perform CPR in such an unlikely scenario. Then the tech told me that each CPR attempt would cost $500, and it started sounding like a cash printing machine. That's what private equity has done to everything it touches: it breeds mistrust and makes the customer feel like a sucker. What if they said they needed to perform CPR six times but now he was fine? So I then decided to opt out of CPR in such cases, saying Neville had had a good life. The tech, who knows Neville, agreed. (That probably wasn't part of the script she was reading from.) I rationalized this by thinking to myself that if his heart gave out during the procedure, he probably wouldn't last long even if he were to be saved.
Gretchen had a prescription for a very powerful prescription non-steroid anti-inflammatory medication waiting for her at the CVS, so that was the other thing I'd been tasked to pick up. When I got to the CVS, the pharmacy in the back was dark, but a message on a self-serve prescription registration terminal said that it would be opening at 8:00am, which was only a few minutes away. But that came and went, so I asked a staffer when it opened and he said it was supposed to have been 8:00, but the pharmacist had yet to arrive. Evidently he was the one with the key. You can't just give any rando employee access to a pharmacy! It took fifteen minutes, but at some point the pharmacist arrived, the lights came on, and I got the medication.
Back home on Hurley Mountain, Gretchen had just gotten word that Neville's heart worm procedure could not proceed because we'd neglected to stop giving him Rimadyl (which he takes for his joint health) the appropriated number of days previously. This was a bit of information the vet office had failed to give us. So I had to go back to the vet (this time with a very excited Charlotte) to pick him up. He apparently hadn't peed yet this morning, because the moment he got outside he peed for the better part of an entire minute.
Some hour or so after Gretchen took the new NSAI medication, it really seemed to be helping with her pain. She was still far from cured, but she decided she could work her shift at the bookstore. Sadie wanted to hang out in Woodstock, so she drove Gretchen there in her car (and Sadie eventually left from there, after having successfully hand-sold a book while in the bookstore). Meanwhile I took Charlotte for a not-terrible walk down the Stick Trail and then homeward via a shortcut to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail.
Later this afternoon I decided to carry through on something I'd been thinking about. Some weeks back, I'd cut through a massive red oak lying across the Chamomile Gorge Trail in order to make that trail less of a bushwhack. But after the success I'd had with that black cherry stool, I wanted to make a huge stool with a piece of that red oak. So I took the big 18 inch Kobalt electric chainsaw with me to that red oak and cut a round from it and then proceeded to cut out all the material between four stubby legs. This produced an enormous amount of saw dust and soon I was sweating profusely in the hot humid summer air. Once I had the initial work done, I rolled and carried that nascent stool down the rest of the Chamomile Gorge Trail and placed it just uphill from the end of a guard rail on Dug Hill Road so I could swing by and pick it up at my convenience. I'd taken a full 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning, and it always feels good to do such crazy feats of brute strength while under its effects.
Since I had that big saw with me, I proceeded back up to the Gulleys Trail and cleared the three or four trees that had fallen across it in the past month or more. Then I cleared a proto-path back up the Stick Trail to make it easier for me to execute that loop in the future. By the way, Charlotte had initially seemed like she wanted to come on this walk, but when she saw I'd be using the chainsaw, she quietly slipped away and went back home.
I was so sweaty and filthy by the time I got home, I had to take a shower and rinse out my teeshirt.
A little before 4:30pm, I loaded up the dogs and first went down the hill to retrieve the block of wood I'd placed near the guard rail. Then I drove to Woodstock, stopping along the way at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford to buy bananas, potatoes, beer, and orange juice. The bookstore was very busy when I arrived, so I waited for the people with the tiniest children to leave the store before injecting the additional chaos of the Charlotte and Neville. Gretchen had managed to be able to work from a chair for most of the day, so she'd been able to do it.
For dinner tonight, I boiled up a box of fettucine pasta for something of a repeat of what we'd had for dinner last night. Later I took a nice lukewarm bath.
The block of red oak with an initial set of legs crudely cut into it. Click to enlarge.
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