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an unhelpful Apple
Wednesday, September 9 2026
At 7:30am Gretchen took Neville in to the Hurley vet for his second (and penultimate) injection in his months-long heatworm therapy regime. He'd be getting his last injection tomorrow, so it was almost like we could now see a light at the end of this very long tunnel. Neville ended up staying at the vet until 5:30pm, which meant I had the first long stretch of time in a month where I didn't have to worry about where he was or what he was doing. Gretchen was off at the bookstore, but Charlotte was with me and being her the usual mopey dog she is when Neville is not around.
I decided to take advantage of the lack of distraction by first taking my third bath in three days and then by doing something I should've done back in February but hadn't managed to do even though I've had everything I've needed to do it: putting a new battery in a MacBook Pro that Ray gave me after a failed battery installation back in January. That installation had failed because an essential cable on the new battery tore in the process of trying to wrangle it under the edge of the motherboard, and that sort of peril was one of the things keeping me from reattempting the installation even though I've had another battery to install since a week or so after the initial failure.
As I did the installation, I was puzzled by the decisions Apple had made about the nature of the torx fasteners used to hold things in place. Most required tiny torx drivers, but there was an intermingling of two different sizes that didn't seem to make any sense. Why not just use one size and minimize confusion? The tiny flat cables made more sense, given how tightly everything needed to pack together, though initially it wasn't clear that one such cable from the new battery even had a connector on the end; initially I thought it was a temperature probe. But the laptop didn't start up until I figured out it was a cable, which connector it plugged into, and what direction into that connector it went.
When the laptop powered up, I assumed I was out of the woods. But the damn thing was locked to particular thumb print and it wasn't immediately clear how to reset it back to factory. Complicating matters further, the keyboard was completely unresponsive, though its connector seemed to be plugged in correctly. I tried going through the options to moved the laptop over to my AppleId, but the button to continue past a Russian-novel-length user agreement never became enabled, and my attempt to scroll through it (sometimes they make you do that) kept hanging on the same paragraph, so I eventually gave up. Without a working keyboard, it's not very useful, and the process for replacing the existing keyboard looks like absolute torture.
A little after 4:00pm, I made my usual Wednesday-evening pasta, though Gretchen had specifically requested fettuccine. Also, instead of leaving the tempeh, mushrooms, and onions as large chunks, I diced them all up into more of a crumble and added more flavor (particularly salt, paprika, and cayenne pepper).
As the afternoon wore on, I began to wonder why the vet hadn't called to have me pickup Neville. But then it turned out they had communicated with Gretchen, who would be picking him up on the way home from her bookstore shift in Woodstock so as not to involve Charlotte (who tends to cause a scene in the vet waiting area when she see unknown dogs). Learning this, I took Charlotte for a walk down the Gulleys Trail and then back on the Stick Trail.
When Neville got back from the vet, he was whimpering almost constantly, though we were able to sneak away upstairs to eat fettuccine and watch Shark Tank. I then spent several hours with Neville on the living room couch, stroking him with my hands and feet to make him feel better. Gretchen spent the night with him down there and he made it absolute hell for her with all his whimpering. But the poor guy couldn't help it.
The nascent stone wall along the Gulleys Trail as it passes across the head of one of two major gulleys, viewed from the southwest (uphill), showing some of the gulley below. Click to enlarge.
That same stone wall viewed from the southeast (downhill). Click to enlarge.
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