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entrenchment of a recently-developed habit
Friday, September 11 2026
Despite it being the night after one of Neville's heartworm injections, I slept better than expected on the couch with the uncomfortable 55 pound patient. He would whine for periods of time, but then he'd go quiet and I'd drift off to sleep. I had put earplugs in my ears, but they didn't have much effect on the frequency ranges Neville was using. (He has a surprisingly wide vocal range and can hit whistle-like notes that Mariah Carey cannot.) Another key factor was that the night wore on, Neville complained less and less, meaning he was either acclimating to the pain, it was reducing in intensity, or some combination of the two. (He seemed to be less whiney last night than he had been the night before, suggesting that acclimation played a role in his behavior.)
By this morning, Neville almost seemed comfortable, though he still did a fair amount of whining, usually just before he'd satisfy a need himself, such as going outside to piss or drinking some water. It was as if he'd gotten used to the habit of using whining to telegraph his internal discomforts, and was now using it to signal all of his wants. I'd noticed him whining this way after his first injection a month ago but hadn't thought about what it implied about the entrenchment of a recently-developed habit. (He'd gradually stopped doing this over the next several days.)
Today was the day that Gretchen would be setting off for Albany on the eve of a march she's been organizing where people would be walking over two hundred miles from Albany to a lab animal breeding facility in western New York called Marshall. After some packing and such, she realized she had a little slack in her day and decided to watch some television, since there would be no time for watching teevee over the next couple weeks. Gretchen hit the road about 2:00pm, setting off in the Subaru Forester.
I'd taken a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning, my first ingestion of any sort of drug (except caffeine) since Sunday night, though I didn't really have any activity in mind for directing the resulting burst of energy. Typically what happens in this situation is that I end up working on a "crackhead" project, one that requires lots of effort but produces almost nothing. (A good example of such a project, though not one that I've undertaken, is trying and failing to hang a picture straight only to end up ripping out drywall to install extra structural material between the studs.) Today's closest thing to a crackhead project for me was the making of several customized clips from bent galvanized steel wire to be placed on the raised seams of the roof of the screened-in porch so as to make the flashing along the top edge lie flat. I made two such clips, neither of which worked very well, before deciding to look for some existing hardware product at Lowes that might be made to do the same thing more reliably.
Late this afternoon at around 4:00pm, I barricaded Neville inside the house so I could take Charlotte for her second walk of the day (Gretchen had taken her earlier). This time I just walked up the Farm Road and back, mostly just to pre-position pieces of bluestone so I could come by later in the Chevy Bolt and pick them up. I ended up pre-positioning what I would later weigh to be 284 pounds of rock, to be added to some I'd gathered the other day on a walk from the Stick Trail to the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, for a total rock payload of 313 pounds. [This would be the first time I would ever weigh a rock haul, mostly just to get a sense of what this amount of rock actually weighs.]
That 4:00pm walk with Charlotte was when I had my first drink since Sunday night, and I tried not to drink too much. To help make sure I didn't over-drink, I took 150mg of diphenhydramine at 7:00pm and switched from rum to red wine.
The clearcuts in the hair on Neville's back. The first and last injections (which happened in August and yesterday) went into the clearing on the right, and the second injection (which happened two days ago) went into the clearing on the left, just below that back scar Neville supposedly got after being shot by a tranquilizer dart in Brooklyn (back before we met him). Click to enlarge.
Neville in his containment corral with Charlotte on the end of the couch behind him. Click to enlarge.
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