So, all things look pretty good on the cancer front. There are no new passengers in my abdomen via the CT scan. My bloodwork isn’t yet in the Normal range, but I also just got my flu shot on Tuesday and I’ve felt like I want to take a nap every minute of the day since then. All of the levels seem to be holding steady with no major drops, so I’ll take that as a win.
When they announced the COVID booster policy, such as it is, I made an appointment to get a dose of the Pfizer vaccine at my local pharmacy. Feeling pious about the whole thing, I went in and filled out the forms and waited in line, and then they looked at them and told me that I was a month early and that I’d have to come back in late October for the actual shot.
Tuesday night we took Finn to karate, where she is acting as a class helper by request of her sensei. It means she needs to be at the dojo an hour early, but I think the added responsibility is good for her, and we’re hoping she starts taking things more seriously. In the meantime, with two hours to kill, Jen and I hit the local thrift superstore, where I was able to find a nice Patagonia vest and a couple more of the Harry Potter movies on disc. We only need the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 to fill out our collection; a few years ago a friend’s daughter deep in a Potter phase borrowed our complete box set and we never saw it again.
Meanwhile, the dog was at home by herself. Jen was experimenting with leaving her by herself for short periods of time while I was gone, and for spans of an hour or two she seemed to do fine. We left her for a full three hours on Tuesday, half expecting to find a hole dug through the wall or a giant mountain of dogshit on the couch, but everything was normal when we walked back in the door. Progress? Possibly, but I’m not going to hold my breath until we get a couple of months under our belt.
Hazel has slowly been working on a routine as she’s gotten older, and some of her more annoying habits have been smoothing out over time. She used to launch out of bed like an ICBM with the first beams of light over the horizon and pace by the bedroom door whining and crying and nervously scratching herself. I’d shuffle downstairs with one eye open, let her out, and then collapse on the couch praying that I’d be able to go back to sleep for a few minutes before she banged on the door to come inside—or woke up the neighborhood barking her head off.
She’s sleeping in later these days, which is a blessing, and even if I’m up before she is and slowly pick up my phone to do the morning’s calendar/weather/news check (what time do I need to be put together for my first Zoom call/how cold will the morning walk be/what’s happening in the outside world) she’ll clock that I’m moving but won’t stir until she sees I’m actually getting up. She knows what reading the iPhone means, and she knows what the pre-rise bed stretch means. She can read the signs.
So on Saturday morning, we slept in for as long as my bladder would allow, and then crawled out of bed to walk downtown for coffee and muffins. Along the way we passed several signs for yard sales, which is your author’s crack cocaine. The pickings weren’t quite as good as the signs promised, but a nice lady gave Jen a 1996 Maryland Master Gardener Handbook for free along with a thick binder full of her notes; she had to carry it back home before we continued our walk.
After eating, I got out to the greenhouse and cleaned up the plants, pinching off all of the suckers, pruning spare branches, and keeping things moving upward. They all got watered, and I fixed the wooden foundation of the building so that it’s a bit more stable. Meanwhile Jen pruned a bunch of the day lilies around the entrance back and cleaned up the gardens around the house. it’s all looking really good out there—I’m optimistic for a good haul this summer.
We ran out to drop Finn off at a friend’s house and ran some errands at the local Home Depot, and while I was there I left my Moleskine in the basket of the shopping cart and drove off without it. On a good day this might have been only a small setback, but I left my vaccination card and some other stuff in the back pocket, which made it a bad day. Two calls to Customer Service and a trip to the store netted us nothing, so I’ve pretty much given up hope. At least I have a picture of my card.
Sunday we puttered around the house and got a late start on the day. After dropping Finn off at a friend’s house across town Jen and I took Hazel to Second Chance to look for some spare doors. To recap: Our fridge is stuffed in what was originally the hallway coat closet, and during the summer, our un air-conditioned house tends to get stuffy. Having the fridge in the closet with the door closed is a terrible idea, so we’ve had to crack the door open and let the cats wander in and out and generally deal with how shitty that looks for sixteen years. Jen’s idea was to find another door in the same style, punch out the center panels, and replace them with radiator screen so that the fridge gets enough airflow and the door stays shut.
Second Chance is one of the advantages of living near Baltimore. We found a very close twin to our doors on the shelf—only 1.5″ taller and 1/2″ wider, in the same large-over-small panel design. We also found a replacement door to the master bath, something to replace the thin wooden screen door we found on the side of the road back in 2004. We stumbled on a beautiful, sturdy 12-light door with good hardware and wound up getting both for $60. I found a way to stuff them both in the back of the CR-V with the rear window up, scooped the dog into my lap, and Jen drove us home with our prizes.
The weather, which has been pogoing up and down for the last month, is supposed to get up into the 80’s this week, which means Brood X is going to rise from their slumber. I don’t know that we’ll get the same number of cicadas without the tree cover we had in 2004, but I’m sure it’s going to be loud out there.
We got about three to four inches of snow that packed down to two inches of snow/sleet/snow overnight. I didn’t bother going out and shoveling anything yesterday because I knew it was supposed to continue until sometime in the early morning. Instead of taking Hazel on a slippery walk—she wasn’t interested in being out in the snow for long anyway—I put boots on and got Dad’s old coal shovel out to chisel off the walk before work. In the afternoon Finley did the driveway and I finished off the apron to the road.
I will cop to the fact that I spiked a second cup of coffee with Bailey’s when I came back inside. We’ve got the fixins for homemade Bailey’s on standby in the pantry—with whiskey left over from the wedding—because that shit is expensive.
I was supposed to have snow-going boots from Nordstrom Rack by now; I found a set of Sperry duck boots on deep discount and ordered them before Thanksgiving, but still have not seen them on our doorstep. They are being shipped via USPS, and while I stand in solidarity with our overworked, underpaid and barely appreciated postal service, I must say their tracking system sucks. They are currently somewhere between Washington D.C. and here, with no estimate on delivery. Meanwhile I’m wearing 12-year-old Keen lowtop boots whose soles have been reglued to the uppers twice.
So after five+ years of contented Amazon Prime membership and hundreds of deliveries, our first attack of porch piracy has occurred. I’d ordered a bunch of gifts for the girls to be delivered together, and it was supposed to have arrived on Sunday (one of the two days we’re not sitting in the office looking directly at the front walk). I looked at the order online today and there’s a picture of the package on our porch—but we never saw it, and it never made its way inside. I called the Amazon customer service number and a nice man checked into things. After a brief hold he asked if I’d like a refund or if I wanted them to ship it out again—I told him the latter. I’ve talked about excellent customer service here before, and this is another example of The Way Things Should Be.
About a month ago all of the field mice in Catonsville decided to move back into their winter home and began making noise in our floorboards. The terrier/reptile part of Hazel’s brain dedicated to sniffing out rodents and killing them kicked into high gear and she zeroed in on a spot under my desk where they must have been gathered down in the ice room. After dealing with several weeks of her sitting in the office and whining for eight straight hours (punctuated by frequent trips under my desk to paw at the carpet) I got fed up and put some baited traps in the iceroom. Having fought with them out in the greenhouse, I know they’re too smart for spring-loaded traps, so bait was the only way to go.
Mercifully, Hazel stopped digging at the floor last week—but an unpleasant smell then appeared in the basement; someone had gotten a belly full of bait and died in the wall somewhere. I spent most of Saturday pulling apart the stuff we’ve stored in there to see if I could find the source with no luck. Disgusted with the mess, I went to the Lowe’s for some wood and put together 10′ of built-in shelves along the north wall to organize the junk, filled two contractor’s bags full of trash, and sealed cracks in the slab with concrete caulk. Next weekend I’ll do the same to the south wall and get all of that shit organized.