Hazel has been battling various side effects of the medication she’s been prescribed for side effects of medication she was prescribed since we’ve had her. To recap: she was given all manner of vaccinations as a puppy, some of which she developed allergies to, and they started breaking down the blood vessels in her ears. We were prescribed different medication to help with this condition only to find it lowered her immune system, causing her to break out with warts across her body. We got the ear thing under control, finally, and her dermatologist decided we were going to take her off that medication and switch to a different one. It’s been a month or so since the switch, and her ears are still clear and the warts are finally disappearing. Meanwhile, the Easy Lead we bought a couple of weeks ago, while not her favorite object in the world, makes walking her about a million times more enjoyable. We’re doing about three miles daily, a long walk in the morning and a family walk in the evening, and it seems to be great for everyone’s mental health.
After fucking around with multiple different approaches to installing OX El Capitan on my 14-year-old Mac Pro, I decided to give up on janky scripts and poorly written directions and just clone the copy of Leopard I had running on it before to test that the SSD was viable, which did work. Now I’m going to have to buy a copy of 10.7 Lion from Apple (it is not available as a download anymore for reasons I can’t fathom, and among the hundreds of archived backup and install discs I’ve got in my collection, I don’t have this installer) and put a clean copy of the last officially compatible OS on the drive.
There’s a wealth of information out there about Mac Pros out there, which is super handy for keeping the original 2006 version I own (and the 2010 version I use at work) running smoothly. It’s hard to believe my work tower is that old, but it still cranks along happily, earning its keep. I see people complaining about the high cost of pro Apple gear, but if I amortize the purchase price over the time I’ve used it, it’s an incredible bargain.
Tomatoes are officially in season here in the greenhouse and the girls haven’t been able to keep up with the harvest. We have a bunch of Cherokee Purples ripening on several different plants, and they’re all about due to be picked. I pulled several beautiful Chef’s Choice on Saturday with a bowl full of cherries. At the same time there are several basil plants getting fuller with the heat.
I totally missed this the other day, but August 6 commemorates an event that has lasting worldwide consequences for the human race; Everything was different from that day forward, and nothing will ever be the same. I’m talking, of course, about Hazel’s gotcha day: we brought her home from the rescue a year ago last Friday.
As detailed on these pages, it’s been a roller coaster. We’ve been through crate training, a painful push from a Prius, several months of sequestration and recovery in the back room, and endless visits to the vet, veterinary psychologists, and pharmacists to find the right cocktail of drugs to calm her buzzing, anxious brain. None of this has been easy (even in terms of puppy-to-adult maturation) and she’s been the largest household expense by a factor of ten this year.
We did make a $15 purchase last week that has been a cheap game-changer so far. Hazel pulls on her lead when we’re walking like a one-dog sled team. She gets low and squatty and starts moving her legs and I swear to god she could pull a locomotive on her own. One of the reasons I bought a tactical vest for her is so that the load she puts on her chest would be spread out wider and she wouldn’t wear the hair off around the straps in her armpits. I’m honestly shocked I don’t have forearms like Popeye from holding her back, and the girls have refused to walk her for this reason. So we bought an easy-lead on Amazon and fitted it to her head yesterday, and the morning walk was like a gentle trot through rainbows.
Hazel and I have a morning routine that’s worked pretty well for the last couple of months. She stirs at 6AM or so, does some light cleaning, and mentally flips a coin. Tails means she’ll jump back up on the bed and settle for another 30 minutes. Heads means she starts fussing at the door and at me to get me up so that she can go outside. Wednesday morning I slept through the first half of the routine and woke to find her methodically chewing up my favorite (and only) brown leather belt, something I’ve had for about 20 years. I couldn’t be mad at her, so I put my clothes on and stumbled downstairs to let her out. This is actually the second leather belt of mine she’s murdered, so I’m down to one black dress belt.
Finley has been bouncing in and out of obsessions during her ample staycation. One of her more obscure fixations has been survivalist preparation. When asked what the fascination was, she simply shrugged and said, “when I go live in the woods I’ll know how to survive.” With no real explanation given for why that might happen, I gave her a couple of books on camping I have on our shelves and asked her to make a list of the things she might need to gather to sleep outdoors. I found a beginner compass I’ve had stashed in the Scout and gave her that. She’s been asking about a pocketknife for a while, and I’ve got Dad’s Schrade waiting for her, but I’d like to give her something a little less valuable so that when she loses it, which she will, I won’t be upset.
We set up the tent a few days ago in the backyard when the weather had cooled off and she prepared for a solo night in the wilderness: a sleeping bag, water bottle, flashlight, Ox, and pillow. In 20 minutes she was back inside: it was a little too creepy out there by herself. I told her I’d join her the following night, and she went upstairs and slept in her own bed. The next day I gathered some gear for myself, figuring I’d be up long after she fell asleep—my laptop, a charger, some other stuff. We zipped ourselves into the tent at dusk and settled down. What actually happened was I fell asleep almost immediately while she laid awake next to me. She reached out and put a hand on my chest and that seemed to help. At about 2AM I awoke and had to layer up, as it had gotten much colder. She’d already zipped herself in to her bag so I was satisfied she would stay warm. The next morning my neck was sore from sleeping on the ground but the rest of me fared pretty well, which I thought was pretty good for a 49-year-old man.
The tomatoes in the greenhouse have skyrocketed in the last couple of days; with the sun and the heat they’re much happier and reaching their stride. I’m testing the use of some tomato fertilizer in two tubs and straight urea in one to see what results I get; nothing is dead yet (I put it in on Sunday) so I’m going to set up a rolling schedule to amend the soil. I put some basil seed in six of the tubs to see if it would grow, and there are seedlings starting in five of them. And strangely, one of the gladiolus bulbs overwintered in the greenhouse and is now sending a new shoot skyward.
It’s officially air conditioner season. Yesterday I hauled all of the individual window units out to a table on the driveway and pulled the covers off so that the girls could shoot some Clorox inside and scrub out the dirt and mold. They dried in the sunshine and after dinner Finley helped me put them back together so I could haul them upstairs and put them in place. I’m getting tired of humping them up and down the stairs in my late 40’s, and now that the front porch has been reclaimed and looks so good I’m going to feel shitty about storing them out there in the winter. My overall goal is to have ductless AC units put in sometime in the next couple of years. I’m thinking ductless—the kind where each room has a wall-mounted unit connected to a large outdoor condenser—vs. ducted—where there’s a big air handler in the attic running hoses to a ceiling-mounted duct in each room, because I’d like to keep the attic open and I figure it might be cheaper. But that may be flawed logic; one handler in the attic, which will never be finished in our ownership of this house, and is mostly inaccessible now that the stairs have been chopped down, may be cheaper than four individual units in each bedroom. More research is required.
From my desk, which faces the front of the house, I see lots of people out walking each day as they escape their quarantine for some moments of sunshine. Most of them have become familiar. There are the joggers, who used to pass once a day but now make multiple runs. There are the dogwalkers, many of whom we’re familiar with because of Hazel and our own morning route. There are old couples, young couples, family groups and singles, baby strollers, bikes, electric skateboards, wagons, carts, scooters, and skates. I’ve grown familiar with them; they tend to come by at predictable times.
Beginning last week, a new family appeared around dinnertime, and they were a bit different. They were dressed in what I’d call Amish chic: definitely churched up in a Pennsylvania Dutch sort of way. The mother had a sister-wife vibe going: long floral dress, buttoned-up hair. The kids looked like cosplayers from the turn of the century—the boy was wearing a flat-brim hat. The dad wore a button-down collarless shirt with suspenders. And they carried signs, both of which I couldn’t read until I passed them in the Scout on the weekend: the first read “HONK IF YOU SUPPORT OUR FIRST RESPONDERS” and in smaller text, as if we needed the clarification, “police, firefighters and nurses.” The second read, “HONK FOR THE CONVERSION OF AMERICA.”
Yup.
At first I thought maybe the Westboro Baptist Church had maybe opened a satellite in Catonsville, and I was excited about brainstorming ways to fight their bigoted bullshit on my own turf. But after a quick google search, my hope is that maybe this is something less sinister. Either way, I wonder if their compound is nearby and whether or not they’re stockpiling weapons in there.
This is progress. Hazel still gets worked up when Nox comes around, but she’s getting better and better about letting him exist within her perimeter. Nox rolled around on his back for a good five minutes before getting bored and leaving, and Hazel mostly left him alone. This encounter ended peacefully, but at any given time there’s a 33% chance Hazel will chase after him to sniff his butt.