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.
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.
