Saturday I took advantage of a relatively light schedule and got a solid block of hours in the bathroom for the first time in over a month. First up was to get the linen closet leveled, centered on its pedestal, and secured to the wall. Before I could do that I had to install a section of wood, included with the cabinets, to stand it off the wall by about 3″. I clamped it to the cabinet, scribed it (the wall is not straight), and tried using the new band saw, but found that the band saw was in desperate need of adjustment. Instead, I cut it freehand with the table saw. I clamped it on to the cabinet and screwed it in place, then snugged the whole cabinet up against the wall: a perfect fit. Now the extra room will allow the cabinet doors to clear the door casing when they’re open.
Once that was secured in place, I knew where the woodwork around the window could be, and started putting that back in. I’d already cut the stool, so it was simply a matter of putting the surrounds back in, measuring, cutting, and milling the casing, and setting up the top moulding. After caulking and adding wood fill to the nail holes, I leveled the small cabinet next to it and secured that to the wall. At that point it was time to wrap things up, because we had advent plans for the evening.
Jen got us tickets to see the Moscow Ballet’s production of the Nutcracker in the city, so we got our church clothes on, gave Hazel her sedative and put her in the crate, and headed into Baltimore. We got there early because they’ve begun security checks at the theater, so we had about an hour to kill before the curtain went up. We all got a cocktail at the bar and found some chairs in the upstairs lobby to relax in.
The production was beautiful. The Hippodrome isn’t the largest of stages, so I got the feeling they had to adjust the blocking to fit all of the dancers, but they did an amazing job and we were all captivated. The pair doing the Arabian Variation took our breath away. By the time we got home it was 10:30 and Finn went right to bed.
Sunday was a family day. The girls went to church while I ran some errands—a haircut and some Christmas shopping—and then did some small jobs around the house. When they got home, we went into Ellicott City for some lunch at Georgia Grace cafe, where the menu leans Greek and the food is delicious. Then we came back and took Hazel for a walk around the neighborhood. Back inside, we caught up on our Advent activities around the dining room table. First, we made our family picture, and then we cut out snowflakes to hang on the windows. Then we lit a fire and talked about our Christmas lists. I started feeling lousy and went upstairs for a nap, and by the time I woke up Finn was just settling down in bed.
I’m hoping this lousy feeling doesn’t mean I’m coming down with something, as I still don’t have a very healthy immune system. I did get a bunch of sleep overnight but woke up with the same sore throat and achy feeling.
Hazel, much like our daughter, is a creature of habit. She (Hazel) understands how things are supposed to go after two days or so, and happily follows a schedule when it’s made clear to her (Finley takes a while longer). She’s been sleeping on the bed next to me for the past couple of weeks because her separation anxiety hasn’t decreased yet—she’s only been on Prozac for 14 days, so we won’t see any real change until Christmas or so—and hosing out the crate first thing every morning is a drag. She’s gotten to the point now where she sleeps in each morning, so after I’ve risen and woken Finn up, she staggers off the bed and sleepily follows me around the house. I put her on the lead out back and she does her morning business, and then comes right back inside. It’s cold enough that she doesn’t want to hang out in the backyard by herself—and I don’t blame her. If I had to whip my jimmy out on the lawn to pee in 20˚ weather I’d want to go back inside immediately and take a hot shower.
Jen has been cranking on two projects so Hazel has been at puppy daycare twice this week, which is a godsend for all of us. It’s a huge warehouse/outdoor area by the airport where she can go and play with 40+ other dogs from 8AM to 6PM. We pick her up after I get off the train and she’s a happy wiggle when she sees us; after she gets home and has some water and a snack, she passes out on her heated bed like a wino on a bender. The one drawback has been that she comes home smelling like the pee of a thousand dogs; it’s like she swims through a river of it to get back home to us. Tuesday night it was raining and when she got in the car she smelled like a train station bathroom. We hauled her upstairs and threw her directly in the bathtub for a shower, which she tolerated but did not enjoy.
After we have dinner and do homework and get Finn to sleep and the house quiets down, I sit with her in the den or living room and she crashes out in her settle bed and snores. When it’s time to wrap up the evening, she watches me start dousing the lights and checking the locks, and she trots over to the front door where I hook her up for her nighttime pee. We come right back inside and she waits by the stairs for me to lift her over the gate, and then she trots up into the bedroom and immediately curls up next to my pillow. This is our routine; it’s comforting to follow.
Deviation from a daily routine sends her into puppy panic. Last night, instead of putting her on a lead by the front door for her evening pee, I walked to the back door and waited for her; she stood in the doorway of the kitchen, blinking at me as if to say, “Hey, asshole, we go out the FRONT door for this.” I coaxed her over and put her on the lead, and she stood on the back porch shivering, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. I thought I’d be able to stay inside but had to go out in socks and convince her to come down to the lawn and pee, and then she decided she had to start barking at something in the shadows and I had to chase her back up the stairs. Clearly I did not respect the system.
As I’ve mentioned before, sleeping next to her is like sleeping with toddler Finley: she’s as hot as a toaster and she likes to lay directly on my body; more often than not I’ll wake up with my arm under her butt or most of her on one leg and I’ve got to push her off to get the circulation flowing again. She grunts and snores and sometimes she’ll get up and circle around to find a new nest and then BOOM she’s laying all 33 pounds right back on my hip again. And then immediately continues snoring. At least the puppy farts are mostly behind us (see what I did there); the room stank like a hobo’s butt for a while.
Separation anxiety, as mentioned above, is still a real problem. Any time past two hours in the crate and she starts peeing on herself. We’ve taken to buying Nature’s Miracle in 55 gallon drums. We have to schedule our trips in short bursts, and anytime we’re away from the house I hear the urine clock ticking like the countdown in a disaster movie. Sometimes we get lucky, and she’s just happy to see us, and other times she’s soaking wet and happy to see us (and not all that interested in going outside, strangely).
All that having been said, we’re all happy to have her, for the most part, and she brings joy to our house every day. Like any child, pet, spouse, or family member, she’s her own person and has her own particular idiosyncrasies, and it’s taking time to learn who she is and what her quirks are. If we could just get her to calm the fuck down and not spray the inside of her crate with panic urine while we all go to the library, life would be great.
Hazel is home from the vet minus stitches and life preserver. Apparently she’s got a clean bill of health to run and play as much as she wants, but she’s not allowed to roughhouse with dogs for a week. This is good and bad; she’s been cooped up so long without any other canine activity that she’s absolutely spastic during the day and pulls like a sled dog when it’s time to take a walk. However, she hasn’t visited any of her usual haunts for several weeks, so the hound part of her brain shuts down all other inputs besides her nose. A SQUIRREL HAS PEED HERE. I MUST INVESTIGATE. This makes each walk feel like a rush hour cab drive through midtown Manhattan: moments of frantic, barely contained activity, followed by a jarring stop and a long, boring wait staring at my phone. Last night I took her out after I got home and we spent a moonlit half hour crashing into each other as she followed meandering squirrel trails in the woods, doubling back on herself and tangling the leash between my legs.
Her strangest new behavior is the rotating poop: She’ll sniff around for a while and her posture will change ever so slightly, from I’m-following-this-squirrel to I’M-GOING-TO-DROP-A-DEUCE, and then she’ll quickly assume the position and then start vibrating. Her legs start moving and she tippy-toes around in one direction until she’s made a 360˚ Circle of Feces, only barely avoiding stepping in her own production. I don’t know if she’s having a seizure or attempting to summon a Shoggoth on the lawn of the church. At least she’s doing it on someone else’s property; it’s hard to sell a house with a portal to hell in the backyard.
Last night, I dragged the second crate up into the spare room and set it up next to the futon. She was demoted from the bed to the crate so that I could actually rest, and apart from some initial whining and a brief episode at about 2:30AM, she was quiet in there. I will be happy to have her back on a regular schedule, because last night was the first good night’s sleep I’ve had since the middle of October. I think moving the heating pad in there did not hurt; at this point her sleeping arrangements are more luxurious than ours are.
A side effect of weaning off the sedatives has been that she found her bark hiding under the couch somewhere; what started as a BUFF and a low growl has now graduated to a full BORR-RORR-RORR-RORR whenever a door closes, a car passes or a dog barks a half a mile away. Her anxiety is at an all-time high, which means she’s tuned to the danger frequency even when she’s snoring. More than once over the past week I was woken to a BUFF and a growl next to my head in the darkness; I would wait until she let out another BUFF and then put a hand on her flank or her head and quietly tell her to go back to sleep. Falling leaves will set her off. Jen and I joke that the house is surrounded by Chupacabra and Hazel the only one who can see them. I don’t know what she’s going to do when it snows; I don’t think there are enough drugs to calm her when Chupacabra start falling from the sky.
Not much to report on about the weekend. I can bullet some of them out.
- We found a new place for weekend breakfast, neither closer or cheaper, but definitely tastier, in Ellicott City. Three sandwiches and three fancy warm drinks totaled out to a little under $30, but damn, a sausage cheese and egg sandwich between two waffles was the fucking bomb.
- Finn and I drove the Scout down there, after two weeks of slumber in the garage, and she ran great. But it was cold. It’s definitely time to get the hardtop back on her.
- My back could not take any more days on the couch, so Hazel and I moved upstairs to the futon on Friday night. She was relaxed enough to go right to sleep, but any stirring of leaves or wind through branches outside had her awake, hackles up, staring out the window. Several times she started barking, and I had to talk her back to sleep. Saturday night I closed the blinds and she didn’t hear anything or move for the whole night.
- Sleeping with Hazel is like sleeping with Finley at age 4: she’s all elbows and knees, and she puts off more heat than a wood-burning stove.
- Jen took a well-deserved mental health afternoon on Saturday, and Finn was invited to a friend’s house for a sleepover that evening. Jen and I were so beat that evening, we got a pizza, poured some drinks and watched a movie. It’s the first time we’ve done that in about five years.
- I got a little woodworking done in the bathroom on Sunday, but my time was limited. Progress was limited mostly to a coat of paint on the dining room windowframe, some woodwork painted in the bathroom, and a new stool cut for the front windows up there.
- I drive to Parkville at 6:30 to buy a vintage Sears bandsaw from a strange dude off of Craigslist. He lived in a little house with his Mom which was CRAMMED with stuff in neat piles all the way through the house. He took me to the basement and I had visions of ending up as a flesh raincoat, but the saw was good and the deal was done. The wall next to the linen closet is not straight, and there’s a piece of wood that sets in between the closet and the wall. Once I’ve scribed the wall’s curves onto the wood, I can use the bandsaw to cut that much cleaner than if I did it with a jigsaw.
Hazel is home from the vet, minus her girl parts and groggy from opioids.
Jen and I stopped in to the PetSmart before picking her up to get an alternative to the Cone of Shame: an inflatable collar. Instead of banging around the house looking like an old-time record player, she looks like she’s on the redeye to Cleveland. She has to wear this contraption for the next couple of days to keep from pulling her stitches, and she goes back in a week or so to have them pulled out.
The overnight was pretty rough. She’s not comfortable at all, so she passes out for two hours and then gets up and wanders around, trying to find a way to be still. At one point she started climbing onto the couch, so I scooped her up alongside me, and we slept like that for an hour, uncomfortably, until she stirred and I helped her back down.
The word on her pelvis is good: she’s got a clean bill of health after the x-ray so once she’s healed up some from the surgery she can walk up and down stairs under her own power again, but we’re carrying her outside for the next couple of days.
Hazel is at the vet this morning for a two-for-one deal: an x-ray to check on her pelvis, and to be spayed. They told us they’d have to put her under to do the x-ray so we figured we’d have them take care of her girl parts while she was out cold. Because nothing says Enjoyable Holiday Season more than a dog in heat. When she gets back home she’s on crate rest again (OH JOY) for a couple of weeks, and we have to find a way to get her down the stairs to pee without busting her stitches or throwing out our backs. I think maybe I’m going to bolt the slide from Finn’s playset to the back stairs so she can just walk out there and pretend she’s evacuating from a burning airliner.
The new windows in the dining room and living room are awesome. It’s currently 30˚ in Catonsville. I was sitting in the dining room catching up on email this morning, and I noticed that the back of my neck wasn’t cold. It’s downright toasty in there now. With the perimeter winter proofing I did last winter and the new windows this year, there are no air currents blowing leaves around in there, and the heat from the radiator actually stays in the room. The living room windows are also tight, although I still need to caulk the edges to seal off the gaps. And I have to haul a huge pile of stuff to the dump—12 windows, stacks of old lumber, and a half ton of pig-iron window weights, all stacked not-so-neatly on the front porch.
Looking back at that link, I see the picture and I’m reminded that I haven’t been called upon to teach for two semesters now, and most likely won’t be for next semester. I’m a little conflicted by this, because while I enjoyed teaching I’m relieved that I’m not spending every weekend thinking about and worried by what’s due in the next class, or looking at a mountain of grading on the dining room table. I suspect this is because the schedules don’t work out; from what little we know, the class times that work best for me are high in demand by full-time faculty, so I haven’t been called up. Either way, I’m enjoying the break.
Hazel was hit by a car on Thursday. She got away from her lead and ran toward the front of the house, where we’ve always taken her for morning and evening walks; she has no concept of what cars are or how they pass by the house, so she ran out in front of one and got hit pretty good. She was able to get up and run to the back of the house, where she waited for someone to get her. The vet did a bunch of tests and x-rays and found that her pelvis was broken at the growth plates, and blithely recommended we keep her from walking for two weeks, before sending her home with puppy Advil. This did not help our dog, who metabolizes everything at the speed of light. Jen had to call back and get a sedative and anti-anxiety medication to get her to calm down. One or more of these medications has the bonus effect of making her stool into fragrant toxic pudding, which smells only slightly worse than her farts.
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So she’s confined to the back room, mostly in her crate, and she’s not supposed to walk. The usual practice of sniffing around for a good place to shit is forbidden, so we have to try to discern between HAZEL FREAK OUT and HAZEL NEED POTTY, and carry her out to the side yard (hereafter known as Diarrhea Alley), put her on the ground, and try to talk her into pooping in that spot while she looks up at us with half-glazed eyes wondering what the fuck is wrong with you humans? I think Jen may have better luck with this; I’m only right 1/8 of the time.
I crashed out on the couch for the overnight last night and missed it twice; At 3AM and at 5AM I was awoken by a smell similar to that of an overflowing festival port-a-potty only feet from my face. She sat in the crate on the other side from the mess, looking at me with stoned reproach, wondering when I was going to clean things up. That took a half an hour and three sleeves of paper towels. Then it’s time to feed her the drugs; I’ve gotten pretty good at saving them down her throat. SWEET ANXIETY MEDS.
When the sedatives do hit, she’s a bag of wet cement in the shape of a dog, which is kind of nice after two months of constant spastic activity, but calm times are few and far between. She’ll pace in the crate and whine and cry and carry on and scream, and we’ll take her out and she’ll just stand there in the rain for ten minutes and then we bring her inside and she pees on the floor, and while we’re cleaning that she’s in the crate howling. It’s enough to make me want to pee myself. The back room looks like a bomb hit and smells like stale bus farts. I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this for two (four? six?) more weeks while her pelvis supposedly mends itself; I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll grind through this hell and come to find her intestines have moved to where her lungs should be and her pelvis has fused to her jawbone. I can’t wait to see that vet bill.
We have two more windows sitting in the hallway ready to be installed, but I have no idea when that’s going to happen. We’ll probably have to wait until the spring to get them in, as the warm days are disappearing fast. I’m in a holding pattern in the bathroom as well; last weekend I was able to get a shallow shelf built for the front two windows and framed out the insides, but I had to stop at the outer casings. I also put cap moulding above the closet and the front windows in the dining room. The next big push will be to move the plumbing under the sink, but I don’t see that happening when I have to cut holes in the drywall directly above Hazel’s convalescent bed.
Finn and I drove down to Grand’s house yesterday to help him sort out his computer issues. He was locked out of his Gmail account, the account he’s been using since Verizon shut down their email servers, and he couldn’t remember any of his passwords or account information. Through some judicious use of internet forensics I was able to answer enough questions to get the authentication started, and then my sister-in-law called wondering why her phone was blowing up with two-factor requests. I switched the number over to his cell, made him a shortcut on his desktop, cleaned out his keyboard, and we were back in business.
