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Eleanor gets quilled
Sunday, June 13 2004
I continued my cowboy electrician work today and managed to get a lot more done than I'd accomplished yesterday. Late in the morning Gretchen and Dina (who is still visiting) drove up Eagle's Nest to pay me visit. At first I thought they were just dropping by to see me on their way to do other things, but I could tell by their shell-shocked expressions that something was amiss. "Do you notice any new whiskers on Eleanor?" Gretchen asked. Eleanor and Sally had been disgorged from the car and were running around excitedly as usual. It turned out that Eleanor had been quilled by a porcupine late this morning somewhere along the Stick Trail. But nobody even noticed until they got back to the house. The quills, which were all over her lips and embedded in a row along the front of the roof of her mouth, were far too numerous to remove and so now they were on their way to the vet. I thought I'd take a stab at removing some of them myself, but Eleanor wouldn't sit still for me. Gretchen told me that she'd also removed one quill from Sally. I took this as the one bit of good news in the story - I interpreted this to mean that Sally had lunged at the porcupine while Eleanor was attacking it, but had drawn back when the prick of a single quill reminded her of the ordeal she'd gone through that first time she'd met a porcupine. As for Eleanor, it seems unlikely that she'll learn anything from this encounter. She's not really into learning anything. As for what we can learn from this, there's precious little. The encounter happened in broad daylight on a sunny day, not normal conditions for porcupines to be out and about. It was a statistical fluke, and the price would be an expensive weekend veterinary visit. It ended up costing us $177.
Before Gretchen, Dina, and the dogs continued on, I gave them all a quick tour of the house. Gretchen was apalled. She couldn't imagine a realtor, a guy who sees dozens of properties every week, settling for such a house, especially at the price he'd paid. Gretchen thought this place was worth maybe $70,000, although even then it wouldn't be worth the money necessary to make it, you know, inhabitable (let alone non-muy-fea).
This evening Gretchen and I took Dina to La Pupuseria on Broadway for our favorite inexpensive meal in town. She loved it, but how could she not? As always, I ate my five bean and cheese pupusas as if they were tacos, folding each around a fat wad of pickled cabbage drenched in green hot sauce.
One of the characteristics of La Pupuseria is that it tends to be rather slow, and if you don't ask for your bill it never comes. We lost track of time and came very close to missing the beginning of tonight's episode of Six Feet Under, the first show of this, the fourth season. We've been eagerly anticipating the return of Six Feet Under for nearly a year. Tonight's show wasn't especially good, but it didn't have to be to make us happy.
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