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bored enough for a tennis ball
Friday, October 4 2019
I would only be working a partial day today, so I roused the dogs out of bed (that wasn't hard) and then took them with me on the foggy drive eastward (into the rising sun) to work. Not long after setting up at my desk, it seemed like bringing both dogs had been a terrible mistake. They wandered the office, snorting around in random trash cans for traces of the sort of food they like (but which is never available in our house). Then, after I'd given them several peanut butter dog bones, they kept bothering me for more as I was trying to initiate the mental focus I need to do my job. Eventually, though, they settled down enough that I could mostly ignore them. When they've formed a cuddle puddle on the dog bed and Neville is snore-purring, they're about as good as office dogs can possibly be. That said, I need to remember for the future that I should never bring both dogs to work if the day is going to be in any way stressful. Ramona on her own is well-behaved enough to bring every day, Neville's presence tends to amplify her tendency to misbehave, particularly when they are running around off leash. Today I was particularly worried about them developing a sudden interest in a baby goat I've heard bleating at the one house behind the complex. The house is one of those ugly possibly-prefab structures with no windows in its gabled ends, the kind only hillbillies and retirees feel comfortable living in, and I'd be worried that its resident might be quick to resort to second amendment remedies were the dogs to wander too close (and not, I would have to admit, completely without justification). But I managed to keep the dogs away from that trouble spot today. Instead, they tried to bum rush a squirrel near the road. Somewhat surprisingly, Ramona gave up the pursuit soon after I shouted "No!" The squirrel was hopelessly gone by then, but it was almost as if Ramona wanted to be good.
Even before 1:00pm, when I would be leaving, Ramona was acting exceptionally bored. She started playing with a the office doggie tennis ball, which normally doesn't much interest her. She flung it into the air, caught it after a rebound, and then lay in the middle of the floor squeezing it flat repeatedly with her powerful jaws, making a series of rubbery clunking noises.
After leaving work at 1:00pm, I drove directly home to drop off the dogs. At the time, Gretchen was just about to drive to the Brewster Street house to check in on some improvements that our handywoman had been doing there. She'd also had someone resurface the bathtub in the bathroom there. This had been done two years ago by a subcontractor who had only charged $300, but the resurfacing material had quickly delaminated. The new bathtub resurfacing had cost nearly $1000 and, for the time being at least (as Gretchen reported later), it looked great.
My doctor's appointment was on Hurley Avenue in a dreary building with a suitably-dreary waiting room. But I didn't have to wait long to get the thing I'd come for. I was just there to start up a new relationship with a new doctor as part of a new health care plan (one I'd actually enrolled in back in January). This actually my second health care plan since being ousted from Mercy For Animals; I'd briefly had a different plan for the several months between when I was first hired and when my new employer was acquired by a private-equity firm. This wasn't to be a full-on physical, though I would be leaving a urine sample and having my blood pressure checked (it would be normal). My new doctor is a thin woman in her forties from Red Hook, and actually knows the guy whose company I work for. Our main non-medical conversation concerned the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, which we both cross (in opposite directions) twice each day. Somehow I got upsold into getting both a flu shot and a tetanus shot. These days I almost never get the flu, but it would be nice to lower my odds of getting it even further. As for tetanus, the last tetanus shot I got was probably as a teenager, and my lifestyle is full of potential tetanus infections, so that was probably a good idea.
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I swung by the Tibetan Center thrift store on my "way" home, and there I bought a large bullhorn for $15 (definitely a post-Rob price). It later proved not to work, but probably most of the functionality is there, and would make for a good basis for a powerful Disturbatron.
Fog this morning. Note the banhmi wrap on the dashboard. Usually I eat pupusas for lunch, but I'd known I'd run out.
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Fog near the Hurley State troopers' baracks.
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That creepy tree on the left is getting bigger.
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I love that creepy tree.
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Eastward across the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge into the sunrise. Fortunately, fog has obscured the sun.
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But the glow grows brighter.
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There's the sun, a perfect circle on the left.
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Ramona in the field behind where I work.
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Ramona and Neville snuffling around.
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