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Neville's nails get too long
Friday, March 6 2026
I'd spent another night on the laboratory beanbag to continue avoiding being infected by whatever Gretchen has. She would go on to spend most of the day in bed again, though by this evening she was feeling well enough come out to the teevee room to watch Jeopardy! and other things.
This morning, after much nagging from Gretchen, I arranged an appointment for Neville to have his claws trimmed at Pretty Pet Parlor. I brought Charlotte with me when I took him in a little after noon. Usually the trimming doesn't take long and nothing much happens, but this time I could hear Neville whimpering and growling while the Pretty Pet Parlor employee tried to Dremel his nails (which is pretty much how it has to be done). Charlotte was not liking those sounds and kept standing up on her hindlegs trying to look and even let out a bark. The employee called out and asked if I wanted to come in, which really meant she wanted me to come in, so Charlotte and I did and we was calmer for the procedure with me stroking his head and Charlotte being a concerned sister. The employee thought maybe the problem was that Neville's nails had grown out too much because we had waited a bit long. I agreed, saying we'd been on vacation but would try to keep taking him in on a monthly basis.
Then I drove to ShopRite (where I hadn't shopped in years) to get the things I'd neglected to get yesterday as well as more grapefruits. I then swung by the Tibetan Center thrift store to see what they had. If I was in the market for a used internet router, I would've been in luck. But cheap microcontrollers are much easier to work, so I'm no longer excited to install Linux on an old router. Today the only thing worth buying was a small insulated travel mug, which I got for a dollar.
It's always a big job after I get back from traveling just to write journal entries about it. Getting caught up on a twelve day backlog usually takes well over a week, but I managed to get all caught up late this morning. I thought this was something I should be able to celebrate, so I started drinking booze this afternnon, and by the time I was sitting a safe distance from Gretchen this evening watching Jeopardy!, she could tell I was "altered." In hopes of finding a lower dose of pseudoephedrine I can take without getting heart palpitations, this morning I'd taken a 90 mg dose, and this seemed to have all the positive effects and none of the negative ones.
Charlotte's Tractive Tracker fell off her at some point while we were in the Caribbean and our kooky housesitter randomly found it in the path. The rubbery framework that secures it to the collar had gone missing, though I'd found a piece of it in the living room, suggesting it might've been destroyed in an incident of yarfiness between Charlotte and Neville. Fortunately replacement frameworks are available, but you have to buy them in six-packs, suggesting they wear out regularly. Charlotte's actual tracker has six prongs on it designed to hook inside the rubber framework so it can hold it in place, though one of these prongs has been damaged (perhaps it came that way, as I bought the tracker used). Today I wanted to fix it, so I thought I'd just doodle on it with a 3D pen squirting ABS (the material the tracker housing seems to be made of). But I couldn't find my 3D pen (which I've never found a real use for), so instead I used a soldering iron to melt a stick of ABS to weld onto the end of the broken prong. Then I heated up a small metal washer and embedded it into the mass of plastic. With some filing, I managed to rebuild a working prong.
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