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The (advanced) nurse (practitioner) will see you now. I snuck up on her. Yes I know snuck is not a proper usage but it should be. The language keeps changing they say. Besides, sneaked sounds like something you’d do to somebody with an athletic shoe.

On the other hand …

Usage Note: Snuck is an Americanism first introduced in the 19th century as a nonstandard regional variant of sneaked. Widespread use of snuck has become more common with every generation. It is now used by educated speakers in all regions. Formal written English is more conservative than other varieties, of course, and here snuck still meets with much resistance. Many writers and editors have a lingering unease about the form, particularly if they recall its nonstandard origins. And 67 percent of the Usage Panel disapproved of snuck in our 1988 survey. Nevertheless, an examination of recent sources shows that snuck is sneaking up on sneaked. Snuck was almost 20 percent more common in newspaper articles published in 1995 than it was in 1985. Snuck also appears in the work of many respected columnists and authors: “He ran up huge hotel bills and then snuck out without paying” (George Stade). “He had snuck away from camp with a cabinmate” (Anne Tyler). “I ducked down behind the paperbacks and snuck out” (Garrison Keillor).

There you have it; if Keillor could snuck then so can I.

So I arrived early to pick her up and instead of waiting curbside in the car I thought I’d park, walk up and surprise her. I wanted to get on that exam table so bad. I asked her to “do something” to me — blood pressure, temperature, stick a Popsicle stick in my mouth and make me say “ahh,” anything. Nope, she was having none of it. All that being well beneath her pay grade. Probably my insurance doesn’t cover spousal exams anyway.

Reminded me of one of my favorite Graham Parker songs:

Woke to a disquieted bowel. (For the record I wasn’t the only one!).

Pardoned myself, rolled out of bed and held the corner of the bedsheets higher and longer than usual to permit evacuation of unwanted vapor. (Not all my own!).

I slipped on my comfys and tip-toed cautiously downstairs. Feeling like a delicate puffball. You know what I mean — all it takes is one heavy footfall too many to jostle a vulnerable bowel and…

Minutes later, downstairs, feeling more settled but not out of the woods, I carefully stepped with coffee in hand (Gepetto is back online!) toward a familiar chair in the kitchen, sat down and opened the laptop thinking I’d search for a solution to offensive anal vapor. With Christmas coming maybe a novel his ‘n her stocking stuffer? (I am not the only offender in this house!).

Good grief, is nothing unfindable anymore:

New line of underwear filters out farts

Incredulous, I clicked…

… and was agassed (sic) to see two product testers.

Srsly?

Here’s something…

Several years ago Happy Wife and I along with friends hiked to the summit of Knoya (cuh-noy-ah) peak in the Chugach mountains near Anchorage. At the summit (~4600′) we ironed. That’s right, iron, like press a garment, in our case a pullover, and a badly wrinkled one if I recall correctly. To be honest we didn’t really iron the garment because we’d brought an electric iron, along with a full-size ironing board. But we went through the motions, enough I believe to qualify it as a legitimate extreme ironing experience, and us as true “ironeers.” As far as I know we were the first people to extreme iron in the Chugach mountains.

Proof:

There are two infinities
they say
countable and non
and now
with you and I
there are three

Happy Wife had a troubling day at work. Prescribed her a Sapphire martini with a splash of vermouth and two plump pimento-filled olives. Shaken. Served up. I delivered.

I could relate. Many years ago when I worked at a traditional job in the corporate world… oh some of the days I had. Occasionally I’d arrive home so pissed off I was visibly trembling, like a Quaking Aspen in a stiff Fall breeze. Mental commotion is one thing, but when it affects you physiologically like that you know you’ve let it go too far. Over time I learned to tame my reaction to these situations. Which is not to say that pissant managers who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the sole didn’t continue to annoy me — and I them, to be fair. We did (continue to annoy each other). Only that over time I gained self-control over how I chose to react to the enmity. Reaching professional maturity is often coincident with the adoption of a Dilbertesque attitude. Day-to-day therapy comes in the form of amusing catch phrases meant to demean pissant managers, little quips you share with fellow employees of like mind. For example, say the pissant’s name is Dave, then one of my favorites was: ” Having Dave at work today is like having two good guys on vacation.” Haha.

Alas, it’s only a distant memory now; been over eight years since I last worked in a corporate setting, and years before that since I last experienced or cared about said discord.

What I remember for sure about those days coming home livid is that I never once felt like I had anything left to “throw” together an impromptu dinner like this:

BIGGER.

Baked squash with a dollop of cottage cheese, spinach salad with honey vinaigrette dressing and crispy prosciutto, and pork in Calvados gravy.

No, I’m quite sure I would’ve never been capable of that.

Coffee by Rube Goldberg. Right? Who else would concoct such a monstrosity merely to make…well, coffee? The Italians, that’s who. Welcome to the internals of Gepetto, an Andreja Premium Espresso Maker by QuikMill. That’s right, “Gepetto”, because we have a name for everything around our house, given our tendency toward anthropomorphism. Gepetto, an Italian, you may recall was the impoverished woodcarver of Pinocchio. Don’t ask.

Why did I need to open Gepetto for surgery? Because the low water float magnet is no longer actuating the sensor, and so the circuit remains open (closed?), and so the alarm — intermintent Beep! Beep ! Beep! – won’t be quiet. This greatly annoys me, Happy Wife and especially the doggies, and fractures the prayer-like quiet of our morning.

To make sure the problem was in fact the tiny magnet in the float and not the whatchamacallit controller board, I took a big honkin’ wall magnet, one that could suck metal filings to it from one city block away, and moved it gently behind the sensor actuator until, Bingo!, no more alarm. Good, the whatchamacallit board was in fact not fried, and this was good seeing as the New York service man on the phone estimated a replacement was in the neighborhood of $160! One float, by contrast, $10.50. Less shipping. I ordered two. Two, because one float detects low water, and another one detects really low water. To hear the really low water alarm go off — loud, interminable Beeeeeeeeeep! — you’d think there was a fire in the house. Lucy, especially, does not like that alarm.

And so, because our tendency to anthropomorphism extends to pieces & parts, I imagined the two magnets might be in cahoots. That is, one misbehaves, gets replaced, and then the other gets to thinkin’, “I can misbehave, too.” So you have evidence one is bad and you try to do the repair on the cheap and replace just that one magnet. You reassemble Gepetto, put him snugly back on the counter where he lives, plug him in, fill his reservoir with water, switch him on and ….Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

No. For $10.50, you think,  this can be avoided.

Two magnetic floats due in the mail today. ~$28 w/shipping. What a country.

Janet Yellin (left), nominee for new Fed chief, reminded me a bit of another woman I know. One parts her hair on the left, the other on the right. A coincidence I assume, not an indication of their political handedness.

Hint: A former Fed chief was in this other woman’s Inner Circle for some time.

I don’t have a good explanation for why one dog attacks another, a display of dominance, to gain possession of something, feeling threatened — these are some I’ve heard but none do I find completely satisfying. Show me a dog who’s had a really bad day at work, is drunk at the bar, and hears some dude go off about his mother, that I get. But when Lucy approached the Akita-looking dog at the park the other day I thought nothing of it because she and Harry had met this dog before, and while I wasn’t too keen on this dog (I have a big bias against Chinese breeds), nothing bad went down. But this time Lucy wasn’t next to this dog more than fifteen seconds when it exploded on her. And unprovoked, too, so far as I could tell anyway — I was on the trail behind her maybe two hundred feet away when I saw it happen.

I ran like a track ‘n field star, screaming at the top of my lungs, “No! No! No!” There was no time to think what I’d do when I got there, pull the dog off Lucy I suppose, but thinking back on it now that might have endangered me — this was a big, solid dog ripping into her, but at the time I didn’t care about me, all I wanted to do right then was to stop Lucy’s wailing and shrieking, and had not one of the dog’s uprights finally pulled it off her by the time I got there I might’ve just tackled the sonofabitch. It was bad.

Back at the parking lot the man and woman both showed concern for Lucy. I was pretty flustered at the time and not feeling very generous toward them, but I appreciated their sense of responsibility. We’d just started out on our walk when the attack occurred, Lucy had suffered two pretty nasty bite wounds so I wanted to get her to the vet quickly to disinfect them and see if either or both required stitches. After I’d got her and Harry back into the car the man appeared, looking repentant, “She’s never attacked a dog before.” I hear this frequently, people saying their dog has never before done this or that, but this time I believed him. He seemed sincere, standing there, his shoulders drooped, obviously concerned for Lucy, yes, but the expression on his face indicated to me he felt doubly bad, saddened that his dog had betrayed his trust (like Lucy she was off lead). He and his wife (?) offered to cover the vet bill, which came to $85 — an exam, antibiotics, and anti-bacterial compresses to apply twice daily to encourage wound healing.

The most interesting thing about dogs and dog fights: they never dwell on it like humans do. I’ve seen two dogs get into it real bad one minute, and the next they’re running and playing like nothing happened. Lucy & Harry, for example, on one occasion.

Both good and bad, you can learn a lot from a dog.

BIGGER.

Pretty nice photo taken by Happy Wife with her new phone. My old phone. She’s a passive Luddite around smart phones, a judgement she wouldn’t deny, and one she’s not the least bit shamed by. I say “passive” because she will concede some features of a cell phone are convenient — When I was in Seattle we texted back ‘n forth one night and she commented, “This is fun!” and I was like, Hello. But encourage her to learn more and she’s right back to: “I don’t want to know how all that stuff works. I just want to make calls, and get calls. Okay, and maybe text. And pictures. But that’s it.”

Over the phone guidance remains a challenge. “Can I send you this picture?” Why yes dear you can — I hear it in her voice, she’s excited, she wants to know more! I anxiously tell her the steps, then realize it was too quick, I sense she’s struggling. I try to reassure her: “No worries, just slow down… Now, open the gooey (GUI) and tell me what you see.” Silence. When she hears “gooey” she doesn’t think Graphical User Interface, no, she thinks sushi, specifically Geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”), a favorite of hers.” I say, “Okay, forget what I said, just hit the back button, then your menu button, and …”

“Oh nevermind,” she interrupts, “I’ll just show you the picture when you get home.”

Sigh.

Moving right along; the dogs have lice. Evidently the skin-chewing kind. The other kind sucks blood. Symptom: incessant scratching. We washed all the blankets and sheets and whatnot they lay on around the house (which is considerable; you’d think we were running a canine hostel). Then we put the dog beds (3) outside for a couple hours — A little winter cold for you my pretties (sinister laugh). Finally, Happy Wife bathed them both with special shampoo, at least three times now. Seems to have helped. They still scratch now and then but nowhere near as much as before. Some web site said that in order to prevent reinfection we should, effectively, delouse the entire house.

And I’m like, no, I’m not doing that. Turn off the heat, throw open the windows and leave for the weekend — maybe. Freeze the damn things to death. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Funny!

Frightening.