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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.

I need to write to convince today, not to entertain or intrigue. Both involve forms of storytelling; the former, however, permits almost no imagination, exploration, or creative flux. A short discussion of history and background is permitted, if for no other reason than to vet the author’s chops, so long as it doesn’t begin with “Once upon time.” Or drag on and on. Brevity, clarity, and clever ordering of facts are features of adept grantsmanship.

By contrast, imagine the unlimited freedom of mind the writer of fiction has! You might think this makes writing fiction easier than non-, but I would disagree. Exempting the overtly creative forms, non-fiction is like being dropped in a cornfield maze and pressed to find the way out; fiction is the dark side of the moon. And it can be very dark. I was reminded of this yesterday while reading a history of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. A book I read and supposedly enjoyed some years ago. I’ve heard it said that to read a book is to have in front of you the mind of a man (or woman) laid bare. Indeed, certain readers of Lolita were convinced the prurient details were so well drawn…

 

Which brings to mind the convenient veil of the fiction writer, he (she) may always — always — dismiss critic’s claims that the character’s feelings, motivations, desires, etc. must really be the author’s own. This is merely fiction, the author will defend, fiction. Nobody can prove otherwise.

Except for 46^o days, no pretense of Fall remains. Dormant grass, leafless trees, died back brush, dim days — everything it seems has acquiesced to the coming change.

Happy Wife is back from Seattle. Told you so. She returned with various bits of wisdom relating to her professional work, plus homework for me. She asked that I read and comment on a paper relating to genetic risk assessment in breast cancer and clinical implications, something like that. Ohhh-kay then. Next time my normal sleep aids are failing me there’s this!

Srsly. Happy to help. Since it already made past peer review it must be correct, right?

Speaking of which…

Of the dozen or more papers I’ve been asked to review over the last four years or so, I’ve probably rejected half of them, or at least said the paper would need significant revision to be reconsidered. Most of these I never saw again, meaning the authors evidently decided not to revise the manuscript and re-submit it, because if they had I would’ve been asked to review the revision. Ordinarily that’s the way scientific peer review works, if you want a second chance with a manuscript in the same journal you’re stuck with the same set of reviewers, usually more than one.

As a reviewer I consider myself pretty generous. I try to give comments that are helpful to the authors, suggest changes I think will improve the quality of the paper, etc.. Other reviewers are not so generous, and because I am usually privy to the criticisms of my co-reviewers I’ve seen some pretty harsh comments, things like “totally ill-conceived…fool’s errand…pile of dung”. I’ve often wondered if these reviewers would make comments like this if they weren’t guaranteed anonymity as a reviewer, as you always are. It’s safe to flip somebody off from your car as you speed by them on the freeway, but face to face, not so much. I think one rule of review is that even after a paper is published reviewers are supposed to remain anonymous, otherwise I’d have no problem linking to the papers I’ve personally reviewed. However, I don’t think there’s any rule forbidding me from disclosing what journals I’ve reviewed for, PLoS Computational Biology, Human Molecular Genetics, and Proteomics, to name a few with the highest impact factor.

Happy Wife just added one more fleeting sign that Fall hangs on here; she’s still harvesting chives from our backyard, some of which are right now being added to the breakfast omelet frittata she’s making for me. Good to have her back home!

Framed and hanging on the wall in an exam room at our veterinarian’s office:

BIGGER. (From: The Outermost House, by Henry Beston).

I want to believe every word of this is true.

Another moody morning outside, brindled clouds with unclear intentions.

Happy Wife texts me from the conference. The keynote talk, which she left not half way through, was delivered by an optometrist on national health care. My God, what possibly could be worse, decaf coffee? A baseball game tied 0-0 in the bottom of the ninth? Hey, want to watch paint dry, follow me!

Good grief.

The goal of an early morning keynote is to enliven the attendees, not to induce somnolence.

I texted her back: Just go shopping for cryin out loud.

Our daily rag had an article raising concern for moose in Kincaid Park. Followers of this blog know that the dogs and I are at Kincaid park nearly every day of the week. Two moose were recently shot and killed there, one because children were being threatened, the other in self defense. It’s true that moose can be particularly surly during rut, one needs to be careful. Years ago Happy Wife and her dog at the time were pinned down by a bull moose, and eventually rescued by police who shot and killed it. A tragicomic story she retells well.

Anyway, in the article, some dude claimed the problem at Kincaid park is menacing dogs off leash:

To Doug Lloyd the solution is simple.

“Get all the damn unleashed dogs out of this park,” said Lloyd, a wildlife photographer and Department of Corrections retiree.

Lloyd has been photographing moose in Kincaid since 1981.

On a sunny day last week, he and Rob Tappana, another wildlife photographer, were watching a bull with an impressive rack eat its way along the edge of the Lekisch Trail, near the stadium.

Tappana, who retired from the U.S. Air Force, also saw new mountain biking trails and unleashed dogs as central to what he agreed was a growing problem for Kincaid’s moose.

What a load of dog crap. I’ve been walking/running dogs off lead in that park almost as long as he’s been photographing moose there, and I can’t recall a single instance, not one, of an off leash dog (even many dogs) threatening the life of a moose. I’ve witnessed plenty of the reverse of course, pissed off moose charging, and in some cases, stomping dogs. People too. Who knows, one day it might happen to a photographer.

Water in the outside dog bowl was in the liquid phase this morning. The puzzled look on Harry’s face when it’s solid, watching him lap a pie-shaped icicle, priceless.

Happy Wife left us for a conference in Seattle. No worries. Once she sees the proverbial pasture is no greener she’ll come running, begging us — please! — to take her back. Ha!

Now, I did note among the clothes in the staging area on the bed, where clothes are placed before transfer to luggage, the slimming dress, high heels, and, was that a necklace?

“Well,” she says, “you said you wanted me to look nice for my night out with Beth.”

Careful what I ask for I guess. She greatly underestimates her allure when dressed this way. The heads I see turn she thinks I imagined. A case of feigned jealously meets true modesty.

“Well, sure, but, uh… that nice?”

Alas, it was too late. Into the luggage the clothes went, a thorough good-bye pet to each of the dogs, and she and I were off to the airport. Outside the car it was hugs and kisses aplenty, yet all I could think of to shout to her as she walked away pulling that suitcase behind her was, “Don’t talk to strangers!”