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Date night tonight! I was alerted to this fact this morning by Happy Wife before she left for work. Ordinarily home-based date night is Wednesday or Thursday. This puts me on the hook for dinner.

The lead I am challenged to follow:

BIGGER.

All ingredients locally provided except the chicken and feta. Peas from our garden. Preparation by Happy Wife. Baked-to-crisp prosciutto — TO   DIE   FOR.

What will I do? I can’t top this. Duplicating it would make me a copycat, a plagiarizer, a fraud!

Maybe I’ll just make her favorite, prepared with my own flair, a kind of Caprese salad —  Burrata cheese (hard to find!), heirloom tomato, avocado and fresh basil. Served with EVO and salt. A chilled, unoaked Chardonnay. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

I’m off to find Burrata. Wish me luck on that. If I can’t find any, I’ll need a chef, and quick.

Spent the past weekend at our “Nest” on the beach, working. You don’t ordinarily associate beach with work, but da light fixtures, day no hang demselves. Also finished the hatch door to the attic, which I’d fashioned from bead board leftover from another honey-do project in the kitchen. And it rained, I had no distractions (Happy wife & the beasties stayed in Anchorage), so momentum was on my side. Victor the electrician stopped by and fixed the outdoor light. The prior weekend I thought I’d fix it myself, got as far as establishing there was no power at the fixture or at the switch inside, then I gave up. Turns out the wires from the breaker to the switch had been cut and were hidden among a snarl of other wires in the breaker box, and I just missed it. Working in the confined space of a breaker box, bare wires sticking out here and there, without dropping power to the mains is not something I’ll ever be comfortable with. At one point I heard Victor get on the wrong side of some 110 when he touched a wire he thought was cold. He took this in stride; like a beekeeper getting stung he just rolled with it. Occupational hazard. No biggy. Me? Amps and bees frighten me.

Best $85 I spent all weekend.

So you might find it surprising I installed the light fixture myself. Here’s the thing: three wires I understand. A tangle of Romex and other wires choked together in a breaker box, not so much.

Three S-turns. Turned out nice, I thought. (Victor battles the amps in the breaker box).

Returned to Anchorage Saturday afternoon, washed the car and then Happy Wife and I went to a fund raiser for the Anchorage symphony. We were invited to come and  join a table of people we’d joined last year at a different fund raiser… because, I was told, we made the table fun. That put pressure on us to bring the levity along again.

We do our best:

Now, should you think we’re all just a bunch salmon smokin’, 4-wheel drivin’ bumpkins up here lacking any appreciation of the arts, well, you’d be wrong about that!

BIGGER.

That’s Latisha up their singing. From Ypsilanti, MI. The male duettist is from Flint. Both were American Idol contestants. An impressive set of pipes Latisha has. At one point, with full orchestral accompaniment, she belted out an enthusiastic version of “I’m Every Woman,” encouraging the women in the audience to stand, sway, and sing along with her. Experiencing a moment of gender ambiguity the man in front of me, dressed in a kilt, stood.

The evening ended with a ornament-topped desert and two encores, one of which was a pretty tight rendition of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, complete with some pretty slick solo fiddle work.

 

I just learned that the glob of gastric gunk removed from Harry, in medical lingo, is known as a Bezoar.

Don’t have a prescription?

Before long you won’t need one!

Harry is recovering well.

I need to swallow something I can’t pass. Get me some of that special attention.

Harry had surgery yesterday afternoon. He had rather suddenly stopped eating, appeared constipated, and bereft of spirit. Happy Wife was very concerned. She called our vet and one or two others, all of which were either slammed or already away for the holiday weekend. I advised watching and waiting, thinking (hoping really) his problem, whatever it was, would fix itself. When he wouldn’t eat Lucy’s custom-prepared food, however, I knew something was very wrong. Imagine a termite turning up its nose at a fresh, kiln-dried 2×4. Yeah, that kinda wrong.

Off to Pet Emergency Harry and Happy Wife went, and I swear we should get a punch card for this place. The veterinarian came out and showed Happy Wife the x-ray: “Missing anything heart-shaped in your house?” she asked. Lodged in his stomach was a very large mass. Happy Wife said it really was heart shaped, and she guessed it was a big hairball because in the past Harry has thrown up big balls of hair. How such hair comes to accumulate inside him I’m not sure, Happy Wife has theories.

Too big and/or tricky to remove by an endoscopic method, the vet recommended surgical removal. And good thing, too, because what she found when they cut him open was a large mass of vile looking crud congealed around a bunch of shredded plastic crap. Some fun. Worse, attached to this mass were stringy strands of undigested grass which had started to pass into the small intestine. Think jellyfish head & tentacles. Consequently, the muscle in the intestine is contracting like an inchworm trying to suck the mass down. Left untreated this condition can kill a dog.

Snip snip and out it came.

Harry is recovering well this morning and we hope to bring him home later this afternoon. When I phoned this morning to get an update they said he ate a meatball and kept it down. Not ordinarily a milestone for Harry, but today you can imagine how happy that made us.

Cobwebs were especially bad this morning as I pushed back the bed covers. In the time it took for my feet to touch the floor I floundered to remember my name. One of those, “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife” moments, when you are conscious but your recognition apparatus hasn’t finished bootstrapping.

Outside: oatmeal gray and drizzly. Fine. Life can’t be chocolate and roses all the time. Or, if you ask me, Ruffles and French onion dip. Both of which are once again contraindicated foods because my blood is (still) fat. Screw you Low Density Lipoprotein, screw you! So I bought a 7# bag of peanuts in the shell at Costco to sate my frequent salt & crunch crave. I pop my 40 mg statin and chase it with cabernet. Eating the enemy and the cavalry together like that makes me imagine a chemical war inside me, good versus bad molecules.

Are there ten reasons not to argue on the internet? How about this one: Your internet interlocutor, that means the person you’re talking to, that person makes a sweeping statement of the kind: “All X are Y”. You reply that no, not all X are Y, cite evidence of exception, and elaborate why the exception is important to the issue under discussion. This person then replies with a new claim “All new X are not Y”, and you reply how this contradicts the first claim — because the set of “All new X” is a subset of “All X”.  Then a new person comes along, in defense of the first person, and says there is no contradiction, effectively arguing that I should’ve known a new X is not in the set of All X. This person goes on to repeat the second claim of the first person, saying it is obviously (!) true, To wit: All new X are not Y.

You pause at the keyboard, anxiously tapping your finger, wondering if this is worth it. You decide it is. You let this person down gently, reply that unfortunately the sweeping generalization — All new X are not Y — is also false. You provide evidence of exception. The first person then returns, evidently exasperated by now, and says, “Jazus man, there’s no contradiction, Most X are not new.”

Yet a new claim!

Ugh.

You feel bereft.

Worse, in this particular internet exchange, X and Y had little to do with the main point I thought my interlocutors and I were arguing, which, funny enough, was in part about the defense of the scientific enterprise, and the insidious danger posed by certain people and/or groups in society who are, several of my interlocutors feared, anti-science. I found it surprising, possibly even amusing, that people who defend the scientific enterprise should be so sloppy careless in fact checking the claims they make in the course of an argument defending science. Not that fact checking claims is in and of itself an example what “doing science” means; as somebody with experience actually “doing science” I know this. However, the ability to conduct a logical argument, citing evidence and counter evidence for claims, admitting when you haven’t, etc., you would think would be features of a person defending the virtues of the scientific enterprise.

An eyebrow was raised by a blogger, on a blog where I’m a frequent commenter, on the sensibility of a recently established bike lane in his city. I like bicycles. I like bicycling. I like bike lanes. Striping a bike lane on the shoulder of the road reminds drivers that cyclists are permitted to share the road. I wouldn’t care if the road was striped or not if not for the countless drivers in my fair city who see bicyclists in the roadway as a deserving target of a jettisoned beer bottle.

Unfortunately, however, advocating for bicycles and bike lanes has become associated with being politically liberal. I understand there’s a basis in reality for this. Nevertheless, I am far from politically liberal, and I am not going to stop liking bicycles or quietly advocating for bike lanes in my city simply because it overlaps with a nominally liberal cause. So what?

Attempting, I suppose, to amplify the sentiment of the blogger, a commenter snarked:

Liberalism at work. Let’s create traffic jams in the off chance there’s somebody pedaling a bike.

This got me started. I replied, not disrespectfully I thought:

Where I live car lanes have never been suddenly appropriated for bikes only. And offhand I can’t think of a single city I’ve biked in over the past 30 years (many) where that has been the case. Sometimes when a bike lane is established it may make an existing car lane narrower, but so what, what’s wrong with sharing the road? Plus I’ve never understood why people make the association that if you like cycling and/or support bike lanes you therefore must also be politically liberal.

Instead of booyah!, I was booed. Initially anyway.

Okay, no biggy, I’m a thick-skinned boy, been arguing on and off on the Internet for, oh, going on twenty years now I guess. I cut my teeth on USENET.

But then what really got me going was this:

It’s the use of government force to bring to fruition a pet cause of the elite minority regardless of it’s impracticality or the views of the overwhelming majority.

Good grief. The liberal association smear again. I can’t expect the commenter knew my politics are largely Libertarian, and thus likely to the right of even him/her on many issues, and I should have dropped it, but I didn’t, couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out that both political parties use the force of government to oppress majorities. I replied:

Yes, like the unending commitment by the majority of Republicans to continue prosecuting the WarOnDrugs.

More loud booing. 4 down votes, among my first at the blog!

True, my overall “score” did improve as the day wore on, as more readers weighed in evidently finding merit in my thinly veiled wisdom, but still, I couldn’t fathom how anybody’s Scopeometer could be so out of whack as to think bike lanes are a worthy example of the tyranny of the minority!

No, booing my comment more likely indicates that certain people on the Right are rankled by any criticism of the Republican party, true or not. Too bad. Because it is a feature of Libertarianism, not a bug, to be able to express contempt for the overreach of both parties, where the policies of either merit it.

Moral of the story: It is a mistake to assume that people who advocate for a nominally liberal cause are necessarily liberals.

I’m afraid I’m not going to reach my goal by year end, to play this on my guitar and sing it for Happy Wife.

In the meantime, enjoy Neil’s rendition. Live a little — turn up the volume!

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Pouring Rain. You can watch the grass grow. Must be state fair season.

What’s new? Oh, not too much, we are well, the dogs are good, especially Lucy, who is showing no signs of metastatic disease from the cancer she had removed from her neck in July. Did I mention that? Anyway, yeah, a big ugly growth on the back of her neck which we’d known about for months, but suddenly, like in a matter of days, it started growing bigger very quickly. Happy Wife thought it was likely a sebaceous cyst. Needle aspirate said Mast cell tumor. Pathology said, “Aggressive, stage 2.” This is not what you want to hear over the phone while on vacation.

When we returned home we had Lucy genotyped for mutations in the c-Kit gene, which, if positive, may indicate an especially aggressive tumor. Test came back negative. We considered chemotherapy, which would be largely prophylactic because a) barring clear symptoms, it’s very difficult (and expensive) to determine if the cancer has metastasized in a dog, and 2) it is also difficult to determine if the chemo is working if in fact the cancer had metastasized. Our vet advised, “I’d do nothing. The surgical margins were clean. Good chance we got it all. She’s going on 12. I’d spare her the chemo; just coddle her.”

So we did, and so we do.

I’ve started calling her Sweet Pea:

BIGGER.