The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
At Six Months
We almost have Gibbs into a routine. He is going to camp three days a week, which means that three days a week he is too tired to cause any trouble at all. He is still barking too much for me to be comfortable taking him out in public for real, and he has no leash manners. But I just picked up a pass to Glenview’s dog park, the Community Bark West.
I didn’t name it, folks.
I know that he is perfectly socialized with other dogs, and am hoping that he will start to get used to seeing strangers, while he is playing with the other dogs.
He still isn’t used to the football thing. This is where he spent half of the first quarter:
I wasn’t about to tell him not to soak up the sun while he still can. He doesn’t know what winter is yet.
Besides that, Game Day is a great big danger zone for the potty accidents. Because he still isn’t very good at telling me that he needs to go outside. And I can’t stop to ask him every ten minutes. Not when Matt Forte could light it up on any given play.
No accidents yesterday. Although Gibbs slobbered up half a bowl of water and promptly vomited up his lunch.
Puppies. When do they outgrow that nonsense?
Parrot Week
About Trio and Vitriol
So here is my response:
Heartland Animal Shelter
Heartland Animal Shelter in Northbrook was featured on WGNTV yesterday. I can’t seem to embed the clip, but you can find it here. And this is one of the puppies featured:
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford
Book 45
This book is the reason I pick up so many of the modern book club favorites. Because every once in awhile, one is so good that it restores my faith.
1986. Chinese American man aged 56ish loses his wife to cancer. In his melancholic haze, he reads that an old boarded up hotel has been sold, and the new owner has discovered a bunch of WWII era stuff that presumably belonged to “evacuated” Japanese families.
Henry recalls his friendship with a Japanese American girl and her family in 1942. He obtains permission to search the stuff. Drama ensues.
The thing I like best in this book is that even in Henry’s 12-year old perspective, he finds sympathetic adults that appreciate him, help him and keep him safe – both from baddies and from the harsh old world judgement of his father. The thing I like least (SPOILERS) is the old “daddy kept the letters from getting through” gambit. Seriously, it was so obvious that I didn’t even think of it. I seriously thought there was going to be a reasonable explanation.
I also like that despite the title of the book, there is a surprising lack of bitterness displayed by most of the characters. There are a couple generations of people here that have a few reasons to hate the world, but almost no one takes that route.
Score one for the bestseller list. This time.
Blankets 50 – 52
I finished these between Wednesday and Sunday:
The above pink fleece with Red Heart Soft yarn in Plummy, left over from a previous project.
Above has two rows of Red Heart yarn in Light Coral and two rows of white.
And three rows of Red Heart yarn in Cherry Red. I almost didn’t have the nerve to use red, but I like the way it turned out. My mother would say that dog looks just like Rin Tin Tin.
New Favorite Dog Toy
Gibbs likes these:
They are called Hide & Seek toys. His current favorite is actually from Martha Stewart, because it has some kind of crinkly plastic in it that makes a lot of noise. Of course, then he loses the little stuffed toys.
As it happens, Drs. Foster and Smith sell refills of the stuffed toys. But they cost $8.00 and I didn’t have enough other stuff to justify an order when I was looking. But today, I spontaneously decided that Gibbs needs a Big Boy Collar, so I went in to PetsMart. They didn’t have the refills, but they did have some little stuffed toys from Kong:
Actually, the one I bought is a brighter green. It is the right size to stuff in the Hide & Seek toys and was on sale. I think three of them cost me $10. It is “low stuffing” and has a squeaker inside. It even came with an extra squeaker, which I don’t think I will be using. Although it did occur to me for five seconds that I should try to talk my mother into making some toys for him. The squeakers would work for that purpose.
Anyway, Gibbs loved it. He took it out of the Hide & Seek toy and ran of squeaking it. And squeaking. And squeaking. He finally dropped it and I went over to “reload”, but the “fur” is all wet.
I wouldn’t want it to get mildewy. And I’m glad I got three.
My Favorite Person Today
Because The Bride wants to hear more about my mother and less about my blankets, I will tell you that I brought her home from the hospital – for the third time – last Tuesday. I don’t think she will mind my telling you that she needed surgery to remove a large mass on her ovary and while they were in there, they just took the rest of her reproductive system. Then she developed an infection, then she had an allergic reaction to the anti-biotics. She is nauseous and in pain most of the time, but she doesn’t have cancer, which is, I think the important thing.
So. Tuesday night. I will spare you the debacle, but the punchline is that it took two pharmacies and over two hours of my time to get the drugs that she needed. And no one seemed particularly interested in the fact that I’d been waiting all freaking night for this stuff. I was sorta hating the world right then.
So today, I walked into the Noodles & Company in Glenview. I am a serious regular. I have regular orders and a regular table. I generally come in by myself, on the early side of the rush, order some pasta and read my book.
Today, I decided to bring home stuff for my mother. I asked for a bowl of pasta for myself, and some other stuff to bring home. This is not the first time in the last month that I have done this, but the young lady at the register was a bit thrown. She called over a more senior staffer, who also had trouble making it happen. I realized I was making things difficult and was ready to tell them to just place it in two separate orders. It didn’t make much difference. Then Stacy saw me.
She punched my order in, in about five seconds, while asking how I am because she hasn’t seen me in awhile. I told her that my mother was still laid up, which was why I was placing a complicated order. She didn’t ask for details, just whether Mom was going to be ok, which she is.
She said that she would bring my pasta out right away, and make the carryout order when I was ready to go. Then she comped my bowl of pasta. “Don’t even (argue),” she said. “It wasn’t a problem order and you shouldn’t have had to wait.”
Can I tell you? One friendly acquaintance with whom I do business noticed that I was having a crappy time and made my day. So:
Dear Noodles & Company: Glenview. Stacy. Rocks.
Press for Project Linus
I wasn’t able to make the Project Linus Starbucks night this month, but I popped in to drop off blankets and pick up some prepared fleece. All were abuzz about how Harry Porterfield of CBS News came to visit with his news crew. Here is the video of the story that ran tonight in his People You Should Know segment:
That Thing in Georgia
I am not all that familiar with the Troy Davis case. I know that he was executed and there was a great deal of controversy, as many people doubted that he was guilty of the crime. I had been reading headlines on this case for only a few days. I couldn’t even bring myself to read all the details, and I felt sick when I read that the execution was imminent.
I have no idea whether Troy Davis killed a police officer. No idea. But the older I get, the less I approve of capital punishment.
When I was in high school, and all right-wing about it, my civics teacher told our class that between 1900 and 1990, 300 people were executed in the U.S. and later found to be not guilty of the crimes for which they died.
Three hundred. That sunk in. And I talked about it for while. I remember some adult in my life – I don’t think it was one of my parents – heard the stat and said, “You have to believe that most of those 300 were early in the century before the development of modern forensics.”
Maybe. I eventually let it drift to the back of my mind where I store things that I don’t really want to think about anyway.
Then something was found to be rotten in the State of Illinois. Stop laughing. A journalism professor at Northwestern University names David Protess led his students in investigating a whole slew of controversial convictions and the work ended up freeing several prisoners that were wrongly convicted – including some on death row. He has now started a non-profit to continue the work.
The State of Illinois owned the fact that something was wrong. The governor put a moratorium on executions. Later, the assembly abolished the death penalty altogether. It doesn’t really fix the problems on the front line of criminal justice, but with this action, Illinois definitively put a stop to the greatest injustice of all.
I gotta tellya. There is not a whole lot for which to be thankful in my state government. But last night, I was feeling it. Not proud. But..satisfied. That my state got onto the right side of this issue.
The Next Dark Age 