pre-october update

first off, i'm pleased to say i'm on page 3 of a new story. it's happenening slowly, the writing, but it's happenening again. the richard rhodes book on writing that i'm reading is comforting. he says near the beginning that if you write a page a day, you write a book a year. that's a kind way to think about it, isn't it? i want to get a good draft of this story done before the start of the november race.

last week i typed an emergency department note for a patient whose mother was concerned because the toddler had a bluish discoloration around his mouth. on the way to the emergency department, she recalled that she had just given the boy some grape juice to drink, and realized that this was the likely cause of the discoloration. yet she continued with him to the hospital, waited probably several hours in triage, and saw finally a physician. because the kid drank grape juice! this would be truly hilarious if my tax dollars weren't paying for the hospital visit. by the time she actually saw a doctor, the discoloration had of course disappeared.

kara and i took the dogs to pet stores yesterday. we were looking for toys that we can put food and treats into, so they're sort of puzzles for them, working out how to reach the food. ideally, this will occupy the dogs for long periods of time. we got stuff by this company and this one. (we also got a tried-and-true kong.) many thanks to the good people at lucky dog outfitters for their advice and assistance. dagmar was amazingly well behaved on this excursion, though steve was a little bit spastic and peed several times out of excitement.

steve's first day of school is monday, and dagmar's is 2 weeks from today.

it's saturday and kara's working this weekend. i'm about to hop on the treadmill for a spell. i might do a bit more writing today, though i've already written a page and a half this morning, so i might not. i have to go to the grocery store, of course, and determine what we might eat this week. i'm watching and fascinated by the new ken burns film the war, which i am recording on tivo. it's not cheery or anything, no, not hardly, but it's good stuff.

i'm still going to the office 2 or 3 days a week to do quality assurance stuff, filling blanks, appropriately attaching disparate fragments of reports, and administrativy things. i like doing this; at first it was just a welcome reprive from sitting at home all day typing, but i'm growing to enjoy the troubleshooting aspects that come up. the days that i am home just transcribing reports seem to stretch quite long.

increased mass

the dogs saw the vet yesterday and got some more shots. they've both doubled in size since we've had them. dagmar weighs 21 pounds and steve 18. they're giants. the vet and the tech marveled at the size of dagmar's paws. yikes. they have classes starting this week, obedience, training, what have you. i think kara resisted the notion of outside classes at first, thinking we could train them ourselves, but we simply don't have the time or the energy. (this is why i like cats! you put them in your house and you're done.) the pups are creeping up on bona fide 3 months of age. these days they like digging in our backyard and coming back into the house filthy. but they're good kids. (i haven't put many pictures of them up because in all our pictures of them they look more or less like this.)

library thing

my friend jim, in whose house we're living (oops - i mean whose house we bought fair & square and are living in currently) and who is going for an enviable degree in lib'ary science, clued me in to this. i'm only starting out with it, and will probably mostly only add books slowly, as i read them, rather than sit and enter my entire inventory in one or three goes. though i might enter a couple more, right about now, because it's fun for me. although, really, there are other things i might be doing with the stretch of hours before me today. but it's certainly intriguing. check it out, hey? so - thanks jim. my best to mark and bryce.

and another jim - my one and only father - had a birthday yesterday. happy birthday yesterday, dad. it's conceivable that you too wouldd be interested in this library thing, if only as a concept.

lighten up

eliot's getting better. he's still restless, especially at night; he hasn't been outside in weeks. but he's spending more time downstairs among the dogs. he hisses and growls when they get too close, but he doesn't run away all the time. baby steps, eh?

kara and i saw the film away from her last night. it's based on an alice munro story and it was written and directed by sarah polley. julie christie has alzheimer disease and gordon pinsent is her husband. it was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, and of course terribly sad. we were just in tears from 5 minutes in. everyone in it is wonderful. that it's the first feature written or directed (let alone both) by young ms polley is astonishing.

but, maybe someone can recommend a nice comedy? something light? maybe not on the level of blades of glory, but something, you know, good? i look at our netflix queue and it's all horror, thriller, drama, documentary. those are the sort of things we like, yes, but maybe we need to ease up up a tad now and again. life is short.

the book i'm reading now is a novel about a 27-year-old man who was in a car accident and suffered head trauma. now he can't recognize his sister as his sister; he sees her as an impostor and wonders where his real sister is. it's a fascinating book, well written, and i like it, but it's not exactly upbeat.

thinking back on what i've read and watched lately, i see fiction and nonfiction about the holocaust, september 11, people with memory loss or psychoses, murder, governmental conspiracies, childhood abuse. what's with this? i look around at my bookshelves, anticipating what i'll read next, and the spines i give second glances to are of books about obituary writing, found suicide notes, aids, 1968, alcoholism, autopsies. sigh.

at the same time, i am happy to report that dagmar and steve are 11 weeks 1 day old today. yesterday we took them for a walk; they're getting used to the leashes. steve had the pee scared out of her by a yipping pomeranian in a shop window.

plate

errands were run today. i had to get the hyundai's emissions tested, and it's a good car; it passed. then i went to get new tags, and i didn't know i'd be getting whole new plates. exciting! my new plate number-letter combo feels like it fits me better than the old one. (670 reminds me of my bookselling days because one of penguin books' isbn prefixes is 0-670. so how big a dork does that make me? and i like the x and the a because they're in my first name! so there's that.) don't ask me what the old plate said; i don't remember. then i went to costco for the first time in a few months. i bought some things, important things. things to drink and things to wear. then to goodwill for some cheap plush toys for steve and dagmar to rip to shreds. then to target for some more items. now i'm home.

i'm just in from doing a bit of yard work, which of course in my case involves more killing and mutilating than growing and cultivating. one of these days we'll turn that around. and i've had my shower and i smell fine.

i woke up at about 11:30 last night, having fallen asleep before 9. it took me several hours to get back to sleep because i was internally debating doing nanowrimo again this year. i think i will. because of the dog days of this past summer, and because of my own general laziness and lameness, writing has not really happened in 2007 the way i had hoped. maybe the whirlwind novel(la) thing will get me back into focus and suggest realistic goals. i'm not proud of myself, when it comes to writing. this year has been basically a bust. again. (please refer to 2006, 2005, 2004 ...) so i was up and thinking about all of that and then i read a bit more of the richard powers book i'm reading now, which is quite good. then i slept a bit more, after about 2:30 or so.

anyway. so i'm thinking of another writing race the month after next and then, in 2008, more regular short stories, likely one a month. this is what i think. remind me not to talk myself into a novel next year, okay? it'll only end in tears. stories in 2008, work on the skills, and maybe - maybe - a novel in 2009. don't let me forget.

job perks

i typed a report for this patient last week but i keep thinking about it. a teenage girl went to a party in a friend's apartment. she says she knew and trusted all the people there. she was drinking and she lost some time. when she got home she had a headache and she had trouble sleeping. in the morning her headache persisted, so she was taken to the emergency room. (ordinarily i would think a persistent headache after drinking doesn't quite constitute an emergency, but read on.) a ct scan revealed evidence of bullet fragments in the back of her head. that's right - evidently someone at the party had shot this girl in the head! and she didn't even know it. i wonder what the story there is. that's just freaky.

still, maybe not quite as freaky as the guy in the state pen who some weeks back inserted a jar of jalapeno sauce into his rectum. (i don't know if it was a sexual experiment or if he was smuggling the stuff in.) he lost his grip on the jar and then he couldn't retrieve it. he used a hanger to try to get it out, with no success. he was brought to the hospital and taken to the operating room. they found the jar in his sigmoid colon and had to remove a chunk of intestine along with the jar. a note was made that the jar was mostly full and that the cap was secure. imagine of any of the product had spilled while inside him. talk about ouch!

kara's side

kara and i drove up to seattle yesterday to meet her nephew jon and his wife robin. i'd never met them, and kara and jon hadn't seen each other in something like 15 years. that's a long time. he's in town for a few days for a conference. he's a financial advisor and robin's a cpa. they're about my age but they've been married twice as long as kara and i, and they have 2 kids in addition to 2 dogs and 2 cats. they live in texas.

jon is kara's brother tommy's son from his 2nd of 3 marriages. he's the only child from that marriage (tommy's 3rd marriage produced several offspring) and apparently after the divorce jon's mother spirited him away from the rest of the family. that's likely at least part of the reason jon grew up into a responsible and thoughtful person, as opposed to most of the rest of the family, at least to hear kara tell it.

i'm going to have to get kara to draw me a map, a tree, of her family. i get lost easily. lots of marriages and divorces, lots of great gaps of years between siblings, it's hard to keep track of who's related to whom and how.

i was a bit anxious about the get-together, as i generally am when meeting new folks and feeling pressure to maintain conversation and be interesting, but the afternoon was relaxed and i enjoyed it. we walked around capitol hill a bit and went into the back room of a bar called charlie's. we talked about the family some. jon and kara have that history, of course, and it tends to be more colorful than not. we also talked about christopher guest, u2, electric cars, real housewives, maggie may's in austin, and other things. robin and jon seemed to like seattle, and kept saying how different it is, in just walking around, from where they live. it went well. it was good. i like them. i hope we do keep in touch.

while we were gone, dagmar and steve survived their longest stretch in the crate without a pee break. they did fine.

fodder

yesterday afternoon i decided to walk home via residental streets, as opposed to the more direct route via division and 6th. i went serpentine, just north of 6th.

in front of a corner house was parked a white van with the city's seal on the door. under the seal it read forensic services. a girl of 8 or 10 was on the lawn, a large cat in her arms. it hung between her wrists like a hammock and it watched me. the girl tried out a smile but it didn't quite work. standing on the path to the door of the house was a woman on a cell phone. into the phone she was saying, "no, it's okay. i can hold. wait? what? well, when should i call back?" after i passed this woman i heard the door of the van slam closed. i turned and a man in a uniform said, "were you scared?"

we went to bed early because the night before we hadn't slept much. kara fell asleep at maybe 7:15 and i at perhaps 7:45. the puppies woke us at 10 and 2, like hands on a steering wheel. the cats, especially eliot, were restless through the night, requiring comfort and distraction. between these wakings, i slept hard and heavily, with many vivid dreams.

at about midnight i heard a man muttering. i opened my eyes a little bit and in the darkness i saw him standing near the foot of our bed, holding a collapsible ladder. he wore a plaid shirt and seemed angry. i was still partially asleep and when i tried to move my arm to wake kara, i couldn't. the man walked past me and out of the room, deeper into the house. i struggled to move my arm, to touch kara, to speak, but i was too heavy. i could not move.

more than dogs

hi. kara and i saw the movie year of the dog last evening. i do recommend it. it was interesting how much of herself kara saw in the molly shannon character, in terms of molly's relationship with her dog, pencil. it was a sweet movie, very funny, but with a dark side. it certainly reminded us of our dog-related events of this summer, so there was some crying going on, but it also made us laugh. (i think 2 weeks ago would have been too soon to see it.) plus peter sarsgaard's in it, and kara's probably a little bit in love with him. i like him too, so it's totally okay.

dagmar and steve are 9 weeks old today. i got them a woolly apple at a fancy pet store in the plaza where eliot got shaved yesterday, and they love it. they're tearing it apart. we might have to get them some more fruit.

sorry this blog has been so much about dogs lately. i imagine it's getting a bit boring for my legion of regular readers (all 4 of you!). other things actually are going on in our lives. kara's doing extremely well in school and she's thinking of applying for a job with the city. the job seems to be basically the same as what she's doing now, but it pays something like $6 more an hour, so it would be great if she got that. her current job is still mostly okay, but the management in her department is often a source of stress.

her fingernail is growing back fast. it'll be all the way back way before christmas. it looks really good.

i'm enjoying my new role as part-time filler of blanks and corrector of flagged jobs in the transcription department. (it's less temporary now; even though the person i was filling in for is back, the other person has decided she doesn't want to do it any more.) i like the troubleshooting aspect of the job, and a small part of me actually likes being around people again. the woman who works where i got my coffee almost daily until a year ago (when i started working from home) remembered me immediately when i started going back a few weeks ago, and that was nice. and it's still only 2 or 3 days a week that i have to go to the office. the variety is welcome.

and of course i'm reading (but not enough), watching movies and tv (too much), not doing much exercising (though i've been walking to and from the office, so that's a small something), and not writing. so some things need to change soon. it's day 2 of a 4-day weekend for me (day 1 of a 3-dayer for kara), and there's some yard stuff i'm going to do today. we'll walk the dogs (whoops! i said the d word) probably today and monday and work with them on their potty training and other things. dagmar's a bit rough with steve sometimes with their play, and i'm not sure what the right thing to do about that is.

eliot clearly feels better, happier, shorn. he's more active and social. all that hair just weighed him down. he's a sweet boy.