You know how it’s summer and you think, well, sure, I’m busy now but it will definitely slow down a bit in the fall? No? Me either. I had a sinking feeling all summer that fall was going to be insane and in fact it is living right up to that expectation. I do not have time for anything and it sucks.
Well! My daughter has gone off for a couple days to a concert in California and Five will be descending on what remains of my weekend at any moment, so let’s get straight to the gallery explanations. Consider this alt text, by the way. I am ambivalent on alt text, downright uneasy. Why? Because the clamor to put alt text on every image online coincided with the rise of AI (aka the thieving lie machine; Butlerian Jihad now, etc.) and gosh, it does make it easy for the thieving lie machine to get an idea of what words to put with what pictures, now doesn’t it? Or to be better able to follow prompts when making slop pictures for cheap assholes. So, in the immortal but lost words of the Twitter profile for a vanished convenience store in Asheville, NC, I’m agin it. Nevertheless, I use it on social media like Bluesky because, okay, screen readers and accessibility are good things. But I’m not going to add it on my blog, sorry.
Sunday, October 4, we actually got to go to the nice part of the airport side of the dike trail. Usually I don’t take Harvey there because there are too many other dogs and he, as oft chronicled here, is dog reactive. Sigh. Owning a dog reactive dog just makes one’s life so much more interesting. Monday, we went to the beach. This is because my brother fell again and yet again the firefighters trooped through the house to lift him up. Each of these emergencies throws my whole emotional and psychological self into disarray, every single time, and only the ocean makes it better. Betterish. Nothing really makes it better. Tuesday morning at work the line of light across the river was just extraordinary and I want to paint it so bad. Wednesday kind of a boring dog walk but this illuminated tree made it beautiful. Thursday, I had to run a work errand down by the river and paused to take this shot by Pacifick Distillery. Look at the lines of light on that little gear shack or whatever it is. Coolers. Generators. Shrine to the Dead Fish Gods. I’m not up on the minutiae of the fishery. But by damn the beginning of the sunset gave it glorious stripes. Friday another day, another dog walk, and Harvey is getting old. I have a paragraph about that coming; I’m worried. And then Saturday was yesterday and it occurred to me I didn’t really have a photo of the completed Halloween decorations for this year. Is it not beautiful? Will nooone ever appear to mow my grass? Stay tuned.
Because my life is not complicated enough, Harvey has suddenly developed really extreme separation anxiety. He’s always been an anxious dog and a bit of an escape artist, but he has taken both these tendencies and refined them into a really hellish whole. He cries all day unless he’s right by my leg – or my daughter’s leg, either of us will do – and the minute he’s left alone he goes full MacGyver and gets himself out of the yard. He has a dog door. There is no blocking technique we can use that stops him, so that doesn’t work. Then he takes himself up the hill to my daughter’s house. I have tried repairing the fence, it did not work. I have put up a trail cam, it didn’t catch him in the act. I can lock him behind the kitchen door, which is unfair to the cat and confuses my brother, but then Harvey goes insane. He has clawed through literally 80 years of paint and is destroying the door. He howls and barks and, I don’t know, generally completely loses his shit. I am losing mine, because I have to go to work. I can’t stay here all day. Neither can I continue getting phone calls from strangers who find my dog wandering around, or cranky texts from my daughter as he shows up at her back door.
Therefore in a fit of madness I ordered a crate. I am not, let us say, good exactly, at spatial awareness if it’s in number form. I can look at a space and then look at an object and tell you down to a quarter inch if it will fit but say something is 48 inches wide and I’m like, huh? Then I can’t find the tape measure anyway. This is how I ended up with a crate big enough to hold a tiger. Or a small elephant. I wrestled it into my room anyway: it was flat then. But once assembled it took up, and I’m really not exaggerating, 90% of the last bit of empty floor space in my room. I was mad, though, and so I decided it was great and I could pile clothes on it and whatever, this had to work. This lasted two days but on the second day as I was trying to get my shoes by walking between the crate and the bed with my feet precariously in 1st position, I fell over and went into hysterics. I couldn’t fall very far and the whole thing was so idiotically funny, not to mention that I never even closed the door on the thing, because I don’t want Harvey to be sad, that I about lost it. So the crate, thanks to a genius idea of my daughter’s, is flattened and in the courtyard and next spring I will finally be able to grow vegetables in the front yard. Caged vegetables. Take that, deer! And the Harvey problem, as I go into what will be probably the busiest, most insane week of my job year, is unsolved. I do not know exactly wtf I am going to do. I would take him to the vet, because this is out of control, but alas: like the rest of us here on the western edge of the continent, Harvey does not have easily accessible medical care. I did my best. He has an appointment on the 26th with a new vet. So we shall see.
Also, climate change, and the smallest possible privileged whine: I have nothing to wear when none of the weather reports are right and nothing makes sense. That sentence brought to you by this weekend’s laborious task of swapping out summer clothes for winter ones, a bi yearly PITA which would make way more sense if days that start out chilly stopped suddenly deciding to be over 70 by 3 pm. All this fluster is work related: this coming week, I have to be poised and together and organized and everything has to run like a well oiled machine. Every day is packed from about 7 am to about 7 pm and, yikes.
Yeah, I know, I too can see the disasters lurking just around the corner. But by Friday at noon it will be over. See you next week when things return to what passes for normal around here.
