The Boy Dog is “Spicy!”

Greetings Fellow Humans!

Well, another week gone. Some mild rain has fallen (and is falling) here, and temperatures are low enough that a long sleeve shirt is actually welcome. It’s lovely.

But the past week has been a blur.

Mostly I have worked on the Blueridge Community Association website. It continues to inch toward release, but there are setbacks. Lately it has been slowing down — probably because the database is getting big and it has to run a lot of code to create even a single web page. If possible, that slowdown needs to be fixed before the site launches, but it’s all new territory to me. WordPress is a huge jumble of scripts and related stuff that I do not trust. I am learning it needs vast amounts of maintenance. Basically you need to fuss over it regularly to keep it happy, and I am only just beginning to learn the proper fussing incantations.

Most of the house projects went nowhere last week. Or at least nowhere visible. Anne is still hemming curtains, for example. I did finish painting one door and took another down to get going on it. There are repairs to make to it before I paint it though, because someone other than us was an idiot. I’ll document that for next week.

Looking through my photos there is only one that is barely worth sharing:

That’s the 214 bus out in front of our house. I took that picture for a new web page about transit options in the neighbourhood. Exciting, eh?

The big news last week was that Cruzer got sick. Yes, this lump of a dog:

He wound up in the vet’s office for several hours on Saturday. He’d stopped eating and was clearly not a happy puppy. But still, his first act upon arriving at the vet’s was to put his paws up on the admissions desk as if to say “I’m perfectly fine. Please tell the human who brought me here that and send us home.”

Dogs, however, are always fine right up to the moment they drop dead. Or at least that is what they will try to convince everyone of.

Thanks to Cruzer we had multiple chances to learn new vet lingo. At the emergency office on Saturday and at our regular vet’s office on Monday (when all the dogs happened to have regular exams scheduled) he was described with these terms and phrases:

• Spicy.
• Snarky.
• Cruzer did his best.

Translated, those mean he tried to bite everyone who wanted to examine him because he does not like going to the vet! No one was injured, it seems, which is good, and it turns out he may have had cause for being grouchy. He was in so much pain that he sat up when one vet palpated his abdomen… while he was sedated. He was very sore.

But no cause was found. He had a fever, but imaging was normal except that he had a lot of gas in an otherwise empty digestive tract. He was put on pain killers, antibiotics, and a probiotic, all to treat his symptoms. Thankfully it seems to have worked. Two days later he was basically back to normal, but he loves the special diet we were told to put him on — chicken soup for dogs — while his gut recovered. It will be hard to get him to go back to mostly kibble.

In short, he’s just fine and we are poorer.

And that is just about all I have to share this time around. As for next week, I predict the forehead shaped dents in the walls of my office will get deeper and wider from dealing with WordPress. Oh well.

Oh, last week I mentioned a certain level of anguish over the latest IPCC climate change report. The video below came out the same day as my post and it has a lot to say about the options countries and people have to deal with climate change. And it’s not full of despair.

If you’re well read, there aren’t many surprises. If, however, you’re new to this stuff, it’s an interesting 16 minutes, and I recommend it. The presenter is Hank Green —a personal hero — and one of the founders of Crash Course, which is possibly the best source of educational video on YouTube.

Enjoy!