Prepoceros

Today was a sleepy day. It’s 9:40, I’ve just woken up from an evening nap, and I’m about to go to bed. Sam had a poop emergency at 5:00 this morning; John was the first to wake up and was wonderful enough to take him out, but I think I still lost some deep sleep on that one.

This morning I had a conference with my Writing professor about my memo. I thought signing myself up for one of the earlier conferences would motivate me to have a draft done by now, but I’m still going through the research. I had plenty of questions, but I feel like I kind of wasted a good opportunity.

We had another taiko performance yesterday afternoon, this time at the new Discovery Green park downtown. Real quick, just twenty minutes . . . part of some arts showcase, I think.

Yup, that’s the news from today. I didn’t promise quality, remember.

Last week I noticed that Sam’s pee, instead of issuing forth in a glorious stream, dribbled slowly onto the ground, so that it took him two or three times as long as usual to do his business. He didn’t appear to be in pain and acted normally otherwise, but I took him to the vet anyway.

She took a urine sample and some x-rays and found a mild bladder infection and two bladder stones, one of which was lodged in his urethra. That one was so large that at first she thought it might not actually be a bladder stone, since he shouldn’t have been able to pee past it. But it was; Sam’s just a trooper. I really hope he hasn’t been in terrible pain for the last few days.

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Samson and I make a good roach patrol. He brings the keen ears and I bring the spray of painful death.

How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

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It probably won’t surprise you that I, a reasonably regular blogger, keep up with a considerable number of other blogs. I collect and read RSS feeds with Bloglines, which greatly simplifies that up-with-keeping. If a blog doesn’t publish a feed, I tend to write it off as being not worth the effort; I can think of only three non-feeded blogs that I remember to read at least once a week.

I generally settle in to check on everybody once a day, maybe two or three times if I have lots of work to procrastinate on, and it usually takes me about an hour to get through a day’s posts. If there are enough intriguing links to other compelling sites with large archives, the process can last all day (see above re: procrastination).

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I went to see my doctor today about some persistent mild abdominal pain I’ve been having, and, after feeling me up, she prescribed me two antibiotics. I took the first one (metronidazole) a few minutes ago, and it was awful. The pill, medium-sized, wasn’t coated at all; when I failed to swallow it on the first try and it started dissolving in my mouth, I gagged and almost threw up.

I managed to get it down on the second gulp, but the horrible, bitter taste lingered, even after a whole glass of water. I thought some food might dull the taste, but I only ended up bitterizing the first half of my dinner. One down, twenty-seven to go. Blech.

Any suggestions out there for swallowing nasty, uncoated pills? I think I might try putting it in a spoonful of yogurt.

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Samson doesn’t have what you might call “road sense,” in that he doesn’t have sense enough not to leap into the road when traffic is barrelling towards him. Even in the parking lot he’s usually oblivious to an approaching car until it gets within one dog-length of him, when it startles him. Slower-moving dogs, on the other hand, he notices a block away. I guess terriers haven’t evolved their way into living with cars yet.

Usually when we go on walks I try to minimize the number of major streets we cross, which means the walks get a bit repetitive: every morning we walk around our block, and every afternoon we walk around the next block over. In the evenings we do a lap around the building for one last pee before bed.

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Some people living in my apartment complex, or maybe their friends, have a strange habit of leaving food and associated debris in the parking lot. I don’t mean empty wrappers or fast food bags that might have blown in from elsewhere; I’m talking about half-eaten dinners carefully placed between parking spaces, as if someone had eaten a meal in their parked car, decided they were finished, and set the remaining food on the ground before driving away.

It’s a chore to keep Sam away from the leftovers on our morning walks. None of it is probably inherently poisonous, but he’s probably better off not stuffing himself with people food, especially when the first half of that food was eaten by apparently-crazy people. Nine times out of ten*, when he darts off between two cars, he’s spotted half a hamburger or a milkshake or a box of mostly-eaten chinese food or a run-over dinner roll.

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The neater you keep your lawn, the easier it is for me to pick up the poop. I’m just sayin’.

There’s a dog in my apartment complex who looks a lot like Samson, but with shorter hair and a slimmer body. Her name is Phoenix.

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John got me flowers the other day, and at first I didn’t realize they were sunflowers because half of them were red with purple leaves. The dye in them turns the water purple, but since they’re in a green vase it just looks brown, which is a shame. They almost exactly match the flowers in the painting above my sofa.

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