In September, Lexi was pretty sick, and a couple of rounds of antibiotics and anti-emetics appeared to have resolved her issues. But some odd numbers in the blood work were never explained nor could they be related to the gastric symptoms she’d been exhibiting.
She started up with further digestive issues again last week, and by the time we got her to the veterinarian on Tuesday, it became clear that she was a much sicker puppy than just some tummy trouble. Her platelet counts were way off, red cells way down, and while she was eating and drinking just fine, she was losing weight she couldn’t afford. By yesterday afternoon it was clear that she was failing rapidly.
In consultation with our vet of 15 years, we decided it was time to say goodbye to Lexi, and went over in the late afternoon to have our last cuddle with our little dog, and hold her while the vet eased her across the finish line.
Our chipuggle mutt, Alexis Kay: Gotcha date (adopted) March 27, 2010. Passed October 26, 2021. About 12 years old.
Today is the first time this year (actually, probably since 2019) that we ate out at a restaurant … indoors. We went over to Mi Casita over in Gambrills, and had our fill of yummy Mexican cuisine. Today is also the first time this year that we celebrated our twenty third wedding anniversary. That’ll be the only one, too, but when one is only counting to “one”, it’s easy.
Lexi Being Cute
Because that’s what she does:
Lexi napping with one of her toys
Winding Down
Y’all. Care for our democracy. Be vocal about these voting restrictions being put in place at the state levels all over the country. Put your money and your time into candidates that are in favor of expanding voting rights, caring for all people, and putting country and citizens over party.
In our first week of spring, we had lows in the 30’s and highs in the 80’s. Fortunately, I’m using Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. I’ve managed a bit of yard work over a couple of weekends, and the first mowing of the (front) lawn was yesterday. Today? More rain… a nice follow-up to the 2.15″ of the moistness that visited us four days ago. (Sorry, California.)
Lexiversary
Lexi in her normal state of relaxation
This little cute chipuggle joined our household eleven years ago yesterday, having made a trip up to Maryland from a kill shelter in North Carolina the very day we brought her home. She’s now happy, spoiled, and wonderful.
Bird Condo
The bird condo I built, ready for occupation
The bird condo I built is now open for business, mounted on the fence line, below the oak tree at the base of the yard. It’ll be in shade much of the day, which is a good thing for not cooking baby birds.
Waiting for a shot
That’s what I’m doing, waiting for a vaccination. I’m told I’ll be able to sign up for an appointment a couple of weeks from now. Looking forward to that. Not least because we won’t have to get the alien nasal probing of a COVID-19 test prior to heading up to Maine, either for planned vacations, or on a whim… Yes, we’ll stay masked indoors in public for the next several months, at least. But a great stress will be relieved.
Winding Down
DoD announced no new casualties in the last several weeks, which is a good thing. The GOP, across the nation, are enacting voting rights restrictions among a plethora of other asshole moves. That’s not a good thing. Stay vigilant and motivated, folks. When they make it harder to vote, ensure that you jump through all the hoops needed to get to the poles and vote those jerks out of office and out of our lives. (I’m looking at the folks that sent Susan Collins back to the Senate for another six years, too… sigh.)
Yep, we have ice and snow, but not anything like those folks that Ted Cruz abandoned when he went to vacation in Cancun. For one thing, after just a couple of days, we’re supposed to go above freezing for several hours today. Yesterday’s snow was a disappointment – we got a third of an inch of ice, instead of 4-6 inches of snow.
None of that stops folks around here from getting out in their cars and spinning about on the roadways, crunching into one another.
Lexi
Lexi usually goes upstairs to bed when we sit down to play a board game in the dining room.
Lexi settled in the dining room
But last evening she broke with tradition, and settled in a chair next to me while we played Coldwater Crown (a fishing game). It’s got a lot more strategy to it than a game of Fish! Bass Lake…
Woodshop
I’ve spent some time cleaning downstairs, both in the paint section, and dealing with the never-ending pile of scraps that I’m loath to toss. So I took a number of those scraps, and fabricated a bird condo.
Building a bird condo in the woodshop
It’s got room for four families of little tweet things, and the roof will be removable for cleaning, etc. I’ve still got a few coats of Spar Urethane to apply, to make it weather safe. But all the color coats on on and dry.
Winding Down
DoD announced no new casualties since the last time we shared this time together.
Oh, hey – Marcia got her first dose of the Pfizer coronovirus vaccine the other week, and the second will be in early March. Yay!
I’m counting from 20 January, with a tiny bit of hope in my heart.
Goings On
We’ve been staying busy, but some stuff has been going on.
Lexi being cute:
Lexi with her old stuffed bee (from Linda Rose)
I fabricated a new dog dish holder in the wood shop:
The new dog dish holder I made for Lexi
The dog dish holder was a four day project. The actual cutting and assembly was a matter of a couple of hours. All the rest was staining, and coats of polyurethane, with drying and light sanding at intervals. It’s much nicer looking than the old one, and a couple of inches lower, which is good for a little dog.
I did the annual deep cleaning of the Behmor cofffee roaster:
Annual deep cleaning of the Behmor coffee roaster.
This is a two-to-three hour job, as I first do my normal inside-the-roaster cleaning that happens every 4-6 weeks. Then I dismantle a lot of panels and using a vacuum, compressed air, and a lot of cleaner, extract as much chaff dust and oily crap as I can, before reassembly. This isn’t much work to invest annually in a roaster that enters it’s twelfth year of service next month!
Winding down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Timothy Luke Manchester, 34, of Austin, Texas, who died on Jan. 20, 2021, in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in a non-combat related incident.
That said, we’ve not experienced a significant run of ill luck yet this day, but then neither of us suffer from triskaidekaphobia.
We are having intermittent warm and cold stretches, with a possibility of some icy precipitation on Wednesday upcoming – Marcia’s looking forward to that. Lexi can do without the heat of summer or the cold of winter, but she does look forward to curling up on the electric blanket in the mid evening on cold nights…
Lexi curled up on the electric blanket
Not much else to report yet. I’m waiting to see what happens come Monday.
Winding Down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Captain Kelliann Leli, 30, of Parlin, New Jersey, who died on November 27 in a non-combat related vehicle incident at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates.
Meantime, please stay safe, mask when you need to be around people you don’t already live with, etc. The vaccinations are coming, but it’ll be months…
The shoe that hasn’t dropped, yet. Is he just being a narcissistic asshole, or is he clawing at every possibility he can envision before becoming a private citizen again, and subject to the consequences and suits and indictments that are headed his way?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m super pleased that Biden has won. I’m super disappointed that so many, many people still voted for the incumbent, and that’s going to be a deal for a long time.
So yeah, I’m still on edge, and that’s even without pandemic 2.0, and the idiots who STILL won’t wear masks or stay the hell home. Sigh.
Wood, continued
I’ve been doing a number of small projects, along with cleanup, in the wood shop. I finally broke down and took the small (12″ x 12″ x 1″) cutting board that sees the most action in our kitchen downstairs for refurbishing. I made that a dozen years ago or so, out of hard maple. The cutting surfaces are endgrain, and it’s a really nice small board. But one of the glued joints was delaminating, and that’s neither safe nor nice in a kitchen.
I cut the board in twain, following the line of impending doom. I flattened and dressed the mating surfaces on my jointer/planer. A liberal coating of Titebond III ™, a few clamps, and a couple of days yielded a nice solid board. I tuned the joint and the cutting surfaces with a hand plane, then sanded the thing using a progression of 60, 100, 150, and 220 grit using the orbital sander. A blast of air, a wipe down, and a coating of butcher block oil, and the work’s mostly done. All I’m doing now is letting the coating cure:
Hard maple cutting board refurbished
Winding Down
If I don’t wind down, I’ll surely continue to get wound up. So we keep trucking along, waiting for (more) good news. Two potentially effective vaccine candidates? That’ll be good news.
Lexi the sun dog
Lexi continues to be photogenic, but she’s falling into late-fall sun dog mode – not as interested in being outside in the cold.
I don’t ask for a lot here, but I have one request to make of y’all – VOTE!
Democracy requires citizen participation: VOTE!
OFFS, just get out there and VOTE!
It’s probably too late for absentee/mail-in ballots, which is how Marcia and I have exercised our civic duty. But there’s early voting almost everywhere. Don’t sit home, don’t sit this out. VOTE!
Unless, of course, you’re offended when I ask that if you plan on voting for the incumbent, just keep your ass on the BarcaLounger ™ at home, in front of Fox and Friends. But even if you’re in that special camp, be smart enough to wear a mask, wash your hands, and avoid large gatherings. I do not wish illness or death on you and your family just because you’re … wrong.
Progress
Lexi guards me from my office window while I’m working. She sees squirrels on the deck, and barks. She sees squirrels on the far fence, and barks. She sees squirrels on the tennis court, several hundred feet away … and barks. Additionally, she barks at any other unexpected movement. So, leaves falling from the trees can mean that she’s hoarse for hours. Yay?
Lexi at her guard post
Working with Wood
After doing some chores yesterday morning, I headed down to the woodshop to do a small project – it’s been a while. And as is often the case, the first thing I end up working on is something unrelated to the work I set out to do. In this instance, I ended up re-fabricating my cross-cut sled for the table saw. The first iteration of this handy shop fixture was a shade too big (and thus too heavy). Additionally, I’d gotten the tolerances between the two slide rails a bit too tight, so it was an effort to actually use.
The new one is a bit smaller, a bit lighter, and a lot easier to use. Especially, I added lightness by hogging out much of the back fence of the sled, since it doesn’t need much besides center and side-to-side structure. I used the cut-outs to fabricate a couple of stops I can clamp to the front fence for repeatable operations.
The actual small project I wanted to work on took less time than the sled, although I did finish it up today, since I had just finished glue-ups before supper last night.
Shop-built drawer trays for my home office
What I made were a pair of identical trays for the top drawer in the home office I built 7 years ago. This has all been functionally fine, but as the drawer closest to hand when sitting at the desk, it’s become a bit of a catch-all. And it’s really deeper than it needed to be. So I tacked in a slide rail of pine on each interior drawer side, and fabricated two trays. They’re 1-5/8″ deep internally, and 14″ x 7″ each. Assembly with rabbited corner joints, glue, and pin-nails.
The trays are sub-divided by a central rail that rises above the level of the drawer (still clears the opening in the cabinet carcass) and provides an easy way to keep stuff separate, and I can easily lift the front tray out and slide the back one forward. I reinforced the dividers and the tray corners with small, nearly full height corner blocks.
I didn’t put much of a finish on the trays – just a quick coat of paste wax to seal the wood. I’m pretty happy with the completed project. Small enough in scope to see through in a weekend, including the bonus sled rebuild.
Winding Down
We’re coming up on an important election, so VOTE!
We hope that all of you are keeping well and in reasonable health.
Yes, yes, it’s been a month. Sorry to those of you who worry. We’re all okay here. And for a couple of weeks, we were okay up in Maine, too!
The view of the lake from the door of the camp
Three days before we left for Maine, we learned that they had updated the rules for out-of-state visitors. If we could show proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within three days of arriving in Maine, we could forego the otherwise mandatory two week strict quarantine. We found a clinic, got a test each, and on Friday evening we got our negative test results. 12 hours later, we were on the road to Maine.
Lexi likes hanging out in Maine, too!
It was a lovely two weeks, the best run of weather we’ve had in our many trips up there. The fishing was fun, the catching was … sparce, at best. The best bit about not needing to quarantine is that we could spend time with Marcia’s sister. We didn’t do much in the way of tourist-ish stuff, out of an abundance of caution. But it was really quite relaxing.
The garden lives, that’s good, and I’ve weeded them out. The lawns are now mowed again. And I’m back to work, mostly remote as before, tomorrow morning.
Winding Down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Spc. Nick Bravo-Regules, 20, from Largo, Florida, who died on June 23, 2020, in Jordan while supporting operations in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, from a non-combat-related incident.
So, since we last were here together, we had several more overnight freezes. Sadly, at least one of them was a surprise. So one night I didn’t tarp the garden beds, and everything died. Yup, all of it. So I started over. Rototilled again, raked it all out flat again, bought new plants again, and got ready to put them in the ground, again:
Two garden beds ready for planting… again.
We’re not due for anything below 48F in the next ten days, so I expect that we’re actually done with overnight frosts. (Famous last words). But the plants look good, and since I did that work yesterday, everything is still alive:
Plants in the ground
Right now I’ve just got a variety of tomatoes and peppers, since those are what I want most. I’ll probably pick up some herbs and some beans to go in, in the next few days.
Lexi at my office window (Lexi TV)
While it remains spring-ish, Lexi likes watching “Lexi TV”, quivering and growling at the vicious bushy-tailed rats (squirrels) invading her back yard.
Winding Down
Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. Christopher Wesley Curry, 23, from Terre Haute, Indiana, who died on May 4, 2020 in Erbil, Iraq, from a non-combat-related incident.
Marcia has been baking up a storm, and, well, I love it. I’m ordering some double doors to install in all the door frames, and getting pricing information on the necessary permits…. but it’s all delicious!
We continue, reasonably healthy, mostly home-bound, wondering what the idiots are going to say next.
The bright spot is that our state, in the process of putting off the primary, did so to ensure that this was a vote-by-mail election. We received our ballots, and our instructions in Spanish, completed and mailed them. Yesterday, the instructions in English arrived. Ah, well. We were able to figure it out. Pleased that unlike some Republican-led states, ours was sane enough to ensure that people didn’t have to stand in close proximity to each other to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Yay, Maryland!
Be safe, stay home as much as possible, mask and socially distance when you must be out. Please. If not for yourself, then for the people who love you and will miss you when you die of covid-19, with complications of politics and lack of sanity.
