Members of household who injured their backs during greyhound hikes at Wawayanda State Park: 2
Members of household who injured their hands/paws during routine household activity: 2, after Rufus cut up one of his paws during a run in the backyard yesterday
The gauze used on Amy’s hand after her corn-peeling injury in July.
I was hoping to keep the momentum going and hit you with another 2,000 to 3,000 words about a single day’s meanderings through Vancouver, but it’ll have to wait for the weekend. One of my greyhounds tweaked his lower back/hips on Sunday jumping into the car, and his suffering’s just ground me down to zero.
I took him to the vet this morning, and he’s optimistic that it’s just a pinched nerve, which will heal with rest. Meanwhile, Otis is on Rimadyl (anti-inflammatory) and Tramadol (pain-reliever).
Meanwhile, I have a ton of work to get done on our September issue, so Vancouver and Seattle II will have to wait a little while. But I promise I’ll digress my way through the rest of our vacation!
Otis (with Rufus) getting rubbies on the Sunday hike shortly before he tweaked his back.
What I’m reading: Continuing Black Swan Green
What I’m listening to: Hounds of Love
What I’m watching: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Celtics/Knicks, and the last 8 or 9 episodes of season 1 of In Treatment.
What I’m drinking: Ethereal gin & Q-Tonic
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Being bored and running around the house. Amy was sick, and I was pretty zonky, so I didn’t take them on the Sunday hike. Oh, and Rufus demonstrated his sneakysmarts: on Sunday, both of them walked into my home office as part of their strategy of never leaving my side. There was only one dog-bed in the room, and Otis took it. Rufus looked at him for a few seconds, walked out of the room, picked up a squeaky-toy in his mouth, walked back in, and placed it on the floor in front of Otis. O promptly picked it up and started playing with it, and Ru took his spot on the bed.
Where I’m going: New Orleans, if Continental doesn’t throw us off the overbooked flight.
What I’m happy about: Getting the final installment of the $1,900 in vet bills that our neighbor incurred when his dog mauled Ru. That attack took place 19 months and 1 day ago. Go, wheels of justice!
What I’m sad about: It’s more “What I’m pissed about”. My salespeople ignored the deadlines for closing our year-end gigantor directory/profile issue, and then flipped out when I told them that it’s not going to be finished by this Wednesday, for that reason. I’m all for maximizing sales, but it’s been 11 years that we’ve been working together and they never seem to have gotten over the notion that when they’re done selling pages (and directory logos, in this case), the book is magically finished. So I get to spend the next 3 days pounding out pages (except for Tuesday morning, when I have to do interviews for our Jan/Feb issue), and then have to pick it all up again when I’m back in the office on January.
What I’m worried about: Finishing the year-ender by Jan. 4.
What I’m pondering: Whether Rufus was engaging in trickery or negotiation, and what he has planned for us.
What I’m reading: Finished Never Let Me Go
What I’m listening to: Barking
What I’m watching: Leaves of Grass, plus some football, some baseball, and Bored To Death and Eastbound & Down.
What I’m drinking: I’m outta limes, so I went with Amy’s gluten-free alternative: Bard’s sorghum malt beer.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Taking a nice, energetic hike on Sunday, (pix here and spex here) and getting overstuffed on treats at Rusty’s on the way home.
Where I’m going: Nowhere! Why? You got somewhere you think I should go?
What I’m happy about: The autumn sensorium is just so beautiful. You can check out the first couple of pix from the hike to get an idea of the visuals.
What I’m sad about: The Yankees getting knocked out of the playoffs. On the other hand, I’m also happy about this because it means I won’t be staying up late watching World Series games. So it’s a wash.
What I’m worried about: Eating too much candy on Halloween.
What I’m pondering: Blowing off another NBA preview. The season starts tomorrow, so I’m guessing that’s less of a ponderment and more of a certainty.
What I’m reading: I started The Odyssey
What I’m listening to: Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
What I’m watching: Bear Nation (some of my best friends are bears) and Withnail & I
What I’m drinking: Dry Fly & Q-Tonic
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Not a lot. I was sick, so no Sunday grey-hike.
Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, but I’m hoping to get a Herriman hike in on Saturday with a pal, provided my headcold’s all gone.
What I’m happy about: Getting into NYC on Saturday to meet up with Mark F., a good pal of mine. We had a nice brunch at the Double Crown, during which the ex-girlfriend I mentioned last week dropped off the accordion I’d bought from her. After eating, Mark accompanied me to the Billy Reid store on Bond St., and then we walked up to Astoria Wine & Spirits, St. Mark’s Comics and Porto Rico Importing Co. (for a bottle of Bols Genever, Marvel’s Strange Tales II, and a pound of Kona, respectively) before the farmers’ market at Union Square and Mark’s departure back to the Bronx. We had a good, meandering conversation. Between that and the previous weekend’s catch-up with my old high school pal Jen, I’m reminded of how much I need to stay in touch with old friends.
What I’m sad about: This lousy headcold. Grr.
What I’m worried about: Well, Mark’s response to our conversation about wearing nicer clothes (a prelude to visiting the Billy Reid store, which was a blast, btw) was, “Are you belatedly becoming a metrosexual?” I told him that if I started wearing man-scara, he could disown me, but once I began lugging the old-time suitcase containing the accordion down the street, he withdrew the question. As it turns out, carrying that accessory into the store seemed to grant me some weird street cred with the staff at the BR store. It seems that “Can you check my accordion for me, please?” isn’t said often enough nowadays.
What I’m pondering: How long it’s going to take me to learn to play that accordion, considering I have no musical training. Also, what else Never Let Me Go is a mix of. So far, I’ve got Such, Such Were the Joys and Camp Concentration
What I’m reading: Re-re-re-finished The Iliad
What I’m listening to: Simple Things
What I’m watching: God’s Cartoonist
What I’m drinking: Bombay Sapphire & crappy ol’ tonic. We were traveling.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Spending the weekend with their grey-pal Tut. He seemed pretty sad to see them go when we picked up the boys on Sunday. One of Tut’s owners e-mailed to let us know that everything was going fine; she told us that the dogs were all playing musical beds in the living room, and that Otis had cruised on upstairs immediately after entering the house. Otis has a habit of blindly zooming through any new house he enters, not exactly exploring, but trying to get to their furthest reaches ASAP. Anyway, Tut sleeps downstairs in the living room at night, so his owners thought Ru & Otis would be alright doing the same. Instead, one of the owners wound up sleeping downstairs with them, because my boys wouldn’t stop whining about being left to sleep away from people.
Where I’m going: I’ll probably head into the city this weekend for a little shopping-reconnaissance, and also to buy an accordion from an ex-girlfriend.
What I’m happy about: Getting to see a little bit of Kansas City, attending the fun wedding of one of Amy’s pals, and getting to catch up with an old high school pal I haven’t seen in around 15 years.
What I’m sad about: Not getting to see a college pal of mine in the area, whom I haven’t seen in 10 years. I tried, but she was busy during our scant window of free time.
What I’m worried about: The encroachment of The Jersey Shore. At our hotel in KC this weekend, we had to change rooms twice. The first time, it was because the room stank of cigarette smoke. Our second room was located next to The Loudest People Ever, a bunch of 20somethings who were in town to PARTY!!! We thought we could put up with it, but after the ruckus failed to abate at any time that Friday afternoon, and we could only cower in fear at the thought of what the four or five people would be like when they got back to their room drunk at 3 a.m., I decided to go back to the front desk to see if we could get a quieter room. As I waited for the elevator, the occupants of the next room joined me, heading out to PARTY!!! It was a pack of four, and I sweartagod, the two women looked like
I got to the front desk while they were making their standard ruckus in the lounge area, and I quietly said, “I’m in 221, and my room is next to Those People. I need you to find us a room not next to them.” The clerk’s eyes widened and she said, “I’ll get you up on the fourth floor, where it’s quiet. We’ve been getting complaints about that room for the last few hours.”
Now, the guys were standard post-frat sluggards, with beer-bellies, khaki shorts and baseball caps for non-baseball teams, but the ladies were in too-tight sheer white t-shirts, bras sticking out, and “worn” jeans that made them look like frayed sausages. I thought, “What hath Jersey Shore wrought?”
What I’m pondering: Starting a series of posts about Achilles/Odysseus/Homer under the title Man Of War. You guys interested in my ruminations on the subject, or participating in an online conversation about Homer?
What I’m reading: That Iliad
What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot
What I’m watching: Boardwalk Empire, Bored to Death, and Eastbound & Down. That’s a pretty sweet Sunday night lineup by HBO (not that we stay up to watch ‘em). Oh, and the stupidest finish of a college football game I’ve ever seen (not that I watch much college football): LSU beating Tennessee when too many Volunteers volunteered to make the goal-line stand on the last play of the game. I mean, I’ve seen teams called for 12 players on the field, but FOURTEEN PLAYERS, all lined up? We “joke” that LSU coach Les Miles may be a slow adult, but to see his idiocy get trumped by another coach? I should make a “Special Olympics Bowl” joke here, but I’m not that mean. Oh, wait . . .
What I’m drinking: Dry Fly & Q-Tonic, although I spent most of the week dry, in hopes of getting off the stress-induced cycle of drinking and/or taking a Xanax in order to get to sleep. Why I chose to do this during a heavy-duty production week, I don’t know. I should’ve waited till this week, when there’s less work stress to pervade my brain.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Going on another long-ass hike on Sunday. On Saturday, Ru pulled his R. Kelly trick and peed on Otis’ head when they were out for their morning walk. Oh, and they played grab-ass.
Where I’m going: Kansas City for the wedding of one of Amy’s pals
What I’m happy about: Finishing my October issue (pretty much) on time.
What I’m sad about: The Ultimate Trailer Show on HDNet got cancelled. This is a serious problem, because Robert Wilonsky’s show was just about the only way I found out about good upcoming movies. If it weren’t for that show, we’d never have heard about Louis, and I’d have missed out on one of the best musical experiences of my life. So, grr. Basically, we’d just open Netflix when Wilonsky’s show was on, and plug in movie after movie. In fact, our next Netflix delivery comes from a UTS episode: The Good, The Bad and the Weird. (UPDATE: and, my wife reminds me, without UTS & Wilonsky, we’d never have discovered In the Loop, which is among my favorite comedies.)
What I’m worried about: That I’m forgetting something. I’ve been pretty stressed lately, and my memory’s been addled as a result. Friday, walking the dogs, I had some song lyrics in my head, but couldn’t recall the song they were from. It took a day or two before it came back to me: Babylon Sisters. But that made me sad because that’s also the title of a book
What I’m pondering: Achilles and fate (again). I hope to write at length about a couple of thoughts on the subject, but I need to finish the poem again first. I love how each re-read finds me focusing on a different key; last time (2007), I made a muddled attempt at figuring out the role of the gods in the action & the characters’ lives. Now that doesn’t seem like too much of an issue to me.
Some ladies see his deep, soulful eyes and melt. Others just take one look at his tongue. They either swoon or run away screaming.
What I’m reading: The Iliad.
What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot
What I’m watching: Nothing much. We watched 3 hours of Spike Lee’s new New Orleans documentary, but eh.
What I’m drinking: Luchador Tremblor shiraz. I’m out of Q-Tonic, as is one of my hook-ups.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Sadly, getting diagnosed with mange of some kind. They’ve been scratching like crazy the last few weeks, keeping us up in the middle of the night, so I took them down to the vets’ offices to see what was what, hoping it was just allergies. They figure it’s mange (not sure what variety), so the boys are on antibiotics and Benadryl. Rufus is okay about taking capsules with yogurt or Barney Butter, but Otis is much pickier, so that’s been a bit of a trial. We kept them home from this week’s grey-hike for that reason, not wanting to risk getting the other dogs mangenated.
Where I’m going: Harlem! Amy & I are going to the Apollo tonight to see a performance of Louis. It’s a (new) silent movie, with accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis and a bunch of other jazz musicians. Just watch the trailer and you’ll understand why we’re making the hike out to 125th St. for this one-night show. (The last silent movie I saw was Silent Movie.)
What I’m happy about: Selling off my 2nd generation Kindle for enough money to upgrade to a 3rd gen model pretty cheaply. And since I’ll be reading my print edition of The Iliad (Lattimore’s translation isn’t available as an e-book), that’ll tide me over until the new model arrives. Also, we took a nice hike on Sunday (sans doggies, since I think they contracted this mange by hanging out in the brackish water of Ramapo Lake a month back), which will likely be better in autumn. Oh, and on a little pre-pick-up-Amy-at-the-train-stop shopping expedition on Friday, I was mistaken for a J.Crew employee and had my shoes complimented by young Club Monaco salesman in the span of 10 minutes. I think that’s a little more flattering than last week’s experience at the hiking store.
What I’m sad about: This mange thing makes me look like a crappy dog-father (and my dogs are itchy and irritable/ticklish).
What I’m worried about: Nothing significant. I finished our September issue on time, and my big annual conference is looking pretty good, as far as attendee count and speaker/panelist anxiety goes.
What I’m pondering: How many R-rated movies I saw before I turned 10. I saw at least three in the theater: Caddyshack, History of the World, Part I, and The Jerk. I’m pretty sure I saw Animal House and Blazing Saddles at home (decoder box) before my 10th birthday, too.
