Attrition

Hey, folks - Can't sleep, so how's about I do some general newsiness for you? Seeing as how I don't think I have the mental wherewithal at the moment to develop much of a thesis. But you may be curious about things, so I'll inform you, generally.

Get ready. I got a feeling it's all going to read like that...so let me just apologize, right here at the outset.

Say...Remember this:



(Funny how smokers' voices were considered wise and powerful in the early '70s. And also: Why is that kid naked?)

So, then, remember, how, like, a while ago, I was saying how I was going to get rid of a stump in the back yard? A hundred whacks a day with an ax, and see how many it took to get rid of it? Remember? Well, imagine the axe is my tongue, and the stump is the Tootsie pop. Here's zero:



Janneke's former professor, Judith Kornblatt, and her husband Mark are staying with us for a couple of days. Judith is a Williams grad, and is out here for a friend's 60th birthday party. They were a huge hit with the kids last night - energetic, outgoing, caring people who charmed Q and T into submission in a matter of minutes. Q played piano for them, T showed Judith most of her toys...We all had a nice supper out on the deck, and then a pleasant evening of conversation and guitar. I played my latest acquisitions in the Spanish repertoire, and Mark showed us some songs he uses with his fifth graders. They seem happy with their downstairs accommodations - so much so that I feel confident, sitting here in the kitchen in my underwear, that they'll have no reason to come up and be scandalized. Although, hey, it might shake things up in an interesting way. They're heading out tomorrow.

(Here's 100:)



We're heading out on the 5th of July, driving down to Birmingham, Alabama (we've always heard it's best to go to the deep South at the height of summer) to visit Dominique, Octavio, and the kids. We'll stop halfway, in Virginia, and stay at a hotel for a couple of nights, taking a day to explore the national park nearby (is it Shenandoah...? I don't recall). On the way back, we're planning to stop in DC and spend a day with Uncle Jess, Auntie Stephanie, and Baby Jack, who's probably four feet tall by now. Should be fun.

(200:)



Today was kind of the first day of my summer. Yesterday too, I suppose, but yesterday I never got a real block of time in which to do whatever I liked. Today I did: Two hours, from 10:00 AM to noon. And you know what I did...? I played guitar. Two solid hours, working specific skills, getting particular licks and transitions down, questioning my posture, re-tuning, trying different tempos when a piece gave me trouble...Experimenting, learning. And I didn't stop because I got tired of it - I stopped because I had to be in Lenox at 1:00 for a second interview session with some candidates for a position at the school. (I'm consulting, I guess, on the hiring process. Feels nice to be asked.) I felt distinctly disappointed to be leaving the guitar behind when I left - I was just getting into something. With any luck I'll be able to dedicate a lot of time to that this summer.

(300:)



So a few weeks ago I was out here - walking Hobie, I think (heavy sigh), or preparing to - when I heard something rattling against the kitchen window. I looked out and saw this:



That's a frickin' luna moth! I don't think I had ever seen one before, honestly. Pictures, sure, and that story about a luna moth that everybody reads in third or fourth grade. But I was really thrilled - their enormity! Such otherworldly color...! And the poor, fragile little thing was just beating itself to death, trying to access the light that shone in our kitchen window. After I took a few pictures, I went back inside and shut off the lights, and wished it well. Hopefully it floated moonward and met up with its gender opposite. Although it seems just as likely that it bashed itself to death against a streetlight (which I would like to see removed from our street, personally), or was devoured by a bat. But I can dream.

(400:)



Q told us at supper yesterday that he'd made a vehicle with the Legos at his "camp" (glorified daycare at the Youth Center), and he'd left it there, and then he'd come back later to play with it, when a sixth grader came in and said "What are you doing with my Legos?", and had shoved him to the ground and taken it, and that he'd cried. He told us very matter-of-factly, without much emotion, and kind of out-of-the-blue; he didn't solicit sympathy, or answers, or anything. He told us, and then looked ahead, into a space ahead of him, and waited. I can't recall what interrupted us - a phone call, someone at the door, I don't know - but it was left hanging a bit. We got the kid's name, and asked how he'd reacted; he said he really hadn't done anything. And then with the hurly-burly of the bedtime cycle, somehow we never got back to the subject - you want to treat it properly, without hurry, and there was never a moment. Leaving me and janneke to discuss it after the kids had gone to bed.

(500:)



We decided we would give him the green light to react however he wanted. You don't want to say he "should" do any particular thing, setting him up to feel like a failure if his courage fails him and he doesn't do what you think he should. And you don't want to tell him to run and tell on the kid - if he can deal with it on his own, good for him. Although you don't want him not to, exactly, either - we were burning up with fury over the whole incident, and really wanted there to be some kind of fallout. So we decided we would tell him he could do whatever he liked. If he didn't want to react at all, that was OK - it was his life, after all. If he wanted to tell an adult, fine - that makes perfect sense. If he didn't want to, because it wasn't a big deal and he didn't want to be a tattle tale, we could understand that. If he wanted to call the kid names and fight back, hey, we weren't going to say no. Whatever he wanted.

(600:)



But, we told him (this was this morning, once we had our story straight), we were going to tell an adult in the building to keep an eye on the kid because he was bullying the younger kids. Not Q in particular, necessarily, but the kids in general. So that way Q wouldn't feel like we were concerned about him - just about this sort of behavior in general. You don't want him to feel too fragile, you don't want to fly into conniptions and sink to your knees and start searching him for bruises and crying out "MY BABY, MY BABY, THEY'VE BROKEN MY PRECIOUS BABY!" I mean, you want to. But you shouldn't.

(700:)



So that's what happened today - Q surreptitiously pointed the kid out (thank goodness for bilingualism) - a tall and lanky, obviously evil punk with a white baseball cap - and then I sidled up to the director of the joint and poked him in the chest and demanded action with liberal use of four-letter-words, then did the "I'm-watching-you", two-fingers-toward-my-eyes-then-toward-his gesture as I backed slowly away, breaking anything fragile within reach before exiting. Well, not so much that, really. I pulled him aside with my eyebrows and grumbled conspiratorially the kid's name, then said, "He's rumored to be throwing his weight around with the smaller kids. Might want to keep an eye out." The director, a nice guy named Mike, said thanks, and I went about my business.

(800:)



So Q got home and reported no further monkey business. In fact, he said, the kid seemed to be avoiding him, which was alright with Q. And alright with me. Although I have to say that in my mind's eye on the way to Lenox at noon today, I did a whole beating-up-the-kid's-father montage. The theme to "Rocky" was the soundtrack. I had a full head of hair and a handlebar mustache. It looked a lot like an episode of "Starsky and Hutch", actually.

(900:)



That's probably going to do it, kids - I'm finally feeling a little sleepy. Not sure why I can't get to sleep these days- I lay there and suddenly have all these itches everywhere. Although, actually, I was disturbed by something I read about in the book "Outliers", which one of my students gave me as a gift to thank me for three years of Spanish after she'd graduated. It's a neat book, but it raises all kinds of issues around where we wind up and why in life, and one of the middle chapters has some things to say about child-rearing that really had me second-guessing some of my own socio-economic cultural biases in the way I demand certain behaviors of my kids...got me thinking, I guess, and it's hard to sleep when you're thinking.

(1,000:)



Maybe it's the effect of these stump pictures - kind of like sawing logs. More soon, I promise: It's summer, after all. Once I'm done playing the guitar tomorrow, I'll crank out a few more whacks. See if we can't wear this baby down. Take care, brush your hair...

Pics and prose

Well, pics, anyway. No time for prose these days - summer? Hello, summer? Where are you? Seems I'm running around more than I was when I was working. But, like I said, no time for words - here's the pictures:



Tess' new haircut. It's driving me crazy - I can't quite get used to it. Every time I look at her, it's like I'm seeing her for the first time. Makes my teeth hurt...!



My Father's Day gift. It's incredibly comfortable, except that whenever I lie in it, I tend to suddenly find myself in this sort of situation, which is, shall we say, less than completely comfortable.



Hobie on the Friday morning before his last trip in the car. I had the camera out for something else, and while it was a little morbid, I suppose, to be snapping pictures, I couldn't not do it - had it not been his last day, I'd still have taken it. He just looked so idyllic.



The very last picture I ever took of Hobie. My little Mookalor...

1994-2009

I’m looking at Hobie’s basket. His blanket is inside, pressed and pleated just the way he left it the last time he lay in it. It’s the biggest reminder of him left here, but not the only one: today I found a footprint of his outside, in the back yard, along with a somewhat waterlogged bit of his business. His leash and collar are on the deck – they were a little dirty, and we lay them out there, not quite knowing what to do with them first. They’re still there. And today I vacuumed the house, as I do every weekend. I watched as the Hobie hairs filled up the canister twice, watched as the opaque cast they give to the rugs they cover faded under every pass of the beater bar. Q’s room was the last one I did, and that’s where the last layer came up into the machine. A few will go rolling past occasionally, like tumbleweeds, kicked by a random puff of air from where they’d been hiding. But by now, there are very few left.

Early last week, Hobie went after Skittles pretty seriously. I don’t think he really meant to do anything beyond getting her to stop bothering him, chase her off with some teeth music. But she had been walking past him – something she could not possibly have thought would be bothersome to anybody, something she should be allowed to do. Hobie got her enough to make her trembly, collapsed up into the corner where she’d leapt to get away from him, piled in behind her littler box. Her back isn’t the best, and these sudden spasms to get away from Hobie can’t be good for it. She walked with her spine arched for a good while afterward, and was difficult to console. Hobie knew he’d done something he shouldn’t have, and stiffly limped over to his basket, anticipating a scolding.

Which he’d never have heard. He’d been pretty much completely deaf for a few months now, and so paranoia had set in. As far as he knew, everybody was sneaking up on him all the time. When that’s me or Janneke, he just got startled, shied away and then laughed at the situation, sidled up for a pat on the head. But when it was Skittles, or one of the kids, a snap was becoming more and more likely. Four weeks ago or so, he’d gotten Q on the finger. Q had been trying to call him over to pet him, and for some reason Hobie saw that as threatening and caught him with a snap. Q was shocked, hurt, heartbroken. And so were we. And so was Hobie, probably.

He’d gotten T some time before that, and had snarled a her a few times before that. We had been training him to tolerate the kids more – suddenly, three or four months ago, it had occurred to me that every time the kids come home, or wake up, they should call Hobie over and give him a treat. And it had been working, too – he would do his front-legs-jumping joy dance when they came out of their rooms in the morning, would greet Q as he sat down to take his shoes off by licking him on the cheek. I was kicking myself for not having thought to start doing it five years ago. But it only went so far – the snapping, it seemed, was only going to get worse. We started to look at Hobie with a much more worried eye, and to look for other signs of things going wrong.

Which finally allowed us to see them. His wandering around the house at all hours, which we’d started thinking was senility, was actually just an endless quest for a way to get comfortable. Every step he took was at least a little bit painful; lying down hurt, getting up hurt, squatting to do his nightly business hurt. He didn’t whine or yip about it, but the more we watched him, the more it became clear: He was in pain pretty much all the time. He’d fight through it when he needed to, but there was no question this was a fight. Just two days ago, I was on the floor petting him, and he shook his head because his ear itched. He creaked himself back into an ear-scratching position, lifted his rear leg about halfway toward his ear…and grunted, and dropped his leg again, and stood up. “Screw it,” he’d said with every ounce of his body. “I’d rather itch.”

The fatty tumors under his skin were getting bigger. One just under his chest, which was tender, and another on his right ribs, which smarted so much he’d wince when we approached that side to pet him. It had seemed like an embarrassed crouch, like he was somehow not deserving the attention we were coming to bestow, but once we started looking for it, we found it: That hurt too. His ears were harder and harder to comfortably pet; his eyes drooped, his hips were losing flesh, his back legs, under the strain of standing still, would begin to droop and sag, prompting him to move on ahead again, looking for a comfortable position that was never going to come.

A little over a week ago, we decided. It was time.

This past Friday, the 19th, final exams were set to start at the high school where I teach. I’d give one from 8:00 to 9:30, and then have no further commitments for the day. So that Thursday, I called and made an appointment. Friday, the 19th, at 2:00. Cremation thereafter. No, we wouldn’t need to get his ashes back; no, we wouldn’t like the plaster pawprint.

I hung up the phone and sobbed where I stood, hand over my eyes. I’d just calmly agreed on a date and a time to kill him.

All this past week, then, every evening, I sat and cuddled and thumped and otherwise loved that old dog so much I think he got a little tired of it. I had second thoughts – Couldn’t we medicate him, at least for a while, against the pain? Wouldn’t that possibly help with the snapping and the paranoia? Look how happy he is to see the kids coming home – Isn’t this continued progress? Can’t we call it off?

I thought all this as I sat in front of him and petted his neck, as he buried his snout in my lap and sighed and snuffed and enjoyed it. And suddenly, he fell over. Toward his left, like a tree, crashing onto his shoulder and his hip. And he thrashed, confused, just for a moment, until the thrashing was prohibitively painful; then he slowly began to heave himself into a position where he could hoist himself up to his feet again. The grunting he did was so low that if I hadn’t been right next to him, I’d never have heard it – continual, high, nearly-whining grunts of effort, pain, and – tragically, horrifyingly for me, who was his master, who was right next to him would never let anything happen to him – fear.

I only had one way to protect him from that.

I counted down the times we would go for our evening walk. It was incredible the way every night, it took longer and longer. As if he were illustrating for me the precipitousness of the decline we were on the edge of, measurable easily from day to day. He still sniffed eagerly to see what was going on in the neighborhood that day (“reading the newspaper”, as T and I like to call it), but he was breathing heavily at the end of every three-hundred-yard turn about Lindley Terrace, head hanging so low you thought his tongue would touch the pavement, back drooping in the middle. His eyes bulged as he looked up at me, seeming to smile, but I now knew that smile was as much fearful as ingratiating. I can’t do it, he must have been thinking. I can’t go as fast as Joe wants me to. And I didn’t want him to go fast – now, I didn’t. I just wanted him to go. But he didn’t know that. Just as he didn’t know that we weren’t sneaking up on him, that no one was out to take advantage of his weakened state, that we hadn’t all just decided to stop saying “Good boy!” a few months ago. He didn’t know any of this, and I couldn’t tell him.

Friday morning, T woke up when I did, and asked if she could come walk Hobie with me. “Of course,” I said. She dressed and put her shoes on, and asked if she could hold the leash. “Claro.” And as she had done at least twice before during the last week, she looked over her shoulder at me, gestured toward Hobie, who was clambering stiffly down the one step form our front door to the porch, and said: “I feel bad for Hobie. He’s going to die soon.”

Of course, we had been preparing the kids for this event for at least a couple of years. Dropping it into conversations that Hobie had had a good, long life, and that his slowing down would eventually turn into a full stop. But T just picked up something in the air, and translated it in her mind perfectly, saw just what was about to come about. I don’t know how she picked up on it – our plan was to tell the kids that we’d come home Friday and found him dead in his bed. They never knew we’d made an appointment, never knew that Friday was the day. But T rolled out of bed to hold the leash for one more walk because somewhere, deep down, she knew. I’m still in awe.

I drove to Lenox, gave the exam, and drove back. We had run out of dog treats, so I was taking every opportunity to give Hobie slices of pepperoni. I must have given him five between 10:00 and 12:00 Friday, when Janneke came home. She pulled into the driveway, where Hobie was sniffing the bushes and I was shooting baskets, just to have something to do. She looked at me through her window and began to cry, and then I did.

One last walk around the neighborhood; one more clamber up into the back of the car – the trick now was to lower one side of the back seat, and have him step in through the back door, up onto the seat, and into the hatch. He was a pro at it by now, knew just how to do it.

Hobie smiled in the wind in the back of the car. His ears lifted on the breeze like they used to do whenever we walked him into a headwind – the reason we’d decided his breed name would be the “Schwaebische Schwebendehund” (Schwabisch gliding dog).

Things happened – papers, checks, nodding, holding, petting, listening, sitting beside – an eternity – and then suddenly, all too suddenly, his warm weight was in my lap, loose and relaxed as it used to be when we would cuddle on the carpet, before marriage, before children, before stiffness and tumors and deafness and age. We were all three together, and I was holding him, Janneke was holding him, and he was my warm, soft boy, my good, good boy, for the last time.

We walked out the back door, through the veterinarians’ laundry room, in a daze, emerging with our arms around each other into the bright, humid afternoon, with Hobie’s collar and his leash, and unknowable numbers of his hairs, clinging to us.

I go to pull the T-shirt form Friday out of the laundry, and find the hairs, still there. Itchy, sticky, and curved, advertising to the world that we have a semi-long-haired, white and orange dog at home.

Over there sits his basket, and inside, his blanket, folded and pressed in the shape of my Hobie. With precisely the number of hairs inside as there were the minute he left.

He isn’t afraid now. He doesn’t hurt.

But we do.

Directions to Dad's House

Hooray! Google Earth, my favorite playground, now has high-resolution photos of Gays Mills, my home town! Here are some coordinates:

43°19'46.10"N

90°50'48.43"W

That's the end of Dad's driveway.

43°17'32.52"N

90°51'58.46"W

That's the Boehms' house.

43°19'14.64"N
90°52'4.59"W

That's my Aunt Marian's house.

OK, I'll stop annoying you...Check it out, though. The glory that is Gays Mills has never been clearer.

Nature versus Nurture

Oh, how many things to describe to you! How MANY!

Nature: Fishers were charging through our neighborhood the other night. Thursday night, to be precise. Yowling, yipping, screeching, moaning in the treetops, there were at least three, possibly four, and they were blood-curdling. I heard them as I returned with Hobie from his walk, and quickly stored him inside, grabbed a flashlight, and came back out our open garage door to see if I could get a glimpse of one.

And one was skittering down the trunk of the easternmost linden tree in our front yard. I ran towards it and flashed the flashlight, and saw its silhouette bounding toward the back yard, but the light wasn't powerful enough to illuminate it very well; it remained a shadow, and it ran too fast to focus very clearly on. But I rounded the corner of the house in high hopes of a better look. I heard it clamber over the neighbor's chain-link fence and then silence as it crossed her yard; more clanging as it scaled her back chainlink fence, so I stopped against the gate, and caught it in the beam of my light as it hung at the other end of the yard, splayed out on the fence, eyes glittering at me. It was dark brown, about the size of a large fox, and seemed absolutely demonic. I was thrilled. Two more, at least, were skittering and scratching about in two other trees; I searched for them long and hard with the flashlight, but its beam really was pretty weak, and I never got much of a look at them. Came back in and called them up on Wikipedia, where I learned that they give birth in early spring and the pups leave the den in early to mid summer. So that was what I was looking at, no doubt: a mother and the pups, in the midst of teaching them to maraud.

Add this to the bear prints still visible on the side of the house and the foxes we see slinking through the lamplight on our nightly walk, and we have yet another reason to keep the cat in at night. Fishers are famous for devouring them, or so I read. (But, again, it's Wikipedia. So in truth, cats may actually eat them. It's hit and miss.)

The reason I charged out our open garage door (as opposed to through it, closed, I guess) is that the robins are back, as you may have heard, and have now got four vigorous pichones devourin' worms all day long. And as I lay in bed Thursday night, listening to the fishers (which resumed their clamor a few moments after I came in), I thought how frightened the mother robin must have been. The fisher, after all, had been about twenty feet away, climbing the linden tree, unaware of the tasty babies in the nest in our eaves. Darkness and death all around, and she the only thing standing between her little ones and the toothy night. But I shouldn't get too sentimental about it - had the fishers come close, she'd have simply flown away and left the tots to their fate. Probably already cooking up the next batch of eggs anyway.

Soccer: Q is on a tear. I'll start with the latest game: they played against the Cosmos, the other half of Williamstown's U-10 squad, consisting of ten players or so, with a preponderance of fourth-graders. Colton, Q's buddy, a very graceful and tenacious athlete, is on the Cosmos, and I sat next to his dad, Colin. As he watched the Strikers (Q's team) warm up, he noticed that they only had one fourth grader. It's Crow, who's phenomenal, but still, he's the only one. Everyone there expected the Strikers to lose handily - the Cosmos, in addition to Colton, who's second to none among the third-graders, have the Kleiner twins, Cole D., and Naka, who's just unbelievable - all 4th-graders.

And in the first half, it looked that way - they built up a 3-0 lead. A couple of those goals came, honestly, with Q defending - he was going through one of his stand-and-look bouts, letting people get past him, getting out of position, fascinated darkly by the scary game around him. He got some words on the subject from the coach (always positive, always constructive - we have FANTASTIC coaches here), and before you knew it it was halftime.

And then Q came alive. Hard, long, scrambling runs, poking the ball away from Naka, running right with him, refusing to yield, foiling any number of chances. And when he was playing forward, which was most of the time, he was a blue streak. ("Man," parents of Cosmos were heard to remark, "I knew Q had wheels, but jeepers...!") At one point early in the second half, he was attacking and took a poke at the goal, and it was deflected out the back end by a defender. Corner.

Crow took it - Q stood at the near post, and, to hear him tell it later, felt the man marking him drop away and gesticulated with his eyes and his hands, wildly but quietly, to Crow. "NOW!", he tried to say, pointing to himself. Crow fired, a beautiful, curving, chest-high laser; Q turned to take it in the ribs and it bounced perfectly into the side of the net.

Q raised his arms and sprinted downfield, cheering...then slowed...then bent over...and then went to one knee, then two, grimacing, holding his ribs. That had hurt. He left the game for a while, but as far as I could see, there were no tears. Just a lot of grimacing. (His coach, Hugh, told me later that when the game was over, he'd asked Q, "Was it worth it?" And Q had said, "Oh yeah. You bet.")

Meanwhile, the Strikers had made a change in goal, putting in Q's buddy Henry, and that kid was an absolute wall. Every fourth-grader on the Cosmos took a point-blank shot at him at some point in the second half, and nothing - block after block, save, after save. The crowd was in awe. And Henry had also begun to find the open man with his goal kicks, which meant that it was only a matter of time: Crow pounded one into the upper corner of the goal, over the outstretched hands of the Cosmos' keeper (a kid I don't know), and also lobbed a direct kick from near midfield in front of the goalie, who let it bounce...which was a mistake. Over his head and in. 3-3.

Naka was not to be denied, and at one point he got taken down just outside the box for a direct kick. The Strikers formed a valiant wall, Henry behind, but Naka was pinpoint accurate and put it into the back corner. 4-3.

One more from the Cosmos, I forget who, and it was 5-3.

And finally, for what I honestly think was the first time all game, Naka and Colton took a breather.

The Strikers smelled blood, and Q started making fantastic runs and passes. One shot went wide; another was saved - and then Q found himself relatively alone on the left side. Men closing in from behind, keeper coming out to cut off his angle, Q calmly pulled up and lobbed a long arc, easily 20 yards, over the keeper's head. It bounced behind him and rolled lazily across the goal line, spiked home by a charging Brady. Assist? Goal? Brady, apparently, wasn't sure. And neither cared - the important thing was the score: 5-4.

And these guys weren't done. They swarmed against the Cosmos, running them ragged, and after what could honestly not have been more than three minutes, Colton and Naka came back in, as if to shut down this final threat.

Which was when my favorite sequence happened, because really, nothing changed. Q ran with Naka stride for stride as Naka tried to penetrate and put the game away, stole the ball from him, and then led Naka all the way to the other end of the field and fired off a shot. Wide, but still - Q gave up nothing in this battle. It was the two of them, back and forth, running each other into oblivion, neither giving any quarter. It was a beautiful duel. Others were involved, of course, but Q and Naka stand out in my mind. I mean, Naka is spooky-good, and a fourth grader, but in this, essentially an intramural game, Q couldn't have cared less. It was just Naka, the kid he hangs out with at the youth center and practices with all the time. Pushing, tugging, shouleering each other off the ball, neither able to turn the corner on the other...Beautiful to watch.

Time. 5-4, Cosmos win.

So that was Sunday. Saturday's game had been postponed until the end of the season, and the week before THAT, you already know about, I think. He's been doing great lately, practicing on his own out back whenever he can, with me or Mami when possible, though we just serve as backstops, catching his misses (which are rare) and serving the ball back to him, fishing it out of the back of the net. Big, big fun. And no pressure - during Q's lethargic stretches, I smile and muse on what the glory of Q's development is, as it's laid out in front of me in comical, vivid, exciting colors. The same kid who can go toe-to-toe with the legendary Naka one minute will stand there and watch as the man he's meant to be marking knocks one in the next minute, and that is not maddening or frustrating or bad to me any more. It is simply wonderful. Watching him grow up, I am growing up myself.

Tonight, though I am tired, and it is late. Our firend Brad's project "Roomful of Teeth" is kicking off in W-town today, and I attended a wine-and-cheese this evening, representing our family as Janneke made dinner. Listened to a yodeler, a Tuvan throat singer, and then the yodeler and the Tuvan throat singer together. Freaky, that was, and chilling and hyper-cool.

But now it's very late, and I must yet walk the dog and hygienate. The rest of the week's adventures will just have to wait for another day.

Huzzah!