The week everything fell apart

While we were on our recent road trip, everything else went to hell. Actually, the disintegration started a little before and finished a little after our trip.

First, there’s my left heel. For a couple of days before we left, I hadn’t been able to take Halley on our morning run because of the pain. Achilles tendon. My wife continues to enjoy telling me how stupid I’ve been for months now since Halley and I upgraded our walk to a run — I continued to wear the same hiking boots, which obviously weren’t meant for sprinting and sudden stops. It finally caught up with me. I’m still limping around the house and popping Naprosin.

While we were on our return trip, the cell phone rang. It’s in the front seat, and my wife’s in the back of the Eurovan with the kids, so I fumble around with it while driving (a habit I highly discourage). It’s the boarder where we left Halley. She threw up a rock. They’re also an animal clinic, so they want permission to X-ray for anything else. Sure, go ahead. A couple of hours later, we get another call. Yep, another rock in her stomach. But she seems to be doing well, so we decide to wait until we get back to take her to our usual vet. How did she swallow a rock? She’s a lab, she chews everything.

So, we get back in town and take her to the vet. They recommend removing the other rock, but they have to send her to Bothell to a clinic that has a “scope” that can extract the rock without surgery. So my wife takes Halley on the ferry over to Seattle. After an hour or so of failed attempts, they finally get the rock out. Relieved are we.

However, rock eaters are notorious repeat offenders, we are told. My wife tried to dig up all of the rocks in the back yard (I gave her emotional support — remember, I have a bad heel), but the deeper she dug the more rocks she found. So now poor Halley looks like Hannibal Lechter, wearing a basket muzzle while she’s outside. A modified muzzle, because within an hour she had broken one of the leather straps that holds it on, so I had to make a new one out of an old lead. This dog is a criminal mastermind, I tell you. We used to have her in a kennel, but she figured out how to undo the metal wire wraps that held the fencing to the bars, and escaped. Now we have her on a tie-out tied to a concrete block buried two feet underground. And she has the muzzle on. Poor puppy. I feel terribly cruel keeping her chained up like that.

But we have a solution in mind. Viking Fence will be building a new run for us. 32′ x 20′, with the 6 foot fence sunk 4″ in concrete. To solve the rock problem they’ll stretch fencing wire across the ground, fasten it to the fence perimeter, and we can lay a layer of rock-free soil over it. I can hardly wait. Hardly wait to see, that is, what diabolical plan Halley hatches to get out of there.

Third problem: the day after we returned we awoke to find no water running from the taps. The well pump breaker had flipped, but flipping it back brought no joy (nor water either). Well pump went bye-bye, thinks I. Mike from Aquarius Pumps is on the scene tout de suite. Good guy, he checks everything out thoroughly and finds it is just the electrical line from the pump house to the well. That’s great, except it’s about 160 feet underground, and when attempting to pull a new wire through, the old wire won’t budge. So, he runs it over ground for us, and this week we’re having the excavators (Aspen) and electricians (Bird Electric) over to get it buried for us.

One more thing: the back case fan in my server died while we were away, so it was stuck on a reboot after applying a Windows update, warning me that the back fan was not detected. Of course, my replacement fan did not have the same connector, so that required some creative wiring.

I hope that’s about it for things falling apart around here for a while. I think I’ll limp to the cabinet and get some more Naprosin.