Ashley lay down on the floor in the bedroom, so I sat down on the floor next to her. She started woofing at me, so I woofed back at her.
She seemed non-plussed. #dogsofmastodon

Ashley lay down on the floor in the bedroom, so I sat down on the floor next to her. She started woofing at me, so I woofed back at her.
She seemed non-plussed. #dogsofmastodon
Google offered several filters to make this sky more dramatic or colorful, but I decided that I liked it best with no filter. Dawn sky over the prairie next to Winfield Village.
Back at the end of September I came down with West Nile Fever, which made me pretty sick for a long time. The only time in my life before I was that sick for that long was when I had Mononucleosis when I was a freshman in college. That time I was sick for most of the term, and it took several weeks of the Christmas vacation to fully recover.
With West Nile it took about three weeks to recover from the acute phase of the illness. That is, I had a fever constantly for three weeks. Then it took another three weeks to get my energy levels back. For that period I could walk the dog, fix breakfast, and then do one thing, after which I needed to go back to bed and take a nap.
As of a couple of days ago, I think I’m back to full health. I’ve been doing workouts—not as frequently as I’d like, but often enough that I’ve been able to start pushing the weights up again, although not up to what I doing before I was sick. I’ve been for a couple of runs, both of which were harder and slower than I’d like, but were okay—I didn’t feel like I was sick, just like I hadn’t been running enough the past few weeks.
On Sunday I got a Covid booster, so I felt slightly less energetic Monday, but that has already passed.
After too many weeks, I finally feel back to normal!
Dum mi atendas la aliajn membrojn de la grupo, mi trinkas bieron “U of IPA.”
Just because I felt like it, I made a thermosy french press of coffee, so Jackie and I could have 4th coffee this morning.
If I live to eleventy-one (like Bilbo), Jackie and I will have been married 78 years. #jimmycarter #rosalynncarter
An entire article on this, with no indication that the writer understands that students staying away from school are exactly the same as workers staying away from the office.
“The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent….”
Source: Opinion | The Startling Evidence on Learning Loss Is In – NYT
Whiskey club: Cody Road Rye
Cody Road makes a very fine rye. It’s got a nice rye spiciness, without being harsh at all, and a bit of bourbon sweetness as well (even though the grain bill is 95% rye, 5% barley, according to the label.
Today I served in neat in one of my whiskey peaks glasses. There are several versions of these glasses, with different mountains in the base of the glass. Mine have Mt. Fuji. The shape works great for aerating the whiskey when you swirl it in the glass.
Just a couple of days after seeing the crescent moon at dawn, last night there was a crescent moon at sunset! (Obviously not a surprise to anyone familiar with the phases of the moon, but it made me happy.)
Whiskey club: Cody Road Bourbon. Pre-pandemic, our local liquor store used to have tastings. (It probably does again, but we haven’t started going again yet.) At one tasting there was a rep from Cody Road, which turns out to be almost a local distillery: It’s in Le Claire, Iowa, just across the Mississippi. I don’t remember the precise details, but the rep mentioned that they try to use local corn and rye, grown close to the distillery.
The rye was actually even better than the bourbon (and I’m not usually a huge rye fan). We’ve got some of the rye in our liquor cabinet—I’ll have to have some again soon.
Today though I poured the bourbon on the rocks, although it’s also good neat.