At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens. #dogsofmastodon
The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.
Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.
Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
This gives you some idea how swollen the creek is.Less impressive to you than to me, because you don’t know that there’s a weir across the creek which is completely hidden by the high water.
I wish I had as lean and muscly a physique as Ashley. But I don’t wish it enough to switch to eating nothing but dog food as a way to get it. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
Right from the start I referred to Ashley as my “pupperdog.” After a while though, I realized that she was actually my “pup ur-dog”—that is, some proto-dire-wolf aspect of a pit bull / boxer cross.
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
Now that I’m over 65 I qualify to get the pneumonia immunization. The doctor mentioned that it has much less in the way of side-effects than common viral immunizations—flu, covid, shingles, etc.
Maybe that’s true, as far as the fever and body ache side-effects. But as far as the soreness-in-my-arm side-effect, it is really, really not true.
I’ve been whacked in the arm with a steel bar and not had it hurt as much as my arm hurts right now. (Admittedly, I’ve mostly been whacked with steel bars very gently.)
Jackie almost always gets up before me and makes the coffee. But every few weeks I’ll wake up first and then I’ll be the one to make the coffee. And when I do, I bring Jackie a cup of bed coffee.
Ashley routinely stays in bed until the second person gets up. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
Ashley is on her Very Best Behavior since picked up after being boarded for our trip. I don’t know if they did a bit of training (insisting that she not jump, having her sit to put her leash on), or if she’s nervous that we might take her back if she’s not a good dog.
