Wednesday, September 29, 2004

What to Write?



I'm sitting here chewing the keyboard. Not a single interesting idea for a post in the whole room or the cyberspace attached to it! Granted, I am working on something about the Patriot Act, but that means sitting down and actually reading dry legal text for several minutes. Or I could always torture wingnuts, but I don't feel like doing so today.

I'm taking Henrietta the Hound to the veterinarian tomorrow. She has a lump on her chest. She is at least twelve years old, and every time she has to go to the veterinarian I worry. So I worry right now, and the worry drives away other things that my head could be used for. But Henrietta is a mean old revolutionary and a few little lumps won't get her!

She means a lot to me, as does Hank. The relationship we have is not the same as that with humans, of course. For one thing, dogs don't say stupid things in politics. For another, it's so easy to make a dog happy: just scratch in the exactly right spot. But these interspecies relationships have something deeper in them, too, and I have learned a lot about bouncing back from Henrietta. She was an abused animal when we met, and nine years later she's the queen of the household. I like that in a bitch.

More seriously, she is the Einstein of the dogdom and her extrasensory abilities are enormous. Every night she checks that the doors are locked, then she tells me to go to bed and finally rearranges all the pillows on her bed to make a nest. And she keeps Hank under some restraint. How she does that I have never been able to fathom. Maybe it's just the simple fact that she trashes Hank every afternoon?

The veterinarian will find her perfecty healthy, I hope. And then I get a bill for two hundred dollars and can whine about that instead. I hope.