while commiserating with my housemate, james, about the current state of american politics, it occurred to me that my dog, snuffy, is just like john mccain. observe:

• john mccain spent five years in captivity in north vietnam.
• snuffy has spent the better part of every day for the last five years in a crate.
• john mccain can’t raise his arms over his head without difficulty.
• snuffy has no arms.
• john mccain has flip-flopped on issues from taxes to reproductive rights to the iraq war.
• as a puppy, snuffy chewed on flip flops.
• john mccain worked to increase traffic at national airport, thereby insuring area residents wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.
• snuffy barks a lot, thereby insuring neighbors don’t get a good night’s sleep.
• john mccain made nice with bush, hugging the man who f*cked him up the ass in the 2000 republican primaries.
• snuffy licked his vet on the nose after she expressed his anal glands last month.
• john mccain snuffy was neutered, and now has no balls.

uncanny, isn’t it?

oh, and as for courage - she’s the yowling image of sarah palin. look for yourself:

see? i bet you didn’t know palin had so much gray.

snuffy likes to hang out in the sunshine. on furniture he’s not supposed to touch. with a soggy tennis ball in his mouth. he moved his head in the second photo, but i like it anyway.

snuffy on leather chair Close

snuffy on leather chair Close

 

he’s an attorney’s dog. after being scolded repeatedly for sitting on the antique empire couch (great detailing on the couch, eh?), he moved onto a pillow on the couch. so technically he’s not touching the couch. technically.

snuffy on empire couch Close

awhile back, my laptop was OOC (out of commission) due to a broken dc-in board. jesse, a tech-head friend, was kind enough to fix it in return for some beer and a trout-and-asparagus dinner. for several months, all was well in the world of laloca’s laptop computing.

then, just this week, i noticed the strangest thing. my laptop wouldn’t connect to the house wireless. or rather, it would connect, but it would self-assign an IP address. it was driving me nuts. could verizon’s service really be so bad that the router was konking out at least twice a day?

well, i’m sure it could, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. because i discovered that my laptop connects just fine as long as there’s another computer in the house actively connected to the router.

strange, ain’t it?

###

other things i won’t have time to properly blog about:

• two problematic windows in the house were replaced, and a whole passel of storm windows were installed today. they’re burgundy, which is going to necessitate a repainting of the house’s trim. the difference on the first floor is amazing. suddenly, there’s no breeze.
• what with g and me working long hours, the dog’s getting more neurotic. i considered giving him a klonopin yesterday, but decided against it.
• i had to take 4 hours off work for a doctor’s appointment today (and managed to make it from south of 66 to walter reed in half an hour). i still put in an 8.5 hour work day.
• i should sleep more.

snuffy models this autumn’s sweater. modified fair isle pattern in a merino blend. i will never, ever knit fair isle again.

there are problems with this sweater that i’ll keep an eye out for in future patterns. it’s knit in the round, so it’s essentially a cone with holes on one side for the sleeves - this means it hangs down on his underside and presents a pulling danger (he’s already accidentally pulled threads on the belly); plus, because it’s fair isle, the wrong side (inside) is essentially a sweater mine of long yarn loops - an even greater pulling hazard. also - and i’ve noticed this on commercial dog sweaters as well as hand-knit ones - it doesn’t take into account the dog’s basic shape, so the neck winds up getting pulleddown the back instead of sitting up where it’s supposed to. i think knitting some short rows on the back would have helped with the problems there. also, ribbing the belly would probably take care of some of the sag issues.

last year’s sweater (shown below) has been consigned to the rag heap of history. it was a nasty polyester blend. overall a better dog pattern, though.

recent doings in these parts, now that we’ve resigned ourselves to the architectural horror that is our new neighboring home (complete with clay lion heads adorning the front doors and a garage door that looks like it belongs on a barn):

we had our boundaries surveyed. turns out the fence between us and our rear neighbors is, at one point, four and a half feet into our property. and this spring, said rear neighbors poured a concrete slab one foot from said fence as the foundation for a shed. we’re planning on tearing down the existing fence, and erecting one a few inches inside our side of the property line, to match the lovely fences we had erected when the architectural horror went up.

so they’re busy next door jackhammering away at the concrete slab, so we can put up our fence.

so kind of them.

oh, yeah - and the maintenance/repair of ten of our windows is going to run us slightly over six grand, which all said isn’t horrible, but does mean that i should get off my duff and get re-employed.

and snuffy is licking my laptop in sympathy. great pooch, ¿no?

nick’s t-10

kent island

i took the snuffster to great falls today to spend time outside in my favorite thinking place. turtles basked in the spring sun in the middle of the canal. snuffy, far more interested in pissing on every single clump of grass along the tow path, ignored them.

he did come upon some canada geese, big honking things that were about twice his size. they didn’t like him, and he definitely didn’t like them. but because he was doing his best to chase them (while still on the leash, the other end of which was attached to me), i couldn’t get a good photo.

we sat for a few hours on a hill. snuffy stood watch, intent on chasing off any rogue geese.

once he tired of that, and i dozed a bit, he tried to get me to play with some sticks. his idea of enticing me to play with him: grab a stick, chew it good, and then bonk me over the head with it. repeat as necessary.

go figure, it worked.

we then clambered down a rocky hill so i could get some photos of a semi-quiet bend in the river. snuffy decided it was time for a sand and mud beauty bath. (i haven’t bathed him yet; he is still coated in grit and stinks to high heaven.)

the river: it’s good for the soul.