Aborted Day…and night

Well, I see WordPress published that malformed post yesterday, despite my having taken it offline twice. Yuch. What an afternoon!

Hotter than the hubs of Hades here! Yesterday it was 110 and overcast.

I dread seeing another astronomical power bill next month. The AC has been pounding away day after day after day. Over July and August we’ve had two mornings, count’em, (2), when it was cool enough to shut the system off for a couple of hours. Otherwise, the system has ground along 24/7. And a couple of days I forgot to turn the thermostat back up to 80 in the morning—I no longer can tolerate having it much warmer than about 76 at night. At this age, when I can’t sleep at night I get sick. But after the last programmable thermostat produced not lower but higher bills, I had the AC guys put in a regular thermostat when they installed the new unit. This requires one to remember to turn it back up in the morning, another of those things you don’t do so well as age advances.

Pup was fairly good yesterday—at least I didn’t have to clean up any puddles. But during the hottest part of the day, when he and Cassie are crapped out on the floor like a couple of doggy corpses, I was working myself into a sweat struggling with the damn computer.

Ever since I upgraded to Worpress 3.2.1, the program has decided that it will engross the copy that follows an image into the caption. NOTHING seems to make it stop. It’s OK until I hit “preview” or “publish,” but that action seems to override the HTML clearly visible before then and move the content into the cutline. Sometimes entering a non-breaking line space after the code for the image & caption will work in a crude way, but it doesn’t work consistently. Tried to fix it in two browsers on two computers…finally had to give up. I guess the program is corrupted.

Fixing it is way, way beyond my abilities. Now I’ll have to hire someone to fix that.

Anybody got any nominations? With Mrs. Micah retired from that business, I haven’t a clue to who has that kind of skill.

So, until such time as I can hire someone to figure out how to deal with that, I guess no more images will be going up here.

M’hijito, continuing his after-hours project to escape to better employment, had a chemistry lab last night that went until 10:00 p.m. By evening, of course, Charley the Infant Golden Retriever was going strong. But since I’d wasted the entire flicking afternoon wrestling with WordPress, I had to grade 75 quizzes over my syllabi.

This, it develops, is the only way to get students to read your syllabus: give them an exam on it. And make them sign a form that swears they read and understood the syllabus, which you have to keep all semester because if you don’t they’ll try to claim they didn’t understand your due dates, the nature of your assignments, your “no late papers” policy, and the consequences of blatant plagiarism. As strategies go, it’s only mildly effective at making the students grasp what you’re saying, but it’s extremely effective at adding extra work to your day.

So while Charley was bouncing, I was trying to plod through scoring papers. That led to a fair amount of bouncing on top of Cassie, who was getting tired; running in and out to pee every 20 minutes or so; grabbing of verboten objects; and general frolicking. A couple of times I had to put him in his crate so I could focus on what I was doing, which didn’t help because he barks every minute he’s in there.

With M’hijito gone into the middle of the night, Charley’s visit here extended into Cassie’s dinner hour. Since Charley is a living vacuum cleaner that sucks up everything even vaguely resembling food (including pieces of paper, dead plant leaves, small insects, seeds, bark chips, sticks, and anything else residing on the ground, in the dishwasher, or inside a refrigerator), this posed a problem. Cassie gets real food: meat, veggies, and a starch. Charley finds this cuisine even more exciting than the exuberantly overpriced kibble he’s fed. And he’s already a third again as big as Cassie.

Okay, so I decide to snap a kiddie gate across the hallway with Cassie on the far side of it and then slip her food to her while he’s preoccupied with inhaling his kibble.

Not one of the brightest ideas ever to light up a marquee… Fazing one past Charley is not easy.

The instant he finished polishing his own dish to a high shine, he raced over to the gate to see what she was doing. There he became so exercised by the fact that she had FOOD that he jumped on the gate and knocked it over right on top of Cassie!

He dropped the gate on Cassie’s head, flipped the food dish completely upside down, and then landed on Cassie with so much force she couldn’t even bring herself to snap at him.

Oh god!

After that, he kept jumping on me while I tried to see if she was hurt—she kept licking her lips and I was afraid she’d broken a tooth. Finally I had to put her on the bed, which is so overly high that even I can barely climb into it. That kept him off her for a minute and her out of harm’s way until I could lock him in his crate, clean up the mess in the hall, and get back to inspect her more closely. She was OK, but she did seem a bit shaken up.

Charley continued active right up until the time M’hijito came over to pick him up, sometime after 10:00 p.m.

This made for a long day, since I’d had to be in Scottsdale for a business meeting at 7:00 in the morning.

That notwithstanding, I could NOT get to sleep! At 1:00 a.m. I sent an e-mail to La Maya to tell her I really didn’t want to leave the house at 6:00 a.m. to make the estate sale we were planning to visit—way to hell and gone back out in Scottsdale!

So of course she called me as dawned cracked.

Now I’ve gotta get up, feed Cassie before Charley shows up again, wash the sleep out of my eyes, and get ready to go teach another couple of classes. Thank god it’s Friday!!!