Notes from Maine - 2025/01/19

My friend Albert (German Shepherd dog) had his teeth cleaned on Tuesday. Everything went well. They called during the procedure to ask if I wanted a bunch of his teeth pulled out. I declined that service. He’s only four years old. I think he will need his teeth in the coming years. They found a stray, unattached root on the right side of Albert’s mouth. On the left, it looks like the tooth was never there so perhaps he was just born without those teeth. To avoid future issues, I authorized them to extract the stray root. So now we have two weeks of soft foods and then a recheck to make sure the dissolvable sutures have dissolved properly.

I’m struggling to achieve a satisfactory relationship with the staff they have now. For twenty years I was blessed to deal with a single doctor. Right away with my old friend Moose (English Mastiff), Dr. Freeman did a great job on removing his bladder, sucking out a ton of bladder stones, and then putting everything back where it belonged. It took a while before we saw eye-to-eye on diagnostic evaluations, but we got there. Then, shortly after Albert came around, Dr. Freeman retired. Fair enough, but now I don’t have a decent rapport with most of the staff. There’s high turnover in a veterinarian’s office, I suppose. I can see the way they look at me—I’m an old crank who doesn’t take their word for anything. Why would I? If you can’t explain the necessity of a procedure without tripping over my first question, then I challenge the necessity. I’ve beat this drum before.

When I went to pick him up, the veterinarian brought a completely defeated Albert into the room. His ears were back, tail was down, and he slinked over to my side and sat.

The veterinarian had a completely flat affect. I mirrored it back. 

“He’s currently a shell of his normal self,” the vet said.

“You don’t say,” I said, keeping my tone completely neutral.

“I do say,” they said. “Until he recovers from the anesthesia, he may have some urinary incontinence. I don’t want you to be alarmed.”

“I never am,” I said.

With the slightest amount of interest, the vet asked, “Does he typically have urinary incontinence?”

“No, never has,” I said. “But in general urinary incontinence has never alarmed me.”

“I see.”

The whole conversation sounded like rapid-fire back and forth dialog from the old show Dragnet, if you remember that. 

So far he seems fine, and his teeth look great, so I guess I’ll chalk that up as a success for this vet. I was just working on editing a book from several years ago and there was a vet in that story that was remarkably similar to the one I just met. A character refers to the vet by saying, “There’s no icing on that cake.” Sometimes my characters say things that seem to come out of the blue, but I understand them anyway. After meeting this vet, I think I understood that line even better.

Mom flew in Saturday. She was just here in November, but I guess Virginia was boring enough to require another visit. There’s a ton to do here. We have painting hallway ceilings and finishing of kitchen cabinets. We have to install a Range Hood over the stove so I can properly dimension the final upper cabinets. Mom says the new cabinets make the kitchen look bigger. Seems backwards to me, but she thinks that maybe it’s the lighter color. I’m excited to finally do some lighting in the kitchen. This whole time I’ve been operating with just one hanging light. I want to put in under-cabinet strips, lights over the sink, and of course the range hood comes with lights. I will finally be able to see what I’m cooking or washing.

It’s possible that I’ve already purchased and carried all the plywood I will need for the rest of the kitchen. And, as soon as I typed that, I remembered that I might need one more sheet of 1/2” for the cabinet doors. I have a load of doors remaining. Oh well. Being “plywood complete” was a heartwarming thought for a couple of seconds at least.

I’ve been drawing a lot this winter, but I slowed down this past week. It’s competition right now for how many hours I get lost in writing or drawing. They’re both engrossing but in different ways. I can absolutely lose myself in writing. I’ll sit in the same position, moving nothing but my fingers for hours and hours. With drawing, I have to move around and take breaks. I get too locked in to whatever shape I’m trying to capture and it gets worse and worse instead of better. It requires a fresh perspective to find what I’m looking for. At the moment, I’m just working with pencils. It’s getting easier, but it’s slow. It’s rewarding to develop new skills. After staring at something for long enough, trying to understand the shadows of the thing, I realize that I’ve never really considered all the contours, or the way that light hits fur. It makes me consider the world more thoroughly. I like that. It makes me feel like wisdom is nothing more than good pattern recognition. I’ve never felt particularly wise, but I do think I’m pretty good at pattern recognition, so maybe there’s hope.