As I think I’ve mentioned before, my brother periodically flies to far flung places and builds houses. For charity. He gets to work with cool tools and learn interesting languages and see really neat stuff. Usually when he gets back he send us a link to a photo album of his exploits.
We just received this link the other day. Some of the photos are really outstanding. As he said, it is a work in progress, so not all of the captions are in place yet. But I highly recommend that you look at it.
A week and a half ago, specifically Sunday June 19th, we noticed that there was something wrong with Rerun. For those of you who know Rerun that’s a pretty general statement. He’s a weird little dog. Specifically, this time he had a foot problem. He’d apparently managed to impale a toe or get bitten or something. Either way, it wasn’t pretty. His second toe on his front left foot was approximately three times the size it should have been and he had licked/nibbled on it to the point that hair was missing.
Knowing Rerun’s temper, we muzzled him, wrapped him in a blanket, and functionally hog tied him to keep from hurting himself. He thrashed, growled, probably swore, and tried, despite the muzzle, to eat whatever human body part got closest to him. Despite all of this we managed to bathe his paw in hydrogen peroxide, clean it, and drain the infection out of it. Because it looked like, at minimum, an allergic infection, we gave him a weight appropriate dose of Benadryl and decided to call the vet first thing in the morning.
We called when they opened and they had an opening at 11:15am. By the time we got there is was clear that he was feeling a little better, but his toe was still quite swollen. The vet, one of the newer members of the practice took a look, inspected all of his feet, and upon finding out from us that he was a self nail trimming dog, opined that it was most likely that he’d split his nail to the quick while chewing on it and that’s how the infection had gotten in. When she showed me that there was, um, infected fluid, coming out from under his nail, it made total sense.
We came home with a scrip for pain meds, 3 weeks of antibiotics, and the Cone of Shame. That’s right, Rerun got an e-collar. This immediately turned him into a Zombie Dog. He came in the door and refused to move. He just lay down wherever was most inconvenient and remained there like a rock. A rock with Sad Puppy Eyes.
Naturally this required pictures. For posterity, of course.
"Daddy, please take this off. Please???"
"Take another picture and I eat your face."
If you look closely in the photos you can see the swollen toe on his front left foot. It looks MUCH better now and he’s clearly feeling better, though he still HATES the e-collar. If I can get any more photos without inducing him to kill me in my sleep, I will.
Geoff here – I had the chance to go to Fort Warren for some history programs and to meet with some of the staff and talk about Civil War history and living history. It was just me this time, but I hope to bring Kelly with me sometime because I think she would love it.
The fort's main door from the inside
Especially since this year is the 150th anniversary of the outbreak and the first year of the Civil War, I have been trying to get back into the world of Civil War history. The people I spoke with at Fort Warren were really great, and several of them were highly encouraging. They seemed to be interested in possibly having me come out there sometime to do some talks. How awesome would that be?
It was particularly meaningful for me to be at Fort Warren this month. It was on June 13, 1861 that the 11th Massachusetts Infantry, the “Boston Volunteers”, were sworn into the Federal service there at Fort Warren. For those Beaulieus that may be reading this, this was the unit that Moses Beaulieu joined. So it was somewhat personal for me. For those of you who have never seen it, here is their recruiting poster that I found.
Recruiting poster for the 11th Massachusetts
I took a lot of pictures, but I don’t want to put too many here. If you would like to see the rest of my photos (and the Harbor Islands are really beautiful if you have never seen them) from my day trip we will be putting them up in an album on Shutterfly. Once I have the link I will post it here.
I have the odd fortune to have a huge number a friends who have birthdays in close proximity to mine. I swear, I grew up without knowing a single other Gemini (Ok, I knew one person who had the same birthday as me, but she and I didn’t hang out.) Now, as an adult, I have two friends who share my birthday and half a dozen friends who have birthdays within days of mine. This doesn’t even include my parents. My mother’s birthday is 7 days after mine and my father’s birthday is another 4 days after that.
So, for about, oh 8? 10? years now, my friends and I have been having a big joint birthday party. As times have changed the parties have gotten smaller and involved less alcohol and ended earlier. Now they involve offspring. Ah, how times have changed.
This year the kids were remarkably cute and SO energetic. For your enjoyment I have uploaded a video from the party of 7 1/2 month old Thomas and a bunch of photos from the party and also from a while back when we went out to cut down some trees felled by an ice storm (aah, life in the burbs) and one of the wee ones is wearing my hard hat.
Enjoy and if you’re the parent or Auntie of one of these kids, feel free to leave a comment if you want me to email you an original of one of the kidpics.
An exploration of the Villancicos and Xacaras in the 16th and 17th centuries from Spain and the New World (Mexico and Guatemala). Works by Juan del Encina, Juan de Araujo, Fray Francisco de Santiago and Rafael Antonio Castellanos.
James Dargan, voice and violin; Teri Kowiak, voice; Dan Meyers, recorders and percussion; Camila Parias, voice; Zoe Weiss, viola da gamba; Salomé Sandoval, voice, baroque guitar and direction.
Monday, June 13th 4:00PM
Beacon Hill Friends House
6 Chestnut St
Boston, MA 02108-3624
$10 donation
I got to hear the preview concert this past week and it was excellent. If you’re in the neighborhood or if you’ve got some free time please come by and hear this concert, it is outstanding. I’ll be working the door so come and say hello to me as well.
Some of you may have heard that Geoff graduated yesterday. He finished school back in December, but like a lot of his classmates, he finished his internship a day or two too late to walk in December. So he and a bunch of his compatriots from his NCIS class at Lincoln Tech in Somerville got their Diplomas last night.
I shot video from our seats which were back halfway in the auditorium just past the middle. Before you scroll down and click, there are some things you should know. There were a LOT of people there with no concept of how to behave in public. Many of them talked through the whole thing until it was time to award diplomas. There were probably hundreds of infants and children, many of whom cried, fussed, or otherwise made noise. There were friends and family of the graduates as well as the graduates themselves who were arriving late to the ceremony right up to and through the awarding of the diplomas, so there were people wandering into my shot, completely oblivious of what I was doing.
The most important part of the ceremony was that Geoff was selected as the student speaker. Out of all of the graduates, he was the only one who was selected to give a speech and it was the only speech that actually got the attention of the audience enough that they quieted down and more or less stopped talking.
I’ve embedded the videos below. His speech is there in its entirety along with the various processional, recessional, line up, and diploma stuff. He’s going to blog the whole text of the speech and write about his own experiences at a later date.
And here are the photos of Geoff in his regalia at the podium and with the head of his program and favorite teacher, Jay.
I have much to talk about later including my recent shopping victories and my job interview yesterday, but for right now it’s LOLcats. I think the Crazy Screaming Fiendish Monkey Children I taught last night ate my brain. Or, at least, my ability to think for myself. Damn, I hope they didn’t turn me into Sarah Palin, I’d better check on that.
Geoff here – I have to say that we had a really good weekend at Brimfield. This was our first road trip in the new car, and it did quite well. It is phenomenal the gas mileage that thing gets. I did not have to refill the tank at all for the entire trip. In fact despite driving over 200 miles we barely made a dent in the gas tank – the gauge went down maybe a quarter. I haven’t figured out exactly what kind of mileage we got but it is probably somewhere around 40 on the interstate. We managed to get everything packed inside of it, and still have room left over for the things we bought AND to make a little space for the dogs to lie down and nap.
Anyway, we stayed at our usual place, the Publick House in Sturbridge, about 7 miles away. We love that place, it has always been good to us. And the restaurant is phenomenal. We usually try to eat breakfast there on Sunday and sometime we will have dinner there if we are meeting other people. This year we just went for breakfast. We did not go out much for dinner, since we were trying to be more thrifty. We brought our big cooler (to keep all the food in) and the small cooler (to put in the wagon to hold drinks). The wagon Jo (Kelly’s mom) got us is turning out to be the envy of everyone. Seriously, we must have been stopped at least 50 or 60 times so people could ask us where we got it. There were a few other people that had the same wagon, and whenever we would see them we would joke about it because they got the same questions. We even got our picture with them. See Kelly’s earlier post for that picture.
Of course, the dogs were also a center of attention wherever we went. We were greeted by all sorts of “awww”s and such, especially when the dogs were in the wagon looking particularly cute, which was often. Rerun especially got tired after a while, and by Saturday he really did not want to go anywhere. I even had to lift him out of the car and put him in the wagon that morning. So he stayed in there most of that day, and occasionally Thumbelina would join him. We saw a lot of other dogs this year. It seemed like more than we usually do, and this time we saw a lot of other dachshunds. It was quite cute to see how Rerun and Thumbelina would interact with the other dachshunds. Thumbelina definitely liked them more than the other dogs she saw.
We got a little sunburned on our first day, but after that we did pretty well. In fact, we got quite a bit of exercise ourselves. Kelly’s pedometer showed we had walked over 7 miles on one day – no wonder the dogs were tired! But the weather but cloudy and somewhat cool most of the time we were there, until late Saturday when it started to look like rain. Luckily it did not rain until after we had already quit for the day. The next day, Sunday, it was already raining by the time we got out there. So we decided to leave the dogs in the car where they were sleeping while we checked out the last few tents that we had missed the previous day. While we were inside the first tent, the skies really opened up. It was raining so hard that suddenly there were rivulets forming in the tents and vendors had to start moving things around. After an hour or so of heavy rain some tents had several inches of standing water in them, and low-lying areas near some tents had water that must have been close to a foot deep. People were quickly abandoning any hopes of shopping and many vendors were packing up. Still, we managed to wander through the last few tents and even find a few real bargains. It helps when the vendors would rather sell for a song then have to pack things away. Afterward we stopped by a couple of other places to pick up some things on our way out of town, and then we headed home. The dogs were asleep in their little bed area most of the drive back to Cambridge.
