Some of this is stuff I’ve already said on social media, but I like to say it here too, so:
:: Yesterday at work, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan brought up the Mets season opener on the Peacock app on his phone. As the Mets were hosting my Pittsburgh Pirates, I decided to watch along for a bit. I watched until 2/3 of the way through the bottom of the 1st. This is more Pirates baseball than I have watched in quite a few years…and yet, watching that single 2/3 of an inning feels like a total microcosm of most of the last 30+ years of the Pirates. Paul Skenes, the super-human pitcher who is the reigning Cy Young winner (and who will NEVER finish his career with the Pirates, let’s be realistic), proceeded to pitch very badly, and he was not helped at all by not one but two godawful defensive plays by Oneil Cruz, a guy who is in center field who should not be in center field.
A deeply rare shot of a baseball and Oneil Cruz’s glove being in the same place at the same time.
So, that was fun. I got to see the Pirates’ best pitcher get pulled in the 1st inning of the season opener, and some predictably terrible play by a guy who is only playing center field because…well, I’m a bit fuzzy on that, actually.
:: Here’s another WNY sunrise. We don’t get to see many of them this time of year, but when we do….
:: Anybody watching High Potential on ABC? It’s the show that’s currently giving us our needed “Murder mystery procedural with quirky characters” fix. This sort of thing has been in pretty short supply since Castle went away. This show is a lot of fun, though I do wish it was able to dispense with the “long mystery arc” storyline that is glacially unfolding underneath the week-to-week stories. I do recommend it, though.
Also, a recent episode’s murder method was a poisoned pie in the face! So that was amusing. I was hoping that lead character Morgan, who has a photographic memory and knows everything, would give her cop friends one of her impromptu lectures on the pie in the face, but no such luck. Alas.
:: And finally, in the Four-Legged Friend department:
Even though it’s only 31 degrees out, proper care of your House Hippo is important. Let her get some sun.
Of COURSE it’s a trap. Don’t stick your hand down there.
OK, everyone! Comment as follows: On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning “a gentle No, Carla” and 10 meaning “getting swatted with a rolled-up Sunday New York Times and being sent to bed without dinner”, what level of scolding do you think Carla actually received to react like this?
Spoiler: It was no more than 2. Carla can bring the drama when she wants to.
Carla has been trying to get Daisy to like her and play with her. The results have not been terribly encouraging, but Carla can be relentless, so we’re not giving up!
Hold on, let’s start here: one of my favorite paintings at the Buffalo AKG Museum.
Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”
Nice, huh? I like the suggested motion in the dog’s figure and in the leash. I always linger on this one when I get to where it hangs in the museum.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, flashlights.
(Yes, the painting is relevant. Bear with me.)
The flashlight company is called OLight, and my coworker likes to tell me–rather mischievously–when they’re running sales. Whenever he says this, my response is always the same: “Oh lord, don’t tell me that!” Because if there’s one thing that’s almost guaranteed to get me to part with money, it’s a flashlight. (By the way, that old post of mine, linked above? All but two of those flashlights are now distant memories, and I don’t even remember the little red keylight that was apparently two bucks at Home Depot whenever I got that.)
But anyway, back to OLight. I do not visit that site with any regularity at all, because they’ll get a lot more of my money if I go too often. Heck, I just looked up the URL to link it above and I almost clicked four things to put in my cart! Dangerous, it is! However, sometimes there is necessity, and thus I have to discuss my one time (thus far) purchasing from OLight.
Enter the dogs.
Specifically, Hobbes.
When we adopted him last year, it was late in the summer when the nights were starting to settle earlier. Cane, you’ll remember, was mostly white with a few brindle spots, so we could see him in the back yard even when it was totally dark; we knew where he was and could corral him to bring him in when we let him out there to do his business either at night or in early morning. Hobbes, however, is completely brindle, so The Wife realized pretty quickly that it was going to a problem seeing him when he was let loose into the yard when it was dark.
She brought this concern up, and then I visited the OLight site…and saw this item here:
Now, was this a case of my phone listening to me and making sometime appear? I don’t know, but I do know that based on what I read, this is what the doctor ordered: a small light, with a multi-colored LED set-up on each end, about the size of one of those small McCormick spice containers, with a carabiner-style clip for attaching to stuff…like a backpack, or a belt loop, or somewhere on one’s person or on a dog’s leash.
Yup, this appeared to be just what the doctor ordered. Or rather, it’s what “the doctor” suggested and what I ordered. I got two of them, one for Hobbes and one for Carla. And then we proceeded to not use them for almost a year because Hobbes got injured and to this day he hasn’t been released into the yard on his own recognizance. But as our night-time dog walks are increasingly happening when it’s dark out, we have started using them even though the dogs are leashed. Hobbes doesn’t wear his yet, but on a lark I threw one on Carla’s collar one night. We wondered how she would react…and she didn’t. At all. She just does all her normal walk stuff with this light hanging from her collar. It barely weighs an ounce, so I’m not sure she even physically notices it, aside from seeing light.
And this is where our painting above comes into play, because a few times I’ve snapped Carla’s picture while walking, and the results put me immediately in mind of my favorite painting at the Buffalo AKG!
On the lower pic, it may appear that Carla has somehow red-shifted, because note the blue on her backside! That blue glow is actually coming from Hobbes’s light behind her. These lights can be set on each end to red, green, blue, or white, or flashing between all of those–and the ends can be set independent of the others, so I can set it to red and blue (on Bills game days!) or maybe red and green once we’re into the holidays. Visibility for one’s dogs is always a good idea, and I like having these for safety reasons.
Is that all I bought on that first OLight order? Why, no! I got a small flashlight for The Wife to carry in her purse or bag, and I got a small pen light to hang on my keychain because I’ve been in want of such a thing since my last keychain light died. Currently that’s all I have from OLight. But I’m sure that will change at some point, as I am highly impressed with what I’ve seen of their products thus far.
(Note to self: It’s probably time to update the “Flashlights I own” post….)
Been a while since I updated the progress on our greyhound Hobbes and his leg injury (see here and here for earlier developments). After his procedure in January he spent a number of weeks getting driven to Pittsburgh weekly for follow-up visits, and then he was released to physical therapy here at home, and he’s been doing very well. You can still tell that he favors that leg on occasion, but he’s getting much stronger on it and he walks normally, maybe eighty percent of the time. That’s huge, since at the time nobody was totally confident that he’d be able to even keep the leg.
However, since they didn’t do the bone fusion operation like had been originally planned (for many reasons, most of which were along the “We think he can mostly heal on his own and then we can always do the fusion later if it doesn’t work, but so far he’s healing” line), the vet in Pittsburgh strongly advised an orthotic device for the injured leg, that he’ll use mainly in situations when we want to let him off-leash (like, going out on his own in the backyard to do his business, which he hasn’t done on his own since October). A couple weeks ago he went to Pittsburgh to get fitted for his brace (they make them to order), and yesterday, it came! Here’s how it looks:
Now comes the work of getting him used to that thing. He wore it briefly last night, and he did walk around on it a bit, though after a minute or two he was clearly annoyed by it. Another step on the road to recovery and normal life, though!
