Last week, I was supposed to take a deposition on Thursday, at a prison about two hours away. On Wednesday, I called to make sure everything was set up, and learned that the prisoner was transferred. Yesterday. To a prison literally around the corner, but they wouldn't bring him back for the deposition, nor would they let me into the other prison on one day's notice. It ended up being for the best, because if I had taken the deposition Thursday, I would have come back to a letter from the court that basically meant I would have had to depose the prisoner again later. I was still not pleased, though.
Random minor events on Thursday: jobs for everyone! Two people we know, a law school classmate of mine, and one of Chad's former students, let us know that they got good jobs. And our bay window was put in and looks very nice.
And then there was the Blackout. Our experience was hardly deserving of the capital letter, frankly. At work just after four, the power flickered, went out, came back, flickered, went out again, came back, and we decided to shut down the computers (my officemate had a .dll toasted in the fluctuations, so a wise move). It's not clear if we came back on a generator or not; the lights were at full, which other people seemed to think suggested not. Anyway, when I left at five, all of the traffic lights around Empire State Plaza were up. Became somewhat less nervous as I listened to the lack of significant news on the very slow drive home. When I got home, we read outside until it started getting dusky, and then headed for a nearby town that we'd heard had power. Well, parts of it did, but parts of it didn't, included the half of the strip mall conglomeration containing our goal, a restaurant. We drove around for a while looking for places with power; the two restaurants we tried had waits until 9 p.m. at least, so we just got sandwiches at a deli.
After we ate, we drove around some more, on the theory that if we got home and the power was still off, we'd have nothing to do. Unfortunately, none of the bookstores or movie theaters we tried were open (some had power but had clearly shut down earlier when the power was still out), so I white-knuckled it through the dark traffic intersections until we got home—and found power, hooray.
As a bonus, on Friday we were let out at 1:00 to conserve power and help get downstate back up. I came home and read a book (see the book log), went out for dinner and to buy the sequels, and then read one of them.
On Saturday, we went looking for a dog and decided we weren't going to any more shelters on the "Oh, why not?" theory, because it was just too wrenching. We headed up to Lake George to see how long a drive it would be for Albacon—about an hour each way—and had good Mexican food on the way back. Then we watched the video of The Golden Spiders, the Nero Wolfe TV movie that came before the series. It was pretty good; it had a better Saul (the actor who played Lon Cohen in the series; he was recast because of time commitments), but didn't have a lot of the details quite down yet.
Sunday, did a ton of laundry, read the other sequel, helped Chad fix our gate fence, and spent the evening in that lovely tired-but-insomniac state. Grr. Thus, on Monday I went to bed early, and Tuesday I wrote a week in review post that got eaten, and I gave up in disgust. (Also, the rest of our windows were installed.)
On Wednesday we got our new dog, Emmy, as already mentioned here. She whined piteously when we put her in her crate the first night; it only lasted a few minutes, but I still didn't sleep well for worrying about her. I actually half-woke at some point and laid awake for a while listening for her, wondering if she was awake and needing to go out or something, before thinking to look at the clock: it was quarter to three, and she was definitely not awake or wanting breakfast. And despite that, I still couldn't go back to sleep!
She's definitely gotten more comfortable around here. She started to play the day after we got her. Chad's sister got this absurd fuzzy pig-frisbee thing with a squeaky nose in the middle, which was an enormous hit. She would step on the nose to make it squeak, paw at it with her front paws and end up chasing it backwards around the room, pick it up in her mouth and toss it up in the air—it was absurdly cute. She got the squeaker out of the nose within a day—she's very good at dismantling fuzzy toys. We bought her a canvas toy, on the theory that it might last longer, but no; she ripped at the seam and had the squeaker out within ten minutes, and then settled down methodically to pull out all the stuffing. It is amazing how much stuffing is in those toys . . .
She's still very well-behaved around us, and is slowly getting less needy. Chad's managed to go out of the room at least three times this weekend without her following him. However, the description "good with other dogs," which presumably was from her prior owners, turns out to be somewhat of an exaggeration. She's not eager to meet other dogs when out walking, and yesterday a big Lab lunged at her and she bolted, tail between legs and all, in sheer terror.
Today was an absolute debacle. We're going away for a week starting this Wednesday. We were worried about getting a dog so close to vacation, but since she was supposed to be good with other dogs and Chad's parents' dog is very submissive, we figured we could leave her with them. They all came up today to meet each other. Chad and I were pretty nervous about it, because R.D., their dog, is very energetic, and we'd noticed her behavior with other dogs. And it was even worse than we'd feared. We spent a good two hours trying to get them to come to a truce, to absolutely no avail. We probably should have taken them to a park to introduce them, to reduce the territory issue, but I really doubt it would have helped. Chad's folks ended up leaving early, without a meal, and we were just beside ourselves at how badly things came out.
Anyway, this has put an enormous kink in our plans. We have a 9:45 a.m. flight on Wednesday, so we need to find someplace to board her, probably starting Tuesday night. My boss recommended one place ("Hi, it's Kate and this is not an emergency. Did you like the place you boarded your dog when you went on vacation?"), but they were booked up, and every place else was closed by the time we were calling. We'll try more places first thing in the morning, and hopefully we'll find someplace and she'll forgive us for putting her back in a cage so soon after getting her out of one. Worst comes to worst, she'll go to Chad's parents and they'll try to keep them separated, but hopefully it won't come to that.
And then, not half an hour later, she heard a dog across the street barking and bolted out the gate that was not, after all, closed. Gave us quite a scare, especially since we weren't sure if the dog across the street was barking aggressively; fortunately, they just danced around each other, no cars went by, and Chad managed to grab Emmy by the collar after a minute.
She's very friendly around people; we just need to work on dogs. An obedience class is definitely called for, to get her used to being around other dogs. One more thing to ask the vet about.
I have two sets of legal papers to get out Tuesday, before we leave, plus doing laundry and packing and all that. Then we're off to Chicago for a week. We'll have Internet access, but don't expect to see us much until the middle of next week.
Belated meme: I've added a "policy" on friending, linking, etc., to my user info.
Link of the week: Letters from Space (specifically, the Space Station).