Work last week was, well, I could complain, but it would be (a) tedious and (b) indiscreet. Suffice it to say that I decided I needed to take Saturday completely off, else I feared I would start looking for nearby concentrations of liquid in which to drown myself. I took a nap and read one and a half books (the half was finishing something I'd started after our 40-odd trick-or-treaters stopped coming)—such luxury! I'd planned to go to a co-worker's Halloween party too, but at the last minute I realized I was still very sleepy, with a rotten headache to boot, so I skipped it. Of course, Sunday when I started working again I plunged right back into the Pit of Despair, plus the dog was sick which cut short my working hours. We were both very glad to have Chad come home from a weekend D.C. conference, though.
After our post-dinner walk last night, Emmy threw up—again; she'd been sick that morning and afternoon on an empty stomach. At first I thought that her stomach was just still irritated, but then I looked closer at the stuff on the floor: oh look, a bone! It looked rather like a chicken wing bone, though you'll understand that I didn't make a very close inspection of it under the circumstances. So, sometime on our walk, she'd swallowed an entire bone whole without my realizing it. When walking her in the dark, even with a flashlight and street lights, it's still next to impossible to spot what she might pick up before she gets to it—and yet I still feel it's my fault. And if she ever picks up something that she can't throw up and gets sick or dies, you bet I'll feel it's my fault then, too. (I was quite positive she didn't have anything else left in her stomach, but I still fretted over whether we should take her to the emergency clinic anyway. We didn't and she's been fine.)
Did I mention that I have a slight tendency towards being morbidly preoccupied with the possible deaths of my family, especially premature ones? Yeah. So I was kind of disproportionately upset about this.
Anyway, she's fine and I'm better. She did pretty well at training class last Thursday; she barked some at the other dogs, but I think she was starting to settle down by the end of class. And she learns really fast—highly motivated by food and attention both.
A couple of links:
- William W. Bedsworth, Associate Justice of the California Court
of Appeal, writes a monthly humor column;
this month's is about inmate litigation:
What's more, there's some kind of primeval energy that infuses inmate pro per cases. They're like rabid wolverines—capable of inflicting damage way out of proportion to their size and completely indiscriminate about their victims.
*nods furiously*
- It's one thing to know that Yale sends a really high number of clerks to the Supreme Court; it's another to glance at an article focusing on minority clerks and immediately recognize three of the names as people you were in class with or worked on journals with. (That doesn't count the non-minority Yalies, whose names aren't mentioned in the article.) I know they're all extremely smart, but it's still just weird.
And now I have lots of work to do.