Sculpin

So I’m walking down Roosevelt near 82nd today, and I see a little fenderbender.

There was a woman in a light-colored shirt with a black lab by her side about to cross the street at the corner. I happened to be watching her, because I was admiring how well-behaved the dog was, so I saw her look both ways (apparently she’s well-behaved, too) and as I passed her at the corner I saw her begin to cross.

There was a car down the block that’d easily had ample time to slow to a stop normally, if the driver had been reasonably attentive. But apparently the driver wasn’t paying much attention until the last minute, at which point he or she slammed on the brakes. The car behind that one, whose driver wasn’t smart enough to leave appropriate stopping room, smacked into it just hard enough to knock off its little plastic bumper.

So, the woman with the dog keeps on going. And I’m standing there, wondering if I should go say, “Hi, I’m a witness.” It was a really minor thing, though, and I suspect that the drivers just shrugged and swapped insurance numbers. I look up the block, waiting to find out if anybody comes out of their car yelling. Nobody does. But while I’m waiting, some bald guy in a red Jeep, maybe — something shiny, red, elevated and faintly mid-life-crisis-like, anyway — grins at me conspiratorially and says, “Well, that was rude!”

“Pardon?” Who, me?

“She was really rude!”

I’m lost. I couldn’t even see the genders of those drivers; the light and angle were wrong, and I was looking at the car damage anyway. I walk a few feet back to the corner. “Who?”

“The woman with the dog!”

“What?” Of all the people in this interaction, it’s the pedestrian he’s blaming? The who what now? Is it for walking away?

He nods at the corner curb and says, “She should have stopped!” He is beginning to get that I am not so eager to celebrate his judgmentalism.

Uh. Possibly, and purely for the sake of agreeableness, I’d buy that she was very slightly ill-advised, but that’s only because I’m surely in the top 5% for street-crossing caution. In no way is it reasonable to call her rude. I raise my eyebrows and state a fact: “She had the right-of-way.”

I expect him to tell me that’s no excuse. Instead, he gets huffy and gestures at the street. Clearly I am an idiot, and it is shocking that I am not supporting him in this. “There’s no crosswalk marked!!”

This is when my jaw drops. Yes, you ignorant and deluded entitlement case, that’s what they call an “unmarked crosswalk.” Generally speaking, every intersection contains legal crosswalks, whether or not they’re marked. I could actually feel the hinge of my jaw loosening for a moment before I said, pointing to the corner on which I stood, “Pedestrians have the right of way at every corner. You are wrong. Sorry.” (If only I could have included the link!)

At that point, having heard no yelling, I turned and walked away before I started getting rude. (Or ruder.) Because if you don’t know when pedestrians have the right-of-way, you don’t know how to drive, and in a better world your license would be taken away until you get a clue. Ah, for a better world.

Pansy was not my dog, but she was a famously good dog. I can’t make it to her wake this weekend, so I offer this poem by William Stafford instead. I ran across it the other day and thought of her.

Choosing A Dog

“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for awhile
but then maintenance gets to you.

When I get old I think I’ll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal –

My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what’s really there by the smell.

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know –
it’s too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.

Cissa has created a syndicated feed of House of Cranks: houseofcranks. Thank you, Cissa!

Which reminds me — most of you don’t know Cissa. I met her through Dreamingcrow, I’m pretty sure. She’s a jewelry artist who keeps bees. (Check out the scent lockets.) She’s also a person who knows a whole lot of stuff. You know how you’re going along in life and you come up with questions about this or that, and you smile a little as you think to yourself, “I bet X would know,” because you have thought that same thought a thousand times before? Spiff is one of those Xs; Cissa is another.

I’ve dusted off that Twitter account I’ve had kicking around for a while. You can find me there as “sculpin“, unsurprisingly.

Savannah linked to a ridiculous thread about the safety of mineral oil.

As I said in her journal, I learned all sorts of things from that thread:

1. Mineral oil causes miniaturization, or rather the illusion of miniaturization.
2. Shooting yourself in the foot can kill you, but will probably just make you look stupid.
3. Crackers don’t breathe.
4. Some people swear that mineral oil can turn your eyes to coal.
5. Which is funny, because coal is actually caused by old bush fires.
6. Even smelling mineral oil kills children.
7. Mineral oil is THE #2 CAUSE OF ELDERY DEATH.

I suspect that the person who thinks that the smell of mineral oil kills children is repeating something garbled about lipid pneumonia; probably they didn’t quite have a handle on what “aspiration” meant in that context. It’s true that mineral oil in the lungs is bad news.

This is one of those ridiculous ideas that I might actually put into practice. You know, in all the copious free time not taken up by practicing other ridiculous things.

In Mexico, there are buskers who have trained fortune-telling canaries. They’ll take out the canary from its cage, greet it, and set it down on a tiny stage; the canary flutters over to a little box, rings a bell, perhaps drags a little hat around, and selects a slip of paper with your fortune on it. Josh and his dad saw one in Guadalajara last year, which pleased his dad no end; apparently, training a canary to tell fortunes is a dying art.

I can never resist a dying art.

We don’t have a canary, but three day-old chicken chicks are being mailed to us on the 19th. And chickens, it turns out, can be surprisingly well-trained. (1, 2, 3.) Animal trainers have been using chickens for decades to help them learn to shape behaviors with clicker training. There’s at least one DVD about training chickens, and you can even go to one of several chicken camps.

Will we train our chickens to ring bells and pick up little slips of paper? It could happen. It seems like a shame to have such a trainable animal around and not train it to do something, and I think it’d be fun to learn to train an animal to do something interesting. There’s just one thing — we’d planned to eat the chickens once they’d stopped laying well. I’m not sure I can bring myself to eat a trained chicken.

Actual snippet of conversation from just a moment ago:

Cam: “…And speaking of things to thank you for, you have pants on.”
Josh: “Oh! I’ll go do that.”

When Josh and I first started dating, I said delicately, “You know, some people prefer indirect conversation and some people prefer more direct ways of talking–” He broke in, “Direct is better.” I was delighted, because I agreed completely. Tell you the truth, I’d had my fill of people who’d mince around with indirection and then glare at me for not reading their minds with my magical Women’s Intuition. (Though to be honest, more than once I have read people just fine and have chosen not to act on that for any number of reasons.) So, yes. I held to the superiority of forthrightness all the way.

But I’m rethinking that now. Weird shorthand is my favorite.

Thanks to everybody who gave me recommendations on happy material for reading and doing while I had the flu. (The last of which I’m still trying to get over. God damn, this has been something.) Here’s my addition to the pile: Seb and Mimi (via Siderea.)

On an entirely different pile: Racialicious.com. I’ve been reading over some of the reactions to the latest Amanda Marcotte — I don’t even know what to call it. The latest Marcotte-generated what the fuck?! moment, this one with the spearchuckers. I mean, actual spearchuckers, no kidding. So plenty has been said, as you would imagine, and there’s plenty to chew on here. But if there’s one thing that I personally got out of it, it’s an introduction to Racialicious, which, from what I’ve read so far, is pretty consistently thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Well, shoot. I have a favor to ask of you all.

Josh is a lot better; I, on the other hand, have picked up something nasty. Possibly the same nasty thing, but very possibly some other nasty thing. I dragged myself in for the last day of my SP gig today; by the end of the day, the faculty member evaluating my part of the test, an experienced physician’s assistant, was asking me pointed questions that seemed to be circling around the possibility of pneumonia. So that’s all a great deal of fun. I came home, went straight to bed, and am seeing a doctor on Thursday.

Grrrr.

So I’m going to be an irritable coughing person for the next few days, and that’s going to be very dull. So what I was thinking was this — if you have any recommendations for Neat Stuff On The Web, I would be delighted to know of them. If you use Google Reader, maybe you’d like to add me, eclarios, to your contacts list and share neat things there.

Otherwise I’m just going to play Desktop Tower Defense again and again and again.

Ye gods, is this ever one hell of a flu season.

Josh came home from work early on Wednesday, dazed and exhausted. I paid the cab driver and packed him off to bed. It was an amazing thing to see. He’d overheat in bed, then try to stand up for an exciting trip to the bathroom (so far away!) and immediately his body temperature would plummet and he’d shake visibly. Plus the joint aches were driving him crazy. At one point he was using a cane to get to the bathroom, just for a little extra stability, and I’m pretty sure he would not have turned down a Zimmer frame.

“This is what it’s going to be like when I’m 80, only all the time,” he kept saying.

“No, it’s not,” I kept replying. “We’re going to be tough. Like those old birdwatchers at the Audubon Society. We’re going to start taking walks every evening, and by the time we’re 80, we’re going to be unstoppable.”

“Grmph.”

By Thursday, he seemed to be on the mend, and then Friday more or less kicked him in the head. Friday night his temperature started spiking fast, from 99.2 to first 102.8 and then a bit over 103. He was starting to get pretty well cognitively addled. I decided that we were going to the ER, figuring that if his temperature had kept rising the way it’d been rising, he could be well over 104, maybe close to 105 by the time we got him in to see anybody. I felt like something of a Nervous Nellie, but it bothered me that he had a very stiff neck, headache, and sudden fever spike; I couldn’t help thinking of the kid I knew in college who got bacterial meningitis and didn’t get it treated with appropriate swiftness. (The kid lived, but I understand he’s stone deaf now.) I called Josh’s mom, who lives half a mile away, and away we went.

Well, Josh’s temperature dropped on the way to the ER. Blood tests were run, strep cultures were collected, and the verdict is that he’s got something viral. About what you’d expect: rest and fluids. (”Oh, she’s keeping me hydrated,” Josh said to the doctor. And I am. He’s starting to protest that his back teeth are swimming.) The ER staff was awesome and, it seemed, generally sane and well-balanced, so this did not much resemble any other trip to the ER I’ve ever taken.

Josh is tottering around the house today — he even managed to walk up and down the block once, though he regretted it afterward. It’s such a beautiful day, and I know he’s got a good case of cabin fever. Oh well. No bike riding for Josh today. Only rest and fluids, fluids and rest.

Personally, I’m wiped. I was pretty wiped anyway from getting up early to go to the UW. “There’s not a whole lot of slack in the system here,” I thought a few days ago, and here I am feeling that non-slack. I sure as hell hope I don’t get this bug, and if I do, I hope it’ll hold off a few days until I’m done with this stint as a standardized patient. Gah. In addition to taking care of Josh, I’m trying to get the house and garden in order so that I can be sick for a week without having the full-on Den of Filth and Plague experience. I think we’re all ready for this to be over.

I’d never seen Josh this sick before. Yow.