Labradoris

Trooper experienced explosive diarrhea early this morning. 

I say explosive, because this diarrhea, and the accompanying smell, was pervasive and all over the place.  I woke up to Trooper's whines and as soon as I emerged from my bedroom, I could smell it.  I took a moment to go to the bathroom on my way to the dog room (guest bedroom).  When I arrived, I opened the door and saw loose runny feces dripping down and out of his crate walls.  Trooper is sleeping in a crate that is designed for use on airplanes (the hard plastic shell, not the wire crate that I use in my home office for him), and somehow he managed to put his butt against the walls of the crate and take a standing shit.  I peered in at him, wiggling in the crate, poop dripping off the walls and the front gate like some horror film.  I decided to drag the entire crate with Trooper inside out to the front lawn for a good hose off. 

I released him from the crate and he immediately sped off into the far corner of the yard and unleashed holy hell from his bowels.  I cleaned his crate, sprayed it down with Simple Green, and then turned the spray nozzle off of 'jet' and onto 'shower' and gave Troops a big rinse off.  He was disgusting -- brown goo all the way up to his elbows, poor little guy.  I left his crate out to dry while we took the dogs on a very long walk.

I abstained from feeding him this morning, in hopes to give his stomach a chance to settle down.  If I return home for lunch and his crate is relatively clean, I will feed him about a half a cup of food and see how that works out.  Luckily he is not vomiting, but the diarrhea is a little concerning.  It's been over a week since his last round of shots, and he didn't eat anything unusual yesterday, so the alternatives are a little worrying.  But, I'll try not to fret too much and just hope he feels better by tomorrow.  If he's still having loose stool (and I do mean loose!) in the morning, I'll probably take a trip to the vet's office so we can get this resolved. 

Snapped this photo of the L while walking around Chicago May 1-3, 2009 on our past trip.  I love Chicago from behind the camera lens - it's a very photogenic city on many different levels.  Squint hard, can you see the bird?

Just wanted to give you all an update.  A bad storm blew through here a few days ago, and knocked out the whole town's power.  110 mph winds will knock over more than a few trees, and that's what happened.  Thankfully, my house was spared, unlike many of my neighbors who have a tree (or multiples) through their windows or roofs.  Mother Nature just trimmed my trees but narrowly missed my house, only pulling down my electric and telephone lines.  All of the town is down right now, and I'm in a neighboring town (40 minutes away) borrowing electricity.  The University is closed for an undetermined amount of time.  We're on a boil water order as well.

So, there's nothing else to do but BBQ and enjoy the weather!

Updates will hopefully resume next week, which is when we expect to have power.

I worked with Elmer's glue today.  I'm not proud of this fact, but I'm certainly not blaming the glue or the brand.  The reason I'm not proud is because I used it to create an academic poster - not a true academic poster, mind you, this isn't going to a conference - but it is part of a final poster presentation I am making in my last graduate class.

While normally I pay upwards of $80 for a slick, glossy poster for presentations, the instructor deemed this was unnecessary for the final class and encouraged us to be creatively cheap.

Elmer's, you are hereby deemed creatively cheap.

As I delicately applied you to the slides, flipped them over, and warmly rubbed each slide carefully and created heat to entice you to stick, I had a very strong sense memory from 4th grade.

4th grade was the first time I had a male teacher.  I don't remember his name, but he was tall, brown-haired, in his 40s or 50s, and had clearly done time as a product of the 1960s.  His favorite suit color was brown.  His most typical clothing assembly consisted of brown slacks, brown overcoat, a yellow shirt, and a brown and peach striped tie.  He was weary of teaching, and it showed.  He liked to call out a boy named Jimmy in class, who smelled of dirt and trash and regularly burped loudly.  Every time Jimmy would burp, the teacher would call him out and say how disgusting he was acting.  Poor Jimmy, who clearly came from a harsh home, grinned at the only attention he received during the day.  He would toss his tow-headed hair out of his eyes and wiggle in his seat.  I sat across the aisle from him and can remember how putrid his smell was to this day.

It was in the class that I learned what sex was, what humping was, and why girls don't shave their forearm hair.  Johnny Campbell, the red-headed kid with freckles, innocently asked what sex was one day, and the teacher overreacted by throwing his hands up in the air and started yelling, "YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT SEX IS, HUH?!  DO YOU?  Because we'll get the school nurse in here RIGHT NOW!!  IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT??  She'll explain sex to you ALL DAY LONG!  IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?  HUH??"  I didn't know what sex was, but it must have been important because our teacher was sure mad.  My friend Sarah, an early developer who wore a bra, told me that that sex meant you humped.  I listened to her with rapt attention as we played Connect 4 over the lunch period.  She also told me that she shaved her forearm hair and that I should too.

My mom and I had a lot to talk about that night after she found me in the bathroom with a razor on my arm, delicately trying to determine how to use the device.

My memory though, of you, Elmer glue, is one I'm sure many students expertly tried.  With our hands under our desks as our teacher was spelling out "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"  (just so you know, I totally spelled that correctly on the first try.  Our spastic teacher evidently taught me something.), we would slyly twist open your top, squeeze a few precious beads of white goo onto our hands, deftly twist your top closed, and then slide you back into our desks where we stored our precious pencil cases and rubber erasers.  Slowly we'd press our sticky hands together, bringing the drops together.  Some liked to keep their hands pressed tightly together and experience the satisfying 'crrrrchkssss' sound once you had dried and they pulled their hands apart, but not me.  I was unimpressed with this trick.  My favorite trick was to allow my hands to dry separate from one another, and once they had reached a satisfying level of dryness, deftly peeling off the edges until I could get an imprint of my skin.  Looking at all the cracks and crevices in my skin that you had copied was one of the more fascinating things to me.  I would lay my precious glue grafts on top of my desk for observation, intent on knowing these secrets of the universe that you and my skin imprints must contain.

It's a tradition, established more than a year ago, that I'm trying to keep up.  I started rewarding my students for finishing their final exams by offering them my scrumdilly-dilly-umptious homemade chocolate chip cookies.  This means that during my own final exams, I would slave away in the kitchen until late at night making my dear class their cookies.  I call this selflessness and thoughtfulness.  Others may call this procrastination. 

This semester, I just couldn't stomach the thought of making batches and batches of chocolate chip cookies.  I decided to make cake pops instead.  And I don't know if you are familiar with the wonder that is cake pops, but basically it's sheet cake mixed with cream  frosting, rolled into a ball, stuck with a Lollipop stick, and dipped in chocolate.  And they are pretty much amazing.  I am making 150 of them, which means three sheet cakes, three packages of whipped cream frosting, 150 sticks, 150 treat bags, and 150 twist ties. 

This gets a little messy.  And I'm more than neurotic when I'm in the kitchen.  I prefer all surfaces to be clean and tidy as I'm cooking.  Home ec, 6th grade, taught me that I should wash my dishes and clean as I go, and boy, I have never remembered a lesson as well as that one.  I'm currently - yes, like as I type - balancing the baking process, the whipping process, and the dipping process all at once.  And somehow I've got to keep chocolate cake off the floor, because I have dogs, and they like to eat what's on the floor.  They aren't picky, and these are prime pickin's, but a girl's gotta watch where cake falls.  Like where it should:  INTO MY MOUTH.

In approximately 6 more hours, I should have 150 beautiful cake pops, ready for my students to devour them.  What I most look forward to is the cognitive dissonance that flashes across their face like, damn, these are good...and I gave you a bad evaluation last week.  I shouldn't have been such a shithead.

Actually, I have yet to get a bad evaluation -- but it is fun to think about what they are processing as they bite into that cakey goodness.

We spent way too much time at the Field Museum today.  The special exhibits included a bug's view, where you were "shrunk" to less than an inch tall and transported underneath the surface of the earth, and a pirate's life, and I don't know about you, but count me in with anything involving pirates.  This particular exhibit showcased the Whydah and documented its transformation from slave ship to pirate ship.  At the end of the display, real pirate booty (treasure!!) was shown.  Obviously, the pirates didn't benefit from any of it, as the ship sunk one evening and all the treasure was lost. 

Well, until the historian found it and shared it with us. 

If you are interested in learning about this, they have a nice website.  It's a neat exhibition.