I got paged out at five this morning. I had a server down so I got out of bed and went down to the basement office and logged in to work.
I worked for a while and then decided that I was wide awake and that it would probably not make very much sense for me to go back to bed as it would just shorted my day and I probably would not get very good rest. So I just stayed up.
Being up early gave me a chance to get caught up on SGL updates for a change. And I spent some time on the SpiceWorks forums. And I got to do some shopping on Amazon for classical MP3 downloads. I got some good stuff.
Around seven Oreo came down to the basement to spend time with me. We hung out for a while until Dominica and Liesl got up closer to ten then we went upstairs.
I took care of Liesl and Dominica showered and then went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to do some shopping. So I was home alone with Liesl and Oreo until noon.
Dominica’s shopping went well and she was able to take care of the items that she had been looking for. We ate lunch separately today then she and Liesl took a nap from two until around three. While they were sleeping I took Oreo out and he and I took a nice walk around Chapel Hill. Not as far as we have all been going recently but enough to count as exercise for the day. I didn’t really want to take the day off. I can already feel that Oreo and I can do the hill a lot faster and more comfortably than we were able to do just recently.
We discovered today that Oreo has an open wound where his broken tail is fused against his lower back. Poor little dog. It has probably been like this always and we just never realized. So we are trying to figure out what to do now. It clearly bothers him. It must be horribly painful all of time but there is no way for him to reach it or to tell us that it is hurting him. It is very sad.
Oreo spent most of the day with tissues wedged into the space between his tail and his back in an attempt to wick some of the moisture away to give the wound a chance to dry out, breath and heal. He is going to have to see his vet about this soon. We need to know what to do to make it better. Later on we took a syringe and used it to spray water into the space hoping to clean it out some. We had no idea previously that his tail was actually as long as it is. It is so tightly pressed against his back that we had thought that he had almost no tail at all.
At three, Dominica and Liesl hit the road to go over to Haverstraw, New York to Katie’s cable party. I have been so backed up with work and just overly exhausted in general that we thought that it would be best if Oreo and I stayed home.
Staying home did give me a chance to change Oreo’s dressings on a regular basis which was probably really good for him although he was clearly in real pain by the end of the day. The tissues are probably really irritating to his tail that has pretty much never felt any direct contact.
I did manage to get some important work done today and got some things out of the way that I needed to do. I did appreciate having some time to putter around the house with just Oreo and I. He and I don’t get a lot of bonding time anymore. I’m sure that he appreciated getting bonding time rather than being left at home or in the car or something.
While Dominica was out I figured out to get the PS3 playing our new music playlist on shuffle. We are really appreciating all of the music that we have available now to listen to in the living room.
Dominica had a good time at the party and she and Katie went out to a diner for dinner. So Oreo and I had to fend for ourselves. Since my plan is to weigh in tomorrow morning I decided to go for a really healthy dinner and just had two large bowls of vegetables. Overall I had a really healthy day with just shredded wheat for breakfast with high fiber soy milk, non-fat yoghurt, coffee, some rice cakes and my veggies for dinner. I am very hopeful that my weigh in will go well tomorrow morning.
Dominica and Liesl got home around ten tonight. Liesl did really well on her outing today. She was happy and little Miss Social, I hear. Even being out for seven hours Dominica felt that Liesl did well and that she will be able to take her places more often now.
We watched the very final episode of Major Dad. Going back now and watching that show is surprising because it was actually a much better show than I had remembered. It is too bad that it only ran for four seasons. I am also surprised about when it ran. This was a show that was from when I was in eigth grade until my junior year in high school.
Major Dad was an interesting point in American history. A post-Cold War time period when the Berlin Wall was just falling and the Persian Gulf War was just beginning – Major Dad was, in many ways, key American military propaganda directed internally at our own citizens to garner support for our military engagements with Iraq which then, like now, were highly questionable with “evidence” leading to the engagement that was later shown to have been falsified. The cries that then President Bush had taken us into war just to gain control of oil supplies in the region are echoing still today in our continuing position in the gulf. It is hard to believe that, in reality, the Gulf War has never totally ended and that we have been engaged with Iraq now for twenty years without any solid resolution. All we have done is ravage that country past the point of recovery and solved nothing fearing more from them today than we did in the eighties.
Watching Major Dad today, as an adult, the show is a painful reminder that our government seeks to control us through propaganda measures such as this and this must have been extremely obvious to adults at the time. As a young teenager I did not really see this social engineering in a sitcom but now, looking back, you can’t miss the rose-coloured glasses view of the US Marines at a time when the country was wrestling with some serious allegations of falsifying information to the American public as well as to Congress in order to justify the war. While the show itself was good and it is a great snapshot of “America at war in 1990” it is also a painful and sad reminder of just how easy it is to manipulate a republic.
It’s interesting that in 1990 the US moved twice as many troops to fight Iraq as we did in 2003 for the all-out invasion. I guess the military felt that the best defense was a good offense and that we would not need nearly as many people to take over a country as to defend against it.
We went to bed just after midnight. Dad is leaving in the morning to head down to Peekskill. We should see him at the house around three or four in the afternoon, I would guess. The weather has been good recently so hopefully his drive will be an easy one.