Peeking into the rock

I'm not a very good housekeeper at the best of times. Depressed, I'm worse. I'm worse still when I'm not well.

Even though the War on Rats is not over -- and I haven't had Zack clean out the vacuum cleaner for me, so there's still rat cells in the house -- I can feel a tremendous difference. This week I actually have no work, and I have no interviews yet from any of the jobs I applied to last week, and my searches have only turned up one job to apply to this week, so I am moving on from the War on Rats to battling the accumulated dust and filth in the house. Much of it is much worse than I imagined because I've been determinedly not looking at it, but some is not as bad as I thought. I've cleaned the furnace air return filter, which I normally do monthly, but lately have been doing every three months: the computer's insides, which I last cleaned just before I went to Prague: many corners of the living room and "library" (computer/books/comics room between the kitchen and the stairs): and I washed Truffle and Loki, but not the extra dog, who is kind of large for me to haul her around and put her in the tub.

This is mostly running around with the vacuum cleaner, the duster, many towels and various cleaners, but of course it also involves the gas duster (canned air). I use it quite generously for those teeny corners and the keyboard and the insides of the computer, of course. I've decided that it is a justifiable expense. I wish someone would make a version that compresses air as you go, like those old-fashioned seltzer bottles. But that's not because of the expense, it's because I'm squeamish about producing more trash.

So, anyway, I have a little headache from the dust but nothing like how sick I've gotten in the past when I attempted this sort of thing.

The dogs, by the way, get very excited when I vacuum. I can't tell if they are angry, afraid, or happy. They bark a lot and the extra dog keeps leaping at the end of the vacuum hose and maybe trying to bite it? That's what she does with water from a hose, also.

Yesterday I took them to Frederick Street Park and I finally figured out that that stuff in the baby oak tree by the benches is in fact a bunch of communal dog toys, so I through the tennis balls and frisbee for the dogs for almost an hour and afterwards the extra dog would hardly stand for anything. She has some arthritis, which is why I feel badly about her gaining some weight at the beginning of the summer. We are all working on losing a little now.

I got the student and faculty suite of photoshop and illustrator plus a bunch of junk I don't care about. Now, of course, my computer is infested with demands to register at adobe.com and the update spam I had already turned off (several times) appears to have been turned back on. Damnit.

However, they are shiny!

I am flummoxed in Illustrator though -- when I make a vector object, and I want to go on to a new one, how do I tell the program that the next thing I'm going to do applies to the new vector? So far I have only gotten to the next vector by accident. In paintshop 9, you clicked "apply" to exit one vector and start another. Illustrator seems to have no such thing.

Also, very bad, stupid, terrible manual, which doesn't actually tell you stuff like that. Mostly it tells you how wonderful the program is. I did learn some things from reading the manual, but until I can do this one thing, I won't be able to do anything. Because, as it is, weird artifacts show up between the objects when I go to start the new one, like chunks o'color, or extra line segments, or everything changing to the properties I want the new one to have. Or worse -- stuff I really can't identify and don't know how it got there.

edit: I can't make photoshop do anything either.

On another front, I can say "Muj syn je student na universitu karlovy. Studuje medecinu. Moje datr studuje morske biologie." Only that's missing all the antennas because I'm lazy, and the antennas on the r in "marine biology" indicate a sound that nobody who is not Czech would imagine making voluntarily. You might make it if someone was licking you and you weren't sure whether it was delicious or creepy.

I can even say "Muj manzel je mrtvy." The only thing missing are the antennas. The U in muj has a little tiny O hovering over it to indicate a sound that I cannot distinguish reliably from a regular non-palatized longish U. Or sometimes it seems to sound more like an O. The Z has a little V that turns it into the sound of the S in the English "treasure" (quite straightforward, relatively). The y in mrtvy has an acute accent which makes it sound like the i in atropine instead of the i in pin.

In case it's not obvious, I said "My son is a student at Charles University. He studies medicine. My daughter studies marine biology. My husband is dead."

I had to look some stuff up. Mrtry (dead) was the only word I had to look up for more than confirmation.

I can give terrible directions in Czech, too. I can't say "the station is to the left of the post office," but I can say "Look at the post office. The station is to the left."

In general, I find that I am learning much more Czech philology than useful language, and I wonder if this is a personality flaw of mine.

On another note: Jason's mama offered to take care of the dog and cat while we're gone. I'm floored: it's too much! But I agreed. Now I have to clean the house, out of respect.

On an unrelated note: the keyboard appears to be finally losing its mind -- one key at a time. Right now the letter C is unreliable and I have to pound on it sometimes. So if you see it missing, you know why.

Head thing is a tag because after I realized I had to chage the tickets I had almost a whole week of not sleeping and not doing much of anything else either.

So for the next two and a half weeks I have not one, but two extra dogs. They are really large and bumptious extra dogs. Truffle adores them but they wear her out just by existing. She gets really excited and barks and runs around with her tail wagging and her ears laid back and then she pants and collapses. I have got her on the other stress medicine (prednisone) so she doesn't literally die from the excitement.

However, these dogs don't understand that the cat is a privileged citizen. They think that finding the cat in my bed at midnight is a grand adventure and possibly an offense to all that is good and holy. They have a lot to say about it. The cat is alarmed, probably with good reason. I tried barricading the extra dogs from the bedroom but the bedroom doesn't have a door -- it just opens on to the stairs like a loft or something -- so I tried piling heavy boxes at the top of the stairs and reinforcing the door-object that is lying across the open doorway to the attic so the cat has a refuge. The problem is that he won't be able to leave as I can't get the bedroom window-door thing open, so I'll have catpoop in a corner of the attic. So I need to barricade the opening to the bedroom to keep the extra dogs out while I'm not home and I need to get that window open (call Zack). There are extra protable baby gates at work: I wonder if I can borrow one.

The extra dogs did not accept being barricaded from the bedroom while I was in bed. The larger, fluffier, more wolflike one, Lola, howled. The mastiffy-houndy, slender, puppyish one, Percy (I am not responsible for these dogs names), just kept throwing himself at the barricade and panting really really loudly. Truffle was a maniac. I finally got to sleep by putting the extra dogs on their leashes, which momentarily deluded them into thinking we were going to go for a lovely jaunt at past midnight, but whjen I took them into my bedroom on the leashes and repeatedly explained that they were to sleep on the blanket on the floor and no they couldn't go into the attic they eventually subsided after panting really loudly for a long time. Truffle kept wanting to chew on the leashes, but when I repeatedly told her no (she has shredded several leashes of her own, I can't let her do that to these leashes)she finally settled for licking my arms very thoroughly. I am sure they were quite delicious as I had been working hard during the day cleaning out my classroom and struggling with her and the extra dogs all night.

The dogs have not been trained much but they are socialized with people (less so with dogs other than each other). When they came for a visit last week Percy leaped the front gate and ran off in search of a bicyclist (he only intended to find out what it was). This time he was about to do that and I shouted at him and he didn't. It was hilarious actually. He stood in front of the gate poised to leap and started wiggling his butt ready to jump: I shouted: he settled back a bit: he started wiggling his butt again: I shouted: he stopped: this happened maybe four times in the space of a half minute or so while I caught up to him and grabbed his collar. So while Percy isn't especially adept at following most commands or coming when called, he's clearly attuned to the basic obedience frame of mind.

I'm not the world's most effective or consistent dog trainer, but I intend to have Percy better at stopping and coming when called before Leroy (Katherine)and Yosi come back.

Another baffling part of this is I have their van thing for the duration so I can transport the dogs to the beach or wherever (and run a few errands while I have it, I'm not so devoted to walking that I won't grab the opportunity). However, I am not a big car driver by nature and it was an epic just getting the damned thing into the driveway without smashing into the no-parking-except-with-a-permit sign that bounds one side or the overgrown dwarf Meyer lemon that bounds the other side of my substandard-sized narrow driveway. It took me several minutes of desperate searching to find the parking brake, but I found it. I did not figure out how to accelerate. For some reason touching the gas pedal made no difference at all. However, merely putting the thing into gear and letting off the brake pedal caused it to move slowly and without much power, but sufficient to move the car the few feet I needed to move it back and forth and back and forth to angle it into the little space I have for it.

I do not see the appeal of this type of vehicle, outside sheer necessity. I think I would not have one, even if I had these dogs permanently. I think I would get an old fashioned miniwagon like Honda used to make: something that handles like a small car and takes up not much more space but is boxy enough to have more internal room than a regular small car.

I have been drafting a post about what I know about teenaged mothers but it's not finished in my head yet.

It's different from what most people know.