Seeing-Eye Dog for a Dog

4/7/09

by Marty

Overcast at 12:20; rain is promised, but no sign of it yet.

The big news is that Helix is now stone blind. Lives in perpetual night. What does he think? We can't know. I put a bright purple collar on him so we can attach a leash and lead him to food or water if it's necessary; but he seems to get around, by memory, hearing things, smelling things, telling by his feet whether he's on gravel (the driveway) or grass. And of course Jack is his seeing-eye dog. I spend time with the two of them every day in the upper meadow under The Little Tree All By Itself after I do my determined painful aerobics-jogging according to the instructions in my Johns Hopkins White Paper on Arthritis. I sit there watching birds with my Swift binoculars (7x25, 400 ft.at 1000yds). When I call Helix he comes over and slams right into the chair. He is always turning his head this way and that, so he appears to be seeing; but he's not. He'll stand in one spot, turning his head, then just lie down. He follows Jack and me down the driveway, as he followed us up. But all in all he does get around.

I redid the wiring in the socket by the floor in the cloak room, with Derek's instructions. Got it right on the third try. Now there's a combination socket and switch ($12.99) governing the current down to the box on the side of the barn, where you will find two toggles when you figure out how to open the box: one for the juice in the shop, one for the electric pump. We keep the shop toggle on all the time. If we want juice in the shop but don't want to be running the pump at the same time, we turn off the one to the pump.

I also cleaned the little thimble-sized barrel-shaped filter inside the Paloma water heater. This has to be done about once a year. The filter gradually accumulates a residue which alters the balance of air and gas to the burner; gradually the flame turns from blue to yellow. The hot water still works, but the yellow flame blows out easily when there's a gust of wind and everybody shouts, "There's no hot water!" You turn off the gas, remove the three plastic things, unscrew the two screws on the bottom, remove the entire cowling, clean the filter with a toothbrush I leave on the top of the medicine chest, then put it all back together. Stand on a ladder. Easy.

I repaired the door to the pump house. One of the hinges had come loose. Did a dump run. Fixed the leak in the dog bucket with Goop. I made six racks out of cedar decking for holding the tiles when we play Mexican Train, using the table saw and the dado cutters at an angle of 10 degrees and a thickness adjusted to the thickness of a piece of paper to get the slots just right for the tiles. Carol chopped away some poison oak on the path from the woodshed down to the meadow and has been planting starts like crazy in the greenhouse.

I have ordered from Amazon some books on woodcarving. I would like to have a quiet politically correct creative hobby in my twilight years. I want to make little wooden toys and rattles for my proliferating grandchildren. I have zero artistic talent, but also zero ambition to master the craft. My efforts will simply be amusing. People will think, "Isn't that great that he's started something completely new when he's so old! It's a good sign!" You see, in my long years up here I have developed a relationship to wood, a feel for it, since wood is practically all we ever talk about -- as Louie has pointed out on more than one occasion. The fact is, I look forward very much to starting this hobby!