[noise]

Every once in a while, something will happen to me and I’ll think, “I read about this on someone’s website once, and so what I should do is X.”  Maybe I can return the favor now.

If you are driving at night and the car in front of you suddenly bobs and weaves to avoid the flying tarpaulin that then wraps itself around the headlight-area of your car, the very first thing you should determine is if you have enough available light – from the headlights of the car around you, moonlight, street lighting, nearby businesses – and space to pull over IMMEDIATELY.  Not a great spot, not even a good spot, just a spot not technically in a lane and not down a hill or into a lake or something.

If there is no ambient light, and you slow and try to pick out a really good place to pull over, you will lose the headlights of the surrounding cars and will no longer be able to see the edge of the road.  Or the road itself.  When it is truly dark out – we forget this sometimes – it is really really freaking dark.  Furthermore, if you hit your hazards and have a poorly-engineered dashboard arrangement, the blinking of your hazard lights will so light up the inside of the windshield that you will not be able to see the ghosts of lines on the road.

Should that happen, since you’ve got the road more or less to yourself at this point, attempt to get in the middle of the road according to whatever you can see in front of you until you get somewhere that you can see enough of anything to pull over.  If you can block the glare with a hand or arm, do that, otherwise turn your hazards on and off as necessary to both see the road and communicate to drivers far behind you that something is wrong.

But, really, pulling over immediately is the thing you should do.  I’ve tried the other options.  They sucked.

And here’s the other side of the equation:  if you see this happen to someone else, HELP THEM.  If somebody who saw it happen had just pulled up even with me or behind me, I could have seen where I was going and where to pull over.  That thing could have stuck to my windshield as well as my headlights, and I hope that every person who fucked off instead of being useful wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like an asshole.

I promise I will actually write again before December when I fail at Holidailies again, but this doesn’t really count as an entry.  This entry has been approximately 16 years in the pipeline.  The time has come.

Yeah – informal for “yes:, does not rhyme with anything I can currently think of.  Usage:  “Yeah, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday.”  Some may make a case for the usage “Yeah!  It’s your birthday!” but the truth is that the correct usage in that case is “Yay!” so let’s just stop that right now and move on if you are speaking to someone over the age of, say, four, as it can be assumed that they know it is their birthday and do not need your confirmation of such.

Yay – a word of celebration, or, sarcastically, of the lack thereof.  Another version of “hurray!”  Rhymes with pay, day, way, and hurray.  Usage:  “Yay!  It’s my birthday!”  or “I have to work on Saturday.  Yay.”

Yah – a mostly useless word, though one could argue that this is appropriate spelling for an exclamation used to make cattle move.  Rhymes with “Ma”, and possibly other things depending on where you’re from.

Ya – 1. preferred The word “you” spelled to indicate dialect.  Usage:  “Good on ya, mate.”  2. See above: encouraging cattle to move.

Ja – a word meaning “yes” in a number of Scandinavian languages.  Pronounced the same as Ya and Yah.

I feel like we have nearly eradicated the continuous use of all caps (not completely, I saw it just today on a gardening forum), and I feel that the internet is now mature enough to tackle this much more complicated issue.

Thank you for your time.

My company party was good.  Drinky, but good.  And then we got home and had been asleep for a while when the two girl dogs bust out in an enormous fight.  They did this about a month ago, when I was out of town and we had a houseguest, and I thought “well, there’s one for the year,” which I guess wasn’t correct.  And like I heard about the last fight, we couldn’t get them apart.  There was a lot of water involved, including the hose set to “jet,” and when they brought it in the house I dumped a couple of pitchers over them.  B cast about for anything to try and picked up the big plastic cookie jar we keep the treats in, and a rattle of that distracted them enough for me to get Roxy into the laundry room.

This is no way to go through life:  drunk, naked, muddy-footed, and wet, trying to dry off a soaking wet excited bloody boxer in your laundry room.

Neither of their ears will ever look quite the same again.  It’s mostly nicks around the edges, so they’ll look like well-loved stuffed animals.  Sophie took a small bite to the side of her face.  Roxy comes out worse because she has a ton of neck skin, which makes for good hanging-on, and I think Sophie must have gotten an entire ear in her mouth, because Roxy’s got matching holes on her head and under her ear.

It was Roxy we watched all day yesterday.  I got her cleaned up and didn’t find any injuries that could be improved by medical attention.  She slept a bunch and didn’t eat much, but started perking up towards evening and I think she was probably just exhausted.  Sophie was fine.

And then right about the time Roxy perked up last night, Sophie came in from outside limping and holding up her front left foot.  (And if you have pets and a recent expensive home repair, you just thought “well of COURSE she did!”)  We’d been sitting in the living room, she hadn’t made a sound and she’d been outside alone.  She would put weight on her toes but not on the full foot, so we checked her paw for cuts or a rock or something (including a bite from the night before that mysteriously didn’t bother her for 14 hours), but it’s clean.  And I said, well, okay, maybe she stubbed a toe or something, it’ll pass.

I wrote all the above this morning, and ended up taking Sophie to the vet this afternoon.  She has a mild case of mystery injury.  Of the elbow.  It is possible something bit her on the leg (something with smaller teeth than Roxy, and not very deeply), or she got her leg stuck in something.  Or she fell.  Or aliens threw rocks at her.  There’s a vague scratch or puncture or something, and the x-rays just indicated some swelling.  She’s comfortably whacked out on a painkiller I don’t think I’ve used before, and she has antibiotics.

Sophie doesn’t really like people getting up in her business too much.  She’ll tolerate a lot from me, unless she doesn’t want to, in which case I get the big Elvis Lip pretty fast, and I told the vet tech that they’d probably need to do something about that.  At which point the vet tech tried to take her temperature anyway and saw what I meant.  They muzzled her, and then they had to lay her down on the floor to palpate and rotate the leg.

It was not unlike some of the more memorable scenes in The Exorcist.  Oh my god, the noises that came out of that dog.  It was all muffled because of the muzzle, but I am fairly certain she had some pretty straightforward instructions regarding both Jesus and your mother.  And then, when they were done with the leg and had flipped her over and felt the other leg for comparison, they took her temperature.  If you suffered a brief power interruption this afternoon, sorry about that.

And I did laugh, because I wasn’t anywhere near any of her business ends, but then on the other hand it’s that same rage that fuels these fights, and yesterday was just in general a low day because we don’t want dogs that fight.  We don’t want to have to worry about leaving them at home during the day and coming back to a bloodbath.  I don’t like Roxy’s ears all nicked up.  So it’s probably time to pick back up with the Cesar Millan stuff, making them walk together and wearing them out and things.