Grendel’s Kitchen

I listened to Tom Ashbrook on WBUR’s On Point discuss the current “sense of apocalypse” many have today as I drove out to Grafton to pick up Ahab, our teddy bear of a lab/rottie from Tufts’ Foster Hospital for Small Animals. I didn’t know that I was about to receive the scary news about the progressive lytic changes in his scapula above the fracture that just isn’t healing despite surgery and shockwave treatment. Basically, the mystery is that he has a very strange and unlikely break to begin with, his fracture won’t heal, his leg is atrophying from disuse, and now his shoulder bone is deteriorating — rapidly and painfully. Mysteries such as this often result in an answer we don’t want to hear. The Doctor hasn’t said it, but we know that the biopsy they performed on his bone means that some form of cancer is one possible solution.Ahab is on a nice — but not sufficient, judging by his frequent whimpering and glazed eyes — dose of morphine.This morning I changed out the hay in the chicken coop because the wind had blown heavy rain through the 1 foot door all night, and I had 12 very sodden chickens dripping from their roosts this morning. I went down to the basement to find a tarpaulin to shield openings in the coop and found a foot and a half of water overwhelming our emergency sump pump and now-totally ineffective dehumidifier. Although there is no comparison with how I feel about my family, pets and friends, I think you know what my books mean to me. Let me show you what a foot and a half of water does to the hundreds of books we had stored in the basement while we paint the house.see more sodden pictures, although I can’t seem to capture the rivulets of water pouring from some of these. Did I mention that we’re not covered for flood insurance?I realize it’s not yet noon, and John has quit cold turkey nearly a year ago, but we need a good stiff drink soon or we’ll be hitting up Ahab for a few hits of morphine.