Alley. Looking north.

Alley. Looking south.

During the deluge, the alley flooded into my garage. The floor is five inches or so below grade.

Garage. Looking east toward the back wall of the house.

Garage. Looking west toward the driveway and the alley.

Purchased a pond pump and it’s out there now, pumping the water back out into the alley.

Robespierre, a frequent contributor at Fodor’s Travel Talk Forums online, suddenly stopped posting to the boards in July of last year. NPR’s All Things Considered did an essay on why he stopped and the reactions of his fellow forum posters.

Robespierre died. People he knew online — friends and acquaintances — knew only that he’d stopped posting.

Clearly there is a need for several web 2.0 services to fill this niche.

Notification of one’s demise sent to one’s online communities, automatically, via iBit, the Online Obituary service.

Funeria to host one’s online funeral services.

The bits and pieces of one’s online persona collected from Flickr and MetaFilter and twitter and World of Warcraft and so on and deposited and cataloged at Deathbook, the reliquary updated over time as the service’s worms crawl through the deceased’s decaying virtual corpse, grimly digesting all the accumulated errata and depositing it in DB’s vast servers, where, perhaps, the accumulation will fertilize the lives and thoughts of future visitors.

At nine months, Doughty measured 90 mmHg. At 13 months she measured at 124 mmHg. Monday October 12th, the day before surgery, she measured at 151 mmHg. Obviously, this wasn’t moving in the right direction.

She was 14 months old.

Here’s an abstract of a journal article that describes a procedure similar to the procedure my dog underwent, written by the surgeon who did both. Basically, Dr. Orton pre-positioned a 1 1/2″ by 3″ Gore-Tex patch over the obstructed area and then stopped the flow of blood through her heart (“inflow occlusion”). With blood flow blocked, he made an incision under a gap he left during pre-positioning of the patch, closed the gap and restarted blood flow. Blood flow was stopped for about a minute. From beginning to end, the surgery lasted almost three hours.

“Very smooth,” he said afterward. “Usually it’s a fire drill during occlusion.”

The patch will become the new “wall” of the right ventricle outflow tract. The dog’s tissue will intertwine with the Gore-Tex fabric and eventually cover it altogether. The surgeon did not remove the obstruction; he increased the circumference of the outflow tract, obstruction and all, creating a bigger channel for blood to flow through. A preliminary echo done the day after surgery measured a pressure gradient of 40 mmHg. It was a good result — much better than expected. A second echo two days after surgery showed 36 mmHG. We’ll need to do another echo in December to confirm the result.

Dogs recover from major surgery much quicker than people do. Doughty was out of the hospital the next day, in fact. She looked like hell all shaved and stitched (“Franken Terrier”) and she probably felt that way, but less than 48 hours after surgery, she was already back to fetching and barking at strange noises. They are durable little creatures. We were cleared for the long drive home on Friday October 16th, three days after surgery.

Our house has a nook at the back of the kitchen. We didn’t have a use for it, so stuff started piling up on a folding table we set up last Christmas.

I built a cabinet to replace the folding table.

The plan was to tile the counter-top to match the existing counter-top (as seen in the lower right corner of the picture above), but maybe we’ll get a piece of butcher block instead or finish the maple plywood that’s there now with Behlen’s Rock Hard.

I’m a little sore that my comment to your Germs post didn’t make it through moderation. Sure it was rambling and not entirely relevant, but I thought the link to Dan Graham’s documentary Rock My Religion was mostly on target since it examines, among other things, the same era (although it does so through a New York camera lens).

In any case, the link is entirely relevant here since Sonic Youth contributed to the film’s soundtrack.

Speaking of Sonic Youth, I saw that a Ciccone Youth track was included on Brand Neu!, a compiliation of tributes and covers to the early 1970s German noise rock band Neu!
Funny story about me and Neu!

Last summer I helped my friend John Scane build 14 plywood recessed spotlight housings. The housings were simple five sided boxes with holes cut in one side for the illumination to escape and attachment points for the light fixtures and the rods from which they would be suspended from the ceiling. The boxes were to be installed at Pharmaka, the Downtown LA arts co-op Scane co-founded.

Here’s the tricky part. Pharmaka had been chosen for one of those Cable TV renovation shows, something green on Planet Green, and the boxes needed to be finished and prepped for paint before the next day’s shoot.

It was a long, long day in the shop. We loaded up the van at 1:00am or so, made the run from Scane’s shop in Long Beach to the gallery in LA, made the delivery and turned for home. We were punchy as hell, halfway into our Red Bull boosters, enjoying the muscle ache and fatigue that comes only after you’ve pushed yourself further than you thought you could go and done more than you set out to do, when, from near the chatter of old tires on cracked freeway and inside the shush of wind on steel and glass, there came a steady driving drum beat, simple and insistent, and a steady driving guitar note, chikk-chikk, chikk-chikk, chikk-chikk, on and on, then another guitar came in from somewhere over the top, soaring near and far, as simple and insistent as the rhythm underneath.

I turned up the volume. The music went on and on and so did we, rolling down the night-vacant freeway under the soaring 105 Freeway overpass and on to the lights of the harbor.

We flew like that for ten minutes or so, the song lifting us off the road and out of our bodies and then the song faded back under the wheel sound and wind noise and another began and it wasn’t the same and I said, “Goddamnit, man. Why don’t the DJs ever tell you the name of the song when you need to know?”

The next morning I visited KCRW’s website and browsed the playlist and eventually figured out we had heard Neu!’s “Hallo Gallo“. From 1972 or so. How in the world had I missed it for so long?

Here’s the top after a coat of varnish (Tried and True with a couple of tablespoons of old recipe Marine Spar Varnish (now banned in California)). That’s Plyboo with a strip of cherry at the bottom. This part is 58 inches wide and 25 inches high. The base it rests on is 60 inches wide and 25 inches high (making the total 60×50).

Here’s the base. Solid cherry, which is a waste, really, since most of it is hidden behind the mattress. Also finished with Tried and True and a bit of banned Spar varnish.

Here’s a closer look at the joinery.

Here’s the dog relaxing in front of the installed headboard, 10 seconds before she gets yelled at for sleeping on the bed.