Tag: Repost

Repost: The Death of My Dog

I’ve been thinking about and missing my dog lately. This was originally posted on April 24, 2008, on a blog that has since been abandoned. But it’s important to me that I keep the grass around her digital gravestone trimmed, so I’m reposting it here.

It has taken me a while to write about this.

MuffyO2

Muffy. March 15, 1988 – February 28, 2008.

The above is one of the last pictures of her, taken about a week before her death. She is in an oxygen chamber at an animal hospital. Earlier that Friday she was with the groomer whom she had seen weekly for well over a decade, and who noticed that her tongue and gums had turned blue. My mother and I met the groomer at the animal hospital, where Muffy was diagnosed with heart failure. The x-rays showed her heart was swollen and her lungs filled with something I had heard of before on medically-themed television shows but forgot the second after it was told to me. The relevant part was that they were milky white on the image, and were supposed to be black. We were informed that another hour off of oxygen and she would have expired, that her best chance was to be put on a relatively new vasodialator (“I don’t want to say wonder drug, but I’ve seen amazing things.”), and that she would have to stay in the hospital over the weekend.

The following Monday she came off oxygen and had clear lungs on the x-ray. Her blood work was good and her echocardiogram was indistinguishable from that of a dog without heart disease. The veterinarian was sufficiently optimistic that when we took Muffy home he instructed us to schedule a follow-up with our usual vet in three months.

Muffy lived for another week. I came home during her second to last day of life to discover her making strange, convulsive keening noises that sounded more bird-like than canine. When I let her outside she walked out into the grass and remained hunched over, cawing and wheezing, seemingly unable to defecate and making herself bleed in the attempt. The next day she died.

I wasn’t there when she died, and I never saw her dead body. I was at the Trinity University library, working on a story to submit with my Clarion application. I got a phone call from my parents informing me of Muffy’s passing. I thanked them for telling me, and then continued working. I didn’t really feel anything. The day before, when I had discovered her struggling and gasping I felt panicked and impotent, but I didn’t have an emotional response to her death. I think this was because it had been clear for a long time that she was fading. For the past year I had been taking time specifically to sit with her whenever I was at my parents’ house. She had begun to move very gingerly, and her personality had begun to wane away; for the first time since my childhood I was unable to reliably discern her needs from her actions. And she was nearly twenty years old. The average life span for her breed is 12.2. At the time of her death she was the oldest AKC registered bichon frise in the country, and had been for over a year. While I certainly would not have minded Muffy deciding to live forever, she was a part of my life from baby teeth through bachelor’s degree and it is hard to ask for more than that.

And of course I got into Clarion, and the story I was writing in the library when Muffy died was published in Asimov’s two years later, and then I went and got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where just yesterday I signed a contract to spend some time as an adjunct professor. And through it all, on my keychain, I’ve carried this.

MuffyTag

Repost: My Path to Differential Equations Success

This is not my first blog. There have been others, some euthanized and some abandoned. The ruins of my former blogs are filled with rotten links and gutted by expired hosting. There is, though, an occasional post worth saving. This was originally posted on May 14, 2008.

Some time in 2005 I was studying for my Differential Equations final exam, thinking to myself, “I can have a computer solve all of these problems for me. I will never do this again.” I had thought this in frustration many times throughout my mathematical education, and to be honest it was getting less and less true as the math got more advanced. This time, though, I followed that thought up with another one that hadn’t previously occurred to me: if computers can be given explicit instructions that allow them to solve differential equations, I should be able to write down similarly explicit instructions for myself. Verbalizing the specific steps necessary to solve the problems I was working on seemed like a good study activity. Additionally, I was allowed a page of notes to use on the exam, so if I could organize the steps so that they all fit on a page I could actually use this work during the test. I ended up spending a couple of hours in a study room with my textbook and a pad of graph paper, creating a flowchart for solving second order linear differential equations with constant coefficients. I tied with one other student for the highest grade on the final.

Recently I’ve been playing with Ubuntu, and as a way of gaining some familiarity with the OpenOffice suite of productivity apps I decided to create a digital version of my SOLDE flowchart. It is sized to fit on a sheet of 8.5×11 paper, and I am releasing it under creative commons license. If you think it would be of use to you, or know others who might like to use it, feel free to email it, print it out, pass it around. I think it might make a good handout for differential equations students. (It’s under a share-alike license, so you can make derivative works as well, provided they are also creative commons licensed. One possible improvement might be to create a flowchart for variation of parameters, which gets glossed over on this one.)

(Click to enlarge.)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Rabbit Hole Day Repost

Rabbit Hole Day 2010 has nearly been and gone without my doing anything to recognize it.  Too many distractions this year.  But this seems a fine time to collect in one place the Twitter and Facebook messages I churned out a year ago today.

MICROBLOGGING RABBIT HOLE DAY 2009

Jan. 26, 11:42 pm: Oh hell. Less than half an hour to go until Rabbit Hole Day, and I turn into a jellyfish.

Jan. 27, 11:31 am: Tentacles got too tangled up in the bed, so I slept in the toilet tank. Woke up wet on the bathroom floor, rust stains on my arms and legs.

1:18 pm: Rust stains were actually steampunk spores. All sorts of little dials and whistles budding up now. Will see if body trimmer can work me in.

2:05 pm: Made it to body trimmer, but had to wait 20 minutes listening to a jackhammer outside before I got in his chair and he sliced off the brass.

2:08 pm: Jackhammer reminded me of the aerial shots my dad took of Siberia during the war. Fields of frozen compressors made to steal the atmosphere.

2:26 pm: I think my generation takes the air for granted. I’ve turned off neutral buoyancy for the day. Time to remember what weight feels like.

2:58 pm: Fuck! Weight feels like horrible bending pain in shins, cracking sounds in my knees, and empty cherub husks poking painfully into my feet!

3:17 pm: Non-Texans: Seasons are weird here. Cherubs emerge from ground and molt in Jan rather than Nov. Cat ate so many husks, it needed an enema.

3:33 pm: Uh oh, I’m in trouble. Just got an angry text message from the cat, who is upset I told the internet about its enema. This won’t end well.

4:07 pm: Cat is now threatening to join the neighborhood gestalt. It knows how poorly I handled things when my dog did that where I used to live.

4:11 pm: After my dog sublimed, birds in branches, and the neighbors’ fish would ask me probing questions about my personal life. Total freakout.

4:28 pm: Of course, if the cat does sublime, things won’t be as bad this time. I’ve never let it into the bedroom. ClawBot meets my needs these days.

5:18 pm: Managed to patch things up with cat on phone. Now need to head home before things get angry. Emoteorologist says an affront is blowing in.

6:50 pm: Yeah, I made it home okay, but everything still sucks. I’m SO ANGRY! I just want to go outside and bash people’s thoughts in with a stick!

7:02 pm: Oh god, I’m so ashamed of myself. I actually did go out and pop some kid’s thought balloon with a mop handle. I couldn’t stop myself.

7:06 pm: It wasn’t until that little cloud over his head had burst that I realized what I was doing. I hadn’t even read it! I just didn’t care!

7:08 pm: I don’t usually let angry weather effect me like this. I’d better apologize to his parents tomorrow. I wonder if they like cherub pie.

8:37 pm: Caught enough cherubs. They are always distracted during their mating flights. An even mix of male and female helps the pie taste better.

9:30 pm: Guess the pie in the oven is for me now. The kid’s dad just tattooed an obscenity on the skin of my house. I think that makes us even.

9:49 pm: Brought up the house’s bios to tell it to start breaking down the tattoo, and noticed it is mounting a huge immune response. No idea why.

10:02 pm: OH NO! It’s the steampunk spores! The whole bathroom is infected and overgrown with pipes and stuff! It didn’t even occur to me before!

10:16 pm: Oh my god, there is so much wrench and hacksaw work to be done to get down to the floor before I can even APPLY the genrecidal medication.

11:11 pm: And while working on the bathroom, I forget about the pie in the oven until the delightful smell of tiny burning limbs fills the house. Ugh.

11:21 pm: The spores got into ClawBot. My night is well and truly ruined. Would have been better today to have just stayed a jellyfish. Going to bed.