Barking, and an Unexpected Evening Outing

Yesterday started out pretty slow. The morning was gray and rainy, and although Olga kept acting like she wanted to go for a walk, the minute I put on my jacket and got her leash and opened the door, she backed away, horrified. So we spent the time on the couch. I finally finished that issue of The New Yorker I'd been slowly plowing through, and no, I still don't understand Bitcoin.

The day seemed weird because the clocks changed, and it's interesting how you really feel a time change of even one hour. It always seemed later than it actually was, with the sun farther along in the sky.

Finally, about 11 a.m., after the weather cleared, Olga and I went to the Heath. She was a maniac, running and running through the underbrush.

This picture may look scary, but she's just in mid-bark. I wanted to show how dirty she was, but lately, whenever I pause to point a camera at her she gets annoyed and starts barking at me.

Here's the live-action version:

And normally, she is not a barky dog.

Dave and I did re-watch the 1976 version of "A Star Is Born" and it's not my imagination -- it's a far better movie than the new one. The characters seem deeper, the relationship more real and some of the pacing is better. I've always thought Kris Kristofferson was a weird casting choice for that movie -- he can't even really sing! But otherwise it definitely takes flight where the new one, for me, did not. I think maybe the new one suffers from too much involvement by Bradley Cooper -- not that he isn't capable, but any time one person is doing everything, they're bound to be stretched. The '76 film had two stars whose only job was to act and sing; a director who helped on the screenplay but was otherwise only a director; two top-notch screenwriters (Joan Didion!); and top-notch music supervision and songwriting (Paul Williams, Alan & Marilyn Bergman). The new one is all Cooper, Cooper, Cooper. Dude was busy.

Also, although I criticized Gaga's voice in yesterday's post, I think in retrospect the issue may be more the songs than her singing, because she does an excellent version of "La Vie en Rose." And as we all know, modern pop music is crap.

Anyway, enough about that.

The unexpected excitement of the day came in late evening, after Dave had put a chicken in the oven and I was relaxing with a glass of wine. He said he wasn't feeling well, and hadn't been feeling well all day -- Crohn's issues, and I won't trouble you with the specific symptoms but there were some. So I had him call the NHS ask-a-nurse hotline and he was advised to go to the A&E (the British equivalent of the ER). He hopped in a cab to the Royal Free Hospital and I followed about half an hour later, when the chicken was adequately baked and I could turn off the oven without it becoming a bacteria farm. They checked him out at the hospital, did a blood test and fortunately let him come home again a few hours later, when we finally ate our still-hot but somewhat overcooked chicken. He's got to follow up with his gastroenterologists, and of course, to make things really interesting, he's supposed to leave for Madrid on Thursday on a school trip. Sheesh!