Some of the best, Self destructive behavior, Snow game, The barrel, Again

I played pickleball Friday at lunch and again Saturday morning. For whatever reason it was some of the best play I have had in quite a long while. On Saturday I won all four games I played and some of it was against some good players. I was just seeing and reacting to the ball well at the kitchen line. I have this habit of going for third shot drives instead of drops more often than I should. It goes back to my pitcher mentality, you want to overpower your opponent with pace.

The thing is even if you hit the ball hard from the baseline, because of the physics of a pickleball which make it travel slower, most decent players will be able to block that drive without much issue and you are stuck back at the rear of the court which is a disadvantage. However if you do a successful drop into the kitchen you make it difficult for your opponent to attack the ball as well as give yourself time to get up to the kitchen line yourself which is always the goal. Anyway the cliff notes version is I played smarter on Saturday, dropping and dinking and trying to be aggressive only when there are good opportunities for it.

I watched a good portion of both conference championship games. I loved that the game in Denver turned into a snow game which always makes things significantly more entertaining with New England pulling out a very close low scoring win. The Seahawks and Rams were the opposite, scoring regularly with Seattle coming out on top at the end. I don’t think the 2025 Eagles could have beaten any of those four teams. I also don’t think anyone at the beginning of the season would have picked those four teams to be in the championship games. Watching Matthew Stafford play QB makes me wish Hurts had the ability to make quick, decisive and accurate throws like he does.

Over the weekend I installed an auxiliary light in this cool barrel you see in the picture. This barrel was custom made by my uncle over 50 years ago for my parents. It made the move to Florida with my mom and wound up in my possession after my mom passed. The built in light that is wired never worked since I have had the barrel so I randomly decided to fix that Saturday afternoon, installing a LED bulb connected to a smart outlet so it turns on and off automatically every day. The stained glass becomes much more noticeable and cool when the light is on. I really enjoy seeing the barrel lit up now.

Installing the light meant I had to get inside the barrel. I pretty much forgot what was in there since it hasn’t been touched since I moved. I realized I had pet ashes in there from both of the cats we owned as well as two of the birds. Alison was into keeping ashes. Inside was also the paper I made up for my mom’s memorial service as well as her glasses and her purse. It was a mix of emotions to see all these things front and center again.

We had another horrific incident of ICE killing a man for no valid cause. The spin thrown on this by Trump loyalists would be comical if it did not involve an innocent man’s murder. Their spin is the guy should not have been carrying a gun so it was his fault that he got shot. Yes he was a legal gun owner something most Trump acolytes firmly support. Hell many will say the solution for gun violence in America is for more people to legally own guns. So despite this hypocrisy, the footage clearly shows the man was holding a cell phone, not a gun, yet was extinguished by yet another ICE officer on a power trip. The question is, what are the consequences for this repeated abuse of power and how long is this going to be allowed to continue? Unfortunately it is clear that walking around with protest signs doesn’t move the needle even a little bit.

So Elsa is currently at the vet. In the past year or two she has become increasingly obsessed with eating non-food items. She has swallowed parts of her stuffed toys, various paper products, plastic pee pads, a piece of rope from a beach bag and many other things. As a result I have been locking down the house further and further to limit her ability to do this. It’s crazy.

Well Friday evening she ripped apart and ate about half of a small sock she got a hold of. Typically when she eats non-food items the symptoms can be diarrhea and/or throwing up as well as low appetite until she passes whatever the object was. Well Saturday afternoon she threw up a huge amount. It almost looked like a snake of organic matter. It was hard to tell if there pieces of chewed up sock in there or not.

She resumed eating but has repeated the binge and purge cycle two more times, throwing up early Sunday morning and then again last night after she had eaten more food during the day. By nature I am a wait and see person when it comes to medical issues and since she typically would just pass whatever item it was and normalize I didn’t want to panic. However when she threw up for the third time last night I was genuinely concerned she may have some sort of GI blockage causing the issue. I called the vet this morning and left a message. They called me back and advised me to bring her in early, which I did.

They took an x-ray and said it did not seem to indicate there was a blockage which is good. The also did some blood work and it revealed some very concerning numbers related to her kidneys. They have been monitoring Elsa’s kidneys via urine tests for about a year or so. The numbers were elevated but not in the dangerous threshold. Well the numbers in her blood work were very high, well past danger thresholds. The vet asked if she could have eaten anything else that might be toxic as that could cause a spike in those numbers. I told her it’s possible but I saw no evidence of her eating anything else bad recently.

So the plan is to let them treat and monitor her during the day to see how she is. She ate some food this morning so they want to see if it goes through her GI system like it should. Hopefully the bad numbers slide back to normal, otherwise we could be dealing with a serious kidney issue. Elsa is like my child so not having the ability to know exactly what is wrong/hurting because she can’t tell me is frustrating. It’s equally frustrating that she continues to cause herself issues by eating this shit. I am crossing my fingers that she comes out of this ok. Just the image I have in my head of her being at the vet scared and wondering where I am makes me sad.