a sad, scratchy state of affairs

thursday was a horrible workday. i jumped from task to task and got zero satisfaction. the day ended on a sour note, with a repeat of a nonsensical failure that i thought i'd corrected for. not a great send-off for my team lead, who's taking a month's leave...

on thursday afternoon i walked my ex-coworkers dog home for a couple of weeks of dog-sitting. we've had him for a day and a half, now, and things have been mostly great (we love him!) although we have been concerned about his lack of socialization: he's four years old and terrified of most other dogs, though he's cool with humans big and small. we feel sad for him. this morning i managed to get him into the idea of being brushed, which went really well (we got rid of a few dreads along the way) until gd spotted a flea. i'd seen him scratch a couple of times but this was the first evidence we had.

so after picking up mr smear from school we took him to the pet store where they put ampoule drops on him, and we hoped that that would take care of things... but when we took him out later, he was suddenly walking uncomfortably and constantly sitting down, looking as if he might have worms, too. this was just too much to bear, and while we feel awful about this we really can't handle playing host to anything more than just a dog right now.

we feel awful for the dog, and awful for the dog's owner (who's on his honeymoon right after losing his job), but we've asked his brother to come and pick up the poor creature and we're hoping that everything works out for the best. this is a remarkably shit feeling, but as the saying goes: "not my circus, not my monkeys". or, "not my circus, not my fleas"...

gd's back's feeling much better since her nerve block on tuesday, though. that's something. and mr cat and i made good progress on the upcoming graphic novel page. it's also nice that aside from some good exercise today mr smear and i played through a ton of games from the honorary mentions segment of the AI collaboration game challenge and some of them are just brilliant.

...

i hate this feeling.