Theoria

(1) After writing extensively about Igge’s mystery illness (likely hemobartenollosis), Mickey and Minnie (the dogs) have requested that I write about their nausea of more or less unknown origins. Last week, Minnie managed to throw up her breakfast and dinner, right down to the yellow stomach bile. A few days later, Mickey repeated the problem, although his yellow stomach bile was much thicker, possibly because, on average, he drinks less water than Minnie. Most impressive in Mickey’s illness was his being completely asleep on the couch while we were watching TV, waking up, looking around the room quickly, and then puking all over the place. Extremely gross. After taking Minnie off food for twenty-four hours, she recovered. We weren’t as concered for her because she’s already on antibiotics for her skin allergies. Mickey also went off food for twenty-four hours and then — breaking with being vegetarians — I bought him a half pound of ground beef and a box of minute rice and weened him back onto solid food. We couldn’t do that for Minnie because we aren’t sure which protein it is that causes her allergies. All we know is that soy doesn’t cause an allergic reaction in her, so soy based food is what she eats. They have since both recovered. Speaking of Minnie’s allergies, something I did not write about here, about a month and a half ago, she had a severe outbreak that led — rather disgustingly — to open sores on her stomach and ass and neck. The bad areas had to be shaven down and she went back into her cone. The antibiotics have cleared up the wounds (although the ass inflamation is taking the longest to go away — hence the second course of antibiotics) and the steroids have kept them from returning, as has her new food. Our current theory of the illness’ origin is that they drank dirty water from the Tay River after a storm, thus it was filled with dirty run-off.

(2) Feeling much better, on an adventure yesterday, we stumbled upon an ancient barn. Not especially “stumbled” upon as it was an attraction of sorts at a provincial park, but I wasn’t aware of its existence. We, that is, Blythe and I, parked the car and got out to look at it. As always, we forgot to bring the dogs’ leashes with us on our adventure, so we planned on being quick and leaving the dogs in the car. Mickey, however, had other ideas and managed to get out of the car before we closed the door, so, apparently, the dogs came with us. All that was left of the barn was its foundation, built entirely out of fieldstone. The extent walls were taller than me and the barn itself was quite sizeable — at least three times as large as the log house also on the site. While the construction itself was quite impressive (I highly doubt, for instance, that mini-mansions in the suburbs built by ‘professional’ building companies will still be standing, unlike the amature construction of the barn built with crude tools and materials a hundred and seventy years ago), I’ve always found the clearing of the fields far more impressive. In a sense, I can imagine the laborious construction of the barn and I can imagine the construction of the house, but I can’t imagine the clearing of the fields. How the hell do you, alone or with one or two sons and maybe a horse, clear ten or twenty acres of dense forest, turn the soil, a grow a crop? This feeling is even further amplified driving through Beckwith township, especially the ninth line, were the fields easily approach dimensions of kilometers by kilometers with the house and barns set back about nine hundred meters from the road. Unbelievable.

(3) My all but complete first comprehensive (I’m doing the final revisions this weekend) was judged, by one person, as “very well written” and, by another, as “boring and academic”. A third person suggests that my style resembles the style of the person who gave the positive evaluation and that the person giving the negative evaluation is just strange. I’m not sure what this third opinion means. More substantively, I was criticised for not making reference — at least overtly — to Hannah Arendt. Likely a fair criticism in a paper on “the social and the political”. Moving along, it occurs to me in retrospect that Schmitt has very little to say about “the social”.