This week, for the first time in months, if not years, I found myself enjoying work. Eager to solve problems, to learn new tools, to experiment with radical solutions. I've done more this week than in the last two months, I think. Is it because my boss is on vacation? Because I finally got a mediocre review, after deserving one for three years but still getting disorientingly good ones? Because I've been eaten by a dragon and crunched to little bits? All of the above, I'm sure, though If I had to pick one, it would be being chomped.

Last night Martha and I took turns camping on the floor by the dog bed, while Christmas whimpered. Not a big-deal surgery, just subcutaneous, but the tumor was already goose-egg size when we spotted it and the incision goes clear across her side, a good foot long, and it clearly hurts like hell. Dozed, from three to six, stroking her head when the volume went up, sometimes murmuring "om mani"s till I fell asleep. At least once I woke up still saying them. Thought of what a sap so many people would think me, spending half the night on the floor to comfort a dog. Holding a saucer for her to lap water from. Tracking how long since her last pain meds.

I wondered of course whether I was in fact affording any comfort, or just indulging in the anthropomorphic fantasy that scientists warn us so sternly about, until I left her to go upstairs. She howled, then, and didn't quit till I came back down.