Ta ra ra boom.

This has been a challenging week. And I say challenging because we've all known really bad weeks, and people who fought for America in hellholes all over the world know what really really bad weeks are like. I'll run it down quickly so as to not belabor the point. We start last

MONDAY: Guys come to install the "fenceless fence" system to keep dogs on our property. Installation is no big deal; training section gets off on the wrong foot and remains there. Our big hairy dogs have to have patches on their neck shaved off so that the connections (prongs) on the collar (at choking tightness) would make contact (poke) the skin to issue corrections (zaps) when the dogs ignore the warning (beeps) and go into the danger zone (near the wire). They do not like that correction. Tralfaz shakes his fuzzy head like he just can't believe what his life has come to. Nipper rears up like Silver with the Lone Ranger really digging in the spurs. Training at this stage largely consists of tapping little perimeter flags and yelling NO. This is embarrassing. Plus, a big job I was told to expect from a big publisher fails to arrive.

TUESDAY: My old supervisor at my oldest freelance client packs in the job at the end of June, so I meet with him and the staff at his place by phone to try to figure out what will be going on as we move forward. I make jokes to fill the silence like a soft-headed idiot. No one laughs. Is this a business meeting or an oil painting? I think these new people figure I am a mercy hire, despite working for them for eight years. Dog training held up by my wife's insane schedule as her job blows up. I do training in a sheer downpour, standing by the sidewalk, tapping flags, yelling NO, feeling like I really am a soft-headed idiot. That night we find red skin and scabbing on Tralfaz's neck where the patch was shaved.

WEDNESDAY: Tralfaz's grooming appointment, made last April. We can bathe him but we can't clip him, and he only gets groomed every three months. He is a tangled mess. I would have taken him in today if I were coughing my spleen out from Chinese Death Virus. Also had other business that took me across the border to Pennsylvania, where every New Yorker was loading up on fireworks but me. By the time we get home, Fazzy is so tired that he is essentially a great-smelling hairy 130-pound paperweight. Nipper is losing the desire to do anything outside, because he keeps getting shocked.

Places Nipper may go
Places Nipper wants to go

THURSDAY: Wife's job continues to blow up. Training still going poorly, although it's hard to tell. Did not use the correction collar on Tralfaz because he is still all scabbed up. Still expecting big freelance job but it does not arrive. Nipper seems to be reconsidering the long-held theory that peeing on the carpet is bad.

FRIDAY: Start the day by emptying the dishwasher. Put Corningware bowl and lid in closet on other Corningware bowl, which in a jealous rage throws the other bowl to the closet floor. Shattered Corningware bursts into approximately one bazillion tiny sharp bits. Having cleaned that up, I continue my winning streak by going out to run some errands, spurred on by the need for a new relief valve for the water heater. EVERYBODY IN TOWN IS OUT THERE. Absolutely crazy everywhere I go. I actually abandon a shopping cart in one store, something I never do. (There were no cold or frozen foods in it, though, if that makes me look better.) I will remember this for next July 3: Do not shop on July 3. Nipper seems to have lost the will to live.

SATURDAY: Saturday is okay, except for the blood. Tralfaz scratches himself real good with hind paw, as dogs do, and tears the scabbing on his neck. Now his nice clean fuzz has bloodstains; it hurts him to lie down, and he has completely broken training, roaming around with no collar at all. Nipper is retaining pee like it's his life's ambition to have a UTI. Aaaaand here come the fireworks. There are usually about a dozen fireworks shows in the county on or around the Fourth, and especially if it falls on a Saturday. This year there is one. But that's okay; our neighbors have all bought illegal fireworks and deploy them in stages between five p.m. and two the next morning. Ta ra ra boom de ay, and I do mean boom. If the Spanish had this kind of ordnance in Cuba ca.1898, they'd have won the Battle of San Juan Hill, and American history and the presidency would be very different. Nipper has discovered that he does not want to die, because he thinks he is going to lose his life any second. I try to remind him how the dogs of Gettysburg suffered for three days with cannons going off all the time, but he is not comforted. Fazzy may have lost too much blood to care, although we're keeping his injury clean and sterile as best we can. Everyone goes to bed really late.

ooh. aah.

SUNDAY: I finally get to put in a new valve on the water heater, which promptly begins leaking much worse than the old valve. Well, that's a revoltin' development. Being unable to control the situation, I turn off the water and call a plumber. The wife, stressed out by a terrible week at work, wakes up to no hot water and considers joining the French Foreign Legion because everything sucks anyway. Plumber comes, thank God. I pretend I did not just change the valve; he changes the valve again, but also gets a gallon of black sediment out of the heater by applying pressure in some secret plumber means. Hot water restored; he will be back to install an expansion tank later in the week. Money I did not expect to spend, but cheaper than a new water heater. With all this, we miss Mass on TV. Soup blows up in the microwave. We bandage Tralfaz's neck, which is not his new favorite thing. I fall in a heap on a chair and write this, as I look forward to seeing my ear doctor at eight a.m. tomorrow. By Sunday night, the big job I was expecting the previous Monday has still not arrived.

Two notes:

1) There is a very funny bit in Woody Allen's play (later movie) Don't Drink the Water. Walter, a caterer stuck in a foreign country, hears from his partner by phone that a catering event went poorly because some guests got food poisoning. Walter's wife says, "Be thankful nobody died." Walter responds, "Yes, Marion -- we're thinking of making that our slogan." On weeks like this I want to make that our family slogan.

2) If, like me, you feel like the song "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" just came out of the ether, has always been around, and evolved organically without creators. Wikipedia tells us that "The song's first known public performance was in Henry J. Sayers' 1891 revue Tuxedo, which was performed in Boston, Massachusetts. The song became widely known in the version sung by Lottie Collins in London music halls in 1892. The melody was later used in various contexts, including as the theme song to the television show Howdy Doody." You can find out more here, but not who wrote it. Maybe it did spring out of the ether after all.