Yesterday was not a good one for the puppies in our world. Mrs. NFB's older brother has been living with this girl for about four or five years now. She had a pup when he moved in that basically became his best bud. Good puppy. Chubby, but playful and happy as most dogs are.

About a year and a half ago she suffered a big injury and had to have a surgery on her leg. She was having a terrible time healing and kept reinjuring it. Yesterday, her leg broke again. This time the doctor said there was no hope for repair, it's simply too brittle to try and put it back together even with surgery again. And worse news, two of her other legs were beginning to have the same problems.

She wasn't comfortable anymore and hadn't been for a long, long time. She couldn't sleep because she couldn't stay still in a comfortable position. She couldn't walk right because of the leg problems. She wasn't eating right because she was always fretting over her leg.

Mrs. NFB was on the phone with her younger brother who was apparently given the task of informing the family. That's one thing I'll say about her family. They are a strange bunch, but they treat their pets with great respect and everyone is devastated over the loss of one. I heard Mrs. NFB say, "Well, she wasn't very comfortable for the last few years of her life. . ." and knew immediately.

Remembering the way she wiggled and smiled when she came over to see our pups, I burst into tears. She was a good dog, and she'll be missed by everyone that knew her.

We informed our dogs that one of their friends had passed. Somehow, they know when we explain things like that to them. They were dumpy most of the evening after that.

Pup#1 was chewing a bone to console herself and suddenly stopped, making a chewing motion with nothing in her mouth which made a weird grinding sound. We searched and searched her mouth but she wouldn't let us pry her jaw open to look inside. And we tried and tried. Eventually, she just settled down and laid down and went to sleep, so we let it go for the evening.

This morning, after her breakfast, same thing. And she STILL wouldn't let us look in her mouth. She was eating fine, she could still catch balls with her mouth, but something just wasn't right. So, into the vet with her and. . .

A big chunk of bone stuck in the roof of her mouth right beside her tooth. You know that feeling you get when you get a chip jammed up beside your gum? Imagine a chip a quarter an inch wide, really thick, slammed up into the roof of your mouth that way. I have no idea how she slept with that thing in her mouth. The vet had to grab a forceps and have her assistant hold the pup down while she pried it out. Then she said, "that's a one in a million dog. I usually have to sedate them to even look inside their mouths when they have something stuck in there. She let me pull it right out and didn't even try to bite me."

I guess it's a good thing we took her in, because with as much force as it took to get out, there's no way I'd have been able to manage doing that without fearing hurting her. I mean, I could get out the needlenose and yank, but I couldn't get her to hold her mouth open for me.

So now she's on a heavy round of antibiotics to keep her mouth/sinus area from getting infected. I guess sinus infections are common for dogs from mouth injuries because of how tightly everything is packed together in there. And Pup#1 is not making that weird grindy chewing motion.

BREAK

Hillary - Obama, bestest of buds. Politics is a funny creature. They were looking like they were ready for the knock-down, drag-out a couple days ago. Now they're all chummy, hugging, Obama pulling out her chair for her, her accepting his kindnesses, being all smiley and almost flirty with each other.

Overtures for the Vice seat?

If the supposed dream ticket the media keeps babbling about comes to be, with both of them on it one as vice, I see the Democrats losing in a landslide. Just too much all at once for most of this country to be able to handle.

BREAK

So, our backend runs on a really special system designed primarily for our industry. I say special because the designers obviously had some really, REALLY good crack while they were designing it.

There's something called a "config string" that stores the major data for a line item configuration. How it does this is a mystery to everyone, as no singular piece of data is ever in exactly the same place twice. Somehow, the programming knows. But it's done in such a way that there's no way to query the data or write reports to tap that data without having the special magic knowledge the original developers had.

Did I mention this software comes with no canned reports?

Special.

So the boss tasks me with writing queries to tap that data. Eventually, I convinced him to talk with the developer dudes we have working on the system to create a new database file that updates correctly with each "segment" in the same place every time. The developers aren't sure that's possible. WHAT? So you can just pop that string of random shit out there and use it for your programs, but you can't pull that data for anything unless it's your own report that you wrote?

And suddenly it makes sense. This is a buy-in. You'll always have to go to them for reports on that data. ALWAYS!

Goody.

What a deal.

Outs.