ze Frank says the show will end on Molly Bloom’s third birthday. Some birthday present.

Should we even care about eyeballs? I don’t. I care about my audience, but my show ends on March 17th, 2024 whether I have one eyeball or a million. Given the current state of web metrics, talking about eyeballs seems to create more risk than value anyway.

I held onto AKMA’s “Faithful Interpretation…” for a week or so. It was tough reading. I bristled and groaned. I grumbled and moaned. Dr. Weinberger suggested I start with AKMA’s 1995 volume, “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?” I ordered that book too.

Saturday we had twenty adults and six children here for a Quakerly retreat, a lengthy period (two and a half hours seated in silence) of silent worship, a wonderful lunch, and an afternoon of “worship sharing” — a few more hours with each of us reflecting on a couple of queries regarding faith, religion, and community.

I had an interesting exchange with a Friend from Dubuque. It was complicated and I can’t do it justice here, but my friend suggested that knowledge and common understanding are not absolutes, that the word a-p-p-l-e is not an “apple” and that it doesn’t mean “apple” the same way biting into a crisp and juicy McIntosh does, and in fact that each of us experiences that in a subtly different way. I thought he would enjoy AKMA’s book.

Toward the end of the day most of us went out into the drizzly gray afternoon and walked the labyrinth. Molly played football with the kids. Then we all came back together in the living room, centered again into silence, thanked each other for a wonderful day and went each our own ways.

So, I gave away my copy of “Faithful Interpretation…” to the Dubuque Meeting, and after our friends had departed I went to the mailbox to collect Saturday’s mail. There was “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?”

After a busy day the survivors assembled on the couch.

Had to miss our partner yoga session tonight to take Molly to the vet for a second chiropractic adjustment.

The story so far… June 24: Smooshed in the road by an ambulance racing at high speed, siren blaring, on a mission of mercy and unable to stop for a crushed pet, Molly crawled off into the windbreak, perhaps to die. In the house, Beth heard Molly’s shriek of pain and rushed out to find her. It wasn’t easy. She was hidden far off the road, unable to respond when she was called. Enlisting the aid of a neighbor, Beth beat the bushes from woodlot to windbreak and eventually found the pup, broken and bleeding.

Much stitching and binding of wounds ensued.

She was recovering nicely, so nicely that we left her boarded with the general prison population at the local kennel when we went to Massachusetts for a week in early September. She relapsed. She was in serious pain when we picked her up, in spasm from a week sleeping on concrete. After a few days we took her to our local vet, he drugged her to a point where every muscle in her body was ridiculously relaxed, and she began to improve. But the down side was thatwe discovered her injured tail that we hadn’t picked up on the x-rays in June. Local vet recommended surgery. Co-worker suggested we give her vet a try first, so off to the doggy chiropractor we went and damned if Molly doesn’t seem to be well on the way to recovery after only two sessions. The guy is good, offering advice about keeping her slowed down so she has to use all four feet, about exercising her to recover ranege of motion in the injured leg, about helping her recover lost muscle mass by walking her up hills, and most importantly knowing how to release the tightened muscles in her back.

Not cutting my dog open at the base of her spine is high on my list of priorities, higher even than partner yoga class.

Beth and I are going to back up to something more beginner-ish, less challenging than the circus acts we’ve been rehearsing at partner yoga. It sounded cool, but you have to be more advanced as an individual to get the most out of partner yoga I think.

That leaves Wednesday’s open for the 50 minute drive out to Dodgeville for Molly’s therapy.

I’m worried that Molly is running out of drugs. How codependent is that? Today marks the sixth week since she was tumbled under the ambulance, broke her hip, lacerated her hind quarters, bruised god knows what… The first few weeks after, she didn’t move much. The next couple of weeks she showed that the hip injury and the right rear leg were really painful. The Vet. put her on Deramaxx and the relief she experienced was amazing.

The fourth week after her injury, she scarcely could put her right foot on the ground. The fifth week we were traveling and left her boarded in a kennel. They cared for her, kept her quiet, and when we picked her up she was using that leg. She still favors it, but she runs up and down the stairs, plays with her dog friend from down the road a little, tosses her stuffed toys around the living room. She’s recovering and she isn’t in pain. But she’s still on the Deramaxx. The prescription runs out in a few days. The drug has side effects. Worry, worry, worry, worry…

She’s doing better. After getting rolled under the ambulance on June 22nd, suffering major deep lacerations, bruises, abrasions, and a broken hip, Molly is returning to her normal irrepressibility. This is not all a good thing since she still needs time to heal the hip. Chasing rabbits may slow her recovery. When we returned from vacation and picked her up from the kennel, she was using all four feet, something she simply didn’t do a week earlier when we dropped her off at the kennel. Even so, she mostly favors the right rear leg, and has learned the three legged farm dog gait. I hope another month of recovery will have her back on all four all the time.

* * *

In other Molly Bloom news, there’s a beauty of a new blog by Molly Ditmore of Molly Golightly that I’ll be following… Molly Bloom knows style. I wonder if she’ll eventually integrate StyleFeeder and get Halley some ROI for all the BlogHer schwag. But no, StyleFeeder is still part of the TopTenSources bonfire. As the touts at TechHunch point out, it isn’t really monetized yet.

Too long since I’ve updated the blog with a cute story centered on the pup. She’s over two years old now, born 3/17/2004. She has matured, and she is too bright for her plodding owners. We don’t always have words for what she wants us to want her to do. So she teaches us.

Take for example the command, “Roll on rug.” One evening Molly was indeed rolling on the rug and I asked her about it. Pretty straightforward… “Are you rolling on the rug?” I asked.

She leaped into my lap and began to lick my face and ears. After a minor tussle she was back on the floor and I was swabbing off dog spit with a paper towel. Unable to leave well enough alone, I asked her if she liked rolling on the rug. Bam! She was back in my lap licking my face and showing no mercy. When she was back on the floor watching me wisely from the (rug), I called Beth in to check it out. “Sit on the couch,” I suggested. She did. Then in a whisper I said, “Now ask Molly if she enjoys rolling on the rug.” She raised her eyebrows. “Really,” I said. And so she uttered the key phrase with the predictable result, and now Molly has us trained. Whenever Molly wants to play licky-face, we have to ask her if she’d like to roll on the rug.

Complex communication scenario, ain’t it?