Wednesday Bag o’ Pogue

I just committed close to a grand to have this old Seiko repaired and restored. You may think I’ve gone off the rails, given that I own two newer self-winding Seikos and a gorgeous Breitling, all in excellent repair. This one’s special, though: it’s my Vietnam War-era Yankee Air Pirate watch, the big Seiko to my little you-know-what.

Donna bought it for me in 1978, when I got my first fighter assignment. I wore it daily and for several years after retiring, right up until a seal gave out and water got inside.

This particular model has come to be known as the Seiko Pogue, named after astronaut Colonel Bill Pogue, who wore one on the final Skylab mission in 1974 (during which he led his crew in an orbital sit-down strike, effectively ending his NASA career). Seiko Pogues are collector’s items today, not that I plan to sell mine. I’m having it fixed so I can wear it again.

Our three dogs are on a prescription diet. Only one of them, Mister B, needs it, but the food (Hill’s prescription dry kibble) is equally nutritious for the other two, so they all eat it. It’s the prescription thing that mucks up the works — we can’t just go to the store to buy dog food when we’re about to run out. We have to order it from Chewy.com and manage shipments to arrive on time.

Used to be one 17.5-pound bag would last seven weeks. We set up automatic refills with Chewy based on that, and all was well. Then the vet said Mister B was losing weight and we needed to feed him more. We’d been giving each dog a cup a day, half for breakfast and half for dinner. Per the instructions on the bag, they should have been getting one and a quarter cups a day. That’s what they’re getting now, which has thrown the refill schedule off. We’re still trying to figure out what the new interval between shipments should be. We shortened it to five weeks, but ran out of food last week. Now it’s set to four weeks — one $75.00 bag every month.

Trouble is, the current shipment is late and we ran out of food last Friday. So far we’ve made two batches of home-cooked dog food. The first batch was white rice with chunks of cooked chicken breast and green peas. The second, which we whipped up last night, is rice with ground beef and broccoli. I served the first batch with a little chicken stock mixed in, beef broth with the second batch. Of course Mister B, Fritzi, and Lulu all love it, and will probably hate going back onto the dry food when it finally comes.

I listed the Goldwing on Facebook Marketplace and so far have had four nibbles … nibbles as opposed to reasonable offers, that is, so it’s still waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right to come along. One nibbler said he might come over to look at it, so I took it for a spin to make sure everything still worked. When I got back I saw bird seed on the garage floor where it had been parked, and now I know why the ABS light’s flashing. The same pack rat who moved bird seed from the storage bin in the garage to the engine compartment of our pickup truck must have also stored some inside the engine fairing of the Goldwing … incidentally chewing wires while he was up in there.

I caught a pack rat in the garage two months ago, followed by, to date, five mice. I caught them all with a humane trap baited with peanut butter, releasing them in dry washes two or three miles from the house. The trap’s currently on the garage floor near the motorcycle. As for the blinking ABS light, that’s a problem I’m going to pass on to the buyer, should there be one. Shouldn’t be a big fix, or an expensive one either.

I’m reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project,” the expanded book version of the original 1619 Project, which ran in a 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine, and has become a frequent target of white-wing book banners (I plan to review it and discuss the banning attempts in a future You Can’t Read That! column).

What I want to remark on is how unsettling and upsetting it is to read Black American history — the stuff that was intentionally written out of the textbooks I learned from in elementary and high school — during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, currently dominating both the news and my Twitter feed. To see racist GOP senators take turns recycling the same repulsive crap slave owners once used to spout to justify the horrors they inflicted on other human beings is to see pure evil in action.