Something happened at my house a couple of weeks ago that was like living in a Stephen King book.

My son Daniel and niece Lily were sitting on the couch one afternoon, telling me about their day, when I spotted a couple of drops of blood on the floor. As they kept talking, I noticed more drops – really a spray of blood – on the pillow next to Lily. I interrupted them: “Okay, hang on, who is bleeding?” Slightly panicked, we all checked ourselves. We seemed okay.

We checked the dogs (Mabel and Gus). They seemed fine. The cat was nowhere nearby. Then I saw more blood splattered across the back of my laptop! We found a few drops on Mabel, but they weren’t coming from a cut, just sitting on the surface of her coat, so that wasn’t it.

As we continued investigating, I suddenly felt something wet on my arm. I looked down – a few more small drops of blood. Lily and Daniel both felt some on their arms then, too, like it had rained on us. Slowly, we all looked up toward the ceiling…

Well, there was nothing on the ceiling, but it was a weird moment, let me tell you.

It took another 15 minutes or so of confusion, but eventually we solved the mystery. It was Mabel’s tail! Somehow she had split it open at the end a little, and every time she wagged she was spraying blood everywhere in tiny droplets. And she’s a very happy dog, so there was plenty of blood splatter all around the room. Karianne took her to the vet the next day, and they said this condition is called “Happy Tail.” She had to keep it wrapped for two weeks, and now she’s back to normal.

Historically I haven’t really kept up with college football, but with kids at A&M and Tech, we are trying to watch some games this season. I made a little bookmarklet to make looking up the game times easier.

Drag this to your bookmarks bar (or right-click and “bookmark link”):

ESPN: Good Teams Only

Then open the college football schedule from ESPN. Once it loads, click the bookmark you just created, and it will remove all the teams except A&M, Tech, and UT. (Or edit the bookmark and add other teams to stringsToKeep if you want to keep them).

On June 5, 2009, I sent a very excited email to some friends. I had pulled up to a stop light right behind one of the Google Street View cars – you know, one of these:

This was only a year after they launched their first images of Austin, and I had never seen one in person before. I told my friends:

I saw the Google Street View car today! I drove right behind it at McNeil and Heinemann. I reached out the window and waved! Watch this URL in a month or so (I guess?), maybe I’ll be there:

(link to Google Street View)

I remember going back to that link a month or two later and not seeing my car. I assumed that they just weren’t gathering images at that moment or something.

FAST-FORWARD NINETEEN YEARS, and I came across that old email. I clicked the link again, used the “See more dates” link on Street View to switch to the June 2009 images, and there’s our old white Honda! When I clicked around a bit, I even found an image where my hand is out the window waving:

Hello from the past!

Isaiah, Mighty Seer, in Days of Old (TLH #249) was written by Martin Luther in 1526. We’re going to sing it in church in a few weeks, but it is 1) kind of a weird tune, without much repetition, and 2) only one verse! So you don’t get much of a chance to learn it before the train wreck is over.

To mitigate this, our choir is learning it beforehand, just so some of the people singing will know the song. Our choir director sent around a MIDI file of it yesterday to help us practice.

When I opened the MIDI file, it loaded in Logic (a music production program for the Mac), and immediately I started messing around, seeing how it sounded when played by different software instruments. In the end, I added some drums and made this “chiptune” (video game music) version of it…

Watch on YouTube

Is this meet, right, or salutary? You be the judge. It is helping me practice the song, though!

A while back, I was on a phone call with a tech support person. I forget why, but he needed to read me a code over the phone. When he did this, he did, “A as in alpha, X as in x-ray, F as in foxtrot,” etc.

So, when I had to read one to him, I did the same thing, but I was embarrassed to discover that I sometimes couldn’t think of a good word for a given letter. My mind went straight for longer or weirder words – “B as in botulism, V as in vicarious…” My inner filter knew that would be weird, so I just seemed like an idiot who can’t think of a word that starts with B.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to learn the NATO Phonetic Alphabet – the standard words used for each letter by radio operators. Here’s the list, copied from the wikipedia page:

I built vibe coded a tool for practicing these. Once you think you know them, check it out:

NATO Phonetic Alphabet Practice Tool

It shows you 6 random letters, and you think of how to say them with the NATO alphabet, then click/tap to see the answer. Kind of fun, if you have a particularly nerdy sense of fun!