Unbelievably gorgeous Arizona sunset this evening. The air is crisp—almost cold—as a rain front is ambling in from the west. A buttermilk sky floating in ahead of the storm turned first hot gold and then deep red against a turquoise backdrop. Very nice: A-minus, God.
Today piled atop yesterday to create 48 hours from Hell. At four in the morning, the dog threw up all over the bed. I’d run out of meat last night and so cooked her a couple of eggs…you can imagine what a mess that made. But try not to! By the time I got out of bed and got her off the bed and pulled the soiled blankets off (the heat has been off to save money toward the expected RIF, and so four blankets and throws were stacked on the sheets), we had yellow, stinking barf all over me, all over the floor, all over the throw rug, all over the bed, all over the bureau drawer. Fortunately it didn’t get on the pillows and didn’t soak through to the mattress, but I had to launder every stitch of bedding.
Since I don’t have any other blankets or sheets, that was the end of sleeping, after a five-hour nap.
The washer ran from four in the morning to about noon. So did the dog: she kept right on barfing, even though she had nothing left in her to throw up. After about the dozenth woof, I called the vet.
The issue here is that a day before Thanksgiving she got ahold of some sort of plastic–what it was and where she found it remains a mystery. Whatever, she chewed it up into tiny sharp pieces and swallowed a fair amount of it. This put her at risk of an obstruction or a perforated intestine.
Over the phone at the time, the vet advised me to feed her some vaseline, which works like mineral oil to…uhm…grease the works, as it were. We managed to get through the holidays without incident, but the vet also had said to watch for vomiting. Here, we had vomiting. With a vengeance.
Meanwhile, I have 200 typeset pages of medieval and renaissance research to index by tomorrow. Wuz supposed to have read a chunk of it yesterday, but as you may realize, that did not happen, partly because I was so exhausted and so harried I couldn’t function.
After the 9:00 a.m. junket to Borders to pick up the lost AMEX card, it was off to the vet at 12:30, marking pages and cleaning up barf around those trips.
A set of X-rays showed the dog has something in her gut near the caecum. What, the vet did not know. She advised watchful waiting. Gave the dog an antiemetic shot, advised me to give her Pepcid AC to try to cut down the barfing of yellow bile, and said to ease up on feeding her. That’ll be $225.
So much for trying to live on $300 this week. Well, I wasn’t going to make it anyway, but now I’ll have to raid savings to make ends meet. How on earth do I imagine I’m going to live on a gross income that’s $880 a month less than I net today?????
Managed to get through 52 pages before I fell asleep. Woke from a nap with the same headache I’ve been enjoying nonstop for the past two weeks. Do wish it would go away.
There are a lot of things one wishes would go away.
Perusing the daily news, I about had cardiac arrest when I read this story. If I may be permitted to say so: God Damn It! A cherubic eight-year-old child dies because some moron hands him a loaded freaking Uzi. No ordinary moron, mind you: a freaking chief of police!
As a screaming left-wing liberal who happens to take the Constitution literally and so believes that law-abiding citizens do indeed have a right to bear arms, I am so enraged by this stupidity that I can barely breathe. What in the name of heaven could these people have been thinking?
- An eight-year-old is a child. Spell it: c-h-i-l-d!
- An Uzi has a recoil. That’s r-e-c-o-i-l.
- If you don’t know what that means, try k-i-c-k-b-a-c-k.
- An Uzi is designed for soldiers in combat, not small children at play.
- A boy will get just as big a thrill out of shooting a .22 as anything else, and a .22 will let him learn how to handle a gun safely and hit a target accurately.
But apparently “handle a gun safely” was not on the agenda at this fun event. w00t! Full auto rock & roll!
Forty-eight hours from Hell.
