Coffee heat rising

Month: May 2013

Memento Mori…and all that stuff

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So, as expected, the CardioDoc prescribed a blood pressure med. When I pointed out to him that if a drug has a bizarre side effect, I will get it (and no, it doesn’t matter whether I know what the side effects are or not), he came up with something so mild one can even eat grapefruit with it. Besides a little diarrhea, a little belly pain, a little syncope, and kidney failure, it’s fairly benign.

Lovely.

You have to die of something, and between you and me, dropping dead of a heart attack, which occurred to my great-grandmother and my great-aunt when they were in their mid-90s, looks a helluva lot better than dying of cancer while bat-brained doctors stand around hooting that you’re a mental case, as occurred to my mother in her early 60s. It also looks a great deal better than dying of kidney failure, which is a) a possible outcome of high blood pressure and b) a possible outcome of blood-pressure drugs. If one could be sure of the heart attack, possibly one would have a clearer view of the best course of action.

Whenever I’m in a doctor’s office or, God forfend, an ER, my blood pressure obligingly goes into the 150s. Here at home, a battery-operated blood pressure monitor registers in the high 110s and low 120s. But CardioDoc blew those figures off this afternoon — he said home BP monitors are unreliable and don’t measure a real figure: you have to take three readings five minutes apart (consuming FIFTEEN MINUTES of generally miserable time), and then average them to get anything resembling accuracy.

Well. Since every time I repeat a BP reading here at the Funny Farm, it’s invariably lower than the first effort, that would push my readings significantly lower. The guy refused to even look at the record I had. Sooo…. I’m thinking maybe I need to get a second opinion about this before I start gulping prescription drugs.

I don’t know. If the guy is right, I need to get on this stuff ASAP. If he’s wrong, it could do more harm than good; at best, it’s unnecessary.

Tomorrow I’m driving out of town. You’re not supposed to drive after taking the stuff until you see what it will do to you, since it can make you pass out. So the soonest I can start gulping this chemical down will be next Thursday…after I finish the dawn junket to Scottsdale.

Two things I like about this guy are that he seems to be right about the heart palpitations, which are extremely uncomfortable and scary, and that he is manifestly correct about the fact that I’m some 20 pounds overweight. How can one do without reassurances that you’re NOT old and you’re NOT fat?

Yes. Young Dr. Kildare has denied not only  that I’m old (give me a break, kid!) but that I’m fat. When I remarked in passing that I need to go on a diet, he looked at the 158-pound weight I’d logged that morning and allowed as to how I was within the “normal” range for my gender, age, and height. Right. And I look like I’m three months pregnant because…why?

CardioDoc suggested that I might be able to shuck the BP drug if I would get off my fanny and exercise (now there’s a radical idea) and if I would lose 22 pounds. These are things I’ve known for a long time but been too indolent to act on.

He also believes that the uncomfortable chest sensations are a manifestation of a genetic tendency to anxiety, which he describes as something different from stress, per se. It amounts to a pathological over-response to pretty much routine stressors. And I do have to say, I get these “heart palpitations” or whatever they are when a series of stressful events or situations occurs over a long period of time, especially when these happenings kick into “it never stops” mode. Even when on the surface things seem fairly quiet, what goes on day by day can add up, in the same way small savings here and there can add up to big savings, or small expenses here and there can add up to big bills.

Consider, for example, the day-by-day sources of stress I’ve recorded in the blood-pressure and Holter monitor logs since this annoying medical venture began:

4/10

• About 3:30 or 4:45, client called. Long angst-filled talk about her co-editor & the project.

• Racing out the door, late for choir, find notice in mail from IRS billing me for $10,000 in 2011 taxes and accusing me of fraud. Fly out the door to rehearsal. Sing for 2 hours.

• Accountant didn’t get message. Client from Hell persists. Student submits late paper in format I can’t open.

4/11

• Get up after awaking at 4 a.m.

• Return extremely difficult edited essay to anthology editors, with involved cover note. Start calculating billable hours. Not washed, made up or dressed! Now running late for 7:15 meeting.

• Late; fly out the door. Make u-turn, fly back to house, RUN to take out overfilled recycling bin, run back to car, race to Scottsdale thru rush-hour traffic.

• Finish chairing business group meeting; have light breakfast w/ coffee. Haggle with nuisance client. Discuss client’s work and general business issues with designer.

• Correspond with book packager, client. Correspond with accountant. Try to find password for p/w-protected financial statements from manager. E-mail binging nonstop. Client’s co-editor nagging for a bill.

• Trim tree suckers and cut back dead (man-eating!) agaves.

5/22

• Insomnia; meet with difficult client; undergo stress test; worry about health; drive thru awful traffic.

5/23

• Insomnia; take on new client’s challenging project on tight deadline; worry about health.

5/24

• Meet with client starting at 8:30 a.m.; it’s after 12:30 before he leaves. Edit Chinese scholars’ work on 5-day deadline.

5/25

• Just once I’d like to be able to sleep for 6 or 7 hours straight. SO tired!

5/26

• Wrestle with annoying ditzy job; pressure from author to accelerate deadline; many errors in Au’s References; Word as usual puts up a fight.

• Work  like a horse to finish Chinese researchers’ paper. Word crashes. MacBook crashes; looks like its drive is fried but it finally reboots. Terror!

• Carbonize my dinner on the grill; have to throw out expensive cut of lamb that I couldn’t afford in the first place & sure as hell can’t afford to toss in the garbage.

5/27

• Spend day shopping w/ KJG at Arrowhead, which should be fun. Feel terrible most of the time: weary, lightheaded, marginally headachey, tense sensation in chest.

• Return from dog walk to find front door open. No one there. Unsettling, after prior garage invasion episode

5/28

• Land another new client! Yet another Chinese scholar, likely to be difficult and low-paid. Chinese faculty’s salaries make ours look like manna from heaven.

• Getting an ear infection — hurts.

• Drive from pillar to post; hustle a business owner to donate to next fall’s choir fund-raiser.

• Get told I need blood pressure meds.

• Make my way through rush-hour traffic to pick up Rx at Costco; luckily, I decide to go by surface roads, because a crash closes the offramp that leads from the freeway to said Costco.

• Lose my American Express card. Find it while on interminable hold with AMEX customer disservice robot.

• Dog is sick. Throws up. Tomorrow I have to carry her in the car to Yarnell, spend the whole day there, carry her back down to SDXB’s house, then drive her home. Hope she doesn’t throw up in the car, on La Maya’s floor, or on SDXB’s floors. What on earth could be wrong with her? She’s been under the weather for days and not only is not getting better, she seems to be getting worse.

Gaaaahhhhhhhh! Is there any question why my heart pounds like a gazelle’s on the veldt?  This is not a hereditary disorder. This is fuckin’ normal! Whose heart would not pound when every goddamn day plays out like that?

So as I was saying, one of CardioDoc’s appealing traits is his advice that the way to deal with all this is to indulge in a spate of wildly vigorous, totally exhausting exercise. I’ve tried this several times and it works.

Today when I came home from picking up the prescription, I fell in the pool and swam a dozen laps as fast as I could go without stopping. It worked. I feel pretty good right now.

And it’s almost 10:30 and I’ve gotta go to bed. Hope to get more than four hours’ sleep tonight.

One More Year…Until the Year Arrives

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Frugal Scholar writes about the latest budgetary convulsions in her state, recurring politico-fiscal nightmares that have already had baleful effects on higher education there. With one kid fresh out of college and the other on the brink of (parent-assisted) homeownership, the sails of the Good Ship Retirement have appeared on  the horizon. Though she says she’d like to teach several more years, FS reports that she’s fallen into the habit, particularly where optional expenditures are concerned, of asking herself “what would I do about this if I had only one more year before retirement?”

Good question, isn’t it? She finds it deflects impulse buys. But it’s also an interesting mind-set — maybe one that anyone of any age should engage.

What if we all kept in the back of our minds that we had OMY — One More Year — before we chose to or had to quit working?  What would that do for us?

Well, obviously, it would make us think twice about the various extravagances and flings we’re inclined to when we know that a steady income will replenish savings or pay off the credit card within a month or two or three. It might lead us to plan for the future more carefully: what kind of housing would we like to have, once we’re retired? And where? How much, realistically, is it going to cost us to live in retirement? If the projected retirement date were accelerated by x or y years, how much should we be saving now to accommodate such a change in plans? What kind of vehicle will we drive? How will we fill the free hours…maybe with volunteering? travel? a new job or enterprise? hobbies?

My dean gave me nine months’ notice, although I realized well before then that the university was unlikely to continue to keep our expensive research support office, what with the president saying he would pare back operations that did not contribute directly to the institution’s primary mission, teaching.

So what was the OMY effect on me, a person who actually knew she had only one more year of employment?

• Debt clearance. The number-one goal was to get rid of a $30,000 home-equity loan I’d taken out to renovate the house my son and I copurchased, to make it livable for him. It required me to take a second job, but I accomplished that.

• Budget reallocation and expense control. Believing I soon could be living under the Seventh Avenue Underpass, I started getting used to spending a lot less. Over the course of nine months, I cut the discretionary budget from $1,500 a month to $900, and aimed to get it down to $850. I got used to running the air conditioning a lot less during the summer and trained myself to tolerate uncomfortable temperatures inside the house.

• Food purchase habits. I began stockpiling nonperishable foods, such as canned goods, beans, and rice. Eventually I bought a freezer so I could store meats and frozen vegetables purchased on sale or in bulk.

• Cultivation of new income sources. I got my foot in the door at Heavenly Gardens Community College, so that a teaching gig of 3 & 3 + 1 — the maximum number of courses an adjunct could teach at the time — was waiting for me the minute I walked off the Great Desert University campus. Meanwhile, I ramped up The Copyeditor’s Desk so the contract editorial work was flowing in by the time the salaried job ended.

• Early Social Security draw. With retirement investments down by something over $200,000, my financial manager strongly advised me to delay drawing from savings as long as possible. Even though it was not in my interest to start Social Security before reaching so-called “full” retirement age, the piddly income from teaching and freelance editing was not enough to keep me in my home and put food on the table. So, I was forced to start taking Social Security two years before “full retirement age” and six years before I had planned to do so.

When one is laid off a job in one’s sixties, one is “fully” retired, no matter what some rule-making bureaucrat or affluent legislator imagines. I applied for job after job after job — everything that I was well qualified for, everything that I was even remotely qualified for, and everything I figured I could stand to do even though it was menial work. Believe it: no one is interested in hiring an elderly worker, especially not during a major recession.

• Postponed or canceled decisions about planned major purchases. Even at the time the job ended, my car was reaching its dotage. Normally I keep a car for 10 years or until it reaches 100,000 miles, whichever comes first; the Dog Chariot was 10 years old on the first day of my surprise retirement. I’m still driving the thing. It’s rounding on 14 years old now and has almost 120,000 miles on the odometer. I probably will run it into the ground before buying a new tank.

All of these OMY strategies cushioned the fall into permanent unemployment (which is, after all, what retirement really is).

And when one bounces off that trampoline into a brave new world, one finds that permanent unemployment is just another word for freedom. Today I can’t even imagine going back to a full-time job — perish the hideous thought!

It really is true, contrary to the warnings of ever so many financial advisors who want you to give them your money to invest, that you can live a lot more cheaply in retirement than you do while you’re working. With fewer external demands pushing up your expenses, it simply doesn’t cost very much to live well.

I’ve managed to stay in my home, despite increasing insurance and tax bills. My son and I have not defaulted on the downtown house (although, admittedly, for awhile it did look like we might have to). I don’t seem to be having any trouble keeping the place maintained. Gerardo is still employed. Various workmen still find jobs to do around the place, and none of them is being asked to go hungry. I still have a dog. I can still buy the clothing I need, whenever I feel so inclined (which isn’t often). I can still get a monthly haircut. And I can even go out to lunch or dinner occasionally.

Without the cost of a daily commute, without the need to buy and wear expensive dry-clean-only clothes, without  the five-day-a-week restaurant lunches, without the repair bills occasioned by the wear &  tear on your car, and without the many other expenses one invests in a career, you save a surprising amount of money. And one quickly becomes accustomed to buying more intelligently, to curbing extravagances, and to cutting waste — so quickly that these new habits are not perceived as significant hardship.

Thinking about your financial life as if you had only One More Year to go will not only help you to get your money affairs in order, it will smooth the way into a comfortable and happy retirement.

 

Links 4 next week

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Busy week; long week. Just finished a new client’s paper. Needed to do a decent job on it because it may mean a foot in the door to a scholarly journal that could provide all The Copyeditor’s Desk needs to make its monthly revenue goals from now unto perpetuity. That would be good. Very good.

In the life is strange department, consider this amazing and spectacular record of the life of the cicada. Astonishing.

Humans, however, are no less astonishing. As creatures go, we also are capable of doing some bizarrely wonderful things.

And speaking of our constructs, here’s a question: Is the Internet destroying Middle America?  Freaking terrifying. And the guy is right.

Drifting further in the direction of personal finance, have you got old folks? Or maybe you’re an old folk, yourself. If so, better download this eye-opening report on the widespread inappropriate use of a seemingly endless number of medications for older adults. Some of these are prescription drugs, recommended by doctors who should know better but apparently don’t, and some are readily available over the counter.

And “widespread” is le mot juste. As far back as 2008, half of all Americans reported that they’re on medications, and nine in ten (!) older Americans were taking prescription medications. Three-quarters of senior citizens were taking at least two drugs, and 37 percent were taking at least five. Big pharma: a parasite on American life.

Elsewhere, on Mother’s Day Donna Freedman posted a heartfelt story about her mother, her childhood, and the memories that haunt her to this day. Awesome piece of writing.

Frugal Scholar and Miss Em hit the mother lode of recycled Eileen Fisher duds in a Goodwill across the street from a fancy country club.  But many of these clothes are made in China, where workers are exploited and suffer unacceptable health and safety risks. She has recourse to Milton in considering the ethics of buying clothing manufactured in Asia, even second-hand.

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal & Mr. BFS are saving a bundle on a bargain cruise. Good thing, because their plan to landscape the new yard gave them an attack of sticker shock.

Mrs. Money Beagle has a new enterprise, Moonshyne Designs, which she’s put up on Etsy! Check out the cool digital designs for cards, announcements, and wall art.

Planting Our Pennies has been with us for a whole year! These days, they’re contemplating ways to bicycle to work, with panache.

Evan over at My Journey to Millions is irked at the flap over Apple’s having used lawful strategies to avoid substantial quantities of taxes.

You thought Arizona, being an arid desert, didn’t have mosquitoes? Mwa ha ha! Check out Abigail’s battle of the bugs, at I Pick Up Pennies.

At NZ Muse, the newlyweds are in Bangkok! Drama never fails to follow bloggers wherever they go — wouldn’t you know it!

“Harmless” OTC Drugs: When Will I Ever Learn?

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Suffering again from heart palpitations, a few weeks ago I visit Young Dr. Kildare, who sends me to a cardiologist. He diagnoses “stress” but recommends a stress test. The blood pressure, BTW, is hovering in the lower stratosphere.

The stress test gets put off for two or three weeks while I struggle with the accursed insurance companies, trying to get a better rate from one of the rapacious private Medigap carriers. While going through underwriting, I cannot have any diagnostic tests pending, even “routine” ones. Finally I get accepted for a new plan with a new insurer.

So at last, on Wednesday I stumble into the cardiologist’s office for the stress test. That seems to have gone OK — it was pretty easy and even kind of fun — but afterward the technician keeps taking my blood pressure. Over and over and over. Even though it slowly drops a little, it is very high.

She tells me to go buy a blood pressure monitor (yup! I needed a gratuitous $50 expenditure just as the AC bills start to peak!) and track my blood pressure between then and next Tuesday, when I’m supposed to go back to the cardiologist.

The heart palpitations, which are very uncomfortable and (despite assurances that they’re probably harmless) quite scary, continue. The blood pressure scores are mind-boggling: 147/93 ; 154/86…holy SHIT!

Yesterday morning I awaken at 2:10 and take another reading. In the past, my blood pressure readings have been lowest just after awakening. Not at this particular awaking, though: 145/80.

“Normal,” for those of you who are as yet uninitiated, is <120/<80.

So I’m sitting at the dining room table contemplating this state of affairs when it occurs to me that I’d squirted my nose with generic Afrin, because it was kind of stuffy when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. Come to think of it…I’d been squirting every evening, in a sleepy haze, right before I went to bed. Bad. Normally I would use the stuff no more than two or three nights in a row, but in a frenzy to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, I’d been snorting decongestant up my schnozz every night for…longer than I could remember. At least ten days or two weeks; probably longer than that.

Years ago, when SDXB was living with me, he had a terrible cold and couldn’t breathe through his nose. I suggested he try a squirt of Afrin nose spray to clear his head, He said he couldn’t use decongestants because they drive up one’s blood pressure — he’s had chronic high blood pressure forever.

Well… There in the wee hours I came to remember that exchange, out of the blue. It dawned on me that, when asked what drugs I was on by the cardiologist and later by his tech, I’d totally blown off the nose squirt — my mind didn’t register it as a drug, and besides, I’ve been using it late at night or the episodes of insomnia, when I’m half asleep and barely conscious.

Interesting.

So I go online and look up the drug — generically it’s called oxymetazoline hydrochloride — and damned if it doesn’t say “causes high blood pressure and heart palpitations.”

Holy shit, indeed.

Also learned that for a lush like me (I have two drinks a day, which the US gummint describes as “heavy drinking” for a woman), knocking off the booze all at once will drive up the blood pressure. You’re supposed to taper off over a period of weeks. I haven’t had a drink in several days.

Well, “weeks” isn’t very practical, because the focus is just NOT THERE to limit the amount of booze in ever-diminishing amounts over that long a period. It’s either lap it up or don’t taste it at all. I figure I could have one five-ounce glass of wine yesterday and half of that today and then kick the habit.

So I knock off the nose squirt. Along about 5:30, I fix myself an amazing dinner and serve it up with 1 glass of white wine. Take the dog for a stroll and jog four of the six blocks (in my achy dotage I’m no longer capable of running).

Come back. Sit down for half an hour. Take the blood pressure: 120/76.

Well damn. That’s the first time it’s been anywhere near the normal range since these antics started. Skip the nose squirt on retiring.

This morning: 111/80. And the heart palpitations are almost gone.

I hadn’t made the connection between the crazy-making heart palpitations and the nose squirt. And I never would have, if SDXB hadn’t made that remark all those years ago.

Take-away message: Just because you don’t swallow it doesn’t mean it isn’t a drug. And just because something can be bought off the shelf in a grocery store or pharmacy doesn’t mean it’s harmless. Always look up every nostrum before taking it! Prescription or over-the-counter, you should know what’s in any medicament you swallow, rub on your skin, drop in your eyes, inhale into your chest, or blow up your nose, and know what its potential side effects are…before you ingest it.

Prepare Your Business for Disaster

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tornado2When I wrote about preparing your family and your home for the various kinds of emergencies and catastrophes that can befall us, I surely had no idea the subject would suddenly become so topical. Again. We’ve seen, time and again, the danger and heartache that a natural disaster brings to individuals, families, and homeowners. But what about business owners and leaders? What can you do to prepare your business for disaster?

Some business entrepreneurs have been there before us and can offer some advice. Forbes contributor Elaine Pofeldt, for example, lists some wish-I’d-thought-of-this preparations that would have helped get her own and her husband’s home-based businesses through Hurricane Sandy:

• generator
• car charger for laptops
• back-up Internet service
• printed list of hotels in nearby states
• bicycle at the ready.

If your business has outgrown a room in the back of the house and is an established, brick-and-mortar retail store, wholesale operation, or service office, your planning issues are more complex and more crucial to the business’s survival. Some 25 percent of small businesses are unable to come back after a natural disaster, largely because they are unprepared. A December 2012 survey showed that 74 percent of businesses have no disaster plan, 84 percent have no natural disaster insurance, and a third have no idea how quickly they could get back in operation after a natural disaster.

Experts urge the importance of several coordinating strategies. These include

• having a disaster recovery plan in place;
• migrating IT functions, data, applications, and processes to the Cloud;
• developing a back-up communication system that does not rely on cell phones;
• and anticipating ways to help restore normalcy to employees whose lives are upended.

Clearly, a crucial strategy is to move data and computer functions off-site, to a secure site in the Cloud. This should include not only archived records and programs, but all work in progress. Not only will this protect your company’s and your clients’ data, it can make it possible for employees to work remotely, in case they can’t get to the office or the office itself is out of commission.

The Pacific County (Washington) Economic Development Council has posted an excellent and broad-ranging series of guides and checklists for business preparedness, in connection with a conference on the subject. If you own a business or are in charge of preparedness at your workplace, this is an invaluable series of resources. While you’re at this site, click on the “Business Planning Document” link at the top of the page. This will load a Word document containing a full business preparedness plan whose purpose is “to allow the company to resume mission critical operations within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, followed by the resumption of all other company operations within three to five days.”

Financial Services Group PNC adds the suggestion that business managers identify their organization’s most vulnerable points — computers located on a first floor vulnerable to flooding, for example — and take action to remedy those situations before the fact.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has published several pages of useful information at its website, including a set of planning and implementation guides for businesses. Also on these pages you can find suggestions for building emergency kits, either for families or for businesses, and descriptions of various kinds of hazards and how to prepare for them. Another FEMA document, “Every Business Should Have a Plan,” provides a succinct set of recommendations for preparations to help to keep your employees safe during an emergency and help your company stay in business afterward.

King David HotelThere are actually two aspects to disaster preparedness: readying oneself and one’s group for natural disasters and preparing for manmade disasters and catastrophic human error. Quite a lot of information addresses the possibility of natural events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, and floods, but there’s less public information about preparing for a terrorist attack. Probably the best organized and most useful discussion appears at FEMA’s site on terrorist hazards. There you’ll find links to pages with details on protecting yourself from biological and chemical threats, cyberattacks, explosions, nuclear blasts, and radioactive dispersion devices.

Another of the best planning documents designed to help businesses cope with manmade disasters is a primer published by Business Executives for National Security. This guide covers the several possible kinds of terrorist attacks, risk assessment and preparation, employee training, terrorism insurance, ways a business can respond to a terrorist attack, and recovery. It includes a short, to-the-point checklist.

In the recovery department, the Small Business Administration offers a variety of business physical recovery loans for companies in a declared disaster zone.

Palm Beach County (Florida) provides a business guide for disaster preparedness that also addresses bomb threats, enraged employees or customers, sabotage, cyberterrorism, and hacking. And King County (Washington) publishes a short and to-the-point set of actions to take in various scenarios, ranging from hazard recognition to survival if you’re trapped under debris.

The Red Cross has a PDF on responding to terrorist attacks; it contains some helpful advice, including instructions for sheltering in place.

In 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) prepared an eye-opening report on potential terrorist actions and the nation’s preparedness for them. A key part of this discussion has to do with the threat to financial markets posed by a successful, major attack. We saw what happened when some joker hacked in to the Associated Press’s Twitter feed and posted a report that the White House had been struck — an instantaneous, deep stock market dip. Had the report been real, the consequences would have been very serious, indeed. The GAO report deals largely with the financial markets, the banking industry, and the telecommunications infrastructure. Even though it’s a decade old, the report and its recommendations are still worth a business executive’s attention.

Images:

Tornado in central Oklahoma, 1999. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Public domain.
King David Hotel (Jerusalem) after attack by Irgun, 1946. Public domain.

Funny, the German Shepherd, and the Dog Behavioralist

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AnnagarlicJestjack’s comment on last Saturday’s post, about the vet who opined that the wide-ranging pisser of a cat had “anger issues” (heeee!), reminded me of Anna the German Shepherd, a dog for whom “trainability” was an alien term.

Actually, Anna was highly trainable. But she was a working dog with a capital W and a capital D, and she had so much drive that she really needed a full-time doggy job to run off her bottomless reserves of energy. This was an animal that needed to herd sheep. Or cattle. Or camels. She was so strong that for many months I faced quite the challenge keeping her under control.

A woman who trained search dogs and drug dogs for the police had been the most successful of a largely unsuccessful lot of dog-and-human trainers. By the time Anna was about 18 months old, she was marginally leash-trained, despite daily efforts on my part. This police dog trainer favored a vicious pinch collar, something that just made me cringe…but I couldn’t afford to have the dog drag me into the traffic, or to have to let her go as she charged in front of an oncoming vehicle. Since she craved to bring cars and trucks down by their oil-pans, suicide by car was a likely end for Anna. The pinch collar at least put a damper on that activity. To a degree. A low degree.

One day I mentioned this to Jerry Jenkins, a now-retired veterinarian who over the years had become a friend. He said he knew a “dog behavioralist” that maybe I should try. Silently thinking “holeee mackerel, what next?” I took the guy’s phone number. In a moment of desperation, after having been dragged around the neighborhood again, I called him.

Now, you should bear in mind that another friend of mine, at the time, was a lady who claimed to believe in astrology and who was in the act of hanging out her shingle as a pet astrologist and mind-reader. No. Yes. She was serious. I think. Who can tell?

At any rate, you can imagine the eye-rolling over the “dog behavioralist.”

So I call the guy up, and it turns out that under the silly psycho-babble veneer, what he really does is teach owners (not dogs) how to behave. Abhorred by the stainless-steel pinch collar, the first thing he did was demonstrate how to get Anna to heel using nothing more than a leather leash and her ordinary everyday rolled leather collar. It wasn’t very difficult. The trick was, you had to do it several times a day. Didn’t matter whether you did it in the house, did it in the backyard, did it on a sidewalk, or did it in the park. You just had to do it for a short period, over and over, every day.

Here’s how to do it:

Get a rolled leather collar (it’s better for long-haired dogs and it will work better for your purposes). Get a sturdy leather leash (not nylon). Place the collar on the dog and hook the leash to the collar. Have the dog sit next to you. Step forward with the dog at your left side. Each time the dog surges ahead of your knees, say “HUP!” and give the leash a sharp jerk. Always precede the jerk with the “HUP!” sound. Never jerk the leash and then say “HUP.” Walk steadily and confidently forward. Never let the dog get past your knees without going “HUP” and giving it a jerk.

This won’t hurt the dog, but it will get its attention. Reward the dog with friendly noises for heeling correctly over brief periods. You may heel and sit, heel and sit, heel and sit if that’s necessary to underscore the idea that the human walks the dog, not the other way around. Do not fail to do this for a few minutes at least three times a day — five or ten minutes per session will suffice.

After awhile, the dog will start to expect a jerk whenever you say “HUP!” You can then use the word “HUP” to mean, approximately, “heel.”

It works.