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On the Road to Heaven’s Gate

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Cassie the Corgi is on her way out of this world, I’m afraid.

Day before yesterday she started having serious trouble walking. The air of confusion, which has lurked for awhile, became more distinct, as though familiar places looked strange and she had no idea where she was.

Now today she can’t walk or stand at all.

Plus she’s having the kind of palsies she developed of late, while she’s asleep: I’d call them convulsions or maybe spasms. Now they’re happening during the daytime hours, and they seem to either scare her or hurt her. When I take her outside and set her down, she looks utterly befuddled…peers around with an expression that says, clear as day, “What is this place and what am I supposed to be doing here?”

Interestingly, it occurred to me that she acts sort of like a person who’s had a stroke might act, under some circumstances. Look up “can a dog a have a stroke” and discover ischemic strokes are incident on Cushing’s disease…which of course is exactly what ails her.

She’s now completely incontinent…leaked all over the pee pad I put down over her mat in the bathroom, her favorite nesting place. While reclining by the dinner table, she managed to deposit a couple of fine turds under the dining room buffet. That was quite a trick.

As soon as Cassie passes on to her furry fathers, I will have to disinfect all the flooring in the house. She’s peed and shat all over every room in the house, and no amount of spot-cleaning changes the fact that the entire dwelling stinks to high heaven. To fix that, I’ll need to mop all the floors with Clorox and then open every window and door to air it out for several hours.

Ruby should not be exposed to the fumes. So I’ll need to schlep her down to my son’s house and leave her there for five or six hours while the place airs out. It’s a little chilly to leave her in the yard all day, and if it keeps raining she can’t be left out there anyway.

{sigh}

Cassie was born in 2006, if you believe what the Humane Society said. That would make her around 12 or 13 years old, depending on what month she arrived. So that puts her right at the median life span for corgis, which is 12.6 years. So she’s had a pretty good life.

Ruby is already showing signs of taking over as Queen of the Universe. Ruby came along in 2014. That would make her about 5 years old, the prime of her doggy life. So if she lives to be 12, she’ll be around for another 7 years…until I’m 80 or 81 years old.

Thinking about whether to get another dog…and I think probably not. In the first place, Ruby will expand to fill all available space. And in the second, I’m already too old to be on my hands and knees five or six times a day cleaning up after a sick old dog at the end of its life — at 80, I will be way too old for that. So I guess, no: no more dogs.

Which is sad. It’s hard to conceive of living without the company of a dog. But what the hell: maybe I won’t live that long. 😉

/p>

Come Saturday Mornin’…

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Another week has blown past. The older you get, the faster time passes…remember when you were a little kid and an hour seemed like an eternity? Yeah…now it doesn’t even make it up to five seconds.

Finally managed to finish and post this week’s chapter of Ella’s Story. Slowing the post schedule for each bookoid — Ella, If You’d Asked Me, and The Complete Writer — from three a week to one a week was a good idea. That seems obvious in retrospect. But Asked and Writer are already written. And really, if I would get off the dime I could (in theory) write a chapter a week for Ella’s Story.

It’s just that, well…I’m not about to get off the dime. Too many distractions beckon, not the least of which is the doggy drama. One could say it’s not that I have too much to do but that I overly enjoy doing too little.

Right this minute, for example, the dryer buzzes angrily. Yesterday Cassie waddled over to the dog bed parked under the computer desk, dragged herself onto it, and…yeah. Squatted right there and pooped all over it. So much for writing. Get up, drag out the bed, clean up the mess, see that the dog is in a bad way, carry the dog outside to do its business, pick her up, carry her back inside…on and on it goes. Instead of doing this — right this minute — I should be dragging out the garbage, picking up the dog shit out of the back yard (again), cleaning the dog shit off my shoe from where I stepped in it this morning, taking down the leaking hummingbird feeder and power-washing the flagstone beneath it before the day gets warm enough to awaken the Ondt Queen’s hordes, drafting a kind of “g’day” email to send out to my missing clientele, returning to LinkedIn and rebuilding a presence there, starting to work more seriously on Drugging of America, putting a load of actual laundry in the washer, sneaking out with Ruby to squeeze in a mile’s walk, checking the pool chemicals, applying a coat of silicone lubricant to the rubber gasket on the pool’s pump basket, calling my friends to see how they’re settling into their new abode, downloading and entering data into Excel for the tax accountant…

Ugh! There’s the hangup: I hate hate HATE the job of entering day after day of income and expense data into a complicated spreadsheet. So, the chore becomes one of entering month after month of data… And, that, having been put off in a monthly fit of aversion, is going to take several long days of drudging away. I don’t want to do that, so…I don’t do anything. Because really, that should be the first priority (January being more than at hand…), and so of course I can’t do anything else before doing that. Can I?

Right…

I fail to see the point of recording every single goddamn transaction. Why can’t we enter tax-related transactions only? Income: sure. Medical-related expenses: yeah. Business expenses: of course. Property tax, state tax, and car registration: yep. Capital improvements on the house: yes. But come ON: every trip to Costco, Walmart, and Safeway? Every bottle of olive oil, loaf of bread, package of dog food? Seriously? Why is that necessary?

Obviously, for the business “tax-related” would mean every single transaction. But for the personal stuff, what is the point of entering dozens and even hundreds of transactions that are irrelevant for tax purposes? If all I recorded were income, medical and insurance expenses, charitable contributions, tax payments, capital improvements, investment income & expenses…wouldn’t that be quite enough? I mean, for godsake…we know what net worth is, and we know what net income/expense balance is: all we have to do is enter the bank balance at the beginning of the year, the bank balance at the end of the year, and figure the difference. Quickbooks downloads bank transactions and preserves them, in a clumsy way. Fidelity provides reports for all IRA and non-IRA investments. So…why are we doing this?

Add to the list of things to do today: Ask accountant why are we doing this.

Ruby just peed all over one of Cassie’s pee mats. Suspicions confirmed. Because Cassie has come un-house-trained, now Ruby figures she can forget that “outside” rubbish, too.

Cassie fell into a disturbing relapse yesterday. On her best days, she’s far from well. On a bad day? Well: disturbing.

She started having difficulty walking. The past few days, her chassis has just kind of given out: her hind legs either collapse or, on the slippery tiles, slide out from under her. Yesterday she was very weak, and by evening clearly was in pain. I dosed her with half a Benadryl and a baby aspirin at night, and by this morning she seems better.

Sometimes she becomes confused. A few minutes ago I found her standing in the office with her nose sticking into the bookcase. She seemed not to know how to disengage herself from this pose. More and more often, too, she goes outside, she looks around…and she appears mystified. Her expression and body language seem to say What is this place? Where am I and how did I get here?

So…that’s depressing. Yesterday I thought it was “Time,” but knowing she may spring back to at least a marginally acceptable state discourages me from whisking her off to the vet to be put down. And yea verily: this morning she’s not well, but she’s not in those desperate straits, either. Far as the human eye can discern.

I discovered that closing the doors to two of the bedrooms cuts down considerably on the excreta pick-up. Why? That is unclear. But without the freezer/crafts room floor and the spare bedroom floor to use as outposts of the doggy loo, they’re both more inclined to arf at the door when the mood beckons.

But Cassie really needs to be physically guided outside and reminded to do her business about once an hour. Sometimes, if she’s feeling feeble, this entails picking her up, carrying her out the door, toting her to the peeing ground, setting her down, and then picking her up and carrying her back inside. Besides the obvious joy entailed, this poses yet another problem:

SDXB is determined to get me to go on a day trip to Castle Hot Springs with him. So enthused is he about this expedition that he has engineered an entire party with his present girlfriend and one of his other ex-girlfriends., which he expects me to join. He now has this scheduled for early February.

The problem is…if Cassie doesn’t accommodate his plan by shuffling off this mortal coil before then, there’s no way I can go with them.

I can’t leave her with my son: he has a job. (Remember those?) I can’t leave her outdoors all day: for one thing, she’s always been an indoor dog, and for another, even if she were accustomed to spending hours out of doors, it’s too cold now for that.

So…uhm… I really don’t quite know what to say… “Sure, I’ll come along if my dog is dead by then”?

Right…

Robocall Exploits: Part II

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LOL! So the robocall scammers, presumably annoyed — really annoyed — at NoMoRobo so consistently derailing their nuisance calls ever since I subscribed to the program — doubled down today. As I reported this morning, one of them apparently drained the battery from one of my landline handsets, when I tried to use it to espy their caller ID. An hour or two later, in came a barrage of phone calls from area code 186.

This makes it impossible to report an unblocked call to NoMoRobo’s online reporting page. To do so, you have to enter the number’s area code, and NoMoRobo does not recognize an area code beginning with the numeral “1” — and so it won’t take the rest of the number that shows on your Caller ID, either. Clever exploit, eh?

These assholes call me several times. The number they’re using is 186-467-6230.

Turns out that 186-467-6230 is a number used by those scammers who call up elderly people and claim to be an adult grandchild, niece, or nephew who, as the hustle goes, has been arrested (or has been injured in an accident) and needs money fast to make bail or to pay for medical care. Click on that link: the stories it elicits range from astonishing to hilarious.

HOW a grown man or woman could fall for these pitches escapes comprehension. What planet do these folks live on? Do they never watch a TV news show or read a newspaper or cruise the Internet or hang out with their old college cronies on Facebook? Do they spend ALL their time filling out crossword puzzles? The “I’m in jail, send money now” scam has been around for so many years, you can’t even imagine how anyone could fall for it.

At any rate, it was a real blitz today. Half a dozen calls came in, of which three were attempts by the 186 scammers to get through. And the apparent draining of my bathroom extension phone’s battery: that was scary. If they can reach out to your equipment with some kind of code or signal and cause damage, that represents a serious problem. Fortunately, the other handsets were unaffected…only the one I picked up to try to disconnect the call was attacked. But still: this is not good.

New Robocaller Exploit? Or…just coincidence?

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I think — being the paranoiac that I am — that a robocaller just broke one of my landline handsets. As you know, I now subscribe to NoMoRobo, which works with amazing effectiveness against telephone pests. And you can be sure that the electronics the pests use can detect the presence of NoMoRobo when the program derails incoming nuisances.

So this afternoon the phone jangles. Caller ID reads, weirdly, Welcome! Please wait…

WTF?

So I wait for it to ring through to my voicemail so I can capture their data and, if as suspected it’s a sales pitch, I can hang up on the bastards. When they give up, I click on the “last call” button to capture the phone number and caller ID so as to send it along to NoMoRobo, which collects this stuff. And what I got was…NOTHING.

Blank. Nothing. Dead as a doornail.

Well, f**k.

So I tried another phone set, and from that was able to download the (without a doubt spoofed) phone number. Sent this and a report of the exploit along to NoMoRobo.

But…this is a new one. That phone was not out of juice. It was sitting on a charger when I picked it up. And yeah, the charger was plugged in. So drained was it that it took about ten minutes for the handset to come back to life.

Now, you know and I know that I am batsh!t crazy. With that in mind, you will have to add whatever grains of salt you choose to this speculation:

I suspect that somehow they did something to disable my phone.

We know this is possible for cell phones: the technology exists to drain a cell phone’s power. Maybe this works on a battery-operated landline extension????

Why? Somebody out there (not surprisingly) really, REALLY does not like people to subscribe to NoMoRobo.

Anybody had this experience before?

Pillar to Post…or is that Po$t?

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Okay, I knew I was going to have to drive from pillar to post this morning. But that doesn’t make life any less…amazing.

Item: Yesterday by pure serendipity I happened across a study that looks real (but sure, may not be: have we heard of the International Journal of Dermatology?) reporting that virgin coconut oil is almost as effective as mupirocin in beating back staphylococci. I’ve come to the end of the time that one is supposed to use the anti-MRSA staph ointment, and my nose still itches and the fading remains of the first and largest of the staph boils lingers on my paw. I am neurosing.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to throw out all of my makeup, because of course all if it is contaminated with the honored microbe. Yesterday I spent $90 at the Target replacing just  a few of my favorite drugstore cosmetics. But Target, being in the process of dumping last year’s fashions and restocking with this year’s fashions, offered precious poor pickin’s.

Item: Today I need a bottle of wine and a bottle of that “green” odorless relatively environmentally friendly dish detergent, which Sprouts does not carry. Sprouts does carry woo-woo shit like “virgin coconut oil,” whatever that is. There’s a very fine Sprouts down in the old, now obscenely gentrified neighborhood. It’s across the street from a Safeway, which will sell the coveted detergent. And I needed to go in search of the eyeshadow and brow powder that Target didn’t have.

Target, which I visited yesterday, is in the process of replacing last year’s stocks and so had almost none of the brands and products I use. To frost that cake, most of my makeup is several years old. Makeup, like clothing, goes out of style under the impetus of its manufacturers’ craving to sell more, more, and still more of the stuff. So of course I couldn’t find most of my preferred brands and colors.

I wear a lot of makeup when I go out in public, because my weathered skin is so grotesque that my unpainted face will scare small children. It’s an annoyance: when I was a young thing, especially during the hippy-dippy period when women went around bare-faced all the time, I could go out unpainted without feeling self-conscious. But now: not so much. Two layers of L’Oreal foundation covers a lot of brown spots and scars.

And carries a lot of staphylococci, presumably: I apply it with a brush, which gets dipped back into the cream between smearings-on.

First stop was the new Sprouts in Encanto, where yes, they did have several brands of the coconut oil nostrum, including one in a house brand that was significantly cheaper than any of the offerings at Amazon. Plus of course some wonderful red potatoes on sale. And a beautiful squash…and…and…

Moving on: of course, as usual, the road was under construction. Getting out of the parking lot involved dodging an 18-wheeler and a ninny in an SUV who felt entitled to take his half out of the middle of the road (and whom the truck driver also had to dodge), then navigating a fine mess at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Osborn.

I needed, also, a bottle of red table wine. Sprouts’s choices of wine range from poor to mediocre, all of them overpriced. So I needed to dodge through the construction to get into the large, fairly fancy Safeway across the street.

Wow! I’d forgotten how massively gentrified the stores in that area had become. Holy mackerel! At the Safeway, I saw a bottle of wine that Costco sells for $9…on offer for eighteen bucks! No, thank you.

This added a trip to said Costco.

Up to Costco through the homicidal traffic. It being Wednesday, almost noon by then, the place was as uncrowded as it’s been in weeks. I stand in a very short line and buy a bottle of $9 wine and a bottle of $7 wine.

How hard is this?

Very, apparently. The cashier charges up a lifetime supply of butter to me, which really belonged to the guy in front of me. Said guy doesn’t notice.  Neither do I until I pick up the box his sidekick hands me. He says he didn’t charge me for the butter, and they take the stuff back. I head for the door, but check the receipt on the way. Yes, he did charge me.

It’s the unsalted variety, which I use. I go back and say “you did charge me.” His sidekick is about to take it back to reshelve it. I say I’ll take it, by way of avoiding the hassle of standing in line again and wrestling with the cash card to get the money back. Fortunately, it’s the unsalted variety, which I prefer, and so that’s one fewer thing I’ll have to buy in the future.

Onward.

Cruise east and north across the city to get to the Walgreen’s I habituate. This entails driving through a residential neighborhood to avoid having to wait to turn left at the interminable red light at Montebello and 15th Avenue. Which is OK, but a nuisance.

Arriving in the vicinity of the Walgreen’s, I see it’s a good thing I decided to try the Safeway downtown, because as usual the City has the streets torn up and getting catty-corner across the street into my usual Safeway haunt would have presented a headache.

In the Walgreen’s, I finally find the make-up I’ve been searching for. Damn! I kick myself: I should’ve gone to Walgreen’s first, not hoped I could find replacements at Target.

Yesterday I spent $90 at the damn Target on foundation, mineral powder, blusher that was the wrong color, and eye paint, but still didn’t find the products I prefer.

At the Walgreen’s, hallelujah sisters, I do find a blusher whose color probably will be OK. And they have a lady who runs the toiletry and make-up department: unlike the Target lady, this one knows what she’s doing. I ask for matte eyeshadow. She does not look at me as though I’ve lost my mind. And she does indeed find a box of the stuff I want, over on the Neutrogena shelf. They also have the L’Oreal gold accent shadow I like, which I grab before it evaaporates.

The new mode is to sell all eyeshadows in “sets.” so to get the color you want, you have to buy a box that contains upwards of five colors: four or more shades you don’t want. This is exceptionally annoying, but far as I can tell can’t be avoided. The Walgreen’s still had a few of the glittery gold eye stuff I wanted to replace in single pads. But to get the matte brown I need to use as eyebrow fill-in, I had to buy five colors.

Shee-ut! $30, all told.

So I’ve now spent $120 replacing the makeup contaminated by the late, great staph infection. Ducky.

Now to get home…  Hah! The city has the intersection of Seventh Street and Glendale blocked for construction, too. So now, to go west and north I have to backtrack a block, come back around, navigate the left-turn at the intersection, veer through a neighborhood, beat my way through to Central to go north. Lovely.

The dog, of course, has peed on the floor while I was gone. Again. I’ve already cleaned up two brown mounds this morning, before leaving the house. Is there any question why I have a staph infection all over my hand and arm?

In cruising the Web this morning, I learned that rubbing alcohol — which I used in hopes of disinfecting my computer’s case and touch-pad — does NOT disinfect. To the contrary. It’s exceptionally counterproductive in the case of S. aureus. It not only does not kill staphylococcus, it enhances the bacteria’s film, which it produces and which harbors the little bastards.

Holy fuck.

The only way to kill S. aureus is to clean well with water and detergent. And of course…you can’t very well apply those substances to a computer keyboard, hm? The CDC says about the best you can do is equip the keyboard with one of those plastic covers, which  can be removed and washed in a sink.

Holy shit. As though this damn computer isn’t hard enough to use?

I wonder if I’m going to have to buy another MacBook? Like I have a spare three grand laying around for the purpose.

Oh, well. At least I found this out before I wasted my time scrubbing down all the door handles in the house with rubbing alcohol.

The coconut oil, by the way, is extremely soothing and makes your itch feel a lot better. It also makes you smell like a walking Mounds bar. But if you don’t dislike the parfum de palme, it’s something to know about.

Now I have to cover my face with the new make-up and run off to choir practice. And so…away…

Use It Up or (Dammit) THROW IT OUT

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So I’ve spent the past few days helping some dear friends move out of their home of 40 years. They sold it, successfully, and now they’re moving into a very attractive and comfortable life-care community. I’d call it the Queen Mary on a Concrete Foundation…it’s quite the luxury liner.

These are folks who live a normal life in a normal home: they’re not what you’d call, by any stretch of the imagination, “hoarders.” They buy what they need. Over time they use it up and go back to Costco to buy some more of what they need. They have a lifetime of tschotskes of the sort that come to rest in the homes of ordinary people: pieces of cherished artwork (some of it valuable); several exceptionally handsome (and exceptionally expensive) lamps, the usual collections of dishes and pots and pans and glasses and whatnot; a computer and a desk and a filing cabinet and a TV and a couple of easy chairs and all those good things. If you were invited into their home, you would find it pleasantly middle class and comfortable.

But…my friend Ms. J has lived there 40 years. She and her late husband built the house all that many years ago. Mr. L, her present husband, married her and moved in heaven only knows how long ago — I do not, but can say they’ve been married as long as I’ve known them, which is some 18 years.

It’s a two-bedroom house, explicitly and attractively designed for an aging couple to spend the rest of their lives in. The late husband passed; she remarried, and now the two incumbents are in their 90s. They decided the wisest thing to do, at this point, would be to follow their friends into the environs of the upscale old-folkerie, where they will be cared for like passengers on some grand luxury liner until they shuffle off this mortal coil.

Sensibly enough, they signed up for a two-bedroom apartment, which they got. It’s a very, very nice place. And it appears, at a glance, to be about the same size as their long-time manse. It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms. A separate dining room, a nice living room.  A full-size kitchen. A washer and dryer. A truly spectacular view off the sixth floor. Three restaurants for you to dine in with your monthly chow allowance. Cleaning help included. A library on-campus. Clubs, activities, transportation…the certifiable Life of Riley.

But…

A two-bedroom house with 40 years of seniority does not easily fit into a brand-new two-bedroom apartment.

The apartment doesn’t have a garage: the garage that has sheltered a lifelong accrual of collected valuables. And most to the point, the garage that housed a large upright freezer, the home of innumerable Costco Lifetime Supplies of various food items. Nor does an apartment have the kind of closet space and kitchen space offered up by a house, even a modestly sized house.

Much of the stuff that couldn’t be moved or that is now simply redundant will be offered up in an estate sale, getting it out of their hair, out of their adult children’s hair, and out of the movers’ hair.

What a job! Moving is always a challenge…but when you’ve been in a place for 40 years, it’s more than a mere challenge. “Ordeal” might be le mot juste.

I was reminded by this adventure of the many (many!) times I’ve held forth on the subject of decluttering, dating way back to 2007. And…then was reminded that I need to put my money where my mouth (or keyboard) is. It has been quite a while since I’ve shoveled out the Funny Farm. So this week, I think, I’ll go through the closets and toss out anything I haven’t worn (or wish I hadn’t worn…) in the past year. Also need to go through the garage cabinets, kitchen cabinets, and office closet to get rid of things I’m just not using.

This is a good thing to do whether you live in your shack until the end of your life or are forced to move to some place that’s easier or cheaper to care for.

Moving is difficult under the best of circumstances. But when you’re in your 90s and you’ve been accumulating stuff in the same place for the past 40 years, it’s quite the nightmare. Whether you move or whether you shuffle off  this mortal coil in place, leaving your worldly goods to your unlucky offspring, you need NOT to accumulate junk.

That was something my father the sea captain knew by habit, since most of the time he lived in a first mate’s or captain’s cabin on a tanker: i.e., one room. My mother also knew not to stash too much junk — and he wouldn’t allow her to — because they moved so often. But y’know…I’ve been in this house for almost 15 years and hope to live here until I die. Whether I get shanghaied into an old-folkerie or just leave this place to my son, it would be a good idea to clean out the unused junk now, while I still have the strength to do so, and then to make it a habit to throw out anything I haven’t used in the prior year. I sure don’t want my son to have to deal with shoveling out all the junk you can collect over a lifetime.

This month being January, a thought occurs: Why not designate January as THE annual decluttering month? Then you would be reminded to shovel out the redundant junk on a regular basis, instead of getting around to the job only when forced to it. January is a perfect time: right after Christmas, when you’ve presumably acquired some new junk to find a home for.