Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

How to Restore a Tired Whiteboard

by

Can you believe that it was four years ago that I dreamed up the idea of velcroing a whiteboard calendar to the door to the garage, where I would be forced to look at the current to-do’s whenever I fly out to the car? The calendar idea came in handy, but ultimately I found that a blank whiteboard with a to-do list — no dates painted onto it at the factory — was a lot more effective in goading myself to get down to work on the tasks of the day.

One reason for that is that the little squares on a calendar just don’t have enough room to list the 87 berjillion things you have to do every day. And another: I don’t necessarily go out in the car every day, and so don’t necessarily look at that calendar. The office though? Yes, I go in and out of that place many times a day.

Whiteboards don’t last forever. What makes them erasable is a smooth, polished surface. And after you’ve scoured that surface clean often enough — whether with a special whiteboard eraser or a microfiber cloth or a Kleenex or a paper towel — you inflict a matrix of scratches that merrily captures the ink from a Magic Marker. Eventually the whiteboard becomes a ghost-catcher, and the to-do’s of times past take up permanent residence there.

Not feeling much in the mood to pony up God only knows how much and to traipse around the city or search Amazon to acquire a new office whiteboard, I decided to try to restore its surface. Some Web-surfing elicited a number of suggestions. A bunch came up, some of them conflicting. So I contrived to amalgamate the ideas that seem to make the most sense, and came up with this:

Erase everything, as best you can, from the tired whiteboard.

You will need to acquire:

  • A bottle of 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol, available in supermarkets and drugstores
  • A can of Turtle Wax (carnauba wax for cars), which you can get in an auto supply store, a Home Depot or Lowes, or of course the ever-present amazon.com

First, wipe the whiteboard clean with 70% rubbing alcohol, easily available in any grocery store. This does get the marker residue off pretty well. I used one of those Mr. Clean wall scrubbers to facilitate the process, but on reflection suspect those things may be a bit harsh for the purpose.

Then, go away and let the surface dry completely.

Later, come back with a can of Turtle Wax. Slather on a generous layer of carnauba wax.

Go away again and let this stuff dry completely. I let it sit for several hours.

Now come back again and buff it shiny with a clean, dry, soft cloth.

Et voilà! Like new! No: BETTER than new!

Merchants: Savin’ me money!

by

So this morning I set out to visit Fry’s (a giant supermarket-cum-Target sorta store) and Costco, whereinat to get…

Costco

Pick up new glasses
Reload the cash card with next month’s budget for CC purchases
berries
cheese
melon
rubbing alcohol
possibly a new whiteboard

Fry’s

dog food
chocolate chips
Turtle wax
1 small bath rug
1 long-sleeved shirt, red
$80 in walkin’-around money

Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it?

The Fry’s is on the way to the Costco.

They do have bath rugs…in eye-popping hideous colors. Okay, I knew it would be hard to get a pale purple (we mean “lavender”) rug in an era when the couleurs du jour are battleship gray, eye-searing white, and crudely produced teal. But…jeez.

Rubbing alcohol: that’s a Costco purchase: I can get two bottles for little more than one would cost at a regular retailer, and since I use the stuff liberally in the making of window and tile cleaner, Costco is the desired vendor.

Chocolate chips: no problem, though they’re running low on the favored fancy varieties because of the holiday.

Shirt in the desired color: not a freakin’ CHANCE! Reference the colors of 2018, above. Ugh.

Turtle wax: nope. Any number of other car polishes, but no Turtle wax. Car polish is not what I want. What I want is effin’ carnauba wax (which is what Turtle wax is) with which to renew the aging surface of my beloved office whiteboard.

Dog food: noooo problem.

We come away with one package of dog food and a bag of bird seed that we happened upon, offered at a price that puts Walmart to shame.

That was it. Yes. One (1) item of the six things we went in there for. SO PISSED WAS I, between not being able to find 99.8 percent of the things I needed and getting behind some broad in the fast-service line who decided, as I pushed my cart up to the cashier’s conveyer belt, that she just had to run all the way  back to the far south wall of the store to pick up something she’d forgotten, THAT I forgot I needed to extract a little cash. So…what we have here is a fuckin’ waste of my time. Of the first water.

And so, away!

Heading catty-corner across the gigantic eight-lane intersection  to the Bed Bath & Beyond, I dodge effing entitled rich people every inch of the way and risk my life to get into the effin’ parking lot.

Into the BB&B, a kind of Magical Mystery Wonderland for the housewife and the homeowner.

Yeah. Yep. They had the desired lavender bath rug: Twenty-six dollah and change. Add the tax (10% here in lovely uptown Arizona) and it would come to something over $30.

For a shower mat.

Don’t think so, White Folks.

Movin’ on.

At Costco I retrieved the new Rx shades — having prepaid, it was just a matter of asking. BUT…contrary to past practice, staff there refused to reload my cash cards at the service desk. They instruct me to go through one of the checkout lines to get that done.

You understand: the parking lot is SO JAMMED that I had to park in the Penney’s lot to deposit my car and then hike hundreds of yards to get into the goddamn Costco. This means the lines at the checkout stands are halfway back to the meat department.

“Thank you,” say I. “I’ll do my shopping someplace else.”

Goddamnit.

So I figure the Home Depot on the way back toward the ‘Hood will have the carnauba wax. And the Walmart will have the rubbing alcohol. These are the only two sorta urgent items on the list. (I really, really do want to repair and resuscitate the beloved whiteboard!)

Cruising into the HD parking lot (some miles — read, “quite a few miles, in the context of a city”) — I’m reminded that an Auto Zone resides there. Hot dayum!

Park, go inside. I know they have Turtle wax there (I’ve bought Turtle wax at auto stores before), but of course can’t find it. The two (count’em, two) staffers are occupied at the customer service/checkout desk, serving (if you can imagine!) customers. The guy in front of me is trying to buy and install a spark plug, but he has a little problem: he knows NOTHING about spark plugs. The CSR is trying to instruct him, right down to showing him how to apply a pair of pliers.

Oh. Dear. God.

I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and finally break one of the two staff folks loose. This person instantaneously produces the desired can of Turtle wax, giving me an escape from a frustrating expedition across the parking lot at the Home Depot.

Filled with great joy, I proceed to the Walmart.

Searching for the rubbing alcohol, I discover — did you know this??? — that Walmart’s pharmacy shuts down over the lunch hour on weekdays.

Follows, doesn’t it?

Their clientele in that hardscrabble neighborhood includes not just the usual crew of welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients, but a fair number of actual working stiffs. You know: the sort of folks whose jobs require them to freaking BE THERE to collect their piddling hourly pay. Which in Arizona, a right-to-work-for-nothing state, you may be sure is piddling. Right. This requires them to do their shopping for prescriptions during the lunch hour or — their only choice, if the shop at Walmart — after a long day’s work.

Not that it mattered to me. It was just a subject of astonishment.

Moving on: I do find the rubbing alcohol, very cheap. Very pleased. And over on the other side of the store, I find a different variant of alcohol, which as you may have surmised by now, I also purchased.

Bogle. Best cheap wine on the market.

Holeeeeee shit.

So now I’ve blown the whole goddamn morning, I’m half-starved, and I’ve accomplished almost nothing of the chores I set out to accomplish.

Since that was how my day had gone, can you guess what happened next?

No, I did NOT crash any of my fellow homicidal drivers on the way home, or run over any of the locals’ small children as the little creatures played in the street. For that we may be grateful to God and to ingrained suspicion.

Now I get home and haul the junk out of the car and…and…find Cassie the Corgi. One of her hind feet is encased in petrified dog shit, cemented with a skiff of quarter-minus.

W

T

F

??????????

This, I did not see before I left home. But since she couldn’t have gotten outside to embellish her new boot with gravel while I was gone, she must have accomplished it before I left, and I must not have noticed.

My poor little dog.

This stuff has turned to concrete. But that has not stopped her from pissing all over the house. Luckily, she’s confined her pissing to the large incontinence mats I’ve thrown down in her favorite pissoires and shittoires. So it’s fairly easy to pick up. Damn good thing I acquired another Lifetime Supply of the things at Walmart yesterday.

I cannot wash or scrape said concrete off her little foot and hind end.

So I have to find a large cap of a large jar — thank goodness for Little Old Lady habits that do not allow one to throw away a container, no matter how much space it occupies — fill it with warm water spiked with Dawn, and force her to sit still long enough to soak the stuff off her foot. This is a trick, but fortunately (??) she’s too ill to put up much of a fight. Manage to soak and scrub her more or less clean. Fill up the garbage cans with incontinence mats and brown wet paper towels. Feel very, very happy for Bogle Vineyards.

Get onto Amazon and look up purple bath mats. And by God, there it is! Yeah. There it is. For about 1/3 the price Bed Bath & Beyond expects to collect.

How do these stores stay in business at all? Even if I had to pay for the delivery (which I do not), it would still come to less than BB&B was charging. And it’s exactly what I want. Not approximately what I want.

Yeah.

And that’s how my day has gone.

Yours?

 

Did a misdiagnosis kill my dog?

by

Cassie the Corgi is not dead yet, but it’s pretty clear that sooner or later the adrenal gland dysfunction that has afflicted her since I took her to MarvelVet to treat a cough will carry her away.

I’ve suspected for some time that the medications he gave her made her sicker — a lot sicker — than she was. The combination of prednisone and fluconozale, as it develops, is contraindicated: the makers of prednisone specifically say not to give the drug in the presence of a fungal infection, which is what Valley fever is. When combined with prednisone, fluconozale can interfere with adrenal gland function. Fluconozale has a variety of baleful side effects, all of which appeared in the dog. By the time I unilaterally took her off the drug, it apparently was too late to save her from those effects.

Yesterday out of curiosity I looked into the question of whether adrenal tumors and dysfunction could result from an infectious agent. She does sleep on my bed, and as a matter of fact I’ve been feeling fairly shitty of late, myself. Yes, I find, that is possible, but it sure as hell isn’t likely.

However, what should I stumble across at Science Direct but this interesting statement:

It is noteworthy that a major category of antifungal medications, the azoles, can adversely affect adrenal function presumably via liver cytochrome P450-mediated interactions. In particular, the inhibition of CYP3A4 (the most abundant cytochrome P450 in humans) significantly impacts steroid catabolism.133 The most potent antifungal that inhibits the P450 system is ketoconazole (an azole that currently is infrequently used in the USA and Europe), but adrenal insufficiency can occur during the administration of other azoles.134, 135, 136, 137 Additional important inhibitors of the P450 system include antibacterials (such as macrolides and isoniazid) and antiviral agents (such as ritonavir and delavirdine). Hence, clinicians should carefully consider the potential risks associated with the use of an azole or other medications that affect glandular function in patients at risk for, or with suspected or proven, adrenal dysfunction.

SON of a bitch!

This pretty much fits the bill. New Vet remarked that her liver is somewhat enlarged. And yes, Cassie surely IS “at risk for, or with suspected or proven, adrenal dysfunction.” She’s at risk for two reasons:

1. She’s an elderly dog.
2. Pembroke corgis are genetically presdisposed to adrenal sarcomas.

And then of course we have number 3: evidence of an adrenal mass seen in an abdominal ultrasound.

Okay. It’s probably unreasonable to expect a vet with a busy urban practice to be aware of an obscure study that appeared in 2014. BUT… Putting her on a powerful drug with nasty side-effects in the absence of proof that the dog had the disease for which the drug was intended? Not a good idea. The Valley fever test came back negative, which is not proof that his shoot-from-the-hip guess was wrong. But…if we’d waited four weeks and then tested her again, it probably would have shown positive if she really had VF. Which, in my opinion and in the ever-so-much-better-educated opinion of New Vet, she does not. Even if she did, a more conservative approach wouldn’t have harmed her significantly.

She no doubt did have the adrenal tumor. But like most such growths in aging dogs, it was asymptomatic and probably would have remained so until she died of something else. Now, though, we learn that the fluconozale very likely activated or aggravated a condition that was quiescent.

So in fact what we have here is an iatrogenic ailment that almost certainly will kill the dog within the next few weeks.

I don’t even know how to say how furious this makes me. Poor little Cassie! She was a healthy, active, middle-aged dog one day; a week later she was an elderly, sick dog.

Is it possible to sue a vet for malpractice?

i-Hassle

by

LOL! This all turned out (well…so far) for the better.

My friend La Bethulia kindly gave me an out-dated iPhone, she having updated hers a couple times since she bought this one.

Hot diggety! All we had to do was clear all her data off of it and then get the thing to connect me, magically, to some sort of service. Which service, I have no clue.

Well, doesn’t that sound simple?

Well…no. Nope. Not at-tall.

Finally, after about a 40-minute wait, I got an Apple tech on the phone. She ascertained that the problem is, the phone not only is set up to take her secret code, it has to be confirmed with a fingerprint!

INSIGHT!

Well, we did find that one of the two codes La B. guessed was the passcode actually IS the passcode, so that’s progress. We now have an appointment over the noon hour on Monday to traipse to Scottsdale to try to get this done. Between now and then, I guess I’ll have to figure out what carrier I want, something about which I have no clue and no desire for a clue.

{sigh} I hate these technohassles.

So I’m hoping that by Monday I’ll have my very first iPhone, and that from there I’ll be able to learn how to work it.

Never could learn how to use the Android phone that was my first foray into the cell phone jungle. So we shall see. This at least will not cost me an arm and a leg: if it’s another FAIL, that will make it slightly less aggravating. But they say iPhones are the easiest of these gadgets for old buzzards to learn. AND Apple stores give lessons in working the iPhone. Free.

…sorta…

Post-Thanksgiving

by

Thanksgiving: Great! Wonderful afternoon with my son’s excellent friends, their beautiful children, their charming grandparents. Wish I could socialize with these folks 365 days a year.

Dog: Still alive. More or less.

Paying work: Some pending but none active, thank God.

Phones: Blissfully silent!

The NoMoRobo system that Cox finally, after years of lobbying, made available to its customers has been in place for two days. And it’s been two days of peace and quiet! One, count it (1) scam call got through, this one with one of the weirdest Caller IDs I’ve seen. On two lines:

V123119420100687
1602875-9937

The second line evidently is a spoofed local number. The top number is emitted by a system called “V-dialler,” commonly used by crooks. Why it wasn’t blocked? Possibly because the series of figures represents a kind of time & date stamp (down to the second), which would mean there would many thousands of V-numbers to get registered in the blocking system. At any rate, that particular series got sent off to NoMoRobo. Unknown whether that’s useful, but typing the figures into NoMoRobo’s web form takes all of about 30 seconds…so, voilà.

Another nuisance call came through at ten after 9:00 this evening. It was intercepted. The bastards call at all hours, so the fact that the call is intercepted and forwarded after one ring is a problem: it doesn’t stop them from jangling you up, interrupting whatever you’re doing or even waking you out of a sound sleep. You could probably stop that simply by turning off the ringers on the phone (though I don’t think mine can be completely turned off). But that would mean you’d miss calls from friends and family, unless people could be trained to speak into your voicemail and wait to see if you hear and pick up.

The little dog survived Thanksgiving Day. Most of today she’s been sorta OK, though in the last hour or so she’s had some slippage. She just walked over to the chair where I’m sitting and fell down. And now she…what? She gets up, walks into the corne3r, and appeaers to be lost. She’s sniffing the floor like she’s trying to track something. And there she goes dowbn the hall, fo0llowed by a very puzzled Ruby. I’d better get up and see what’s going on now.

….

Hmmm…  Having some kind of episode. She’s very weak. These passages come and go, evidently in response to the emanations or not of the adrenal gland’s hormones. Now she’s shivering. Poor little beast.

Carried her out to the backyard, where she peed and then fell over trying to take a dump.

So, however you look at it, the future is brief for this little dog. We can let her limp along, I guess, as long as she has more good days than bad. That, I expect, will not be for much longer. This is the second day in a row when she’s had an episode that brought on collapse or near-collapse.

…

But it’s late. I tire. Tomorrow is another day. I guess.

Happy(?) Thanksgiving

by

Never fails, does it? All real emergencies, terrors, clogged drains, and minor inconveniences invariably happen on a holiday. Or, at best, on a Sunday.

Not so reliably on a Sunday, though: too many resources are open and available on Sunday.

But Thanksgiving? Christmas? The Fourth of July? Ohhhhh yeah! Whatever can go wrong will go wrong…on a major holiday!

Early this morning the dogs and I climb off the bed. Cassie seemed OK but tired, which wasn’t surprising because we spent yesterday evening at my son’s house. She doesn’t sustain even the most routine exercise well anymore: lately, if I try to walk her around the corner and back — about a tenth of a mile — she tires but seems OK. But the next morning she seems exhausted.

When she walked outside to do her thing, and I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But within the hour, she couldn’t stand up to eat her food. She just stood over her dish, shaking all over. She seemed almost paralyzed: couldn’t or wouldn’t walk, and though she was sort of standing, it was more like huddling upright. I had to lift her onto the doggy bed pillow, and then position her so her nose would not be pressed into the stuffing and suffocate her.  Even reclining, she continued to shake all over and she seemed unable to move on her own. It was almost like she’d had a stroke.

My son and I are supposed to go to our friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. This, we might add, is a bit of a BFD.

So the emergency vet’s receptionist said the wait there right now is several hours. And how much does a trip to the emergency vet cost? “A hundred dollars.” And that is  just to walk in the door.

If Cassie is dying, I figure she might as well die here as there.

But now I don’t know what to do about the Thanksgiving thing. I hate to leave her here to die by herself. But…on the other hand, I don’t know that she will die today. She has her ups and downs (though rarely as extreme as this). This isn’t the first time I’ve thought she was on the way out. Apparently these swings are a function of the adrenal gland tumor. Weakness, shaking, collapse, lack of energy, panting, rapid breathing are all symptoms of the thing. So, we might add, is “symptoms seem to come and go.”

There isn’t much I can do for her except let her rest. And frankly, other than putting her down right now, there’s not much a vet can do for her, either.

So I’m sitting there on the bed e-mailing this intelligence to my son: writing her obituary, as it were. And I hear {click click click click} up the hallway. Ruby is standing right there, so it ain’t her. Cassie has managed, somehow, to pull herself to her feet and she’s staggering up the hall toward the kithchen.

She’s walking and she’s stopped shivering all over. And…next thing y’know, she eats a whole plate of dog food..

Well, she staggered outside briefly. Then disappeared. Had to set Ruby to searching for her, which is a trick because one thing a corgi ain’t is a search dog. I’ve worked on the “find” command with that mutt until I’m blue in the proverbial face, and she still only vaguely gets the idea.

Found the patient inside, again unable to walk, shaking again. Picked her up and carried her back to the dog bed. She’s resting and has stopped shaking, at least as long as she’s reclining.

Okay, let’s try to think rationally here.

  • She doesn’t appear to be in much discomfort, except that she’s too weak to walk. That she ate an entire serving of dog food indicates that she’s not in a lot of pain.
  • I’m going to have to have her put to sleep in the next few days or, at most, weeks.
  • Therefore it doesn’t make a lot of sense to rack up a bill of hundreds of dollars to take her to an emergency vet.
  • Nor does it make sense to spend all of Thanksgiving Day sitting in a veterinary waiting room for something that ultimately can’t be helped.
  • If she’s going to die today, my being here will not change that.
  • But she’s probably not going to die today, given that she was able, eventually, to get up and eat, and given the pattern of ups & downs.

Unless things change a lot for the worse, I think I could safely go to our friend’s house. There’s little or nothing I can do for the dog here.

Next week, though, I’m afraid it’s going to be The Time. If she doesn’t pass through the veil today, I’ll have to take her up to one of the vets tomorrow or Monday.

This Event will present a whole series of new decisions:

• Do I get another dog?

If so, what kind of dog?
From where?

• Do I stay here in my house, or move away from the recrudescent Tony Situation?

If I’m right about what Tony is up to (let us hope not!), then I will need to get another German shepherd or similar protective, aggressive dog. There’s a reason I didn’t replace Anna with another GerShep: I’m too old to train and handle a large, high-drive dog safely. This fact inclines us to say “move away.”

• If I move, where do I go?

• Some friends are trying to sell their two-bedroom patio home, by way of moving themselves into an upscale old-folkerie. It’s a nice little house, centrally located, and I would buy it but for two things:

§ One of the reasons they’re moving is that they have a certifiably lunatic neighbor who has made a lot of trouble for them. Out of the frying pan, into the fire!!
§ It needs about $15,000 worth of renovations.

• Well. And there are some other things:

§ It’s two houses in from Central Avenue, a noisy main drag.
§ It’s in an HOA. I do not want to deal with an HOA.
§ The little development borders the canal, which is a superhighway for drug-addicted bums.
§ It’s within (loud) earshot of Sunnyslope High School, where the band practices and football games blast forth during the fall semester.
§ They’re asking more than it’s worth, IMHO, especially given that it needs new flooring, a new security gate in front, new landscaping, a gate on the west side through which to roll the garbage can by way of keeping the peace with the crazy next door…and on and on.

• For what I can pay, that leaves either Sun City or Fountain Hills, neither of which are within reasonable driving distance of my life.

If I stay here and Tony starts to do his thing again — frankly, I’d put money on it that he’s up to just that — then I will need to get a dog that’s big enough to be some protection. That represents a) expense and b) hassle. I’ll also need to add to the armory: really, I need a shotgun, because I’ve become too goddamn lazy to drag the pistol to the range and practice.

A new shotgun will cost several hundred bucks…as nothing compared to the cost of moving. I have some friends who are into armaments and so may be able to find someone who knows someone who’d like to sell Dear Old Dad’s heirloom. Unfortunately SDXB has already unloaded (heh) his. But a few hundred dollars is, indeed, as nothing compared to the cost of moving.

I might be able to get an older, fully socialized GerShep from the German Shepherd rescue. But that poses its whole new set of questions:

• How will Ruby take to a new room-mate?
• Given enough provocation, will this proposed GerShep exterminate Ruby?
• The German shepherd’s lifespan is nine to eleven years, during which one can expect to have to deal with some very expensive ailments. Do I really want to do that again? For a dog that I may have for, say, five years at the outside?

Here’s the Kid. And so, away.