M’hijito is stuck in Show Low, and Charley the Golden Retriever is dying. He may already be dead as I write this. My son is beside himself with agony and I’m beside myself with sorrow and worry for him.
He drove up to the high country, taking the dog with him, to go camping and fishing on the Rez. At Show Low a wide spot in the road north of Payson, he stopped to take a rest and let Charley stretch his legs. When he got him out of the car, Charley tumbled out onto the ground and he discovered the dog couldn’t walk or even stand.
Charley hates riding in the back of M’hijito’s new car. He didn’t like riding in the old car, which was a sedan, but for reasons no one has been able to figure out, he simply loathes the Ford Escape, and he gets stressed whenever he’s made to ride any distance in it. M’hijito thought his panting and carrying on was a manifestation of the usual stress, and when he saw the state the dog was in, he thought Charley was having a stress attack.
He called me on his cell. I advised him to take the dog to a vet and looked up the main vet in Show Low, who has a 4.5-star consumer rating, interestingly enough. He rushed the dog over there, where he was told the problem was heat prostration.
The dog’s temperature was 107 degrees!
As they were trying to cool Charley off, they were blaming my son — the vet evidently thought he’d left the dog locked in the car and gone off.
That is absurd. My son dotes on that dog and would never do any such thing. Charley was in the back of an SUV with the air-conditioning going the whole time. I called Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic and asked if it was possible that the back of a Ford Escape could get hot enough to harm an animal if the vents in back were nonfunctional. He said he didn’t think so: because the front seats are separate, like captain’s chairs, enough cool air from the front vents would blow between and under the seats to keep the dog from overheating.
At any rate, now M’hijito blames himself.
The vet said Charley would probably not live until this morning, but if he does live until today, he will probably die in agony sometime during the day. In that case, he suggested, it was best to put the dog down.
I’m quite sure my son would never have left that dog in a hot car: that would be utterly against his nature. And though I expect the back of an SUV could get warm, I’d be surprised if it would reach the level of “hot” — as in 107 degrees. Once you’re up the hill above Black Canyon City, the climate cools significantly, so even if the AC system were not working, if it was reasonably cool in front it shouldn’t have been dangerously hot in back.
A little research shows that dogs can suffer vestibular strokes or heart attacks, which would elicit symptoms similar to Charley’s…except for the 107-degree temperature. That says the animal was overheated and is definitely life-threatening. More research shows that about 50% of dogs afflicted with heat stroke survive, if they receive care soon enough. Of course, we don’t know how long Charley was in this condition: my son had been on the road four or five hours by the time he discovered it, and an hour of that time was spent stopped dead by road construction. Maybe the car could have heated up that much if it wasn’t moving forward — I understand the construction is in the Salt River Canyon, which would be a couple hours outside of Show Low.
And still more research reveals that the longer a dog stays in a veterinary hospital, the more likely it is to survive. Although…that’s deceptive.
One study of 42 dogs that presented with heatstroke found that patients that died from the condition did so within 24 hours after development of signs. Those that were able to survive longer than 48 hours lived.11 In the same study, all of the dogs that were hospitalized longer than 72 hours survived, despite evidence of multiorgan involvement.
The thing is…if most heat stroke victims die within the first day, then the ones who survive are more likely to live anyway. So to say that 100% of dogs hospitalized longer than 72 hours survive is only to say that dogs who manage to get through 72 hours alive are not going to die of the heat stroke.
The key to survival, though, is rapid treatment: cooling the dog’s body temperature back to normal as quickly as possible. But…if this happened to him while they were stuck in the construction mess, Charley would have been suffering that life-threatening elevated temperature for a two or more hours before M’hijto discovered it.
M’hijito wants to bring the dog back down into Phoenix today. But that will entail getting someone to help him. I offered to drive up there, but the thing is, if he’s going to be in the back of the vehicle tending to the dog, we would have one (1) driver to get two cars down the hill.
His friends are in Payson. He’s talked to them and apparently they’re willing to come meet him and help him get the dog back into the city. His father and the new wife have also said they’ll go up there.
However, given the business about the survival rate, I’ve suggested he should leave the dog there, without interrupting the IV and oxygen for an afternoon. He could drive down and pick me up, and we could then turn around and drive right back up the Rim. Today is Saturday: his vet will be closed by the time he can get back into town. So bringing Charley down today will mean risking his life further.
Does it seem to you that even MORE retail stores are going out of business than ever before?
Of course, there’s all the mall closings, which we know about: Sears, Penney’s, Macy’s going down like dinosaurs in a meteor crash. But now the trend seems to be reaching smaller specialty stores.
Drove over to the Tuesday Morning store about two miles from here and discovered, LO! An empty space where the shop used to be.
That’s too bad, because it was a cool little store. I think they consign things that don’t sell in a timely manner at larger retailers, so there’s a lot of nifty housewares in there, bedding, and even nice area rugs. Well….there was a lot.
I’d gone over there to try to buy a wall clock and a couple of pillows. My faithful old battery-run clock, the one that’s run for a good 20 years or more, fell off the garage wall and broke. Meanwhile, two very cheap pillows were needed for a little DIY project that’s under way.
The recent junket to the vet’s office through 110-degree heat reminded me that the damn Venza was NOT designed for dogs. Holy sh!t, what was I thinking when I bought that thing?
You can fold the back row of seats down, all right. Though they don’t lie flat(!), it’s good enough for government work. I guess. BUT…the result is a big gap behind the front seat, where the stupid back seats don’t fold flush against the front seats. The back seats do not scoot forward, so you can’t adjust them to close up the space. If I have to stop short with a dog in the back, the dog is going to fly forward and tumble into one of those holes. If the car is going very fast, the dog is going to get hurt; even below freeway speeds, enough momentum will break legs and sprain backs and break teeth.
With the seat backs up, the only remotely safe way to carry the dogs without wrestling them into cages, there’s no freaking air conditioning in the space the dogs have to occupy. Can you believe it? There’s only one tiny AC vent for back passengers!
How could I not have noticed that when I was test-driving it? How? Because I imagined Toyota’s designers have common sense. That seems to be something they took leave of sometime after they built the 2000 Sienna, which had four back AC vents. Stupidly, I imagined they would run AC vents at ceiling level for the Venza’s backseat passengers. WTF?
So the dogs cook when I have to drive them someplace in the summertime. The only way to protect them from the risk of overheating is to expose them to the risk of broken bones. Or worse.
M’hijito came up with an idea: Stuff pillows down into the hole. Excellent!
Conveniently, the two cheap pillows I’d bought at Tuesday Morning were wretchedly uncomfortable to sleep on, so I’d stashed them away. In that stash, too, were three very old and grungy pillows that could also be sacrificed for this project.
These worked to fill the space between the back and front seats, but they still left enough of a drop that a dog might get hurt or stuck if she fell in there. So I needed two more cheap uncomfortable pillows. Where better to get them than Tuesday Morning, source of the original cheap uncomfortable pillows?
So I was kinda shocked and annoyed to find the place GONE. Only alternatives — a Bed Bath & Beyond at the Colonnade and a Target way to hell and gone down by the Costco — are further away than I feel like driving in today’s heat. So what does that leave?
By golly, it was 80 degrees out here on the back porch come dawn this morning. At 9 a.m., it’s no warmer! And here comes Ruby, bearing a mummified orange. Cassie has taught her the delights of chewing up the things…and there she goes, carrying it to the Nest in the back bathroom.
Apparently quite a monsoon blew through during the night: friends who were leaving for vacation last night were marooned at the airport. But as usual, nothing much was up here except for some dust. No sign of any significant rain in our parts. {chortle!} We live in the desert part of the desert. Wonderful, fat-looking gray and blue-gray clouds still shade the desert floor, and for the first time in three months one can sit in one’s yard to play with one’s computer.
And that’s about the extent of what I’d like to do today.
I really need to make a Costco run but don’t see how that’s going to happen this week. Normally Wednesday is the best day: smallest crowds. Monday is not so good, because they tend to run out of stock over the weekend. They restock Monday afternoon, meaning pickings are relatively slim on the first day of the workweek. Plus the employees tend to be a little crabby on Monday.
L’orange de mon chien
The rest of the week looks even less promising, though: every day is filled up with one appointment or activity after another. Doctor’s appointment, dentist’s appointment, vet’s appointment: all of them scheduled smack in the middle of the time one would usually use for midweek errand-running.
Some of this stuff I could probably buy at Safeway, but a few Costco-specific things are running low. And, come to think of it, I need gas if I’m going to have to drive from pillar to post every day for the rest of this week and out to the Indian Reservation for this week’s bidness networking group meeting.
Hm. The vet appointment isn’t until 2 p.m. tomorrow. That would leave time for a Costco run in the morning, assuming I fly low, get back here early enough to pile the perishables in the fridge and freezer in time to shoot back out the door at 1:00. That would maybe be preferable to surfacing at the store and finding them low on produce and meat. I’m pretty picky…and when I’m paying that much for a lifetime supply of whatever, I want some choice in the matter.
Wednesday: out of the question. Doctor’s appointment in the morning, way to Hell and gone in Maryvale (a 45-minute drive each way). Then as soon as I get home, it’s off to meet a friend and go in search of some upholstery fabric.
She has a lovely dining room set,vintage Ethan Allen from the 1940s or 50s, which she found some years ago at a thrift store in Sun City. It still has the original, pretty damn handsome seat covers, but they’re wearing thin and need to be re-upholstered. So we’re going in search of upholstery fabric.
These days, that’s easier said than done. One of the many “joys” of surviving into the early 21st century is finding that most fabric stores have shut down. The Fabric World nearest to us closed years ago — and it didn’t carry much upholstery material, anyway. There’s an expensive store out in Scottsdale — you have to take out a bank loan to recover your favorite easy chair with stuff from that place. But up Cave Creek Road there’s a dingy but highly serviceable joint called Fabric Depot. Shopping there is a bit of a project. Though staff is anxious to help and will climb halfway to the stratosphere to get down whatever suits your whim, the stock is indeed arranged almost to the warehouse-high ceiling. So it takes some doing to find what you want, and then you have to get ahold of it.
I think she might be able to take the chairs to Ethan Allen and get them recovered there…but Ethan Allen being what it is, that could be outside the budget.
The shop in Sun City simply defies belief. It looks like an ordinary grungy thrift store. But what’s happening is, when some out-of-stater’s parents croak over in Sun City or have to go into a nursing home, the kids don’t want to be bothered with coming to Arizona and shoveling out the house, so they’ll just consign everything to these places — there’s a whole strip mall full of them. NG (that would be SDXB’s New Girlfriend) got a Stickley dining room set there!!!!!!! For a handful of peanuts.
Amazingly, she didn’t know what Stickley is…I had to explain it to her. Neither, apparently, did the former owners’ kids. Ohhh well: their loss, NG’s gain.
So late last night I finished drafting the current index and shipped it off for the author to review. That is now off my desk, and I am reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned.
The book is a collection of testimonios — short memoirs, as it were — by second-generation Mexican Americans who climbed out of the agricultural fields of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys to go on to universities, often acquiring graduate degrees and law degrees. Their stories are extremely interesting…sometimes jaw-dropping, come to think of it. The book should come out in another few weeks or a couple of months. I’ll let you know when it appears — it’s so worth reading!
Because the contributions are engagingly written and look like informal reflections, I thought this index would be a piece of cake — something I could toss off in a couple of days or so.
Not so much. It turns out that despite the highly readable style, the content is really very dense: ended up with fourteen single-spaced pages of index entries! So…that took a minute or two to assemble…
Along the way, I discovered that this new MacBook, running under Sierra, will in fact run Apple’s “dictation” program. The old one would not; it would read aloud, but it would not take dictation. So…let’s try that:
Along the way, I discovered that this new MacBook, running under Seo, Will in fact run apples “dictation program” the old one would not; it would read aloud, but it would not take dictation. So… Let’s try that:
Heeeee! It ain’t perfect… Sierra becomes “Seo” (that could be my pronunciation), and the future tense of be is turned into some guy’s name. In playing with it, I learned that it recognizes a lot of Spanish words…but not all of them. Mocorito, for example, comes across as Margarita. 😀
I wonder what happens if you spell out “apples” with punctuation… E a PPLE’s
ooops! That didn’t work!! No spell, just punctuation: apple’s
Chortle! Well, it’s getting there. Give it a few more years.
What I can’t tell is whether there’s a way to teach the dictation function new words and spellings. Apparently not, at least as of about 2015. It’s not something that entertains me SO much that I’m gonna run out and buy Dragon. But it is kind of handy.
Last night when I was too pooped to type a multisyllabic word correctly, I highlighted the typo-ridden term and read it into the dictation program…and voilà! Out it came, to perfection!
What really is handy, though, is using the read-aloud function for proofreading. Along about 9:00 last night, I hesitated to launch it to proof the almost-finished index copy. But I strongly desired to be finished, and I was getting tired…as in too tired to notice small errors. “Alex,” the system’s selected “voice,” chugged right through the damn thing, pronouncing everything to perfection, so that by following along I was able to pick up a lot of typos and oddities.
The other day I realized that, at some point along the line, Stephen Hawking was using “Alex” as his electronic voice. He has good taste: Alex is the only one of that bunch whose diction is consistently pleasing.
It’s almost 11 in the morning and I have done exactly zero work, unless you call cleaning the pool “work.” The pool has now fully recovered from its algae infestation. While I’ve been distracted with the indexing project, I’ve shamelessly neglected the hole in the backyard full of water — days have gone by with zero attention. It has rained. Wind has blown. Algae-feeding sunlight has streamed down. The pile of floating chlorine tablets has dissolved away to nothing. The water is bathwater-warm. Yet this morning there was not a bit of moss clinging to the walls!
Underwater with work: shot off the latest Chinese math paper just as an indexing project came in. By yesterday afternoon, managed to mark up pages and create a five-inch-high stack of notecards. Entered an inch or so worth in the draft document.
Problem is, any given keyword recorded in this way may point to a topic that needs to be documented more carefully. So for about every fourth or fifth keyword, I end up having to run a “search” through the PDF. This is time-consuming and mind-numbing…but alas, it usually does unearth a few more indexable instances of the term. All of which means, put briefly, that it takes for-freaking-ever to type up the index terms, and then they have to be alphabetized and formatted to the publisher’s standard.
Alas, we don’t have forever: this thing has to go back to the publisher on August 2, but before that it has to be reviewed by not one but two authors and their changes entered. It will be a gold-plated miracle of we make the deadline at this rate.
Yes…it is true: I’m not working; I’m blogging. At 7 in the morning I get to do something other than work. For a minute or two, anyway.
Stupidly, I subscribed to Nextdoor, the social media site that puts neighbors in touch with each other. It’s interesting…but… Overall its effect is to reinforce one’s feeling that the neighborhood is being over-run with drug-using, potentially thieving derelicts. The other day on my way back from the fruitless effort to get the present stack of page proofs printed at the Metrocenter UPS store, I counted nine such folk — that’s just on the main drags, not in the alleys and on the neighborhood streets.
One of the neighbors was cleaning up the alley and found a fine bum encampment hidden behind a transformer. In it they found…
11 cell phones (older Kyocera and Alltec models. Cases to newer ones present but no phone)
30+ chargers and cables
A/V cables
License plate with current tags (97 Chevy)
Jewelry
Sports watches
Laptop
Credit/store cards (numerous different names)
Dismantled bike frames, parts, gears, broken locks
Personal items like keepsake pins and work anniversary memorabilia
Purses, backpacks, and makeup bags
Once a nice bike. Probably got more for the parts than he could for the whole thing.
The police responded that they weren’t interested in this loot because none of it constituted evidence of a crime. Right. Miscellaneous credit cards, a license plate hot enough to singe your fingers, a stash of expensive watches…clearly innocent stuff, hm?
Here’s our guy’s bed, cuddled up against the resident’s backyard. Doesn’t that look cozy?
The other day I had a long chat with a group of enthusiastic city bureaucrats in a teleconference about lightrail safety. This materialized, presumably, from some rant I put on Facebook or waypoints. No doubt I remarked online — truthfully — that I do not feel safe riding the lightrail because of the number of vagrants who use it as free air conditioning. All of these shady characters are dumped off at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way, whence they osmose into our neighborhood. The city is accommodating them by installing a meth clinic around the corner and encouraging nonprofits to build homeless shelters. (Note that NarcAnon suggests there’s a fair amount of money to be made in the meth clinic business. Some investors seem to think so, too.)
The group members were very nice, and I’m impressed that someone in the City gives a damn whether some old lady feels safe riding the train. One of the speakers, who before acceding to her present position had a long and successful career as a police officer, pointed out that the city has increased patrols and enforcement along the train tracks where they run north from Camelback up Conduit of Blight. And it is true, arrest rates have skyrocketed along that stretch.
But: it doesn’t address the problems: homelessness, vagrancy, and drug addiction, deliberately brought into reasonably quiet neighborhoods by an ill-conceived, incredibly expensive trophy public-transit toy.
First, let us address the safety on the train issue: you can put as many officers on the street as you can spare, but it doesn’t put them on the train, where they need to be.
SDXB, recently back from Seattle, reports that their lightrail has a conductor on every car, and the person stays there and keeps the peace…as well as collecting fares, which are rarely collected here. You can jump on our train in north Phoenix and ride all the way to Mesa with a good chance that no one will ask to see your ticket. The cars are stupidly designed in that there’s no passway between them. So if you have four cars on a train, you have four separate pods. That means a single conductor cannot walk the length of the train collecting tickets and cannot see the length of the train to keep an eye on the goings-on.
It also means that if somebody who stinks or who is arguing with his voices or is shaking people down for change or shooting up or masturbating or pestering women gets into the car, you can’t get up and walk to another car: you have to get off the train and stand on the platform until another one comes along.
Next, let us consider the folly of the train project itself: the most efficient way to move traffic around a sprawling city like the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area is by bus, shuttle, and car. The infrastructure for those vehicles was already here. To build the light-rail system, which can only go where the rails are laid, the city has had to spend$70 million per mile!Think of that. That’s $1.4 billion for the first 20 miles.
Just imagine what $1.4 billion would have done for the homeless in this city. For the drug addiction problem. For our bottom-of-the-barrel K-12 system. Or how many electric buses and shuttles it could have bought.
Holy Sh!t.
In the folly department, our crew from the City reported that our city fathers and mothers intend to continue building the train tracks to Metrocenter, the ghost mall of which we have spoken in the past. For this to happen, the line will have to cross over Interstate 17. In the past, the Arizona Department of Transportation has stated that they will not allow that to happen, because sooner or later they intend to convert the I-17 along that stretch into a double-decker freeway. That plan seems to have been ditched…or at least, they’re not talking about it in any venue that ranks in a Google search. 😀
In terms of people-moving, doubling the freeway’s carrying capacity — even though that, too, will be quite the little horror — probably makes more sense than the train because within the next 10 or 20 years, most cars and many trucks will run on electricity. And probably a large number of those will be self-driving, cutting the accident rate and eliminating the Sunday drives up the wrong side of the freeway.
If we must put billions of dollars into transportation schemes, why not dedicate it to building an infrastructure for the inevitable self-driving electric cars?
Folly continued: The idea that developers are going to fall all over themselves to renovate the Ghost Mall or to build offices and apartments there is…well, a pipe dream that makes one wonder what who put into whose pipes. That whole district is dangerously blighted: it’s the sort of place where you reflexively check to be sure your car doors are locked when you drive through. There’s not enough customer base to support a middle-class shopping area there — that’s why Metrocenter crashed and burned. Right now they’re building a Walmart Supercenter amongst the ruins…not the kind of venue guaranteed to attract the young urbanites who ride from their pricey mid-town digs to their downtown or ASU jobs. About the best one could do is try to lure light industry or a big medical center. Most likely, though, the site will end up as a gigantic park-&-ride.
That alone is silly: why would you drive 40-plus minutes to Metrocenter from the westside or Anthem and then park your car in 110-degree heat in a high-theft area, walk through said high-crime area to stand in the heat, and climb into a vehicle that will put you elbow-to-elbow with folks who need a bath and a handout?
Finally, let us consider the question of whether, as the city asserts, the lightrail system really does jack up property values and does lead to upscale development.
It’s undoubtedly true for certain districts and certain demographics. Studies have shown that the effect is modest, and in some cases may be negative. In the Phoenix area, there’s a certain set of urbanites, most of them in well-paying jobs, who prefer to live in centrally located areas — first, because they dislike commuting long distances and second because they want to take advantage of downtown and mid-town cultural amenities. My ex-DH and I were among those: we lived in the centrally located historic district specifically for those reasons, and because we could afford to put our child in private schools. Those people will regard a lightrail or a trolley system as a convenient urban amenity and will ride it.
And certainly, mid-town and downtown Phoenix’s economic development has exploded.
But interestingly, that does not apply everywhere. The slum apartments across Conduit of Blight are still slum apartments, despite several years of shiny tooting and honking up that road. The abandoned golf course behind the slum apartments is still a derelict piece of property, one that houses a number of human derelicts. There’s no serious sign of fancy development up here.
•Some people work in places where they can park for free or for a modest cost and so have no interest in rubbing shoulders with their fellow citizens twice daily on buses or trains.
•Some have sporadic or contract work to which they have to drive, and whose customers provide parking.
•Some prefer to live in the suburbs where there are more children for their kids to play with, more people like themselves, and at least a shot at usable public schools.
•Some — make that “most of us” — can’t afford to live in those “value-improved” districts. Downtown and mid-town rental rates here rival Portland‘s and Seattle‘s…and believe me, Phoenix ain’t Portland and it ain’t Seattle.
What seems to be happening is that while the thing pushes property values up in some areas, it may push them down in others — areas where people have no vested interest in riding the lightrail to work and where the train serves mainly to transport derelicts into formerly placid neighborhoods. The City no doubt knows this. Clearly the strategy of building shelters and installing a meth clinic belies the claim that the lightrail merrily improves districts through which it moves. A population of drug addicts and mentally ill bums does nothing to increase property values.
Here in the ’hood, there’s not a thing we can do about the train: it’s already built. Unless we sell our homes and move a long way from Folly Central, we’re pretty much stuck with the result.
So…what can be done?
Well, to start with, take some of the funds planned to build still more miles of track — which as we can see must amount to billions of dollars — and apply the money to the problems of homelessness, untreated mental illness, drug addiction, and health care for the indigent. The Man Who Is Not Dog, for example, had pinkeye — no, not red eyes from drug use, but an itchy infection in one eye — that clearly was untreated. He didn’t even have a place to wash the sweat off, much less get his infected eye treated.
•Provide SRO-type housing for single homeless men and women — not religion-based, a status that repels many non-believers.
•Provide medical care targeted at specific issues common in that demographic.
•Provide mental health care and counseling that does not substitute one addictive drug for another and is not thinly disguised preaching.
•Engage neighborhoods in empathizing and working with the poor: possibly create grants to provide services that reliably get people off the streets, out of established neighborhoods and parks, and into SROs and off of drugs (alcohol included).
•Provide grants to landlords to upgrade deteriorating apartments in return for dedicating some portion of the complex to homeless housing or space for service facilities caring for the homeless.
The point is this: Just driving a light-rail train along a route and adding a bunch of police officers is not going to increase property values or get the people whose neighborhoods are damaged to like it. Or persuade people who’d rather drive to ride it.
* From 1 PM MST this afternoon through late tonight
* near-record levels of moisture will result in heavy rainfall
with any thunderstorms that develop this afternoon and evening.
Localized accumulations over one inch in a very short amount of
time may lead to flash flooding.
You should see the black mass to the east. Something bloody scary this way comes. The sky is grumbling and mumbling angrily, and it’s wayyyy too early for those shenanigans: only 5:00 p.m.
Locally, only Faux News is covering the storm, amazingly enough. But maybe not: local news coverage is basically dead. The National Weather Service is reporting it, but in a technical way that most of the troglogdytes couldn’t begin to figure out. This is why we need strong local news media.
Oh well. We do have dogs. The dogs are visibly scared. Managed to get them fed and wrung out. Now they’re hiding in the house.
Welp, I’d better go disconnect the computers from their power sources and check that the lanterns have batteries.
Enjoy, those of you who live in more temperate climes! 😀
M’hijito is stuck in Show Low, and Charley the Golden Retriever is dying. He may already be dead as I write this. My son is beside himself with agony and I’m beside myself with sorrow and worry for him.
