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Whacked!

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Quite the little freshet blew in this afternoon. Along about 2 p.m., it got as dark as evening — you’d have thought it was 7 or 8 o’clock at night. Then a heckuva rain and windstorm hit.

Shortly, my neighbor Will e-mailed to report damage in his part of the ’hood: branches on a roof, gate down…  Naturally, after the sun came out the dogs and I had to go out to explore, along with all the other neighbors.

Aleppo pine, detail. Christian Ferrer. Creative Commons.
Aleppo pine, detail. Christian Ferrer. Creative Commons.

Across the road, my neighbors’ young paloverde tree looked like some cosmic hand had reached down out of the sky and smashed it from above. It lost one limb during the last storm, but this one flattened the thing.

On my old street, two blocks to the north, an Aleppo pine, uprooted, crashed to the ground. Fortunately, it fell into the street and not onto the neighbor’s house.

These pine trees, a popular landscaping item forty years ago when our houses were built, grow fast, get huge, and are brittle. If they’re not kept pruned so the wind can blow through, limbs will break off and fall on nearby structures. Or the whole damn thing can fall over.

Back in the Pleistocene, when I was a young society matron, one of our social acquaintances lived in a historic house in a district of old mansions. It was shaded by a historic Aleppo. Come a monsoon one summer, a limb the size of a small tree snapped off the thing and fell on their four-year-old’s bedroom. Luckily, the child wasn’t in the room — if he had been, he would have been seriously injured or killed. Like eucalyptus and cottonwood, it’s not a tree one would like to park next to one’s home.

Amazingly, none of the trees in the forest that surrounds the Funny Farm broke, not even the remaining devil pod tree on the west side. Those things — known in the real world as willow acacia — are also fast-growing, messy, and brittle. The Aleppo is one of the few trees that makes a bigger, even more obnoxious mess than the devil pod.

Guess I need to have that taken out, now that the weather’s cooling. It could be replaced, I think with a desert willow, which is quite a pretty tree and, while not as tall, provides nice shade when it’s mature. And doesn’t fall over in a stiff breeze.

At any rate, these melodramatic storms are coming more often and more violently, presumably thanks to climate change. Probably would be a good idea to remove — or at least tend to — the brittle and the breakable. Make an insurance company happy!

Hired Help

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So, knowing I was about to be rendered too incapacitated to keep up with the labor around the Funny Farm and its north and south forties, I hired some workers to help out. We already had Gerardo, a worthy who relieves me from having to weed, trim, blower, dig, repair, and rake. The redoubtable Gerardo, the indispensable Gerardo. He drops by every couple of weeks, to the tune of $85/hit.

Now we have Luz, a cleaning lady, who also comes around every two weeks: $80 a hit; and Chris, a pool guy, who charges $80/month for once-a-week service. If and when I ever get well, am I going to keep these people on the payroll?

Well, of course, Gerardo will stay, come Hell or high water. But the cleaning lady? The pool guy?

Normally, I dislike hiring cleaning ladies, because they rarely do the job as well as I can and often break or otherwise dork things up. But Luz is an exception (well…not counting for the broken vacuum cleaner and the dislocated the shower doors…). She really is very, very good, and in fact does a better job than I can do. Her efforts, which are considerable, make it possible for me to invite friends to dinner without having to knock myself out cleaning house before they arrive. Overall, she makes my house a much more pleasant place to live…simply because I hate cleaning and put it off until the place is such a rat’s nest that I’m forced to shovel it out.

Do I need Luz? Or rather, will I still need her once I’m back on my feet?

Probably not.

As for Chris: what’s happening there is I’m paying a guy to come once a week to do a job that needs to be done every day. Effectively he relieves me of one day a week of work. On the other hand, when monsoons are not storming, the pool water will self-maintain for several days; if he does the heavy lifting when he shows up on Wednesdays (make that “if he shows up”), the rest is pretty easy for me. And it must be allowed that he finally succeeded in beating back the mustard algae, which took to coating the walls along about the middle of last winter and, once the weather warmed, turned the pool into a mossy fish pond.

However, in November I’ll drain and refill the pool, and once that job’s done, it’ll be very, very easy to maintain the system algae-free. Chris will become majorly redundant.

So: Luz in, Luz out?

I incline to want to keep Luz around. It is almost impossible to find a truly competent cleaning lady, and this one is competent in spades. Luz is the best cleaning lady to cross my path in 35 or 40 years, and on top of that, she’s an extremely nice person, very comfortable to have around. Letting her go could be the height of lunacy.

Okay, so we’ll think about Luz. Now, Chris in, Chris out?

Well, it is nice not to have to stay on top of the swimming pool every living breathing day. On the other hand, $80/month is $20 a week for about 10 minutes of Chris’s time. He ghosts in and out of here so fast that if I’m not actually outdoors when he slides through the side gate, I miss seeing him.  But…if I’m right that the present horror show will resolve along about the middle of December, if I let Chris go I’ll be firing him at Christmastime!!!

Augh.

There’s another way of looking at this: not over the short term (I’ll only need these people until I recuperate) but over the long term (as age advances any recuperation will reverse itself and I’ll again need help to take care of the place).

I like my house and my neighborhood. They’re pretty much perfect for me, especially given that the house is paid off. So much do I like the house and the ’hood that my goal is to age in place. Ideally, I would like to get old here and die here.

To make that happen, I will need someone to help keep the house habitable and someone to deal with the pool (unless I have the pool filled in or covered). When that happens, I’m going to have to pay their wages out of my monthly cash flow. And $ 170/month for Gerardo plus $160 for Luz plus $80 for Chris comes to $410 a month.

Maybe it would be good to make myself accustomed to having to carve that much out of the monthly budget now, rather than having to struggle with it when I’m older, even less able to think clearly than I am now, and probably sick. At this point it would be fairly easy to adjust to the required belt-tightening; in ten years or so, that could be more difficult. If I hang onto this bunch, the staff will be in place and the budget will be in place when the need arises.

On the other hand…one could simply take Luz and Chris’s pay — $ 240/month — and stick it in a rainy-day account, to be used to hire people sometime in the future. If I don’t need the extra help until I’m, say, 80, then such a fund would contain enough to hire maintenance people until I’m 90. And if I’m lucky, I’ll croak over before then.

{chortle!} I don’t know. Gerardo is not going. But as for the other two: it feels like a silly extravagance to hire a housecleaner and a pool guy to do work I can and should do myself. Yet it’s nice. It’s so very nice to have someone else doing this stuff. They may be worth the cost…

One. More. Try….

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By gawd, just because I’m tired, sick, and in pain is NOT a reason to give up and throw in the towel. I’m going to give Ruby the Corgi Pup one more try before I fling her back at the breeder or advertise her on Craig’s List. Here’s the deal: I am bigger and probably smarter (maybe) than this dog. I. am. GOING. to. win.

There are a lot of things in the puppy department that I’ve neglected, not least of which is training the damn dog.

• Item: Pup is going to learn “down and stay” and “leave it!” within the week.
• Item: As soon as I can figure out where they meet, I’m taking this pup to the corgi obedience training classes.
• Item: If she lasts long enough, she’s going to herding classes. That’ll run the ginger off her. 😀

Puppy Pool Fence
Puppy Pool Fence

After seven months of royal expenditures, I already own all the gear needed to keep Pup under control: a perfectly fine crate that she doesn’t hate; an expensive hinged kiddy-gate that is ridiculously handy and dandy to use; a pool-proof doggy yard; collars, leashes, harness…. Damn it. I yam NOT throwing all this stuff away. Nor am I throwing away a $1,200 puppy.

Decided to make the crate a little more chew-resistant. The bath rug and scrap swim towels I put in there are beginning to look like someone tossed them in a shredder.

So I thought to buy one of those big rectangular Costco doggy beds. But of course, Costco’s radar sensed that I wanted one…and so they took the damn things off the shelf.

Fortunately, I happen to have kept the outer fabric shells of the two doggy beds I’d used for Anna the GerShep and Walt the Greyhound. The stuffing was shot and got thrown out, but the covers were run through the washer and saved.

While contemplating what on earth I could stuff them with, it dawned on me that several old bed pillows would do the job. In fact, three decrepit old pillows supplemented by one decrepit old throw pillow (isn’t it great when you never throw anything out?) would plump one of those covers right up.

And while a fat doggy bed is of course chewable, it’s a lot less frayable and tempting than an old beach towel.

P1030244
Cassie inspects newly re-stuffed Puppy Mattress.

So. First off, the initial strategy will be to exile Pup from the bed. Two dogs on the bed is approximately two dogs too many, especially when you hurt. Cassie, being a polite little dog, always gives me plenty of room: she occupies a bottom corner of the bed and rarely encroaches on what she has declared to be my space, unless it’s very cold and she wants to get warm. Just now, that issue isn’t operative.

Pup, however, believes that her rightful spot is dead in the middle of wherever the human thinks it wants to be. She actually will try to push me off whatever spot I’m trying to get comfortable in. The heck with that noise: Puppy to puppy den.

Next, that damn X-pen is going out of the family room. Lordie, but I’m sick of climbing around that thing! Pup goes out the back door to eat her food. If it’s raining and the patio is under two inches of water, fine: she goes in a back room to eat.

As for the jump-Cassie-bite-Cassie behavior: why should I buy an electronic collar when I have a perfectly fine squirt bottle? Matter of fact, I could buy a whole arsenal of toy squirt guns (very handy!) for what one of those collar lash-ups would cost.

By golly, that dog hates to be squirted. She jumps on Cassie: SPLAT! That should bring a quick stop to that shenanigan.

squirtgun
Assault squirt weapon

Otherwise, to the extent necessary she can be kept on a leash and simply jerked off Cassie whenever she gets any ideas.

If these schemes don’t help within a month or so, then she can go back to the breeder.

Grateful (not) Postscript

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Heeee! Let us add to the list of dubious gratitudes. Here is what a Ph.D. with almost 20 years of university and college teaching and another 20 years of journalism and business experience earns for the task of teaching one three-unit lower-division college course.

MCCDpaycheck

Yes. That would be for two weeks of work.

Adjunct faculty are limited to nine credits (“load hours”)  a semester, so the District doesn’t have to provide Obamacare. That actually is not as piddling as it looks. Consider: I’m carrying three load hours just now. The District regards one load hour as equivalent to two work hours.

3 load hours x 2 = 6 work hours/week
6 work hours/week x 2 weeks = 12 work hours/pay period
284.50/12 =$23.70/hour

Slightly more than half my editorial rate for academics and nonprofits. Significantly less than half my rate for businesses and professionals.

I suppose one should be grateful for whatever crumbs come one’s way, hm? And if you are a college student’s parent, or if you are a college student yourself, aren’t you grateful that the inflated tuition you’re paying goes to hire faculty whose skills and time are so highly valued?

 

Resuscitating My Life: Überlist 2

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So yesterday I decided I need a couple of broad, overarching lists to get back on track for managing my life in the middle of the current healthcare madness. The first outlines steps to try to recover my health. Next, a strategy for dealing with the dog situation.

Dog Management To-Do’s

1. Decide whether to keep Ruby or not

• Find out if M’hijito wants to keep her

• If he continues to refuse to answer emails and phone, physically go to his house and get a response
• If he wants the dog, leave her there
• If he doesn’t want the dog, retrieve her and make a decision about what to do next

2. If decision is to return dog:

• Call Lindsay
• Get SDXB to help navigate back to Wittman, turn dog over to Lindsay

3. If decision is to keep dog:

• Simplify feeding

• If M’hijito has switched Pup to Charley’s kibble, keep her on it
• If not, feed her cooked commercial dog food rolls

• Order vibrate/shock collar from Amazon and put it on her full-time. Use it to…

• Bring a stop to food competition
• Break up fights with Cassie

• Keep pup off bed

• Only Cassie goes on bed
• Get Costco dog  mattress; place in crate
• Get hinged gate for bedroom door
• After 2 or 3 weeks, leave crate door open at night, with hinged gate closed
• After another 2 or 3 weeks, remove crate from bedroom, leave mattress in place, and close hinged gate at night
• Use hinged gate to confine Ruby to bedroom while gone, leaving Cassie at large in house

• Teach Ruby to use doggy door

• Keep dogs separated when I’m not home

• When weather is clement, leave Ruby outdoors
• Confine her indoors only when it’s too hot, cold, or wet to leave her in the yard
• When she has to be indoors, confine Cassie & Ruby in different spaces

Effing nightmare. As if there weren’t enough to cope with…

Resuscitating My Life: A Pair of Überlists

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Okay, enough is enough. After a week of lying in bed, I have got to try to drag myself back into the land of the living. The plan is to try to resuscitate my life by drafting two overarching überlists, one for managing the health situation and the other for managing the dog predicament, should I decide to keep Ruby.

Today, a plan for restoring my health to something at least vaguely tolerable. Tomorrow: how to deal with the dog problem.

Health Restoration To-Do’s

1. Draw a line at which the “it’s not a cancer” torture must stop.

• Contact Dr. Laura Esserman at UCSF and ask for a consultation. Try to get answers to these questions:

• Given that there is no invasive cancer and there never has been a cancer, and given that an EPC is so indolent that it was never likely to have developed into a cancer and that only two cases of metastasis from an EPC have ever been recorded, is radiation really necessary?

• Is tamoxifen treatment really necessary?

• Instead of subjecting myself to a third re-excision — a fourth surgery in what is likely a futile quest — should I ask to have the breast amputated now instead of going after a successful excision + radiation + tamoxifen?

• Make decisions as possible and reasonable in light of any answers obtained there

2. Try to return to some semblance of normalcy

• Exercise:

• One walk in a.m. or p.m. without dog
• One walk in p.m. or a.m. with dog

• Get back to healthy eating

• Make xergis so as to gag down yogurt to counteract antibiotic damage
• Restock veggies and fruits, and eat the damn things!
• Cut up the spoiling apples and refrigerate them so they can be cooked for breakfast
• Consume oatmeal for breakfast or lunch to get gut working again

• Combat fatigue and depression

• Nap in afternoon to alleviate exhaustion
• Get back to the company of humans:
…..Go to choir!
…..Go to SBA!
• Have Shane style hair and come up with attractive up-do
• Get a top-quality body cream and massage hands, feet, and nails daily
• Oil skin all over once or twice a day

2. Fix the front bathroom so the shower in there can be used until this sh!t is over

• Learn how to jimmy showerhead to remove flow restrictor; install
• Remove bathroom decor for the duration

3. Clean out the lingerie drawer and organize so finding iron maidens and bras is no longer a headache

4. Buy a new heating pad; make another cover.

• Treat boob with heat and ice three times a day

5. Decide what help to retain

• Cleaning lady? Pool guy? Yard guy?
• Figure out how on earth to pay them

6. Try to get back to work

• Figure out how to deal with 235 class that starts five days after next surgical circus
• Figure out what to do with Pete’s project or who to farm it out to, and for how much
• Work on P&S website
• If Jesse can’t or won’t help make sense of this, move it to BlueHost
• In either event, move Writers P&S off WordPress.com at the earliest possible moment