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Wednesday from Hell, November 2

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Ohhhh make these days go away!

Late last night Tina e-mailed to say she’d gone to urgent care and been told she has a sinus infection and bronchitis. She has sounded, for some time, like she has exactly the same thing I have. A doctor there told her that a cold shouldn’t last more than seven days, and if it goes on longer than that, then it’s something else.

Ugh. Mine has gone on for over three weeks.

Of course, there’s NO WAY I’m going to get to an urgent care facility today. The nearest one is a half-hour drive from here.

Well. I suppose if I left right this instant—6:40 a.m.—maybe I could get in there, get seen, get pills, and get back here in time to throw on some rags before running out the door to class. However, that would mean no breakfast and probably not even time to take a shower. And of course, on Wednesday from Hell there’s no time to get lunch, either. So the first time I would eat would be around 5:00 p.m. Very quickly.

I should show up at choir tonight…I’ve been out almost a month, and we have a big shindig this Friday that I’m committed to go to. But there’s no way I can sing: I’m still barking and hacking.

Welp, if a real cold goes away after seven days, that means I’ve never had a real cold in my life. That’s ridiculous. I’ve never gotten free of a cold in less than two or three weeks.

However, you’d think by now this one should be getting better. And it is…at least now I can sleep at night without having to spray a toxin into my nose.

One saving grace: Pup was so well-behaved yesterday, I wondered if something was wrong with him. He’s starting to act almost like a dog!

The only times he jumped Cassie were when she deliberately teased him. (Yes: a great deal of the tup-the-Corgi game is initiated by the Corgi, who thinks it’s great fun to get him in trouble.) When told to “leave it!,” most of the time he left it. He did not dig up the yard, charge around the house like a rocket, drag me back and forth, gouge the kitchen cabinets with his claws, pick up pieces of palm tree litter to chew on, or otherwise make mischief. He was off the leash most of the day.

I hope he’s OK. Assuming he’s not sick, it’s a good sign: it means he’s beginning to get the idea of what it means to live with humans. He’s a bit young to grasp that concept, so I’m suspicious. But…it could be promising.

A stiff breeze blew all night long. Amazingly, there’s hardly any crap in the pool. The wind must have come in from the north, blowing the devil-pod leaves away from the water. Thank heaven for small miracles.

Better get up and get going if I’m gonna get any food or coffee before M’hijito shows up with Pup. Looks like the earliest I can get in to an urgent care facility will be mid-morning tomorrow. I could drop by the place on the way back from the SBA meeting.

Ugh!

Eventually, This Too Shall Pass

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After tomorrow, only four more Wednesdays from Hell! God, I can not wait until this semester is over. Not that I don’t appreciate getting the extra composition course, and not that I’m not unutterably grateful to end up with four sections this semester. I am, ohhh I am.

But I’m tired.

This is my third week of being sick with a stupid cold. As usual, it will NOT go away. Invariably it takes twice as long for me to shake off a virus as it takes normal human beings. I’ve missed several choir practices and songfests because I can’t speak, much less sing, without falling into a coughing frenzy.

Under the best of conditions, Wednesday is a Day from Hell. After coping with the puppy from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m., I get to stand in front of classes for five hours straight with no break; then come back, cope with Pup for another hour while bolting down a meal; then shoot out the door for choir practice, where I have to be “up” for another two hours. By the time I get home, I’m beat, and I haven’t even begun to look at student papers or read copy.

Last Wednesday, though, took the Devil’s-food cake.

I let the Wednesday-only afternoon section go a little early because I just couldn’t talk anymore or even stand up. Stumbled in the house around 4:15 or 4:30, dizzy, nauseated, so sick and so tired all I wanted to do was fall into bed. That, I knew, would be impossible with a 300-watt puppy anxiously waiting to be let out of his crate.

Sick as a dog, I was. But not as sick as that dog. Soon as I walked in the door, a great stink walloped me in the face.

Oh.

No.

Oh, yes. Charlie had squirted diarrhea all over his nest and got it all over himself and all over the floor and…what a mess!

So I had to shuck my clothes and shoes, grab the squirming 45-pound puppy, drag him outdoors, wash the shit off him with shampoo, wash the shit off me with more shampoo, towel him as dry as possible. Then drag him back in the house and tie him to a doorknob while I dealt with the unbelievable stinking mess in the living room.

Thank God for tile floors, anyway.

Before I could put the blanket in the washer, I had to haul it out to the backyard and hose the crap out of it. Drag the wet, heavy, stinking blanket through the kitchen and out to the washer in the garage and run that through with plenty of hot water and detergent.

Then take the crate apart so I could remove its plastic floor, which was covered with puddles of shit. Drag that outside and wash it in the hose.

That was when, yes. I stepped on the honeybee.

That’s right. I stepped on a dying honeybee that was flopped in the water on the pavement.

It drove its stinger into my foot, between the large and second toe. Oh SHIT did that hurt.

But at that point I was up to my ankles in dogshit and water, struggling with the large, clumsy plastic bottom to the crate. By the time I got to the point where I could disengage from that mess, the bee’s venom sack had pumped about as much poison into my toe as it could.

Retrieved a knife, scraped the venom sack and stinger off my foot. Dog is hollering and straining to get free.

Stumble back in the house to clean up the remaining smears and puddles of doggy diarrhea, which are still decorating the living room tile. Another 20 minutes or so of scrubbing and upending of the dog cage and scouring the wire walls and doors and it was time to run the blanket through the washer a second time. It seemed a wise thing to do.

Hosed the remaining shit and the deceased honeybee off the back porch. Soaked the burning foot in the cold swimming pool water. Dosed the puppy with Pepto-Bismol. Dosed myself with two Benadryl, not knowing how the body with its recently acquired panoply of allergies would react to the second bee sting of my lifetime.

Climbed in the shower and scrubbed the stink off myself.

Doorbell rang. Charlie broke free, raced for the door to greet M’hijito in a frenzy of dog joy. Caught the flicking leash on the coffee table, dragged the table across the living room floor, slammed it into the sofa, and flang the pottery riding it to the tiles, where it broke into a zillion pieces.

Now my son is pissed off at me because I fly into a rage because now I have ANOTHER mess to clean up and I’m barefooted because my foot hurts like hell and the dog is bouncing up and down in the center of a lake of shattered stoneware and because I did NOT want that piece of hand-thrown stoneware to end up in a thousand pieces on the floor!!!!!!!!!

Shovel the kid and dog out the door. Lock Cassie in the bedroom. Spend another 30 or 40 minutes sweeping up the large pieces and moving the furniture and vacuuming up at least a jillion tiny sharp pieces of broken pottery, some of it thrown all the way into the hall, 15 feet across the room.

Retrieve the blanket from the washer, hang it on the line in back.

Feed Cassie.

By now the Benadryl has taken full effect. It’s only just after dark, but I’m so zonked I can barely wobble down the hall. Fall in the sack and pass out, along about 7:30.

Wake up at 2:30—at least I got seven hours of sleep. That’s something. Anyway.

Friday the dermatologist told me that after his wife stepped on a honeybee on the beach at Rocky Point, it took about three weeks for her foot to stop aching. This being almost a week after the fact now, I’d guess that’s about right.

Oh, yea…while all this was going on, I was also nursing stitches in a surgical wound.

He did say, however, that the lump he biopsied was not a leiomyoma but was indeed, a plexiform neurofibroma. That’s good in that it’s not an indicator of kidney cancer. Not so good in that it’s hereditary and can cause some big problems in one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring…like bone deformities, mental retardation, widespread disfigurement, internal tumors, high blood pressure, susceptibility to cancer. About 10% of people with these charming little lumps do see them morph into cancer. And the ugly things cannot be removed from one’s shoulder, where they frighten passers-by, without causing significant scarring and worse disfiguring than the ugly lumps themselves.

{sigh} I don’t know where this came from. Don’t recall either of my parents having anything like this. But then you don’t have to actually manifest the lumps to pass the defective gene to a child. And I never saw either my grandmothers or my grandfathers.

Enough, already. I can’t stand it anymore.

🙁

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Burglar Who Is Still Running

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God, but we were stupid when we were young.

It was late when my still-youngish husband and an even younger me arrived home from a night on the town. We were both very tired.

Our aged German shepherd, Greta, had been cooped up inside all night long and half the day. Her plumbing didn’t work so fast any more, she being an indeed very aged Ger-shep. We’d acquired a new Ger-shep, Brandy, who we hoped would take the illustrious Greta’s place when the time came for Greta to pass through the veil. But Brandy was still a puppy. She knew from nothing.

Greta, however, could open and close the screen door into the back yard. So, that night, not wanting to wait for Her Ladyship to do her endlessly slow Thing, we left the back door into the fenced yard open and the screen unlatched, so she could visit the doggy facilities at her convenience. Without a second thought, the humans fell blithely into the sack.

Well, my not-so-very-young husband, pushing early middle age, was beginning to snore. The volume had yet to reach the stage where I was forced to spend all my nights on the sofa (and eventually in a bed far from his house). But at that time, on occasion when he was very tired he would snore loudly enough that I couldn’t sleep. So it was that night.

After he started sawing logs, I got up and repaired to the living-room sofa, where I pulled a blanket over my altogether naked body and stuck my head under a pillow.

Greta the German Shepherd, half-deaf, was at her usual station, asleep in the hall right outside our bedroom door. Brandy…who knows? Probably somewhere near the bed, or in the baby’s room.

Along about three in the morning, I awoke and heard Greta go boof? A quiet, tentative inquiry, launched from the hall outside the bedroom. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I saw a light in the kitchen: a flashlight beam.

Here’s what goes through the mind of a youngish mother at three in the morning:

Oh! John must have gotten up to get a bottle for the baby, and the power must be out and he had to get a flashlight to get into the fridge.

I go, “John?”

And from the the back of the house a flickin’ NUCLEAR EXPLOSION ERUPTS!

Holy God!

Greta comes blasting into the front of the house with both afterburners roaring.

The flashlight is jerking around frantically. Greta’s savage rage is splitting the air. John and I each shoot up about three feet off our respective sacks. The flashlight goes berserk. Greta goes even more berserk.

Still innocent of what’s going on, I drop the blanket like Venus Rising from the Shower Drain and walk toward the kitchen. As I flick on the light, John comes in from the other direction. Greta is at the side door, hackles on end and mad as Hell.

“Who was that man?” he asks.

“What man?” say I.

“The one who just went out this door!”

The light dawns on the lush young society matron. “Oh, my god!”

He opens the door. Greta charges outside. He slams the door shut.

The guy had come in the back screen door—develops he’d been seen trying someone else’s back door in the neighborhood—and wandered into the kitchen. When Greta heard me call her name from the living room, realized I wasn’t in the bedroom and that wasn’t me in the kitchen either, she went ballistic and got between him and the door he’d come in. Those old houses in the Encanto district are like mazes, with their various additions, so he had a panicky search for a way out.

Fortunately, the burglar had the presence of mind to shut the backyard gate behind him as he fled. So Greta is not still chasing him around and around the world. Still, I imagine by now the poor guy has circumnavigated the globe about eight times.

One thing you have to say for an angry German shepherd: it’ll get your attention. Having an asthma attack, need a shot of adrenalin? Piss off a German shepherd.

The cop who eventually showed up after John called remarked that someone who comes into your house when he knows you’re there doesn’t mean you any good.

It wasn’t the first time Greta saved her humans. Wasn’t the last. But it probably was the most memorable.

Image: Botticelli. La Nascita de Venere, ca. 1486. Public domain.

Fainting Dead Away in the Grocery Store

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Was that a hallucination? Did anyone else see it?

The other day at the Safeway I went to buy a couple of yellow onions. Bounced off the onion bin like it had a forcefield around it. They wanted 99 cents apiece!

A dollar for an onion? One ordinary yellow onion?

Really? Really????

So I walked around the bin to see if they had any smaller, punier numbers they might be trying to get rid of. Found one narrow shelf that at one time had these, which the Safeway was peddling for 49 cents apiece. All the half-dollar onions were gone but two, each of which was bruised and starting to rot.

I could not freaking believe it.

So left the Safeway onionless, figuring to pick up some onions at a more reasonable price at one of the ethnic markets. My schedule being what it is, though, of course I never made it to Lee Lee’s or El Rancho. The larder is empty of onion.

Maybe I should plant some in the back yard. Wonder if they’ll grow here in the winter?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Grumpy Old Lady’s Jaundiced View of Fools

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Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.

Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?

We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.

Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?

LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed  he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.

I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.

What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?

When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding  blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.

Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?

Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.

I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?

At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.

So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.

What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?

 

w00t! Am I gonna get a RAISE?

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So despite our getting a slight cost-of-living increase in Social Security, we’re told that Medicare premiums will go up much less than expected. Most of the news reports natter on about how the new premiums will rise to $99.90. That of course causes me to go “huh?” because my premiums are already $111 a month.

But lo! Here at the Washington Post we learn that those who pay more will see their Medicare premiums drop to $99.90.

Can that be? It’s a miracle, if it’s so! If it’s true, then I should see about a $40 or $45 increase in net government dole for 2012.

That will just about cover the increase in property taxes. Significant, because I couldn’t afford said increase.

Well. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile, another small miracle: the American Express bill arrived this evening. And hallelujah, I indeed did manage to stay UNDER BUDGET last month. Not by much—about fifty bucks. But fifty bucks is fifty bucks. That much more to spend this month.

$🙂$