Coffee heat rising

Angst

YOUR DOG IS NOT YOUR KID! The fur-baby syndrome

by

Honestly. What IS the matter with people?

This morning’s doggy-walk devolved into another Trip Devoted to Hassles. At this time of year, a day very quickly gets hot. So all the dog-lovers are out by 5:00 or 5:30, traipsing around the park and up and down every street adjacent to the park. This would be charming (as long as you watch your step and don’t have a lawn that invites doggy toiletry), if only people would be just a little smarter about dogs. If only the idiots would keep their dogs under control. If only they wouldn’t assume you’re out there so that your dog can “play” with their dog.

Ruby is poorly leash-trained, because the minute I got her, I landed in the Mayo Hospital getting both boobs lobbed off. So she never has been adequately leash-trained. She’s fine as long as no one else is around, but let someone come trotting up with their “fur-baby” and she has a lunging frenzy,.

If you say something like “please keep your dog under control,” the idiots simper and go ohhhh don’t worry! They just want to pla-a-a-a-y!

Well. No. They don’t just want to pl-a-a-a-a-y. My dog wants to clear the earth of mutts like yours, stupid!

Seriously…what does possess people to come bounding up to a stranger and let their dog have at your dog?

Part of the problem, IMHO, is the idiotic “fur-baby” trope.

Jayzus! Talk about stupid!

Your dog is not your “fur-baby.” It is not your child. It is a highly evolved wolf. It can be regarded as part of your family only if your family is regarded as a pack, like unto a dog pack or a wolf pack.

That latter bit sounds promising, until you consider that dogs are not humans, humans are not dogs, and canine social structure is only superficially similar to human social structure.

The fact that those two social structures are vaguely similar makes it possible for dogs to live with humans, for humans to live with dogs, and for the residents to empathize with each other. But it does NOT make a dog the same as a human child, or a child the same as a dog.

This morning Ruby and I got out the door at exactly the wrong moment: 5:30 a.m. sharp. From the git-go, everywhere we looked, here came some chucklehead with a dog towing them down the street. In several cases, the dogs were off-leash. One guy had three dogs with him, nary a one on the legally mandated lead. At the park itself, people’s dogs were running around loose all over the place.

To avoid confrontation, we had to walk by on the far side of the street. This is a road that has no sidewalks in front of the houses facing the park. So either we climb up onto people’s lawns and tromp on their grass, or we risk life and limb to walk along that stretch of asphalt.

Finally we reach our corner of the ‘Hood and turn up our street. There, what do we encounter but a guy with one dog on a lead AND a guy with THREE dogs romping around off-leash!

Understand:

  • We’re not in the park
  • We’re not in anyone’s yard.
  • We’re on a public sidewalk running along a street where most people drive around 40 mph, out of not-payin’-any-attention habit.

What IS the matter with people?

Covidified!

by

coughity cough
coughity cough
coffity cough
cough cough COUGH cough cough cough….

The song of the day… 😮

I’ve been living on aspirin and Robitussin for longer than I can remember now. Fortunately, though, I don’t HAVE to remember. In a blinding stroke of foresight (how DID i know i would not be able to remember my name, much less when i took the last dose of pain-killer or cough med?), I set up an Excel spreadsheet to record when I gulp down this med or spray that med into my nose.

Good thing, because this damned covid virus affects your brain. I couldn’t remember my name if it weren’t written down somewhere. (But…where???)  Seriously: there’s no way in Hell I could keep track of the med-gulping without writing it down.

The Mayo’s staff diagnosed me with Covid on May 16. So this has been going on for over a month, with no credible end in sight.

Well. No. That’s not quite true. With mind-boggling genius, I started taking notes in that spreadsheet, recording the state of the Onion and the progress of the Disease. And adding any bits of information I happen to come across. Review those notes,and you see that in fact this thing is getting a LITTLE bit better, very very verrrreeee slowly. At the crack of today’s dawn:

Date Time Temp Meds Ailments
19-Jun 6 a.m. 97.7 Robitussin Mild cough
CBD cream itching hands, feet (milder than y’day)
Tingling about the same as y’day, maybe slightly better
8:00 a.m. aspirin Back pain mild, seems to be going away

WordPress resists any attempts to tidy up Excel’s formatting…sorreee. I’m just too sick to fight with a computer program this morning!

Hmmmm… The fever has gone away: 97.7 is normal for me, being the cold fish that I am. One of the most aggravating symptoms of the Ailment is FRANTIC tingling in your hands, feet, and lips. This is called peripheral neuropathy, and it is truly crazy-making. A little experimentation revealed, however, that over-the-counter CBD nostrums work handsomely on the phenomenon. Unscented CBD balm — comes in a tube that looks like Chapstick on steroids — beats back the lip tingling. And unscented CBD lotion keeps the buzzing in the extremities at bay.

This, of course, means you need to reside in a state where CBD products can be sold legally.

Robitussin and aspirin, though, should be available wherever you are in the US.

Lanacane and Aspercreme, both presumably legal anywhere in the nation, do exactly nothing for the peripheral neuropathy.

Apparently, the reason I’m not in the Mayo’s ICU just now is that I had the good sense to get ALL THREE shots of covid vaccine at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise — given my gruesome susceptibility to respiratory diseases — chances are good that I’d be on a ventilator. Or dead…

So, if you haven’t taken the covid vaccine, GET IT NOW! Do not buy into the superstitious nonsense about the vaccine. It will not kill you. It will not make you sick. It will not turn your hair green. But it will protect you from developing a life-threatening case of this hellacious disease.

Meanwhile, despite repeated evidence of the truth of the old axiom, “Whatever can go wrong WILL go wrong,” things are as under control as they can get. I guess.

* Ruby has apparently not caught the disease (yet), even though dogs are susceptible to it and even though there’s no hope in Hell of keeping her from sleeping on the bed with me.

* Swimming Pool Service and Repair came out last Friday and made off with the pool pump. They said it would take three days or so to fix it. So I hope their guy will resurface (heh) along about Wednesday.

* Pool Dude has disappeared from the scene. Whether he also has The Disease (a strong likelihood) or whether he got peeved when he discovered I’d arranged someone else to fix the equipment is unknown. I hope he comes back — the man has been a godsend. But if he doesn’t, well…I’ll just post a query on the neighborhood Facebook page, asking after some other service.

Don’t think SPS&R does regular weekly maintenance. If they do, they’d be charging some phenomenal rate…don’t even ask!  However, I’ve found a new Leslie’s outlet, and the guy who runs it does NOT behave like a vulture. So if Pool Dude disappears from the scene, I’ll go over there and ask for the name of a customer or two.

* Today is Cleaning Lady Day. Just now Luz should be at WonderAccountant’s house, across the street, though the last time I walked by the front windows I didn’t see her car out there.

Two weeks ago — last C.L. Day — I turned her away, because I surely do NOT want her to catch this thing. The shack really needs to be cleaned now. So…this does not bode well. I hope she hasn’t come down with the the covid horror.

****

Hmmm….  WonderAccountant thinks the Beloved Luz  arrives HERE around 9 and then goes to her place. I think the opposite. Ohhh well…

****
BING BONGGG!
*****

And speak of the Devil…by golly, there she is.

Well, this is good. BUT….  I’m not real comfortable about exposing her to The Disease. Just explained to her that I’m Infected and so she does not have to clean the house today. Offered to pay her for this week’s job and let her go on her way. She declined.

“You Can’t Get Away from It”

by

Holeee mackerel! This episode occurred in the early afternoon, right where I almost bought a nifty condo to get away from the unending crime and bum drama here in the ‘Hood. It’s within walking distance of where I was going to buy.

At the time of the Great Garage Invasion, I remarked to one of the cops that I thought maybe I should move out of this area to escape the endless crime episodes — to Scottsdale, Fountain Hills, or Sun City, for example.

“Don’t do that!” said he. “It’s everywhere: you can’t get away from it.”

Appears that he was right: this sh!t really is everywhere. About your best bet to avoid being beaned when you go out in the backyard is to buy into a gated community. But even then…you have to leave its sacred precincts to go to the grocery store or the doctor or the vet.

{chortle!}

Imagine a gated community where just about everything the residents need on a routine basis is INSIDE the gates. Like Sun City or Fountain Hills or SmallTownUSA with a big wall around it and a gate that opens with a code, attended by a security guard.

Around here we do have a lot of gated developments, but they’re relatively small and, other than a one-room community center and swimming pool, they have no other amenities.

Now suppose that in addition to the community center and the pool, the place also had a general store — selling groceries and drugstore items. And a pharmacy, where you could get prescriptions filled. And a clinic, where you could visit a nurse practitioner or a doctor and a dentist for your various minor ailments. And a veterinarian, maybe.

Add a K-8 school. Or maybe, depending on the size of the place, K-12 schools.

Think o’that. You would hardly ever have to leave your immediate precincts. You might not even need to own a car. For the few errands that would take you out of the place, you could use Uber or Lyft. Because the development would in effect be its own privately owned municipality, the HOA could block “entrepreneurs” like Tony the Romanian Landlord from buying houses there and turning them into reform schools for juvenile delinquents. Or into rentals. High enough walls around the perimeter would limit the number of cop-chase dramas…by a big margin.

O’course…America would cease to be America. Every neighborhood would become its own municipality. Cities would become agglomerations of tiny mini-governments, rendering city governments largely irrelevant. Same might apply to county and state governments. And upward mobility? Whazzat?

On the other hand, we wouldn’t be dodging crooks and cop helicopters every time we venture out of the house….

Covid-Smacked and Delinquent-Zapped

by

Wow! This covid bug is SOME germ!

Supposedly the version I’ve got is not very severe. But I’ll tellya…it’s got me knocked into the middle of next week!  Uhm…I think… It’s hard to tell what week we’re in.

It zaps your memory. Especially short-term memory. I can. not. remember. things that I did just a few hours ago, or things that I’m supposed to do now and in the near term.

Case in point: the pool motor busted. (Wouldncha know, eh?) So now I’ve gotta get some guy out to work on that.

Pool Dude gave me a guy’s name. I know I called the guy…but…

I can…not…remember…what…we…said!

Is he going to come by? If so, when? What day? What time?

Seriously: the conversation we had is a blank. A total blank: I cannot remember one thing we said.

So now I’ve got to call that guy up and fess up to that little lapse…what an embarrassment!!!

****

Yes. Yes I did talk to him. He said he would come by whenever he can — has a pretty full plate, apparently.

Weird!!

Also weird is the apparent variability of this virus’s effects. Some people, as we’re widely told, are brought to Death’s door.

I, on the other hand, have a cough. That’s it. Well, that and so-called “brain fog.”

  • No fever — to the contrary: my temp is in the negative numbers.
  • No headache.
  • No sore throat.
  • No stuffy nose.
  • No compulsive pounding on Death’s Door.

I suspect the “brain fog” is a real thing. Even though I’m getting damn senile, I’m not THAT senile! Normally I can remember who I talked with this morning and what we said.

So I’m left worrying whether it’s safe for me to drive the car…even though I feel fine, if some marbles are missing, am I a menace to navigation?

***

The day stumbles on. Now we learn I must not have been THAT sick last night. Because….quite a commotion took place a half-block from the Funny Farm, and I slept right through it.

NEIGHBORHOOD FACEBOOK PAGE, 12:38 A.M.

Neighbor 1:
What is happening on Butler right now? Cops and helicopters everywhere

Neighbor 2
Suspicious person hiding near a car on NNth Ave & Funny Farm Road

Neighbor 3
Author
Pass-Through Street is completely blocked with first responders

Neighbor 4
The Hood…never boring

Neighbor 3
unfortunately not these days

Neighbor 5
https://www.abc15.com/…/two-teens-injured-after-stolen…
Found this article!

ABC15.COM
Two teens injured after stolen vehicle crashes into wall, fencing

Neighbor 4
3 teenagers stole a car, there was a police chase , they lost control on PassThrough and FunnyFarm Ave, one was ejected, the other they caught in my neighbors yard then the other one apparently was a few blocks north

Neighbor 6
How did you figure this out? They took out my fence and damaged property.

Neighbor 4
oh my goodness ! I’m 2 or 3 houses down i believe, the neighbor across the street spoke with the police last night and he told my husband .

Neighbor 7
If anyone has video- please let us know asap! From what I understand he took off his jacket and had a white shirt on. It was between 12-1am Saturday night. Detectives are knocking on doors looking for video. https://ring.com/share/14201c5b-5acf-434e-846d-4cebeda5a21a

RING.COM
Ring #AlwaysHome

Neighbor 7
They were hiding under our neighbors car but got away before the cops arrived on foot… :/
UGH

****

So it goes: Life in the Big City. I personally am getting bloody tired of it, and if my son weren’t dead-set against my moving, I would be soooo gone by now.

SDXB moved to Sun City because of exactly this kind of sh!t. I’ve lived in Sun City and don’t want to do that again. But there are plenty of other venues that are significantly less active than ours.

Fountain Hills is one. It’s halfway to Payson…but on the other hand, it’s close to the Mayo Clinic’s doctors’ offices, which could be convenient on occasion. On the other side of town, there’s Cave Creek and it’s affluent sister suburb, Carefree. Very pretty area, though expensive. The Arcadia district, over on the easterly side of town, has houses very similar to the ones in the ‘Hood but is a significantly better area.

Most of the neighborhoods in town, though, have this kinda sh!t going on all the time, unless they’re gated communities like the Country Club district. The nearest comparable area is probably Moon Valley, but because it’s solidly middle-class and has no adjacent slums, the cost of real estate there is way outside my budget. By and large comparable houses there cost almost twice what I could get for the Funny Farm. Most have no gas service, so you’re stuck with an electric hot plate instead of a real stove. And — not so obvious in the real estate photos — the houses are VERY cheaply built. Many or most of them have essentially zero insulation in their exterior walls. Many have flat roofs, so you can’t insulate the attic (such as it is) either. So they’re hot all summer despite astronomical power bills.

It’s Life in the Big City…i guess…

***
**** AND no, I do NOT know why WordPress refuses to double-space between paragraphs here! Yes, I HAVE tried to fix it, every which way from Sunday. No, NOTHING that I do makes it work. And so…screw it. Imagine paragraph breaks where ye please.
****

And (cough!) today….

by

Yes: Today is still today. The world has not collapsed into a ball of bread dough. The air conditioning (thank the heavens) is still working.

Seen from the underside:

It’s too hot to breathe, AC or no AC. My right eye continues to fuliminate and as we scribble consists of one blue-green pupil in a field of bright blood-red.

Mercifully, it doesn’t hurt.

That’s something. I guess.

The covid (or whatever it is) continues to hold forth, though I’ll say today the cough is a little milder. However, I still have a fever: 98.2, it sez here.

For normal people, that sounds OK. But it must be borne in mind that I am a spectacularly cold fish. Normal for me is about 97. 5, and even that is on the high side. So we have about one degree of fever, which ain’t that bad. But which I could surely do without.

Just tried to clean and flush the steamer, which had about stopped dead as of dawn this morning. Kinda doubt it’ll do much good. Managed to fish a few little flakes of calcium out of the thing, but not enough to interfere much with its operation. So I don’t think “clogged up” is its problem.

“Clogged up” is sure my problem, though. My head is stuffed. My chest hurts. Breathing is a chore. The cough is dramatic. And I’m real tired o’ this stuff. 😀

Having done nothing today, I’m deathly tired and would love to go to sleep. That seems not likely to happen, though.

I should get up, get dressed, trudge down to the Walgreen’s through the chilly 95-degree heat, and buy another steamer. But ohhhhhh I don’t wanna!!

First place, you just know that if I traipse down to the Walgreen’s, I’ll find they don’t carry the things anymore.

Next, you know I won’t be able to find anything like it. This thing gets hot, and of course Big Brother wouldn’t want any of us to hurt our little pea-brained selves, so probably you can’t get your sticky little hands on it it. Or on anything like it.

Hmmm… This thing looks kinda similar. Mine is not that brand, but its design is like unto it. Now waitaminit…apparently you can rev these things up by adding salt to the water.

Why not? The thing is already not working. The worst that can happen is adding salt will totally bust it. Either way, I’ll have to trudge out in search of another one, or  order this one from Amazon (which will take another two days to get here).

*******

4:20 p.m.

How can it possibly be this early? Feels like it should be about 8:00 or 8:30 p.m.

But it’s not. It’s actually late(ish) afternoon. Ugh!

The salt-in-the-water experiment: YES!!!

It WORKED!!

No kidding. To my astonishment, adding a tablespoon of ordinary table salt to the gallon or so of water in the steamer’s tank revved it right up! Within 10 or 15 minutes, it was pumping out steam.

Who’dve thunk it?

Actually, it’s revved the thing up so much that a tankful of water is unlikely to last all night. Highly unlikely. But for the nonce, it’s pumping steam into the victim’s face, and I can sorta almost breathe.

At any rate, the contraption is working for the nonce. Probably I’ll have to get up in the middle of the night and fool with it. But that will mean I’ll have managed to steal half a night’s sleep. Which would be some kinda miracle.

 

Humanity…HOW have we survived?

by

Seriously, how HAS a creature so many of whose representatives seem dumb as posts managed to survive at all? Gawd, but humans are stupid!

Out the door this morning, in an early hour of a hot, sticky morning: doggy-walk time.

Ruby dearly loves to walk around the park. The human dearly hates it.

No doubt Ruby loves it first, because our yard has no grass, so that grass stuff is THE bidness. And second, because the damn place is overrun with dogs, many of them as ill-trained as she is. Whatever her sentiment, a visit to the beloved park means an hour-long Dawg Drag for the human: she hauls me around the park at the end of her lead, jerking here and jerking there.

She arrived here at the Funny Farm just as I was getting both boobs lobbed off at the Mayo. Upshot was, I had neither the strength nor the inclination to leash-train an obstreperous puppy. Upshot of that is: the morning dawg-drag.

This would be OK if other people would keep their dogs more or less under control.

Today, for a change, we didn’t encounter any dogs off the lead over there. The “dogs must be on leash” sign at the entrance is for other people, y’know… But on-leash dawg or off-leash dawg, Ruby wants to lunge at them, yanking me with her.

And today, just barely beginning to recover from the Cough from Hell, I am distinctly NOT in the mood to be jerked around.

I should call a vet and try to get a recommendation for a professional dog trainer. My dearly beloved, now long-retired vet did that for me when I had Anna the German shepherd. The guy he referred me to was a miracle-worker. Seriously: he had that dog under control in two sessions.

Heh! Here’s a new movie series, V, which really does bring up the question of how humanity will survive — the inevitable alien invasion, o’ course. Unreality oozes out of the production room, though, and comes to visit us right here. If it just weren’t so…true to life… 😮 Substitute a virus for the aliens, and you’ve got it.

Speaking of survival — or not: This morning I felt like maybe the agèd body was begin to schuck off the Killer Virus. Now, late in the afternoon, it seems to be thundering back. Dunno about you, though, but in my case whenever I come down with a bug like this, it’s always worst in the late afternoon. It’s 4:30 as we scribble. Can’t sleep — not least because of some moron coming door-to-door trying to hustle up lawn maintenance business. If I hadn’t been busy hammering at Death’s Door, I would have taken him up on that, since Gerardo and the boys have disappeared into the forest.

While hammering, though, I spent half the day driving from pillar to post through Phoenix’s Hellish L.A,-style traffic.

Up to Young Dr. Kildare’s office. They insist I owe them $160, even though I’ve repeatedly tried to pay them. Why my payments don’t go through escapes me. And them, too…apparently.

So I staggered through a covid fog up to his place and insisted on paying the bill in person. This time they took my AMEX card, even though over the phone his staff insists they don’t accept credit-card payments.

Why? Is there some REASON to inflict a mindless hassle like this on your clients? What, really, is the point?

Then it was over to the credit union, to check in person if there was some reason earlier payments didn’t go through. Staff were as mystified as I was.

So now I’ll have to ride herd on that nonsense for a couple of weeks, But…in my covid haze, I’ll be damned if I can get through the online hoop-jumps to access my account. So that means I’ll have to drive back up there again in another ten days or two weeks. Better put that on the calendar, or I’ll forget it.

Hmmm…in other sylvan realms…

Think solar power will be our over-developed planet’s savior? Think again!  We’ve been merrily trashing the Mohave Desert, sucking up its water and blighting its surface.

{sigh}  Y’know, folks…there’s only one solution to the Kill Mother Nature problem: that’s to QUIT MAKING BABIES.