Coffee heat rising

Dogs

Doggy Distress

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Two-fifteen in the morning, and here we are attending to a sick dog for the third time tonight. Poor little Ruby is ailing…has been for some days. Now she’s developed doggy diarrhea! Wants to go outside about every ten minutes. Or so it feels.

In fact, it’s more like about once every two hours. But since I’m sick as a dawg myself…Helle’s Belles! It ain’t good. 

Suspect this is a function of the drugs the vet gave us. Tomorrow we’ll have to drag her back to his office. And that is MORE than “not good.”

Because…my son having purloined my car, I can’t haul her to the vet! He’ll have to take time off his (demanding!) job to drive the dog and me around.

And that is about as not good as it gets.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sick myself. Whatever is causing this horrible peripheral neuropathy can’t possibly be good. It hurts, and it makes my ears feel like an air-raid siren is going off in my head.

Welp…the little dog is back on the bed and conkered out. Better try to join her!

***  ***  ***  ***

Welp!  THAT didn’t work!  Here we are, an hour later, and the Dawg is up again, demanding to squirt the backyard with more liquid sh!t.

The Human is good & sick: in no condition to be jumping out of bed once an hour.

***

Hmmm….  She’s not wanting to get back in the sack. Probably figures it’ll be ill-advised to put the Human in a position to have to get up AGAIN to let her out.

***

Ohhhhhh GAWD! Now I’ve got the collywobbles, too!

What the HELL?????  Whatever is making the dog sick is making me sick, too??  Is that even possible?

….

Ohhhhhh yeah! Wouldntcha know!  And some of these bugs are drug-resistant bacteria.

Since she’s been on pills for the past two weeks, chances are pretty fair that we’re looking at just that.

Shee-ut! That means I’ll have to go to a doctor tomorrow, which means somehow I’ll have to get myself out to see MayoDoc, an hour’s drive away from here. And do so without a car….

Yay. I can hardly wait for the sun to come up…

Another Swampy-Dampy Day

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Yech! Feels like ugly, hot, wet Saudi Arabia out there, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Extraordinarily unpleasant morning for a doggy-walk.

But (ugh!) we’re back. The Human and the Dog are pretty well cooked. Dog is dosed with prednisone. Overdosed, actually: I accidentally gave her a whole pill, when she’s only supposed to get a half. Hope it doesn’t make her sick.

Not many fellow travelers in the park this morning. Understandably: it’s hot, sticky, and ucky out there. Horrible place to live: almost as bad as hideous Saudi Arabia, there by the by the seaside where I grew up. Horrible place!

Feeling on the ragged edge of “I can’t deal with this.” Dunno why…just don’t feel like coping with…anything. Not that there’s much to cope with this morning.

Truly: I hate Arizona.

Where would I rather live?

Mars,  maybe…..  😉

Seriously: San Francisco is where I’d rather be. A thousand times rather be.

It’s where we decamped after my father quit his job in Saudi Arabia and we finally came home. I was sick all the time out there, but that didn’t make much nevermind to the parental units. What finally changed my father’s mind and forced him to take a Stateside job was the amoebic dysentery that struck my mother.

She damn near died of it.

He loved her dearly, and her illness — a direct result of living in an unsanitary Third-World country — was what drove him to quit his spectacularly paying job out there and bring us home. At last. 

After we’d been living in San Francisco for awhile, my father landed a better-paying job, shipping out of Southern California: the land of the stupid and the home of the bourgeois. So it was off to Long Beach, where I’d been born 16 or 17 years before, and where my mother’s dearest friend dwelt.

Awful place! I hated living there. The schools were so backward it felt as though I’d been demoted about two grades. And my dreams of going to school at UC Berkeley went straight down the tube.

Arizona is ten times better….but that ain’t sayin’ much.

Hmmmm….where would I ‘druther be?  Let’s see….

  • San Francisco
  • Berkeley
  • Just about anyplace in the S.F. East Bay
  • New York City
  • Paris
  • London

Heh! Don’t ask much, do I?

Ohhhh well.  Here we are, on the ragged edge of Hell. We ain’t goin’ anywhere. And this is where I’ll be until I die.

Without a doubt.

Soggy-Dogging on through the Day

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Good grief! It’s only 100 degrees in the shade of the beloved back porch...and yet it seems hotter than that. Asked to make a guess, I’d have said it was about 108.

Just back from a stroll around the ‘Hood. No, the little dawg did NOT come with me. It’s way, way too hot for the short stuff out there. The pavement alone would burn off her feet!

But…oh, my! Is it ever beautiful out there.

Well. Visually, that is.

Spectacular cumulus clouds are piled up in the eastern sky, glowing white in the full sun. Wunderground posits a 13% chance of rain. I’d put it at a little higher than that…but not much.

So…yeah. It would be nice if some water would fall out of the sky. But it doesn’t seem likely.

My original plan was to walk over to a nearby shopping center and retrieve the contact information for a dirty-shirt lawyer who practices there. But…meh! No hurry for that: the matter is nothing urgent and nothing to do with business or with much money. So that guy can wait until the weather settles down. 😀

Last time I asked the ex-husband — who spent his career as a high-powered corporate lawyer — he was pretty much out of touch with that community. All the guys he used to know seem to have retired. So decided not to pester him this time.

***

Meanwhile, the vet put Ruby on prednisone. 

I beg to differ. He hasn’t explained what ails her — if anything, really — or why prednisone is the drug of choice. It can have some nasty side effects, so…I’m inclined to drop it after this first dose.

Like we didn’t have ENOUGH problems here at the Funny Farm, without deliberately making the dog sicker than she is. /eyeroll/

***

Mean-meanwhile, I’m reamed, steamed, & dry-cleaned. Why is not fully clear. Probably the humid, muggy heat. Even inside the house, the air is heavy with dampness. Sooo…. I guess it’s time to stop the keyboard-tapping and get something useful done.

I hope.

Soggy Doggy Day

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Wow! Is it ever WET out there!!!

Nope: no rain. Just air so soggy it feels like rain could coalesce around you as you’re walking up the sidewalk.

Ahh…but, the Young People out for their exercise walks are no more discouraged by this stuff than Ruby and I are.

Me, I  absolutely must get in a mile or more of stalking around. Otherwise the hip freezes up like it was made of steel. Very painful steel.

The young people, on the other hand, appear to fall more into the category of true health nuts. Plus some of them, like the Human, are just out walking their dogs in the park.  In any event, you can’t help but love ’em.

The pleasant architecture, the central location, the relative safety, and most of all the adorable young professionals are what make this neighborhood a delight.

How, I found myself wondering, can I engineer a way to stay in my home until the last cat is hanged?  I do NOT want to be hauled off to one of those horrible old-folkeries, like the (rather nice) one where my father spent his last years. Please, please, PLEASE, Dear God: let me drop dead first!

One strategy, I figure, will be to hire a live-in keeper.

Turns out Wonder-Cleaning Lady used to do that. Apparently you can hire them from some of the old-folks’ holding pens around here: the Beatitudes, the Terraces, and the like.

How you’d vet such a person’s qualifications escapes me. Plus…we have my prickly personality: ever since I was a little kid, I’ve infinitely preferred my onliness to the company of other humans. And evidence suggests the feeling has been mutual…

In the Doggy Day category: Ruby is choking every time she laps up a sip of water. She’s GOT to go to a vet, but I can’t get her to one without the car that my son purloined.

What exactly I’m gonna do about that remains to be seen. My son is already in trouble with his employers for the time he’s had to take to transport me back and forth to the Mayo Clinic. Yes: that’s even though it’s against the law to zap your employees for taking time off to haul a relative to the doctor.

Hmmm….  Might be able to talk Wonder Cleaning-Lady into schlepping us to a vet…but that would require coordinating an appointment with her visit. And that will be trickier than it sounds. She does three houses in a day, and so she can’t just trot over here whenever some vet decides they’ll see Ruby.

Ohhh well. Nothing I can do about it at this hour. Sooo…breakfast-time!

Doggy Update

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Ruby the Corgi seems a little better today. She’s been gagging and horking every time she laps up a sip of water…but this morning she gets through a lot more water before a cough-fest starts.

I’m hoping she’ll be better by the end of the day. Mostly because…well, I’m hoping she’ll GET BETTER. But also because today is Sunday: we’ll play Hob trying to find an open veterinary, and you can be sure any vet who will see us today will charge through the wazoo.

Truth is, it looks like she really is likely to throw off whatever-this-is. She ate all her food without a cough-fest, and did manage to scoop up a fair amount of water before she started choking. So…we know she IS getting enough water, despite the unholy heat. Probably it will be safe to wait until tomorrow to try to get her into a vet.

Apparently the cause can range from pretty benign — gulping up water too fast — to pretty awful: collapsing trachea or laryngeal paralysis.

The fact that she managed to scarf down a lot more water today, without the choke-fest, makes me hope that it’ll be safe to let this go until tomorrow. Our vet is right across the street, which means I won’t have to hire cabs to get to and from the place. And…if we’re REALLY lucky, maybe whatever ails her will pass between now and tomorrow morning.

<3  She’s such a good little dog! Mellow and well-behaved and…doggish. A great pal and easy to care for. If I thought this current phenomenon was anything serious, I’d have taken her to an emergency vet yesterday. But pretty clearly, she’s getting over it…so I think there’s some reason to believe it’s safe to wait until our vet’s office opens tomorrow morning.

Sure hope so….

Augh!!! The Joy of Living in Arizona

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Yeah. In the absence of a car, Ruby and I didn’t make to the vet through the 110-degree heat.

This morning she’s still squawking HORK HORK HORK! very time she laps up a drink of water. Dayum!!!!!  

It seems a little better today, though: doesn’t go on and on and on. Whatever the problem is, she may be throwing it off.

Sure hope so. I could do without another $100+ vet bill.

Arizona: what a horrible place!!!! 

My mother used to go on and on about how much she loved it here. And I suppose by comparison with Saudi Arabia, where we spent ten hideous years on the shore of the Persian Gulf, it looks…uhm…good.

To my mind, it looks like an outpost of Hell. You can be sure I’d be someplace else –– a good long way else — if my son weren’t here.

We’re here because his dad landed a job, fresh out of law school, with one of the most prominent firms in the Southwest. After 20 years of marriage to that guy, I was well established and in no position to seek a job anywhere else than in the Phoenix area. And our son had no desire to move away from where his dad and I lived.

So.

Here we are. 

Ugh.

There’s a fate for ya.

I do hate it here, and if I could escape, I’d head for the Bay Area in a trice.

But a) I ain’t leavin’ where my son lives; and b) I couldn’t get a decent job in San Francisco or the East Bay on a bet. A Ph.D. in English a decent job does not buy…

But honestly…

I hate Arizona!