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Dogs

Day from Hell…on Steroids!

by

HOLY mackerel, what a day!!!

Along about late morning, I started enjoying some breathing and coughing problems. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Pretty much a dry cough — not hacking anything up. Well, actually, once or twice during the night I practically strangled. But…WTF? The coughing wouldn’t stop.

Nothing I tried beat it back one bit.

I’m thinking this does not look good. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Eventually I come to light long enough to take my temperature: 101 degrees.

Holy shit.

My normal temp is around 98.2.

I’ve already been charging from pillar to post out there in the heat. The last thing I wanna do is traipse to a doctor. Way to hell and gone up in North Scottsdale!

Try the mercury thermometer. It’s off the scale: over 106.

Oh, sher…

RE-try the electronic thermometer: 100.8.

Prob’ly not very drastic, after all the crap I’ve been through this afternoon.

Call the Mayo. Nurse Kim gets all anxious. She wants me to drive right out there, or else call an ambulance and have them cart me up there.

a) I do not want to drive halfway to Fountain Hills to get to the nearest Mayo facility.
b) There’s no way in Hell I’m going to our nearest full service hospital and ER: John C. Lincoln, the home of the careless and the incompetent.
c) Nor am I trudging downtown to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I’ve had a truly hair-raising experience.
d) I suspect these wacky swings represent…well…Looney Toons.

So we decide I should go to a nearby pharmacy or the neighborhood Urgent Care Clinic, which is right down by the Albertson’s. She wants me to get tested for covid-19.

Albertson’s has an excellent pharmacy, and straight across the street, Walgreen’s has one very similar to it. If it weren’t 96 degrees out there just this minute — at 7:20 p.m. — I could walk down there. In mid-afternoon, Wunderground suggests, the high was a balmy 99 degrees, with 19% humidity.

Garden spot.

No, Albertson’s pharmacy does not have covid tests. No, Walgreen’s does not have covid tests.

So I go to the Urgent Care Center next door to the Albertson’s. That fine institution has six people sitting in the waiting room. And outside, the most horrifying, pathetic bum…the poor guy is collapsed on the pavement, in the shade of the pony wall that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Even if I had any cash — which I didn’t — I don’t give handouts to panhandlers. Many of these folks are dangerous, when they’re not making pests of themselves.

Inside the “Urgent” (yeah…) Care place, I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait, along with all the other “patients” (got that right) who are waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

Finally I think oh fukkit! Get up, walk out, drive back home. Gasping for air.

Call the Mayo. They try to get me to drive out there. I bang around trying to manage that…but finally think, once again, oh fukkit!

I just. can. not. bring. myself. to. drive, a half-hour or forty minutes. and then get to a place where I have in the past waited HOURS for care.

If I die, I die. Kulawahed!

Right now the mercury thermometer won’t let me shake it down below 99 degrees. Screw it. The battery thermometer reads 100.8.

So presumably I have a low fever. Or I’m fricaseed in the heat.

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

First, I’m going to set up the steamer to blast

I’m a-gonna traipse into the backyard and take a dip in that cool but not at all cold swimming pool.

Well. Maybe not. Now that the steamer is put together, I feel a little cooler. The headache could go, though….

Reset the electronic thermometer. FRANTIC beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep!!!!!!!

WTF?????

Now it claims I have a temp of 101.1!!!

Make up your mind, ya damn thing!

WhatEVER: my mind is made up: throw on some clothes and head for the Mayo. DAYUM!

********

So…here I am, in the Mayo’s shiny, majestic new ER. Quite a place!  The computer’s iOs (or the surrounding architecture??) is not letting me save much to disk, or save copy written in Word or MacMail. My son is in the middle of a dinner party…offered to drive me out here, but that was not necessary.

How could I do without this little horror show? Let me count the ways…

I hate hospitals, to begin with.

Especially, I’m not fond of ERs, which are scary places…IMHO.

A little kid is back there being tortured: screaming her sweet head off.

My head hurts like hell, speaking of heads.

I need to go to the bathroom, but am afraid they’ll ask me to pee in a cup so I’d better not get rid of the present collection.

****

LOL! We’re now all pee’d out, X-rayed with a vengeance, ridden around in a chariot all over the new and old parts of the ER. Zowie! They’re still threatening to drain blood out of me with a damn needle: THE part of this sorta thing that I hate the most. But ohhh well.

This is a nasty li’l cough. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it’s GOTTA be a case of covid.

COULD be an ordinary cold, o’course. One could keep on hoping. BUT…I don’t get a fever with an ordinary cold. And rarely get a fever with the flu. So I think it’s pretty safe to guess that whatever ails me begins with a “c” and ends with a “d.”

My computer isn’t working right in here. Though I’m in Funny’s post-building function and it seems to be working…nothing else is functioning. This post is up and the system is letting me type in it, but other pages are nonfunctional. So it remains to be seen whether any of this copy ends up on the Web.

Lordie!!! All these professional folks with tattoos! About every second or third staff member is covered in skin artwork!

Heh… My mother would have been SO abhorred!!!! She thought tattoos were low-class even on men. And on women? Well! It just wasn’t done!

Another thing that would have sent my mother into a spiraling tizzy is the price of gas!

It’s well over $5 a gallon here. Yesterday I did manage to fill up at a QT: a bargain $4.99!

Back in the Dark Ages — this would have been in the late 1960s or early 70s, I think — my mother once remarked, reflecting on the State of the World, That when gasoline reached a dollar a gallon, we would have soooooo-shal-ism!!!

My parent were right-wingers, Goldwater types. My father: even more extreme than that. I recall him sitting me down one day to lecture me about the virtues of bigotry. He was, as you might imagine, an extreme bigot: anyone who wasn’t white like him was less than fully human. Not only white, but American of English and German extraction.

Ironically, though…as we’ve mentioned elsewhere in these precincts, he was a quarter Choctaw.

Soooo….how it came to be that he hated anyone who wasn’t lily-white is a great mystery.

Cultural thing, I expect. It was probably just the way people who lived in rural Texas were.

***

It’s almost midnight. I think they’re going to spring me out of here pretty quick. One of the staff was in here collecting my insurance information.

***

A-N-N-N-D…I was right. The disease of the day IS Covid 19.

Holeee sheeut!

Online! It’s a miracle…

by

Been offline for a few days, thanks to some kind of screwy computer thing. Noooo idea what it was.  A Best Buy tech came over the afternoon and banged around and banged around —  very rushed, obviously running late and overworked. He seems to have gotten the thing working again. We’ll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, the Human crashed, too: fell into the sack around 7 p.m., a ridiculously early hour. But I was sooooo tired I just couldn’t stay awake another minute after we got back from the evening doggy-walk.

Come 8:30, the Human is awakened by a familiar melody: urp urp urp urp urp a-a-a-a-a-a-c-k!

The chorus: Ohhh godDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!

Dog barfs all over the bed.

Fortunately, the Human has smartened up a little bit over the years: to keep the dog hair off the bedding, we lay a splendidly washable knock-off serape over the quilt. Exactly like this one, as a matter of fact. We have several of them, in various gaudy patterns…and the one Ruby defiled a few minutes ago is now running through the washer. Mwa ha ha!

The hour is still ridiculously early as we scribble: 8:47 p.m.

My belly feels like there’s a rock in it, speaking of bilious bellies.

Kulawahed, though. It looks like the MacBook is back online. At least it seems to be downloading the email. We’ll find out when we go to upload this post.

Come dawn, I’ve got to pay American Express…at least I think so. A $5500 bill came wafting in (!!!). Was going to have WonderAccountant help figure out what caused that, but at this point I just can NOT deal with any more conundrums. My plan is to pay it and then just not charge ANYTHING for the next couple of months.

Heh.

We’ll see how THAT goes, eh?

So much paper has piled up on the tables, though, it’ll be a God’s Miracle if I can find the damn bill. But I’ll deal with that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, cruising the national and local gnus…

CAN you believe Americans voted this ogre into the effing White House? One who thinks he has a right to insult and cuss out everyone around him?

Welp. We’ve failed to educate our people, and this is what we get for our non-efforts: grown men and women who don’t know any better. My apologies if you’re one of those who was suckered into voting for the guy…but the truth is, THAT thing is not now and never was Presidential material.

Then we have the lovely local gnus: I was up in this area just a few days ago, very likely as this woman was being murdered. The cops claim to have caught the perp…but how that could be possible escapes one.

Hiking around the local mountain parks — a popular activity among the fit set — is riskier than it looks. Not only because you can slip and fall, requiring the cops to come extricate you with a helicopter, but because of this sort of thing. A surprising number of creeps are crawling around out there. I was hiking on a trail near North Mountain, when I noticed some guy following me by a couple hundred yards. When I tried to dodge him, he followed. Managed to hop down into a little arroyo where the trail curved around a little hill. Slipped off my bright blue back back, tossed it in a ditch, and hunkered down on top of it, hiding under a creosote bush.

Sure enough, along he came. I could see him stop and peer all over the area, searching for me. After about ten minutes of eyeballing the landscape, he turned around and headed back in the direction he came.

Thank God!

I don’t go out there alone anymore. And no, little Cassie is not enough dog to negate the “alone” definition: in the Dog Department, you’ve got to have something the size of a German shepherd. Best not something that looks like a lovable golden retriever, either.

Ugh! The 21st Century…what a time we live in! What a place we live in!

Speaking of the which, it looks like the city is going to try to spiff up the defunct Metrocenter Mall, once the largest shopping center in the land. It’s abandoned now.

Heh heh…good luck with that, folks…

With its acre on acre on acre of (now empty) parking lots, it will be a major stopping place for the new lightrail system: one end of the line, at least for awhile.

This, we can only hope, will carry the bums on out of our neighborhood, dropping them in someone else’s lap.

Just now the end of the line for the damn lightrail is right here at the top of the ‘Hood, about four blocks north of the Funny Farm. The bums ride for free — no tickets are required to get into a car, so all you have to do is step into a car and then, if you see a cop getting on at a stop (there are no conductors — clever, eh?), hop off before he can ask to see a ticket. Then just hop back on the next train that comes along.

So the ‘Hood is overrun with drug-addicted derelicts, just deee-lightful. Another good reason to carry a pistol when you go out. 😉

Seriously: that’s why I wouldn’t even think of walking to the nearby grocery stores or Walgreen’s. You’d be nuts to do that.

Anyway, if the accursed lightrail carries the bums, the pickpockets, and the rapists all the way up to Metrocenter, our neighborhood may get a little safer. Maybe.

Dog Back; Human Unraveled

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Whew! WHAT a Day from Hell!

If you’re ever (un)fortunate enough to land in (un)lovely Phoenix, remember this survival tip: never, EVER drive around this exquisite city in the rush hour. And bear in mind that evening rush hour extends from about 3 p.m. to something after 6 p.m. Morning? Make it 7 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. At least.

Y’know, I hated living in Southern California: crowded, crass, ego-driven, ticky-tacky junky dumps every which way you turned. Shopping was annoying, time-wasting, and often fruitless. People were so focused on themselves they didn’t even notice the other humans around them. Driving was a horrid, hectic, miserable hassle. Neighborhoods were bland, faceless grody collections of ticky-tacky apartments and cheaply built houses.

Chez Pitz.

Welp. Gotta say: I feel approximately the same about this place. The only difference between Phoenix and unlovely Long Beach is that Phoenix gets one helluva lot hotter in the summertime. In all other respects, the two garden spots echo each other when it comes to the…uhm…graces of living. Dump A and Dump B: one smeared up and down the Pacific Coast, the other oozing across the Sonoran Desert.

Started out the day perusing real estate online, briefly. Just in the past few months, housing prices have exploded.

We have, for example, this garden spot. The place is smaller than my house. Jammed closer to the neighbors. And when you come down to it, situated in a neighborhood that’s about the same as mine in terms of quality, economics, social class, and crime rates. The thing is on the market for a good $200,000 more than my place is worth (Zillow claims my house is worth $540,500…and here I thought I paid way too much at 235 grand…). That would be because it’s located in darkest Arcadia, rather than on the top end of North Central. It’s been on the market for two hundred and sixteen days and still hasn’t sold.

That, I would offer, suggests the asking price is WAY too high.

First thing this morning it was off to the vet’s, there to get her smelly teeth worked on. The vet is way to Hell & Gone over in the Arcadia Lite district, a good 30-minute drive under the best of conditions. Make it 40 to 50 minutes in the accursed rush hour.

Leave the poor terrorized little dog there. Traipse back home, still navigating the horrific morning rush-hour traffic, and mope around all day in the absence of my furry friend. Worry, worry, and worry some more about a) the state of the pooch’s health and b) the staggering amount I figure Dr. Bracken is going to charge for yanking rotten teeth and scraping the rest of them clean, presumably under full anaesthetic.

Back at the Funny Farm, wrestle with the finances, wrestle with the busted garage door, wrestle with the pool, fart around fart around fart around fart around. Study real estate ads, thinking…really…I do need to get away from the accursed Tony situation. Calculate how I could buy a new house without cluing the bastard to where I’ve moved. Not difficult, really. 😉

Waste an inordinate amount of time on these and similar ventures.

Along about mid-day, call — yes, I can come get the dog.

Back into the traffic, this time plugging into the early afternoon rush hour (wherever you need to turn left, you can’t!). Drive and drive and drive and drive and…and…huh?

OVERSHOOT the street where the vet’s office resides.

Whaaa???????

Now I’m LOST in darkest Arcadia.

Drive around drive around drive around drive around…can NOT FIND HIS STREET!

Pull into a parking lot, walk into a business, and ask them if they know where Meadowbrook (his street) is. They do not. They pull out a cell phone, look it up, and decide I prob’ly passed it some blocks to the north. This: puzzling, since their phone seems to be showing the map in an east-west layout.

Drive around drive around drive around drive around…STILL cannot find his street!

This is weird, because I’ve been going to this vet for a good 20 years (with a hiatus or three) and yes, I DO know where Meadowbrook Drive is.

Go into another shop. This place is close enough that the clerk can say…oh, yeah: it’s three streets up that way.

Drive around drive around…FINALLY find the vet’s place.

All this driving around is happening as the afternoon oozes on and the traffic thickens. And thickens. And thickens.

Retrieve the little dog. Staff tells me not to feed her and not to let her drink too much water.

Right. Don’t know much about corgis, do ya?

Amazingly, though…unlike the avaricious vet here in our part of town, the one who proposed to extract several of Ruby’s teeth, to the tune of something over a thousand bucks, Dr. Bracken has not yanked out even ONE of Ruby’s fangs…all of which are now shiny and white.

Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive, the better part of 45 minutes: through heavier and heavier traffic, dodging up side routes I happen to know about, admiring the very expensive and fancy real estate in Paradise Valley (is there any way I could afford one of these palaces?), scrabbling past a couple of chronically congested intersections…at last, make it into the ‘Hood.

Get the dog out of the car. She is PARCHED. Let her drink some water but try to keep her from drowning in it. Not an easy task.

Refrain from feeding the dog. Piss off the dog.

Reheat some left-over grocery-store pasta…bolt that down. Yech. Why DO Americans eat this stuff?

Reflect on how horrible Southern California was as a place to live in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Reflect on how much lovely Phoenix has come to resemble that scene. Want to go someplace else.

Anywhere else.

Waaah! I want my doggie!!

by

Dayum! Ruby is at the vet’s, getting her teeth cleaned. A-n-n-d…that occasions an unnerving discovery:

Thanks to the plague, I have become so isolated that a little dog is just about my only companion.

She’s only been gone about four hours, and already I feel so lonely I’m freakin’ about to lose my mind!! Seriously: I want my dog back!!!!! 

This, I fear, is not a good thing.

Okay, it’s nice that my dawg loves me and I love my dawg. Sure, sure: very cute very sweet. But the fact that I’m now so separate from other human beings that in the absence of a bossy 35-pound dog I’m developing the heeby-jeebies?

No. Not good.

And…it does bring to the surface a lurking question: what next?

What am I going to have to deal with in the next phase of my life? What should I be doing now to get prepared for that phase.

Make no mistake about it: I am NOT prepared.

What am I not prepared for?

  • 24 hours a day of uninterrupted isolation (except, I suppose, for the computer and the yard man)
  • Getting food and other supplies into the house when I can’t or won’t drive through Phoenix’s homicidal traffic
  • Paying utility bills that are already approaching the outer layers of the stratosphere (how, for example, will I keep that pool full of water when I have to pay for water and everything else on Social Security?)
  • Filling the empty hours when just about any kind of volunteer work holds the promise of exposure to a potentially fatal virus
  • Endlessly soaring inflation, pushing up living costs even now…in a few years, even the cost of food may be unaffordable.

And I’m especially not prepared for the day that Ruby the Corgi will leave this doggy plane, once and for all.

{sigh} I want my li’l dogger!

Looking Forward (NOT!) to Another Lovely Day in Uptown Phoenix

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Ugh! This is gonna be a horrible day.

Up, as usual, at 2 in the morning with old-lady insomnia. Kinda sorta got back to sleep, dozing lightly on and off, around 4 a.m. Then up at 6 a.m. to drive the Ruby the Corgi to the vet, there to have her teeth (expensively!) cleaned. Have to leave here around 7 to get there “between 8 and 9.”

This guy is the best vet in town, IMHO. If anyone will do her teeth without ripping me off, this guy will. But…

Well.

Yeah.

Her teeth stink, indicating she has a gum infection. Her mouth is so narrow, it’s impossible for me to use the contraptions they’d like one to use to clean a dog’s teeth. So yes. Her teeth no doubt are very dirty. Yes. To clean her teeth you have to anesthetize her to knock her out, a spectacularly expensive step that is just Step 1. And yes. He no doubt will have to pull out some of her teeth. So yes. This is going to be a bank-busting day.

La Maya and La Bethulia have a pair of mini-dachshunds. That breed also has a long, narrow muzzle…just like a corgi’s. The “long narrow” part is the operative issue. The mouth is so small and so tight, you can’t get a gadget in there to clean the dog’s teeth…especially not when the dog puts up the Fight from Hell every time you try.

I had stopped taking Ruby to Dr. Bracken (best vet in town) because his office is in the Arcadia district — a LONG way from the crime-ridden fringe of Sunnyslop, where we live. It’s an unpleasant drive under the best of circumstances. But during the rush hour? Ohhhhhh gawd!

To get there requires turning left out of the ‘Hood onto a main or semi-main drag. But Our Honored City Parents have set up all the major north-south routes out of here so that YOU CAN’T TURN LEFT DURING THE RUSH HOUR!

So, before I even reach the Arcadia district (where you may be sure that once again I’ll get lost), I’ll have to drive around and around and around and around Robin Hood’s Barn just to turn east in his direction.

Yes. To turn east out of the’Hood, you have to turn right, then turn right again, then turn right a fourth time. You have to overshoot the main drag that you need travel on. Go down to the next through street. Turn in the opposite direction from the way you need to travel. Then at the next main drag turn right in the direction from which you came. Then turn right onto the first north/south road. Then turn right again onto the desired main drag. Once you’re headed eastward, then you just sit back and drive and drive and curse and drive and drive.

It’s a bitch of a process, and not one I’m looking forward to.

If I have to pick her up at any time after 4 p.m. (i.e., during the afternoon rush hour), I’ll have to repeat the process.

And THAT is why I quit going to Dr. B. and hooked up with La Maya’s vet.

Well. Every time those women took their dachshunds to that vet, the woman was wanting to knock them out and clean their teeth. And every time she cleaned their teeth, she extracted some more teeth. And every time she did that, she presented them with a thousand-dollar bill!

No kidding. Every time you turned around, it seemed, La Maya was getting another thousand-dollar hit upside the head from that woman.

Fine when you both have decently paying jobs.

I, however, am now “retired”: another term for “unemployed.”  And I can NOT afford bills like that. So, as I will explain to Dr. B when I see him this morning, locking me into a cycle like that is going to mean I’ll have to put Ruby to sleep.

And that, I do NOT want to do.

So one of the highlights of this horrible day is going to be BEGGING him not to bankrupt me with the doggy dental gambit. And of course since vets have their own bills to pay, I’m not gonna get far with that.

Welp…it’s getting late. Better get up and start getting ready for the Endless Drive…

Dispatch from Costco’s Tire Shop: Monday as Day From Hell

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Any day could be a Day from Hell, I suppose. Monday’s as good any for spiraling downhill. After a full morning in Hell (cleaning lady, nail in a tire, driving round and round Robin Hood’s Barn), as we scribble we’re now parked on a bench in the Tire Shop at Costco, waiting a predicted two hours to get one flickin’ tire fixed.

Again.

Dave, the doughty fella manning the customer service desk, is so busy he hasn’t had time to take a deep breath. Literally: the action here NEVER STOPS, not even for a minute or two.

This morning I had to take Ruby the Corgi to the vet to find out about getting her stinky teeth cleaned. This is a much neglected task: having foolishly imagined that I would be responsible enough to clean her teeth myself, I’ve let it go and let it go and forgotten about it and let it go until now she stinks so much she no longer can be ignored.

Actually…the issue is that her mouth is too small to allow me to fit the finger-sized tooth-scrubber thing in there. So no amount of pretend scrubbing does…well…anything. So this morning I took her to the vet, who wants A THOUSAND DOLLARS to clean her teeth.

This was no surprise, because the same vet used to pull the same stunt on La Maya, who (more or less) willingly forked over the cash for her two dachshunds.

Expecting this, I told her that on Social Security there’s no way in Hell I can afford anything like that.

She recommended some outfit called Doggy Dental, which supposedly does nothing but clean dogs teeth, for something vaguely resembling a reasonable fee.

That notwithstanding, she charged me for X-raying the dog’s teeth (did I ask her to do that?), and of course for the privilege of walking into her office.

So on the way home I stopped by a newer, closer vet to ask what they’d charge. Walked in. NOT A SOUL AROUND! Waited awhile. Left.

Next: low tire light comes on. Sumbiche!

Stop by the Firestone shop on the way home – they’re up at the corner Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way. Guy there says the tire needs to be replaced. And that’ll be a thousand bucks.

Uh HUH!

See ya!

So now here I am at the Costco, waiting and waiting and waiting to see if they can fix the tire and, if, not to simply buy a new one. Which, you may be damned sure, will NOT set me back a thousand dollah.*

This place is hectic!!!

The guys at the desk haven’t had a chance to take a deep breath since I walked in. But now…weirdly!…the crowd has abated, people have roamed off, and it’s downright quiet in here.

Meanwhile, NATCHERLY today is Cleaning Lady Day. So Luz is on her own at the Funny Farm. Fortunately, because I had to duck in there on the way, I did manage to pay her. That’s something. I guess.

Dayumnation! Somewhere, somehow I’m gonna have to find a vet that charges reasonable fees. And is competent.

That’ll be quite a trick. All the good old vets that I knew have retired and sold their veterinaries. So I don’t know anyone anymore. And they don’t know me, either…so haven’t the slightest compunction about charging me through the schnozzola. {sigh} Because of that, I reckon, Ruby  the Corgi is going to be the last dog to live at the Funny Farm.

How much longer, I wonder will the Ruby last? Overall her health seems to be excellent. So, barring accidents…what? Three to five years?

Holeee shee-ut! In five years I’ll be EIGHTY-TWO YEARS OLD! Assuming I’m still alive, that is.

Doesn’t seem possible.

That’s actually not out of the realm of possibility, though. On the California side of the family, women have lived into their 90s…and since they were Christian Scientists, that was in the absence of medical care. One of my uncles was 88 when he croaked over…. But… my mother’s New York grandparents weren’t so fortunate. Her grandmother died of diabetes in what must have been her mid- to late 30s…early 40s at the latest.

So then we’re confronted with the question of whether, after Ruby passes on to her furry fathers, can I justify getting another dog? Or even handle having another dog?

. . . .

Tire Shop Desk Dude: It’ll take about two hours to fix that.
Customer: That’s fine. I’ll do some shopping. The car is right outside.
TS DD: Where’s the wheel lock key?
Customer: In the glove compartment.

Uh huh. NOBODY would ever think to look for it there….

Guy just came in with a tire that needs fixing. Warrantee expired three years from the day he bought it: YESTERDAY.

Augh!

. . . .

As we were saying…. Can I, should I get another dawg after Ruby passes on to her Furry Fathers? Assuming she predeceases me, that is.

Unless the proposed successor to the Crown is already pushing old age when she arrives in the Realm, I’m not likely to survive her. So…who will take her? Can my son be bamboozled into agreeing to take in an ancient dawg when his mother croaks over? Hmmmmm…..

Old Guy comes in, pays a bill, walks out. He’s wearing well-used jeans held up with suspenders. Looks like he belongs in the Ozarks.

Prob’ly cruised in from Paradise Valley in his Rolls.

This is the West Side, though. Not impossible that he could be an old cotton farmer or rancher. Not likely, though.

Hey: Tire Dude says the guys are just finishing up with the Venza. Give it 2 minutes; then walk out to the second bay.

Hungry hungry hungry. By the time I get home it’ll be dinnertime, almost. So I guess that’ll be the main meal of the day.

How much longer before two minutes have passed?

Ohhhh how I wanna go home!

****

ESCAPED!

* Oh, and it cost $12 to replace the tire… It was on warrantee.