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Dogs

The Dog-Walk Jamboree

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Human to Ruby: Y’know: you’re my favorite dog.

Ruby to Human: I’m your only dog, you chucklehead!

The sun is coming up a little later each day, so we’re not getting out to avoid the blast furnace heat at our usual time, around 5:00 a.m.

The trip through Richistan is fraught with other dog-walkers, about 30 percent of whom represent obstacles or risks. There’s this lady who has two golden-retrieverish characters, one of whom looks like it has as much pitbull in the family tree as golden whatever. The one that looks most like a golden, hilariously, likes to carry along a talisman: it trots along holding a neatly folded-up travel umbrella in its mouth, surely one of the funniest (and cutest) things you’ve ever seen in your life. The other dog, resigned to its understanding that its partner in dogdom is a fruitcake, rides shotgun on the crew’s excursion, and that hound is very serious about its job.

Fortunately, their human is a young, alert, and athletic adult female. The last time it lunged for the kill, by way of taking out Ruby, she caught it instantly and brought a stop to that guerilla operation. Every time it sees Ruby, though, it glares and it watches for its chance. And every time we come upon this fine trio, I have to pick up Ruby and carry her to shield her from yet another dog-attack.

So you see why it is that I prefer not to share the streets with the neighbors’ dogs, any more (I’m sure) than they wish to share them with me. Ruby has now been attacked three times, once by some moron’s pit bull off the leash…in the dark. Before Ruby came along, Cassie was almost murdered by an idiot’s loose German shepherd, but…hey…so was Ruby, just a few weeks ago.

I find these encounters with people’s goddamn out-of-control dogs fucking tedious. And that’s why Ruby and I like to get started on the daily two-mile stroll sometime before dawn cracks…that is, before most of my fellow dog fanciers get out on the streets.

Yesterday, when we left the house around 5:30, I counted nine dogs as we made our rounds. You understand: a lot of people like to walk through the shady, sylvan streets of Upper Richistan, and many of these folks have to go to work, so they get started early for their daily doggywalk. This is good. But, if one were adequately hermit-like, one might regard it as a mildly unfortunate fact of life.

This morning I was lazy, and we didn’t get out the door until after 6:00 a.m.

By the time we’d walked all of a half-block and ambled down to the corner, we had dodged around five dogs: the matched pair of black labs (to die for!), the umbrella crew, and a lady with a dog about Ruby’s size. Understand: we haven’t walked more than fifty yards at this point.

So I say to Ruby, dog food! let’s go home and get DOG FOOD! This is usually persuasive. But today: not so much.

Returning to the Funny Farm right that instant was clearly contraindicated. So instead of heading back to the house, we ventured into our part of the ‘Hood. We went up into the older area to the north of us, a district I habitually avoid because it’s somewhat run-down, it’s closer to Gangbanger’s Way, and…well, in the past there have been some fairly disturbing drug houses up there.

No more! HOLY mackerel, has that neighborhood gentrified!!!!!

We walked by only two remaining run-down houses, both of them wrecks but one of them for sale — soon, no doubt, to be fixed and flipped. Wow!

Gangbanger’s is one of the most major of the city’s major east-west thoroughfares. It’s extremely noisy, and I surely wouldn’t want to live that close to it. But hey: if you want to be centrally located, and you want to be able to afford centrally located, you have to make some trade-offs. Apparently noise and sirens and cop helicopters and Hells’s Angels’ unmufflered hogs are things the lovers of central location are willing to trade off.

That area is looking pretty nice these days.

And interestingly…not a SINGLE dog-walker was in evidence.

After perambulating that neighborhood, we wandered back into our tract. Same story: house after house after house has been fixed up, gentrified, painted, relandscaped. Our part of the ‘Hood is about 10 years newer and probably slightly more affluent. But the area to the north of us is definitely catching up. The whole formerly questionable area is beginning to look pretty damn upscale.

But again: NO DOG-WALKERS.

Not as much expensive shade. Not as many elegant mansions to admire (well, OK: no mansions…). But now that it’s not quite so blazing hot, the area is pleasant enough to walk in.

So I guess, as dawn comes later and we’re more and more likely to start out in the middle of the Doggy Rush Hour, we’ll be roaming the less fashionable boulevards bordered by Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way. There’s something to be said for dowdiness.

😉

Pool (still…literally)/Home Depot Rescue/Doggy Miracle

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So tomorrow the Swimming Pool Service & Repair crew is supposed to come over to drain the pool and start a massive cleanup. Nothing that I’ve done has halted the steady swampification of the water, which now looks like something that should harbor a Creature from the Black Lagoon. You can barely see the drain covers in the deep end.

Frankly, I’ll be surprised if this Great Deswamping works, because I believe the problem is the heat evinced by dark color of the unfortunate PebbleSheen surface, whose application was one of the great errors of my home-owning career.

My son came over yesterday and tried to persuade me to cancel this project. He’s convinced the problem can be solved by the application of a few bottles of Clorox. I explained that Clorox IS liquid chlorine, which I have applied to the tune of several dozen gallons. Yesterday I ran out of liquid chlorine and out of money, so started using the granulated chlorine remaining in the shed. This, I applied along about 2 in the afternoon, after having poured in my last gallon about 7 this morning. By the time M’hijito arrived, around 6:30 the chlorine level was down to nil — meaning enough to last 2 1/2 days was gone in 4 1/2 hours.

Mr. Johnson, the former health inspector and pool chemical guru, says that kind of chlorine consumption is the result of the chlorine interacting with organic matter in the water — meaning algae, leaves, dead insects, sweat, pee, whatever. When Cl disappears that fast, it means organic matter is high — which we know from testing the water, too.

So, hope springing eternal, I had dropped Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in there and along with the nuclear blast of chlorine. He did at least vacuum up the algae clinging to the floors and walls, but that decidedly does not mean they’re gone. They’re just in the filter, inside Harvey, and floating in the water.

Just now the pump is off, the motionless emerald-green water is opaque as fog, and we await a miracle.

We shall see if SPS&R’s scheme works. I’ll be very surprised if it does. I think we need to apply an algaecide such as YellowOut, which entails a cleaning the filter ($150), then dumping chlorine and the algae-killing chemical in a carefully calibrated ratio, running the pump 24 hours (again) for another couple of days, then cleaning the filter again ($150, again).

In other fields of minor catastrophes…

The back door’s latch set fell apart — its handle came off. Appeared that a set screw had fallen out and probably gotten vacuumed up and then tossed in the trash. Sooo… I drove over to my favored locksmith, a venerable operation in these parts, where I figured I could buy a set screw to fit a Kwikset door handle.

Guy sez, “Wellllll….. We can’t know what size set screw without seeing the cylinder that it fits in.” So, since (obviously) I can’t take the whole damn thing out of the door to traipse it over to their shop, I arrange to have a locksmith come over and fix it.

That would be, we might conclude, exactly what he had in mind.

On the way home, I think… “I’ll bet Home Depot has a set screw that will fit Kwikset hardware.” So drive up there. Find exactly the same door handle set on the shelf. Ask if they can sell me a set screw.

HD guy sez, “Chances are you don’t need a screw. These things are known to work themselves up into the cylinder, not out. All you have to do is put the handle back in place and rotate the screw back outward.”

“What size screwdriver will I need?” I ask, thinking I may or may not have one that’s small enough.

“You need a hex wrench. Here: take this. Bring it back the next time you come in.”

Jaw drops.

“Thanks!” say I, fleeing before anyone can catch me.

And…darned if it didn’t work! The handle is now FIXED! For free. Not for a $100+ service call…

Think o’ that….

It was this lock & safe outfit’s guy who, I remain convinced, lifted my cardholder full of credit and Medicare cards when he was here rescuing the office deadbolt from the key I broke off inside it. Thank goodness at least I didn’t have my driver’s license in there. But…it never resurfaced, and the last time I had it was when I was standing in the living room forking an AMEX card over to that guy. I’m dead sure he took it, because if he hadn’t, sooner or later it would have surfaced.

The dog and I set out at quarter after five this morning. It was gorgeous outside. The heat seems to have broken a little, at least for the time being, so that early morning is a lovely time to walk two miles. And because the sun is coming up a bit later now, too, you don’t get the glare in your eyes as you’re strolling eastward.

A-n-n-n-d…in the small miracles department, Ruby the Corgi has lost a pound or two during all these early-morning walks through 90-degree heat, the result being that her little harness no longer fits her. She’s figured out how to wiggle free of it, and now does so regularly. So yesterday after she’d weaseled loose, I hooked her leash to her collar…expecting about 3/4 of a mile of mighty fight. But…but NAY! she trotted right along like she was a normal, leash-trained dawg!

Whaaaa???? We have that harness because she has, in the past, put up such a fight that she would hurt her neck and throat and bring on violent episodes of reverse-sneezing…which is really just a symptom of collapsed trachea. (“Just”…holeee gawd…)

Well. This was a switch.

Snapping the leash to her collar is a far cry from having to wrestle a squirming dog into a harness, secure it, and attach a leash. So I tried the collar-snap-on again this morning, and lo! The whole two-mile junket was accomplished as though she were a normal, sane dog. She did not try to trap the matched pair of labs. She didn’t try to pounce the Gay Guy’s miniature mutts. She didn’t even indulge a lunging frenzy at the Shi-Tzu Lady’s annoying fluff-ball. Nothing!

Admittedly, we didn’t come across her pal Sammy (the world’s silliest-looking pound puppy). But Sammy is benign and will not hurt her if she annoys him. Soooo…. It looks like wonders really DO never cease.

Summertime, and the Livin’ Is…Keeriminey!!!

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Okay, so…one good thing: Out the door with the dog at 4:30 this morning.

This meant we dodged the wee-hours dog-walker rush — in 112-degree weather, everybody and their little brother, sister, dogs, and puppies swarm the neighborhood streets and the park at 5:00 a.m. Not that I don’t love my fellow humans and their dogs, but…well…yeah: their out-of-control dogs when combined with my out-of-control dog add up to a damned nuisance and an annoying start to the day.

Yesterday I thought maybe I could avoid some of that by walking around the park twice (a one-mile circuit: I’m trying to get in two miles a day), on the far side of the road. The park is overrun at dawn, with people who think our neighborhood park is their private dog park. And no…across the street is not so great. There was some stupid woman in there with TWO big dogs off the leash, chasing around like rockets on high-test fuel after toys she was joyfully tossing for them. And here and there, other dog-lovers letting their “fur-babies” run around loose.

By circumnavigating the park, I hoped to avoid the elderly lady who has invaded my favorite circuit around Upper and Lower Richistan. She’s very sweet and I’d like to get to know her, but not around two nuisancey little dogs — hers and mine. She has an ill-tempered Shi-Tsu that goes batshit when it sees Ruby coming up the street and starts barking and lunging and yanking around. The old gal, who said she was 93 years old, has braces on both legs and limps along with not one but two canes while trying to control her fractious pooch. Of course, when Ruby sees this hound coming at her, she tries to lunge into battle, too, so now I have to struggle and fight to keep her under control. All the while worrying that the sweet old lady is going to be yanked off her feet and thrown on the pavement!

Augh.

Well, the park route proved not to be such a great idea, because of the chronic law-breakers over there. (It is against the law — city, county, and state — to let your dog run around off the leash.) (And no, I don’t need anymore dog fights: three is enough, for this pooch.) Which is why I started walking through the Richistans in the first place.

Guess I’m not the only one who had that idea. 😀

At any rate, hitting the road a half-hour earlier this morning seems to have resolved the problem. We didn’t encounter the Shi-Tsu lady, nor did we meet many other dog-lovers. We passed the lady with the gigantic Bernese mountain dog — what a critter! He, despite his vastness, is well behaved and quiet. We passed the guy with the lab-like Heinz-57: ditto…a well-behaved and quiet dog. We came up behind the big, hefty-looking gay guy with the two wee little toy poochie things, always an amazing sight. But that was it. A cat tried to follow us home from Lower Richistan, but gave up when it noticed we were drifting into the slums.

It is hotter than the hubs of Hades here. AC is pounding away most of the time. My son is getting $500 power bills in that leaky old house of his. I suggested he bring his dog and camp out here until the end of August, but of course (being sane) he’s having none of that noise.

The pool, which tends to haze, looked clear when I got up this morning but by the time I’d finished breakfast was full of London Fog again, despite my having poured in about 8 or 10 ounces of granulated chlorine as dawn cracked this morning.

Dumped in another pound of chlorine; Cl level is now back up to around 4 ppm, fairly high. This will drop quickly, because chlorine degrades in sunlight.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

NEVER have I had so much trouble with the chemical balance in this pool — and I’ve been tending it for 16 years. I’ve about come to the conclusion that I need to have the damned Pebblesheen jackhammered off and replaced with old-fashioned white plaster, which IMHO looks better and which is one helluva lot easier to maintain.

You cannot get it clean to save your life. Because the surface is coarse — like fine gravel in asphalt — it eats up a pool brush if you try to brush the walls and floors. Literally pulls the plastic bristles out, which then get into the pool cleaner and break the damn thing. That’s OK, because the surface itself will soon destroy Harvey, and I’ll have to replace him with a new $400 cleaner that has wheels on it — which, we’re told, will break quickly under the strain of running over this stuff. Algae settles into the coarse surface’s billions of pores, so brushing is futile, anyway: the only way to dislodge it is by scouring it down with a hard spray of water from the hose. That’s not practical in the winter:  to clean the walls & steps with water spray, you have to get into the water. Result: haze and algae curtains. So you’re constantly dumping chlorine into the drink, which BLEACHES the damn blue Pebblesheen! So now that expensive new surface is not blue: it’s blotchy yellow (bleached spots) and green (algae) and blue (Pebblesheen waiting to be bleached).

I suspect there’s something about the chemical composition of the surface that bollixes up the water chemistry. I cannot keep the chlorine levels up to save my life. Last night after dark, I poured in a dose of chlorine — the dose I’d administered in the morning having burned out in the 112-degree sunlight. This morning I dumped 3/4 pound of granulated Cl in there — which should have sufficed nicely for the day. That was around 6:30 a.m. By 9 a.m, a test kit  registered ZERO chlorine in there. Actually, that’s with two different brands of test kit. (Yeah: it did occur to me that maybe something was off with HD’s kits, so I bought one from Leslie’s y’day). (No, nothing is wrong with the Home Depot kit…)

Two and a half hours later, and ALL the chlorine is gone????? Huh uh. Something is seriously wrong there

On reflection, it occurs to me that the Swimming Pool Service & Repair guy may have failed to apply chlorine stabilizer when he did the start-up after the pool was refilled. Seems unlikely — this IS their business and they’ve been doing it for years. How could you forget that little detail?

But…it would explain why the chemicals go haywire within a few hours after application.

Whenever I get my act together today, I need to return the wimpy test kit Leslie’s sold me (I found a better one on Amazon, same price, more options, better vials, better chemicals). While I’m there I’ll ask them about the stabilizer issue. It would be good if they had a liquid form (stabilizer is basically cyanuric acid). Some brands of pool chlorine incorporate CYA — particularly chlorine tablets. These were pushing up the acid levels so high that the Leslie’s guy recommended using granulated Cl — which may be the problem right there. If the granulated product doesn’t contain CYA, then…duh! No wonder the water’s clouding up.

I personally prefer the granulated product, which you simply broadcast over the surface occasionally. It seems less nuisancey to me than keeping track of the damned floating pool tab holders and wrestling with alarming potentially explosive tablets every time you turn around. But…hm. But. If the tabs will hold down the haze, that may be the first recourse in a series of strategic steps:

  1. Try the tablets again;
  2. Pounce Leslie’s affable manager and interrogate him about the stabilizer issue;
  3. Possibly buy and add stabilizer…

Which I sure would ‘druther not be hassled with.

Speaking of hassle, on Monday I go in to get yet another goddamn actinic keratosis frozen off my hide.

This has gotten very old, indeed…. A forty-minute drive each way, a fun doctor’s visit, and then a wound to have to care for over the next week or two.

Yesterday, to my horror and amazement, I learned that the current thinking among researchers is that actinic keratoses are not discrete phenomena. Instead, they represent what is called a “field disease,” especially where they crop up repeatedly in the same patch of skin. The theory is that they represent a larger area of diseased tissue. And the suggestion? Treat that area with a chemical, as well as freezing off each flare-up. “The management of multiple AKs is a long-term prospect, with no clear cure,” we’re told. “The best approach is the sequential treatment with a lesion-directed and a field-directed therapy.”

This, quite frankly, does not sound very pleasant. It entails applying a topical gel that singes your skin and can elicit some interesting allergic reactions. Monday I’ll have to take a printout of the article to the doc’s office and ask them if they don’t think they should prescribe one of the recommended drugs. Which, no, I would rather not use. But…besides the hassle and discomfort of these goddamn things (each one itches and hurts at the same time), the fact is they can convert to squamous cell carcinoma in short order. And that stuff will kill you just as dead as malignant melanoma will.

In other precincts: this heat is making me freaking comatose. I have not gotten anything done. Have not posted another section of Fire-Rider. Have not tried to get back to writing Ella. Have not done much house maintenance other than struggle with the pool (many other projects await the human’s attention). Have done little else but eat and sleep. And clean the pool. 😀

Yuch! Don’t buy Precise brand dog food!!!

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AJ’s, my favorite overpriced grocery store, sells a couple of dog food brands for the fussy pet owner. Even though I make most of Ruby’s food, I do add a quarter cup of kibble per serving, since the stuff is laced with vitamins and you never know whether you’re getting the right nutritional balance in a pot of chicken or pork mix. Plus a piece of kibble works nicely as a doggy treat. I’ve been using the “Precise” brand, whose small bags I keep in the freezer by way of combatting the pantry moth plague.

This morning I go to dish up a topping, and ECH! Out comes a congealed chunk of mildew!

WTF? Look around in there, and by damn, there’s more of it!

So this morning I carted it up to AJ’s manager. She took a sniff of it, said “ew! it even smells bad!” and gave me a gift card for the full value. She remarked that she’d heard they’d been having “issues” with dog food…this must be one of ’em!

If you can avoid buying dog kibble at all, bully for you. In any event, whatever you buy, don’t get Precise brand products.

Attacked!

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Yesterday evening Ruby and I were trotting through lower Richistan, past a house that a young couple with kids is renovating, when the morons’ 80-pound German shepherd roared out of their front yard and attacked my little 25-pound corgi. I tried to grab her and pick her up off the ground, but every time I’d reach for her, the dog came after me. Ruby, meanwhile, being a shepherd dog herself, after a second of terrified shrieking, shifted into full defensive mode and launched herself at the attacker.

Fortunately, the pooch’s humans heard me screaming and came running to call off their dog. But not before the animal had harassed and terrified me and my dog.

One of their cute little kids hollered after me, as I was stalking off down the street having delivered to the parents a volley of…uhm, shall we say “vulgar criticism” at high volume, I’m sowwy!

{sigh}

God, but I am tired of stupid. What IS it about people that they think neither common sense nor the leash laws apply to them and they can do as they please as long as a cop isn’t standing there watching?

Our house. Can you believe this place went on the market recently at over a million dollars?

True: it’s scary living here. I was among the cohort who gentrified Phoenix’s historic (and now spectacularly overpriced)  Encanto district. The ’Hood is effectively the New Encanto. And we have similar problems with transients, crime, and endless assaults on our quality of living by moneyed interests that own the city government. Encanto had (and still does have) many more transients than we see up here. Its Zip code had the highest per-capita drug use rate in the city, and the crazy (sometimes horrifying) incidents occurred so often that our office manager used to ask me, come Monday mornings, what new tale I had to tell. And I usually had one.

What were those tales? Ohhh…the day a burglar murdered an elderly neighbor by chopping her to death with an axe he found in her garage. The night a man tried to bump a lock in the exterior door of a room next to where I was sitting in front of the television (and was within about a second of succeeding when I realized what the noise was, ran to the front door, and screamed FIRE!!!!!!! at the top of my lungs). The cat burglar/rapist on the roof. The guy who watched a neighbor until he knew when her husband was out of town (which was fairly frequently), cased the house until he found the only window that wasn’t wired for a burglar alarm, climbed through it, and spent the night beating and raping her. Little things like that…

Consequently, I’ve had German shepherds all of my adult life. And I’ve had them explicitly as protection dogs. Only now that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a large, high-drive dog have I switched to smaller breeds. Here’s what I’ve observed about the breed, after several decades of handling its representatives.

First lemme tell you somethin’: if you bought yourself a GerShep to protect your kids and their buxom mother, you need to know about German shepherds. And you need to have better sense than to leave your dog out in an unfenced front yard.

The German shepherd has been harmed in many ways by overbreeding to develop “guard” tendencies. The result is often an unstable disposition, which can make for a very dangerous dog. Consequently, if you choose to own a German shepherd, you need to keep it under control at all times, and you need to be aware of its power and its potential to do harm. Yes: my shepherds have chased off home invaders (one poor guy is still running…said to be approaching Siberia about now).

Yes: my shepherds made it possible for me to walk around Encanto Park as a nicely endowed young woman without harassment. But I’ve also had a shepherd that tried to attack my mother-in-law and then me and then a veterinarian – the vet explained that some breeds are prone to a kind of mental illness that causes this behavior, and that once such a dog launches into an attack, it cannot be called off. This, he added, is the direct result of ill-advised breeding practices. If, like me, you’re a German shepherd fan, you should be aware that these conditions exist.

A German shepherd is like a .38. You don’t leave your revolver sitting on the coffee table. Similarly, don’t leave your German shepherd sitting around an unfenced yard and don’t let it off the leash in public. It’s a good thing to protect yourself – but not if you put innocent people’s safety at risk.

Harmless as the new-blown snow…

Dog Joy!

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What a wonderful morning!

I thought I was supposed to be down at the church office shortly after dawn cracked, to stand in for one of the volunteer receptionists. So I arrive, plug in the computer (having brought 27 pages of client copy to while away the time), and settle in.

Shortly, in pops the Boss Volunteer.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be here this afternoon. I’m on this morning.”

😀

Well. Ahem. Naturally I suggest that if she wants the morning off, I’d be happy to switch. (“Happy” being a highly qualified term in this context.) What a shame: she has to pick up the grandchild shortly after 12:30.

Out the door like a rocket!

Arrive back at the Funny Farm to find the dog moping under the toilet in the back bathroom. (Don’t ask: I have no clue why the dog thinks the cubby under the toilet amounts to a dog den.) At the words let’s go for a doggy walk, she shoots out of the bathroom and flies to the front door

Out the door like two rockets!

It’s still cool enough to manage a mile-and-a-half circuit of the ’Hood.  It’s a strangely lovely little enclave of affluence, despite being bordered on two sides by drug-ridden slums.

Over in Lower Richistan, one house harbors a huge, beautiful jacaranda tree, now in full, brilliant blue bloom. It is the most gorgeous tree you could ever hope to see.

Across the lane into Upper Richistan, an elderly lady lives in a big old sprawling mansion of a ranch house on about an acre of land, which she keeps up like a park. Her property is meticulously, spectacularly groomed. Most days when we pass there, her yard service, whose proprietors dub themselves “Paradise Ponds and Gardens,” are there puttering around. They must visit almost every day. The place reflects it, too.

Other shacks there are less ostentatiously landscaped but equally tidy — they don’t require a gardener’s daily attention, but nevertheless they’re expensively mown and trimmed.

As usual, we run into morons. Honestly…it’s hard to understand how some people ever learn to tie their shoelaces….

First one is putzing up Feeder Street NW, evidently in no hurry. The hound and I are stopped on the sidewalk, under the stop sign that clearly says traffic crossing Feeder is to cede the right of way. We wait for him to go by.

But no. Ohhh, nooooo! He’s polite. And the little dog is so cute he’s driven to feel even more polite. He stops his car. I wait for him to go by. He waves his paw at me, a sappy grin on his face: go ahead go ahead!

I hate that. I just hate it when some idiot thinks he’s doing me a favor by stopping in the right of way and frantically motioning to proceed in front of him — illegally. What the hell is the matter with people?

Does he really think that my standing there for three whole seconds while his car passes by is THAT big an inconvenience to me? Does he seriously believe he’s doing me some great favor with this silly trick? Does he truly not grasp the concept that urging someone to cross a road illegally puts that person at risk?

God, but people are stupid.

This particular brand of stupidity irritates me most radically because I once got T-boned when some idiot stopped, waved me across in front of him (and the as-yet unnoticed guy tooling along in the lane to his left…), and I took him up on it. With my infant son in the car. In that case, we had two idiots in collaboration: him and me.

So we make a loop through the forested lanes. On the homeward leg, toward our low-rent tract, we encounter a woman with a large furry dog in tow. She is not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything that’s going on around her. She holds a phone up to her ear. From the phone blares a stream of dopey-sounding music. She is, in a word, entranced…

Not caring to discuss the time of day with her barely-under-control dog, I cross the road so as to put some distance between us and the oblivious woman and her not-at-all oblivious beast.

It notices. It lunges at Ruby, growling and barking.

Recovering from nearly being jerked off her feet, the Blithe Soul coos, “Ohhhh, what a cute little dog!”

“Uhm… Uh huh.”

“Grrrrrrrr ARF ARF ROARRRRRgrrrrrrrrrrrr”

“He’s really friendly. I usually let him off the leash so they can play!”

holy shit! “Please don’t!”

I dodge across Feeder Street Northwest, hoping some driver in a ball-busting hurry will come blasting between us. Fortunately, she’s too interested in the racket coming out of her toy to pursue the idea.

At any rate, it was a beautiful morning (and remains a beautiful day). The little dog was beside herself with doggy joy to come out from under the toilet and circumambulate the neighborhood. That was a very, very happy dog.

Human, too.

I realized that I was secretly (not so secretly, maybe) relieved not to have to sit here all morning, editing a client’s copy while nothing much happened in the office.

Indeed, a small revelation dawned:

What do I want to do in retirement? What do I most want to do with the small portion of time remaining to me?

I’ll tell you what I wanna do.

♦ I want to loaf.

• I do not want to work.
• I do not want to master some hobby.
• I do not want to participate in volunteer efforts.
• I do not want to lobby for some worthy political candidate.
• I do not want to travel.

♦ All I want to do is loaf.

♦ That is, I wish to do as little as possible. Nothing, preferably.

♦ Nothing is plenty enough to keep me busy.

• Today, for example, I need to traipse up to Home Depot to pick up a bag or two of potting soil, therewith to plant some new chard and refresh a number of other plants.  While there, I probably should get a basil plant to replace the one that’s expiring of old age.
• Or maybe go by AJ’s and spend too much money on something good to eat.
• Or take the dog for another walk.
• Or just anything that does not require the expenditure of anything resembling mental or physical energy.

Loafing. The highest and best use of one’s time.