Coffee heat rising

Pets

ARF! say we. ARF and ARROOOOO!

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So Ruby the Corgi and I are on our way home from our early-evening peregrination of the park when we encounter a wandering neighbor.

“There’s a coyote in the park!” exclaims she, her voice radiant with fear.

No kidding, think I. Y’know, they were here first….

Oh, well. I manage to keep my yap shut, except to thank her for the dire warning.

By and large, coyotes — even the urban variety — are more afraid of you than you are of them. If one approaches you, the correct response is to turn and face the little fella, glare at him, and firmly utter these words: No! Ba-a-a-d dog! BAD dog! GO HOME!!! 

The standard coyote response to this is a horrified look that says, clear as any human language could say it, Good grief! This one’s crazy! Said realization crossing the critter’s mind, your dire enemy turns around and trots away from you.

LOL! But seriously: the presence of our coyote fellow citizens is the reason I carry a large, sturdy walking stick on the doggy-walks. Get smart with me, Fang, and I’ll knock you into the middle of next week!

By and large, though, coyotes are not interested in getting smart with you. They tend (wisely) to be  afraid of humans. And so, nine times out of ten, if they spot you they’ll turn tail and trot off to the wide-open spaces. When walking your dog in our parts, your job (among several) is to keep your eyes open and maintain plenty of space between the wild canid and your pooch.

Remember: They’re more scared of you than you are of them. 😉

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…

Peace! Quiet!

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Who’d’ve expected it?  😀

Seriously:

Ruby’s spider bite has receded: looks like it’s about gone. Mine had the back of my right hand mighty sore last night, but today that attack, too, has receded, leaving only a mild, almost unnoticeable ache.

Never did find the dog’s kiped water bowl. Fortunately, we have plenty of bowls that she can drink out of. Grabbed one of those out of a cupboard and filled it for her.

Good Son seemed mightily irked at having to take time away from his paying work to schlep me to the Mayo yesterday…for which I surely do not blame him!  It’s a gawdawful drive, half the time for little or no purpose. And it soaks up half your day!

We need to find a doctor here in town…one that meets his standards.

Little progress has been made on the proposal that we can the hired help — i.e., the one who, I’m damned sure, spiked the leftovers in the fridge with ultra-hot chili. Waiting to see what happens next in that precinct.

Have yet to get the electrician over here to get the backyard outlets and power switches running properly again. There’s a limit, Lord! Given that stuff like this has happened at least twice, my sense is that we’re past said limit… But, we shall see.

So…  {sigh} A lot of stuff is up in the air. Some of the gliding stuff is damned annoying. But most of it is just time-consuming. 

 

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!

Hotter than the Hubs…

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Surely Hades was never this hot and soggy! 😀

Ruby is guzzling water (again!), panting, choking, gasping for breath. The human is hurting, hurting, and hurting some more: this peripheral neuropathy is no joke.

But at least we got our morning perambulation…  And ohhh my! Lest you ever feel sorry for yourself, all you have to do to perk up is to look around at other people.

This morning we passed a crew of laborers working on the renovation of a large house in Lower Richistan. Yeah: in the heat. In the humidity. Dear lord! What a job!  Hard physical work in absolutely ghastly weather.

At times like this, (un)Lovely Phoenix reminds me of Ras Tanura, the American outpost where we spent ten years next to the Persian Gulf while my father worked for Aramco. Just about the most gawdawful place to live on the planet! Hot, wet, miserable…and hostile to Americans.

My mother’s health was ruined out there — she came down with amoebic dysentery — and I was sick all the time.

Most of my “sick” was play-acting, a strategy to keep me out of the damned school and away from the horrid little brats who inhabited it. If you were “different” in any way (I was a girl who wanted not to grow up wearing ribbons and frills but to work as an astrophysicist), you were tormented, tormented, and tormented some more. So I was constantly trying to persuade my mother that I was too sick to go to school. About half the time, she fell for it.

And well she might have, since she was sick at least half the time; probably more.

Ohhh gawd! There goes the dawg again: choke choke choke CHOKE GAAAG!  Got to get her to a vet…but how to do that without a car beats me.

My son, despite having made off with my car (he thinks I’m too old to be driving!), cannot take time away from his job to schlep me to stores and the dog to veterinary hospitals. So exactly what I’m supposed to do here, isolated in (un)lovely North Phoenix, escapes me. Even though a doctor has said there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be driving, Dear Son is determined to keep me out from behind a steering wheel.

This, I assume, results from what he’s seen in his job as an insurance adjustor. You can bet he’s shuffled his way through some horrific car wrecks. And yes: it’s undoubtedly true that elder drivers with slower reflexes and weaker vision are more vulnerable to accidents than are the Young and the Alert.  Surely, though, there ought to be some way to test you to see whether you’re safe to be driving. My own doctor says there’s no reason I shouldn’t be driving…but the kid ain’t listening to him.

At any rate: the result is that I’m stuck here in the house and can’t even take my poor sick little dog to a vet.

Not.
A.
Happy.
Camper.
!!!!