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Pets

Cassie: Still Extant…

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…as far as I can tell.

Cassie-off-leashWhen I left the house this morning, Cassie the Corgi was very sick, indeed. Worse than before, by far. Coughing and choking and gasping for air and actually wheezing.

In the absence of a doggy thermometer, it’s impossible to confirm or de-confirm whether she has a fever, but her schnozz certainly felt very hot. I mopped her head with cold water — an effective way to address impending heat exhaustion in a dog, BTW. Works better with dogs than with humans because of the difference in the way the brain circulates blood.

She seemed unimproved.

Comes time to leave for choir, the thought crosses my mind: Lady, this dog is not going to be alive when you get back here…

Really, I thought she wouldn’t make it another three hours. She couldn’t walk a few feet across the floor without gasping for air.

But…I was supposed to be down at the church, so off I went, misgivings or no.

So after cruising southerly two or three miles, I go to turn left from Main Drag NS onto Least Annoying Main Drag EW to get onto Main Drag Leafy Parkway, whereinat resides desired House of God. Traffic clears, I make my turn, and

POP! There’s some clown on a bicycle in front of me, on the WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD, flying through the intersection in the crosswalk.

That is, he’s not traveling on the righthand side of the roadway, as is the law here in our garden state. He’s on the lefthand side, riding on a sidewalk. He’s  in the crosswalk  legally — we both have the light, of course. But he’s not where a motorist would expect to find him, because he’s riding on the shoulder against the traffic.

I jam on my brakes. He jams on his brakes and in his alarm very nearly falls on the pavement. By now cars that were wayyy on down the road are upon us — traffic flows at 45 to 50 mph on that street. He looks confused and scared. I holler GO GO GO!!!! and he jumps back on and dodges out of the way in the nick of time.

Holy cripes. What is the matter with people?

Stumbling across the church parking lot, I think THIS is a towel that I need to throw in. Unnerved by the biker episode and really worried about the dog, I announce that I can’t stay, turn around, and come home.

Not over yet, though:

When I climb back into the car to leave the church parking lot, I notice the statement the vet’s office-lady gave me. I would swear she said the bill was $45. No. They engrossed FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE BUCKS from my checking account!

Holy mackerel! And that’s just to try to figure out what’s wrong with her! He gave me the pills for free, which was mighty kind of him ’cause it turns out that drug goes for — hang onto your hat — $200 a bottle!!!!!!!

I fly back to the house. From inside the garage I can hear Cassie barking merrily. WTF? She could barely drag herself across the floor 30 minutes earlier.

Fling open the door: they’re both doing the welcome home Odysseus how was the Trojan war? dance. They streak out the side door, as usual, like rockets. Cassie doesn’t get far, but she does manage to work herself up to a dead run. Briefly.

Which is better than what I expected: just plain dead.

Well, we’ll find out tomorrow whether the dog’s lung inflammation is really Valley fever, or if she has some other kind of infection. He said he was sure it wasn’t cancer, so I guess that for $485, we can discard that notion.

There are two similar drugs on the market that are cheaper than fluconazole. In fact, this stuff is for the disseminated state of VF. If it’s just in her lungs so far, then we could probably switch to one of the other drugs, which are a lot cheaper. Dr. Vet and I are going to have to have a little chat about this…

Makes “let nature take its course” look depressingly like good advice, doesn’t it? I guess if I have to put her to sleep because I can’t afford exorbitant amounts of money to get her over this thing…well…

Never a Dull Moment: Dog Department

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Cassie the Corgi
The Queen of the Galaxy

Never a dull moment, all right. Cassie has been sick for the past 10 days with an alarming cough and general lassitude. The vet put her on a couple of dog drugs which off the bat seemed to help significantly. But just as I thought she was healing up, the cough came back.

So this morning it was off to the vet, a 40-minute drive through late rush-hour traffic. After considering the details and X-raying her lungs, he found a lot of congestion up near the top of the lungs and near the heart. Between that and the elevated temperature, he suspects Valley fever.

Jayzus!

So he did some lab tests — results won’t be back until Monday — and handed me a bottle of fluconazole and said to take her off the stuff she’s been taking and give her two of these a day. Call back on Monday to see whether his suspicion is correct.

I remarked that about 15 or 20 years ago, a friend had a dog with Valley fever, which they dosed mightily with an antifungal. The stuff was astonishingly expensive in the U.S., where patients are regularly ripped off — he was a lawyer and couldn’t afford the treatment…had to drive into Mexico and bring the stuff back across the border. He said the newer drugs work much better, and that if she does have Valley fever, chances are very high that the fluconazole will work on it.

ohhh-kayyy.  The course of treatment is 6 to 12 months, though some dogs have to be medicated for the rest of their lives.

It’s credible, as off-the-cuff diagnoses go. Every time the two dogs go out through the side door to the garage — which is every time I come home, and then some — Ruby shoots out like a rocket and Cassie chases after her, hot on her heels. So a couple times a day she gets the quarter-minus ground cover sprayed right up into her face. And dusty desert sand is exactly the stuff that harbors the pathogen (coccidiodes).

Valley fever is endemic in the low desert. If you’ve lived here any length of time, you’ve had it. Used to be when they tested you for TB — as they would if you wanted a job as, say, a teacher or a nurse, or just on general principles — you would test positive, simply because the Valley fever antibodies would trigger the TB test. Don’t know if that’s still true — I avoid jobs that require invasive and nosy medical tests or investigations, and so haven’t had another TB test in years. But the point is, everybody who lives here gets it. And so do a lot of dogs: 6 to 10 percent of dogs in Arizona’s Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties get it. Like humans, most infected dogs throw it off quickly and probably develop lifelong immunity. But anything that compromises your immune system…such as, say, old age…can cause you to develop disease symptoms. And Cassie is 12 years old: about 69 in human years. As far as we know…she could be older than that.

Fortunately, her symptoms suggest the disease is still confined to the lungs and has not yet begun to disseminate through her body. If that’s the case, the drug should get it under control and she may live a normal lifespan.

A “normal” lifespan for a corgi is 16 to 18 years… We shall see.

Human to Dog: Do not even THINK it…

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Do not even think, DOG, of whatever it is you imagine you’re gonna do!

What we have here is one very sick little corgi, Cassie the agèd corgi, and one corgi that believes she is the Queen of the Universe (even though it is self-evident even to benighted humans that Cassie is the Queen of the Universe), and therefore, OUTTA MY WAY, YA CRAZY FOOLS!

Ohhhhh gawd, Dear Gawd, please spare your Humans ailing corgis and bossy corgis. At least, do not allow them to occupy any one of Your rooms at the same time.

Human to the Ruby: Let Cassie breathe in the steamer’s mist, because it’s good for her and will make her better.

Ruby to Human: We do not know or care what “good for her” means, because we are a Dog and we do not possess altruism.

Human to the Ruby: Ohhhh gawd! [Repeats prayer to Gawd of Humans, above, with verve.]

***

Cassie has come down with what the vet speculates to be some sort of bronchitis. Apparently it’s going around. The Human suspects it to be a viral infection picked up from Ruby, who acquired it first and quickly tossed it off.

Problem: Cassie is eight years older than Ruby.

You see the dilemma: Ruby is at the prime of her life,  as strong and as fierce and as wonderful and as outta my way ya crazy fools as she will ever be.

Cassie is elderly. In human years, she is about 69 or 70 years old. This would make her as elderly as the Human, which, while still vigorous, is best described as “past its expiration date.”

Called the vet. Described the issue. Underling said “come pick up these drugs.” These appear to be a) an antibiotic and b) a steroid.

Many errands were being run along with the trek across the city to the vet’s office. Shortening an excruciatingly long story, let us say it was somewhat after 1 p.m. before the Human stumbled back into the house.

These drugs are supposed to be given twice a day: once in the morning and once in the evening.

By the time the Human gets back to the Funny Farm, Cassie is choking and gagging and barely able to breathe. The Human decides to dose Cassie forthwith — late in early afternoon (what CAN one say?) and then to dose her again around bed-time, around 9 p.m. if we’re lucky.

This will much shorten the time between today’s putative doses.

The Human imagines this will amount to a kind of attenuated double dose, which the creature hopes will help, as the Cassie is in fairly desperate shape.

Meanwhile, the Gods of the Internet say that bronchitis-inflicted dogs benefit from a steamy shower (FAT EFFING CHANCE!!!!!)  or steamer, just as do ailing specimens of Homo sapiens, an odd creature, indeed.

SO…the Human fills and plugs in the steamer and aims it at Cassie’s favorite nest on the bed. Places Cassie in the direct flow of the steamer’s humid plume.

The Ruby demands to be Up. She stays up long enough to shove the Cassie out of the steamer plume’s way, then demands to be Down. The Human places the Ruby on the floor and continues trying to write this post.

The GODDAMN DOORBELL rings!!!!!

The Ruby has one of her customary sh!t-fits.

The Cassie, freaked, now demands to get Down.

The human, 4/5 nekkid, heads for the front of the house.

It’s the neighbor’s cleaning lady, despatched to the Funny Farm to deposit said Neighbor’s key after a day of slaving, said Neighbor having left the premises.

Ruby, left to her own protective doggy devices, has gone freaking baths!t. By the time the Human and the Cassie arrive at the front door, Ruby has leapt atop the sofa’s side table, pushed its decorative contents onto the floor, and is prepared to LUNGE THROUGH THE DOOR the instant it is opened!!!!!!!

A-A-N-N-N-D….you wonder why the Human is given to drink?

Ohh welll! The barking frenzy this elicits from the Cassie does NOT cause paroxysms of canine coughing. First time today. This is good. Either said cleaning lady is not perceived by Cassie the Corgi as a threat (unlikely, given that a moth can be perceived as a threat…) or the dope I just whacked the dog with somehow managed to work.

Or else Gawd is feeling adequately amused and chooses to refrain from any more antics.

Days of Our Lives, Dogs of Our Lives

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Cassie the Corgi is beginning to look a little grizzled. So it crossed my mind to wonder…how old is she?

Well, she was three years old when I nabbed her from the dog pound. I got her in June of 2008. So that makes her, God help us, about 12 years old!

Anna the GerShep was 12 — just — when she shuffled off this mortal coil. On the other hand, everything that could go wrong with a German shepherd went wrong with Anna. Cassie, on the other other hand, has been bizarrely healthy. Literally, between the time I got her and the recent dental abscess surgery, she almost never saw a vet. Not for any ailment whatsoever, that’s for sure.

She still marches right along on a doggy walk — a full mile is no problem, as long as the weather is cool. (She wilts, and always has wilted, in the heat.)

Still. Twelve years old. In doggy years, this critter is as old as I am. And, subjectively speaking, that is damn old!

She probably won’t live more than another two or three years.

Ruby, on the other hand, is only three years old, in the prime of her doggy life.

So…when, not if, Cassie shuffles off this mortal coil…then what?

At that doleful time, I think, there will be two choices:

  • Do nothing and let Ruby become the queen of the roost
  • Get another dog

Why would I get another dog? Because I don’t think these little corgis are much protection. All they can do for you, really, is make noise when someone comes around. And both of them make one hell of a lot of noise.

I’ve had dogs all my adult life. Most of them have been protection dogs — sometimes for good reason.

And despite the endless stream of vet bills…damn, I miss that German shepherd!

Plus the “good reason” is back. Imagine if Anna had been here when Matthew the Garage Invader had jumped over the back wall into the backyard! If he’d survived (highly questionable), he would have been mightily glad to be delivered into the hands of the cops who beat the bedoodles out of him. An angry cop is as nothing compared to an angry German shepherd. I’ve now seen both and will take the German shepherd, thank you, to hold vigil over my junkyard.

Thanks to the city’s misguided light-rail project, our neighborhood has become infested with drug-addicted transients. And thanks to an efflorescence of roof rats, the hood is also overrun with coyotes. Whereas a German shepherd or the late great greyhound could hold its own against a coyote (a creature that can ghost over a 6-foot wall with nooo problem), a 22-pound corgi hasn’t a chance.

Whatever occupies that backyard next needs to be something that can stand its ground against a coyote as well as a prowler. Both of which we have a-plenty these days.

But…

The next dog who comes to live with me, if another one does, presumably will be inherited by my son.

He is not thrilled by small dogs. He was willing to take the corgis when I was feeling in extremis, but he made it clear these were not to be room-mates for anyone’s life: mine, his, or theirs. He prefers large dogs. And of the larger varieties of dog, he prefers retrievers.

My experience of retrievers has been, pretty much uniformly, that they are exceptionally stupid. Not as stupid as some domestic canids, but not so bright that they do well at interpreting human behavior. And because so many humans admire retrievers, all but the most obscure varieties have been ruined by overbreeding.

Charley the Golden Retriever is really sweet, but he sure doesn’t have the sharp edge that a German shepherd has. And the car phobia: what to make of that? Really, there’s nothing you can make of it other than that he suffers from a neurosis induced by irresponsible breeding practices.

Much like, say the German shepherd.

Merry (Confuse-a-Human) Christmas!

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Ruby and Cassie’s pet Human is merrily confused today. In my old age, I no longer can tell what day of the week it is. Because in old age the day of the week no longer matters.

😉  😀  😉

We roll out of the sack, this morning as usual, whenever the sun wakes us up. It’s around 7:30. I don’t care: just want to sit in front of the space heater and get warm, but that’s not very practical because it’s pretty bracing in here after a heatless night at the Funny Farm. We turn off the heat at night because if the outside temp dips into the 30s, a damn heat pump will freeze up and blast icy air into the house. Plus of course we can’t afford to run the heater in the winter and still have enough in the annual poche to run the air-conditioning in the summer.

I decide to climb back in the sack, put my feet under the heating pad, cover up, and read the morning’s computerized news. The dogs have other ideas about the use of the heating pad and get into a little squabble over who will get first dibs on shoving the Human off the thing. After they’re pulled apart and duly yelled at, they settle down. This is a good thing, because a dog’s body temperature normally runs around 102 degrees, meaning I end up with three heating pads instead of just one…

Along about 9:00, they begin to lobby for food, so we stumble off the bed again, stumble out to the kitchen, and put down a couple dishes of Their Queenship’s Fine Cuisine. Glance out at the porch thermometer: it’s about 45 degrees out there. But at least the wind has died down and the cloud cover has burned off, meaning eventually the sun shining on the dark roof will warm the inside of the house into the tolerable range.

A list of things to do materializes on the white board on the office door. None of them entail any serious work: most of the day is to be occupied by reading a new iteration of a pair of Chinese co-authors’ elaborate research report, 36 pages the gist of which is “all your bases are belong to us.”

I love this stuff. For one thing, it’s a rare day when a Chinese scholar says something brain-banging stupid…not the case with American and European academics, who seem to love to roll around in arcane nonsense. For another, the amount of work these folks put into their projects is astonishing. In an old-fashioned word: they do not spare the horses. So it’s kind of a delight to read it. You find yourself hoping they get published; they get promotion; they get recognition: whatever it is they’re trying to get, they get it done.

This project, at 36 pages much of which I’ve already read once before, will take two or at the outside maybe three days to get through. I hope.

Finish off a fairly large breakfast of cornmeal mush…uhm, “polenta”…and am just carrying the dishes back into the kitchen when JANGLE!!! Phone rings. Damn! A f**kin’ phone solicitor on Christmas Eve?

No. It’s SDXB. He says he’s not coming to the midnight mass tonight because he prefers to go to the right-wing fundamentalist Prod church his present girlfriend favors. That’s fine. But then I say…wait… We don’t sing til tomorrow!

He says you sing on Christmas Eve.

I say, yeah, that’s tomorrow.

He says today is Sunday.

I say no, it’s not. Today is Saturday.

Traipse back to the bedroom, open the computer, and Dayumed if it isn’t Sunday!

But don’t we sing on Christmas Eve? What? Isn’t Sunday Christmas Day?

No. Christmas Day is not Sunday. And yes, today is Sunday. And yes, we’re singing tonight, which is not the same as singing on Christmas Day, which is not Sunday…which is today, which is not Christmas.

?????????????

It takes a good hour to become un-confused and figure out that the list of things I needed to do today is still the list of things I needed to do today, and no, I don’t have to worry about M’hijito showing up over here this afternoon for a ridiculously early high-speed dinner and gift exchange and shoveling him out before I have to fly down to the church to rehearsal.

Now I get an e-mail from M’hijito that indicates I’m still confused. Thought he was supposed to come over tomorrow but apparently he thinks he’s supposed to come over this afternoon.

So I have no idea.

Clearly I am not going to be aging in place in this house, because my marbles are falling out my ears a lot faster than anticipated. If this continues to worsen, soon I will have to move to assisted care.

The corgis have learned to exploit this phenomenon. They have devised a Trick the Human routine. It’s pretty clever, when you think about it.

The Human has trained them to come to call by luring them with a doggy treat. Come into the house when called; get a piece of kibble. It also has trained them to lobby at the back door whenever they need to go out to do their doggy thing. This is also a rewardable activity.

So: they know where the doggy treat jar is, and they know that certain behaviors will elicit a doggy treat. What if….what if one were to combine these behaviors in a convincing way?

So what they do is dance a jig around the back door, begging to be let out. The Human aroused from its comfortable chair and persuaded to open the door, they walk outside, stop at the edge of the patio, pause, turn around, and come back in. Or in Ruby’s case, she stops, stands there, and stares with an expression that says “if you close that door now I will be stuck out here to be eaten by the coyote who lives in the alley, the one that came over the neighbor’s back wall a few days ago.”

She then trots back in and they both charge over to the counter and stand there staring expectantly at the doggy-treat jar.

Oh, well.

Assuming I’ve become correctly un-confused — not an especially safe assumption — the only thing I have to figure out for this evening is how to get this giant crockpot full of fake cassoulet warmed up and over to the church in time for it to be hot for the half-time potluck. There really isn’t enough space in the meeting room for a passel of crockpots — if you don’t get there first you may not find a plug. And I will not be among the first to get there.

Normally I would buy a dessert from Costco for one of these shindigs. But a) the last thing I want to do a day or two before Christmas, at the height of the worst flu season in years, is go into a Costco, and b) even if that were not a problem, I’m flat broke and cannot afford to buy anything at Costco, much less dessert for 40 or 50 people.

And so…onward to the mysteries of running a de-facto state-owned enterprise in the ecology of International Business…

Of Alleys and Dust and Dogs and Pools and Computers and Irons and…whatEVER

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Notice comes in the mail that the City is going to “dust-proof” the alleys here in the ’hood. A Web search to find out WTF “dust-proof” means elicits the actual RFP for the job. Videlicet: they intend to apply black-top to the alleys.

This will be good, because it will, to some degree, discourage the rampant weed growth. Some neighbors apparently believe — wrongly — that the City’s job is to blade off the weeds and grass that run amok out there, creating not just an ugly mess but a fire hazard. Among said neighbors are the couple who moved into Sally’s house behind me. What a pigpen!

Nice, huh? It’s a miracle we haven’t had a fire yet, in a July 4 or New Year’s fireworks frenzy — or just had some crazy or some kid set it alight. So presumably when the City’s contractors come through to lay down asphalt & pebbles, they’ll blade that little jungle.

Meanwhile, my pool’s filter pressure is way up, a signal that the pool needs backwashing. In fact, the filter needs to be cleaned out, but as you’ll see I have a whole bunch of other things to spend my money on.

It’s against the law to backwash into the alley, but everyone does so. That’s one of those things that the city ignores unless a neighbor complains, like out-of-code backyard wall heights and the four mattresses and two box springs someone stashed in the alley and the overgrowth of weeds all up and down the block. But obviously, a bunch of workmen and a layer of fresh asphalt promise to interfere with the backwashing project. So that project got moved up from fourth on the list of to-do’s to first, joining the chores to do before bolting down breakfast.

√ Call vet
√ Call Gerardo
√ Call Chuck
√ Check for wheelbarrow (borrowed by Gerardo and yes, √ returned)
√ Backwash pool
√ Check & adjust pool chemicals
√ Clean office
√ Pick up dog mounds
√ Clean patio
√ Treat allergies
√ Back up data
√ Blog
√ Study material on grant proposal writing
√ Write “Ella’s Backstory”

And it was a good thing I got out there at 7:30 in the morning to engage that tedious little job. About an hour later, along came a city truck, its driver obviously inspecting preparatory to the Big Project.

And it’s a good thing I have a LONG backwash hose that I can run halfway up the damn alley. Backwashing an 18,000-gallon pool creates quite the pond. It takes several hours for that to soak into the packed caliche that forms the surface of our alley. And that would be why the City doesn’t want the natives backwashing into the alleys, hm?

At any rate, the guy didn’t even pause. Presumably his attention was diverted by the mattress collection and the weed forest.

This will accelerate the need to change out the pool pump and filter ($$$$$$$), because without gutters, backwashing onto an impermeable surface actually will be pretty antisocial. I can’t backwash into the backyard, because the quarter-minus that forms the landscaping is actually just sand mixed with tiny pebbles: the backwash hose will excavate a ditch in that stuff. It’s impossible to imagine what might be built out there to accommodate 100+ gallons of water. The only alternative is to install a cartridge filter, which doesn’t have to be backwashed. The cost will require yet another unplanned drawdown from investments.

Speaking of the which, you’ll remember the surgery Cassie enjoyed for her abscessed carnassial fang? That set me back about $900. Welp…guess what: now Ruby seems to have developed one of her own!

Taking her in to the vet Wednesday — soonest I could get an appointment that doesn’t require 45 minutes of fighting my way through rush-hour madness — at which time yet another expensive operation presumably will be scheduled.

You know…I’ve only got $8,000 to last until next September…and maintaining the property, the dogs, the car, the taxes, and myself runs about $3,000 a month. Every time I turn around, here’s another thousand-dollar hit. This is what happens, inevitably, every time I dig into savings to pay off some stupid bill or do some expensive job around the house. Clearly Lady Karma is trying to tell me that I should not have paid off the car loan or paid 3 grand to get the house painted. Especially not in one fell swoop. Every time you pay some big bill because you think the coast is clear, you’re pounced by some new giant expense.

Or in this case, a series of new giant expenses.

Speaking of the alleys and the dust and the fangs, I have a tooth that hurts like hell. The dentist cannot find a crack in it, even though it does feel like a typical split tooth. Last week he studied a fourth X-ray of the upper jaw and still cannot find any evidence of an infection or a crack. So he’s sending me to an endodontist, and God only knows what that will cost. One thing for sure: it won’t be covered by Medicare. It was a hundred bucks just to have my regular guy do another X-ray and consult.

But whilst he was studying the problem, he remarked that my maxillary sinuses are completely filled with fluid. He speculated that chronic congestion on that order could cause some dental pain — although one wouldn’t expect it to be the sharp jab of a cracked tooth.

So it’s back to gulping allergy pills. This morning I’m high on meth…uhm, pseuodoephedrine…plus the usual dose of Claritin. He suggested using Afrin, but Young Dr. Kildare hates that stuff so much the mere mention of it makes him wince. He wants me to use saline solution. Dentist said he’s had the same experience w/ his doc and so is also using saline, with exactly the same results as my own: it does effectively nothing.

It’s reasonable to think, though, that allergies could be at least part of the problem. Lookit this:

Each of those rags represents ONE DAY’S accumulation of dust and dog hair in this house. Every day at about 4 p.m., I run a Swiffer loaded with a microfiber rag across all 1,868 square feet of tile flooring. As you can see, we have a whole lot more dust on the floors than we do dog hair.

Since I’ve started the daily swiff and started swallowing more allergy nostrums, the teeth have felt a little better. In fact, I’m thinking I should cancel the expensive endodontist and go to WonderAccountant’s allergist (she’s found one she swears by rather than at). If there’s no infection and no crack, presumably no long-term damage will happen if I delay long enough to explore the possibility that the maxillary congestion is the cause — and that would be covered by Medicare.

A-n-n-n-d…if the City really is going to pack down some of the dust, maybe that plus some prescription meds would bring a stop to the dental pain.

Hm. Still thinking about that.

Update on the Steam Iron Adventure

And as you’ll recall, my beloved old Shark iron has, of late, taken to threatening to electrocute me. An online search revealed that Costco’s current offering was an expensive thing made by some outfit called Oliso. But when M’hijito and I were over there the other day, we found they were peddling a Sunbeam model that looked very much like the homicidal Shark.

I’ve had a Sunbeam in the past and hated it — the thing would get so hot it would burn your hand. But decided to trust to the judgment of Costco’s buyers. Very nice little machine…or so it looked. Got it home and discovered that what I had was a steam iron that would not steam.

Well. You could produce a blast of steam by jabbing the blast-of-steam button. But otherwise, under no circumstances and with no setting would it emit steam through its sole plate.

Took it back and hiked over to the Target.

There I met a Target employee who did not even know what a fuckin’ steam iron IS! Much less where Target might have them hidden.

However, she being quite a sweetie tracked down a supervisor, who miraculously did know.

Their choices included several models of Sunbeam, all made in China; two models of Rowenta, made in China; several models of Shark, made in China…. Yeah. Pick them up and examine them, and you find they’re all…well…pretty much identical. The only difference appears to be the price, and that appears to depend not on the device itself but on the brand name.

{sigh}

So, despite the 28% rate of one-star reviews at Amazon, I gave up and bought another Shark. It is, as usual, more complicated to use than the older model that worked just fine and didn’t need any elaboration. But at least for the nonce it works.

Speaking of “It Just Works” (…if only!)

I hate Apple.

Why was it necessary to take something that actually did “just work” and BREAK IT?

I hate that the MacBook Pro will no longer upload images from my camera’s memory card.

I hate that it doesn’t have a USB port. Hate it hate it hate it HATE that.

I hate Siri, oh, GOD how I hate Siri. Even when you go into the system preferences and turn OFF fuckin’ Siri, the damn thing keeps nagging at you. The MacBook Pro has this stupid touch bar thing at the top of the keyboard, and up at the far right, directly above the “Delete” key, is a sensitive spot that, if you brush it with your finger, causes a pop-up to ask if you want to enable Siri.

I hate that one uses the “delete” key a LOT with Apple’s current keyboard, because they have subtly changed the size of the keys and pushed them subtly closer together. So every third time you hit a key — or rather, you try to hit a key — you end up having to delete and fix a typo: you either hit the adjacent key or you hit two keys together. For example, in that last sentence:

cur4ent
hgave
s7b tly
change dthe
ieys
puysheds
c loser
togegher

In a word, it is impossible to type on a Macbook Pro without inserting a constant stream of typos.

No, for a change this is not a function of advancing age: when I go back to the old MacBook or use the keyboard on the aged iMac, I do not encounter this problem.

And why do I want Siri go OFF and STAY off? Well, because it is a major invasion of privacy. No, I do NOT want Apple listening to every Word I utter and tracking every move I make online. No matter how glowing a sheen they try to put on it, it invades your privacy. Apple qualifies its description of all the ways that its devices intrude in your personal life with “When you give your explicit consent…” But just turning on Siri amounts to giving your explicit consent!

The Dictation software is a very cool feature…but it also does the same thing: reports everything you say back to the Mother Ship! And there’s no way to forestall that.

I hate Apple’s new photo software. It is a gigantic PITA, and it also invades privacy: it has the capacity to identify individuals by their facial features. And that, of course, means it’s a good thing the damn thing won’t talk to my camera. It means my images do not reside on an Apple device (or, presumably, on Apple’s oh-so-righteously encrypted servers), but on DropBox, where I have to put them manually.

Oh, God. I’ve got to go to work. And so, crabbily, away…