Coffee heat rising

Pets

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…

You load 16 tons…

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and whaddaya get?

Well, if it’s dog meat, you get about 26 tons of dog food…

Today is Dog Food Prep Day, the human having failed in its untiring efforts to avoid working on said project. We’re almost out of prepared dog food; the package holding two large chunks of Costco pork has been defrosted for the past two or three days (in the fridge of course), and we still have a pile of leftover roast chicken.

The pork made a vast pile of ground-up cooked meat. Tossing the aging chicken in the food processor increased that cache by about 30%. Two or three cups of Coach’s Oats are now sitting there cooling down, so’s I can mix the whole shebang together with a mound of pulverized mixed vegetables.

I figure this will make about two weeks’ worth of doggy meals. Each dawg eats a half-pound a day; that adds up to a total of 1 pound a day to shovel into the wild animals’ maws. So…14 pounds, maybe? Possibly even more…I haven’t mixed it up and measured it out into refrigerator containers yet. But my guess is, pretty close to two weeks of food. I hope.

Because I don’t wanna do this again any sooner than two weeks from now.

***

Okay. Slight overcalculation: The mountain weighed out to about 9 pounds. That’s less than two weeks’ worth, dammit. In 8½ days, I’ll have to drop by Walmart and pick up a roll of FreshPet, which will hold them for another week.

So, this is the disadvantage of having two dogs: if it were only Cassie (or only Ruby), 9 pounds would last one 20-pound corgi for 18 days. That would be good. Very, very good.

Dog Dunes

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You think I exaggerate, don’t you, with that turn of phrase? Really?

Yes. That is from one (1) twenty-pound dog. A mound of hair larger than Ruby’s head!

Is there any question why I seem to be developing an allergy to dog hair?

Well. Yes, there is. This being lovely uptown Arizona, great swaths of dust accumulate on the floors, too. I dust the floors every day… And here’s the accumulation of one (1) twenty-four-hour period:

Yup. As a practical matter, even more dust than dog hair has settled in the course of one day. And nothing is going on. The air is perfectly still: no breezes blowing, no monsoons wailing, nary a soul tracking in and out of the house.

Arizona. It’s where you come to find out what your allergies are.

😀

Doggy Diagnosis

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So, here we are back from the vet — WonderVet, we might add. He took one look at the dog and said: “abscessed tooth.”

There’s a suspicion I’d have preferred not to have had confirmed. As I mentioned earlier in the day: a look at her big back-of-the-jaw bone-crunching fang shows that it’s not in good shape.

He said it’s not uncommon for a tooth abscess to present this way in a dog.

Fortunately, this is a vet with common sense and an underdeveloped sense of greed. He said there are two possible courses of action:

• A root canal, which has to be done by a specialist
• Extract the tooth

I asked if there was any real advantage to a root canal and, presumably, a crown (no joke: one friend’s dog was actually given crowns). He said that if I took the dog to the veterinary dental specialist, the guy would give me all sorts of great reasons…but that in fact there really is no advantage. He said the dog’s teeth might migrate over time. I pointed out the dog is over 11 years old…they’d have to gallop to do her much harm between now and the time Gabriel’s horn sounds for her. He allowed as to how that is exactly so. Asked which he recommended, he said extraction is the best strategy: less stressful for the dog and it doesn’t cost $2500.

Root canals on your dog. Dayum! Once again: we are in the wrong business, my friends.

Other vets have thought her teeth were in fine condition; I haven’t had them professionally cleaned (mostly because that way lies fleecing). He said professionally cleaning a dog’s teeth would not stop her from developing an abscess. But he will throw in a tooth cleaning, long as he has her knocked out. They also will do bloodwork and a cardiac test, so she’ll get a very thorough middle-aged dog exam.

So, there we are: that should set me back another thousand bucks. {sigh}