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Pets

Doggie Update

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So Charley the Golden Retriever is still alive. And I had the locale wrong, for reasons attributable only to senility: somewhere along the line “Show Low,” the garden spot where M’hijito and his dog are presently becalmed, morphed in my aged mind into “Snowflake,” a different  wide spot in the Arizona road. Show Low is even further from lovely uptown Phoenix: it’s about a five-hour drive. Images all seem to be copyrighted, but you might enjoy this rustic piece of public relations…

Nice and cool up there, though. It’s hot, humid, and rainy down here.

The vet’s office in exquisite Show Low is closed on the weekend, but they’re kindly letting M’hijito visit his dog while staff go in to check on the imprisoned livestock. They also hope to get a vet in to talk with him this afternoon, maybe.

Charley lives, to the surprise of all concerned. The vet expected him to die and prepared M’hijito (repeatedly) for that eventuality. Apparently he’s stronger this morning and able to sit up (which was not so before this). However, his bloodwork still ain’t great: they’re telling M’hijito that the platelet count is low.

However, he had a bowel movement that was not bloody diarrhea — which would have been the case had the predicted devastation to his intestines occurred. I have not heard that he’s bleeding from the nose, gums, or anus, which would be the case if the low platelet count indicated internal hemorrhaging. There’s some indication of harm to the liver, but the vet says a dog may recover from some injury to the liver.

The vet would like M’hijito to take Charley to a 24-hour veterinary facility. Here in the Valley, these places are billed as “emergency animal clinics,” and they charge $1300 (!!!!) just to walk in the door. Got that? It’s just the down payment. If you say “we can’t afford that,” they will summarily turn you away! Customers either love them or hate them: some people report good experiences, but evidently if you’re unfortunate enough to have a bad experience, it’s very, very bad.

At any rate, it’s unclear that the dog needs that kind of high-powered treatment: he hasn’t died yet under the care of the small-town vet, and my guess is that if he hasn’t died yet, he’s not going to.

M’hijito says tomorrow morning he will call his vet’s office (she actually retired, but at least he’s on record as having been a customer there) and follow their advice, although clearly his inclination is to take the dog to a 24-hour place.

Meanwhile, as reported yesterday, one researcher found that all the hyperthermic dogs in a study survived if they made it through 72 hours in a veterinary hospital.

Additionally both hypothermia (getting too cold) and hyperthermia (getting too hot) can on their own cause platelets to die off. In vitro (i.e., in glass: in a lab), they readily regenerate at room temperature. This suggests that if the dog actually is not hemorrhaging internally, his blood count should recover in due time. If he were bleeding much internally, he would not appear to be getting steadily better, a little each day. Presumably, he would not even be living at this point.

And I also learned that, at least in humans, hyperthermia can be psychogenic — that is, stress can bring it on.

A more technically inclined report says that in humans stress can lead to transient hyperthermia, which will not respond to aspirin (and similar drugs used to treat fever) but which may respond to sedatives and antipsychotics.

As far back as 2008, researchers were talking about stress-induced hyperthermia — the vets up there should know about this, you’d think.  Presumably, though, because they’re in a rural practice they have no need to.

My son says the dog was never exposed to high temperatures en route, not even when they were stalled for an hour by the road construction in the Salt River Canyon. In fact, he says, the inside of the car was “cold as an icebox.” He let Charley out of the car while they were stopped, to let him walk around…and noticed then that he was panting and wild-eyed. This he attributed to the dog’s usual dislike of riding in the car. For unknown reasons, Charley was OK with the decrepit Honda sedan M’hijito used to drive, but he hates loathes and despises the Ford Escape that took its place. Under normal circumstances he freezes up and goes all rigid, M’hijito says, and sharing the back of the vehicle with camping gear evidently got him massively overwrought. M’hijito thinks he became so frantic in his fear or phobia or whatever the eff that he worked himself up into overheating. That possibility seems to be confirmed by the studies above.

Less evident is whether it’s really necessary to consign this dog to a 24-hour emergency veterinary once he’s well enough to travel five hours inside the hated vehicle, or one like it. These places are renowned for bills that run well over $1,000, and one person reported a bill of $22,000. It’s hard to get a straight story, unfortunately, because most of the sites discussing this subject bear all the hallmarks of paid posts, at one point or another coming around to a pitch for pet health insurance.

Herein lies the problem, my friends, with raising children in an upscale urban setting. Well. One of the many problems.

In a setting where dogs and cats are “members of the family” and animal owners go around calling themselves “pet parents” (for godsake), it’s impossible — it surely is socially unacceptable and it probably is objectively impossible — to communicate to a young person the ethos that a dog is a dog.

It is not your friend and it is not your “packmate” and it is not your baby: it’s a dog.

A symbiote.

It cannot understand why it’s suffering, and its concept of the future does not include “someday maybe I’ll recover and sure, I’ll be a cripple but that will be OK because I’ll still live to see my grandpuppies graduate from Harvard.”

So moderns like M’hijito whose parents did not grow up in rural settings aren’t prepared to deal with the eventuality of putting an animal down as the kindest thing for all concerned.

You know, my father grew up as a cow-puncher and my mother’s family scratched a living out of a dirt farm in upstate New York. Neither one of them would have wanted to put a pet down. But neither of them would have impoverished themselves to keep a seriously injured or sick dog alive, or forced that animal to live through a lot of suffering on a long-shot chance that it might survive.

Nor, I might add, would my father have put up with a supposed hunting dog that was so neurotic you couldn’t take it for a four-hour ride in a car without it collapsing in a phobia-induced state of hyperthermia.

This is my fault. I should have made my son understand that a dog is a dog, not a four-legged person…I mean, understand that on a gut level.

My own sense is that one should do what one can, within reason (got that? within reason is the operative term here) and then let nature take its course.

Our ranch manager once told me that. I asked him if we shouldn’t call in a vet for a very aged horse that was suffering an ailment. He said, “No, we should let nature take its course.” And he was right. I would have called the vet; still would, being a city girl. Nothing much would have happened. The vet would have charged more than the horse was worth; the horse would still have died. But I wouldn’t have felt guilty about it, anyway. I guess.

About eight times out of ten, I expect, letting nature take its course is the most merciful thing for all of us. All told.

Beside Myself…

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CharleyM’hijito is stuck in Show Low, and Charley the Golden Retriever is dying. He may already be dead as I write this. My son is beside himself with agony and I’m beside myself with sorrow and worry for him.

He drove up to the high country, taking the dog with him, to go camping and fishing on the Rez. At Show Low a wide spot in the road north of Payson, he stopped to take a rest and let Charley stretch his legs. When he got him out of the car, Charley tumbled out onto the ground and he discovered the dog couldn’t walk or even stand.

Charley hates riding in the back of M’hijito’s new car. He didn’t like riding in the old car, which was a sedan, but for reasons no one has been able to figure out, he simply loathes the Ford Escape, and he gets stressed whenever he’s made to ride any distance in it. M’hijito thought his panting and carrying on was a manifestation of the usual stress, and when he saw the state the dog was in, he thought Charley was having a stress attack.

He called me on his cell. I advised him to take the dog to a vet and looked up the main vet in Show Low, who has a 4.5-star consumer rating, interestingly enough. He rushed the dog over there, where he was told the problem was heat prostration.

The dog’s temperature was 107 degrees!

As they were trying to cool Charley off, they were blaming my son — the vet evidently thought he’d left the dog locked in the car and gone off.

That is absurd. My son dotes on that dog and would never do any such thing. Charley was in the back of an SUV with the air-conditioning going the whole time. I called Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic and asked if it was possible that the back of a Ford Escape could get hot enough to harm an animal if the vents in back were nonfunctional. He said he didn’t think so: because the front seats are separate, like captain’s chairs, enough cool air from the front vents would blow between and under the seats  to keep the dog from overheating.

At any rate, now M’hijito blames himself.

The vet said Charley would probably not live until this morning, but if he does live until today, he will probably die in agony sometime during the day. In that case, he suggested, it was best to put the dog down.

I’m quite sure my son would never have left that dog in a hot car: that would be utterly against his nature. And though I expect the back of an SUV could get warm, I’d be surprised if it would reach the level of “hot” — as in 107 degrees. Once you’re up the hill above Black Canyon City, the climate cools significantly, so even if the AC system were not working, if it was reasonably cool in front it shouldn’t have been dangerously hot in back.

A little research shows that dogs can suffer vestibular strokes or heart attacks, which would elicit symptoms similar to Charley’s…except for the 107-degree temperature. That says the animal was overheated and is definitely life-threatening. More research shows that about 50% of dogs afflicted with heat stroke survive, if they receive care soon enough. Of course, we don’t know how long Charley was in this condition: my son had been on the road four or five hours by the time he discovered it, and an hour of that time was spent stopped dead by road construction. Maybe the car could have heated up that much if it wasn’t moving forward — I understand the construction is in the Salt River Canyon, which would be a couple hours outside of Show Low.

And still more research reveals that the longer a dog stays in a veterinary hospital, the more likely it is to survive. Although…that’s deceptive.

One study of 42 dogs that presented with heatstroke found that patients that died from the condition did so within 24 hours after development of signs. Those that were able to survive longer than 48 hours lived.11 In the same study, all of the dogs that were hospitalized longer than 72 hours survived, despite evidence of multiorgan involvement.

The thing is…if most heat stroke victims die within the first day, then the ones who survive are more likely to live anyway. So to say that 100% of dogs hospitalized longer than 72 hours survive is only to say that dogs who manage to get through 72 hours alive are not going to die of the heat stroke.

The key to survival, though, is rapid treatment: cooling the dog’s body temperature back to normal as quickly as possible. But…if this happened to him while they were stuck in the construction mess, Charley would have been suffering that life-threatening elevated temperature for a two or more hours before M’hijto discovered it.

M’hijito wants to bring the dog back down into Phoenix today. But that will entail getting someone to help him. I offered to drive up there, but the thing is, if he’s going to be in the back of the vehicle tending to the dog, we would have one (1) driver to get two cars down the hill.

His friends are in Payson. He’s talked to them and apparently they’re willing to come meet him and help him get the dog back into the city. His father and the new wife have also said they’ll go up there.

However, given the business about the survival rate, I’ve suggested he should leave the dog there, without interrupting the IV and oxygen for an afternoon. He could drive down and pick me up, and we could then turn around and drive right back up the Rim. Today is Saturday: his vet will be closed by the time he can get back into town. So bringing Charley down today will mean risking his life further.

It’s a terrible situation.

Roadblock Man

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Dammit!  I thought he was gone! But ohhh no! This morning when the dogs and I took our usual route around the ’hood, there he was, in front of the cat brothers’ house, dumping cat food on the sidewalk.

We have this old guy who makes a hobby of driving around Richistan during the early morning hours and feeding the outdoor cats. He’ll dump a pile of cat food in the middle of the sidewalk and then stand around waiting for the neighbors’ stray cats to come over and let him pet them.

He also carries pocketsful of large-dog Milk Bones, which he likes to dispense to passing doggy-walkers.

On the surface, this is cute and sweetly eccentric. But when you give it even just a little thought: not so much.

Today’s encounter marked the second time he handed my dogs chunks of Milk Bones after I’ve asked him not to, and the second time it’s caused Ruby to choke and fly into a ten-minute fit of frantic gasping for air. She tries to swallow the whole damn thing without chewing it up, and of course she chokes on it.

Apparently he can’t or won’t remember not to fucking do that. It was the second time I’ve had to pick her up and run with a 25-pound animal in my arms and another one in tow on a leash, hoping I could get to the emergency vet before she died.

Exactly how I imagine I’m gonna get to the emergency vet through rush-hour traffic escapes me, but I’m willing to try.

Fortunately, she managed to gag the stuff up out of her throat by the time I reached Feeder Street NW, and once again she turned out to be OK.

But one of these times, she’s not gonna be OK.

And realistically, there’s no way I can get her to veterinary help at 6:30 or 7 in the morning.

What is the matter with people? Wouldn’t you think the sight of an elderly woman RUNNING down the street with a choking dog would be at least somewhat memorable?

I haven’t seen the old buzzard for a long time. So I imagined maybe he had fallen ill or died — he’s very elderly and seems somewhat frail. Lulled into a false sense of confidence, I’d taken to walking on that street again.

But no.

The real issue is that I haven’t felt very well myself for the past several months and so just haven’t been walking the dogs at all; or when I have, it’s been later in the day. Now that three-digit temps are here to stay, we need to be out of the house by 6 or 6:30, or else we ain’t a-goin’.

So I guess we’ve just been missing him: he’s been there; we haven’t.

Obviously, it’s my responsibility to tell some nutty animal-lover not to feed random stuff to my dogs. But…

In the first place, it feels rude to yelp at some poor old lonely guy, “Hey! Don’t do that!” Which is about what you’d have to do to stop him. He charges at you with both hands full of dog “treats” and shoves them into the animals’ mouths before you can say no. And in the second place, I have asked him not to feed those things to my dogs. He either doesn’t remember or just ignores me.

When you say to him “I’d rather you not feed those to the dogs” or “Please don’t give that to the dogs,” his response is “Oh, pooh pooh! It’s just a little Milk Bone.” He thinks they’re harmless.

And they probably are. Tales that Milk Bone is full of toxic carcinogenic chemicals, it develops, are folkloric: they’re just not true. On the other hand, they’re not full of anything that’s very good for your dog, either. Sort of like candy bars for humans: empty calories. They do contain some kind of beef product, though…and Ruby is allergic to beef in all its manifestations, even cow’s ears and leather chew sticks.

Ruby and Cassie get plenty of dog treats: pieces of carrot, pieces of apple, cubes of cheese, pieces of high-quality kibble. They don’t need any more empty calories than they already get.

So anyway. The guy poses a problem. What he really poses is a road block to my favorite garden spot to walk the dogs. I don’t take my dogs to the park because of the large number of dogs, some of them aggressive, running off the lead. So that leaves Richistan as the favored shady dell in which to stroll. To get in there, I’ll have to walk two blocks north and then drop south a block. In theory we could get there by taking the street one block to the north of the Cat Dudes’ house, but that street curves south and debouches back onto our usual street…about one lot east of Cat Dudes. To avoid him, we’ll have to go way out of our way, and also avoid the prettiest streets in that part of the neighborhood.

Pisseth me offeth…

Milk Bone Ingredients
Highlighted: Things you might prefer not to feed your dog

Wheat Flour, Wheat Bran, Beef Meal and Beef Bone Meal, Wheat Germ, Beef Fat (Preserved with Tocopherols), Poultry By-Product Meal, Lamb Meal, Salt, Chicken Meal, Dried Beet Pulp, Dicalcium Phosphate, Bacon Fat (preserved With BHT, Propyl-gallate, And Citric Acid), Brewers Dried Yeast, Whey, Artificial Color (Includes Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1), Vitamins (Choline Chloride, Dl-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate [Vitamin E], Vitamin A Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, D-Activated Animal Sterol [Source of Vitamin D3]), Malted Barley Flour, Iron Oxide, Casein, Natural Flavor (Source of Peanut Butter Flavor), Sodium Metabisulfite (Dough Conditioner), Minerals (Zinc Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Copper Sulfate, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide [Source of Iodine]), Soy Lecithin

Springtime Dog Tick Attack

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Last night my son had me over for dinner at his house. This is always a treat, because he cooks like a dream. He happened to be dog-sitting for a friend: the guest was the cutest little critter named Lady. Looks exactly like my friend Susan’s dog, videlicet…

Have you ever seen anything more adorable in your life? {ahem} This side of a corgi, of course.

So as we’re petting and loving up this critter — she jumps up onto our laps while we’re consuming the rest of the wine for dessert  — what do we discover but a tick on her little noggin.

And then another tick…and then another! All told, this beast has five ticks attached to her head and ears!

Of course, I’ve got my dogs there. He’s naturally got his dog there. The poochlet has been around for several days, presumably dropping ticks on the floors and all over the yard. Dayum!

We inspect our dogs and can’t find any other ticks, but that’s not saying much. Cassie the Corgi and Charley the Golden Retriever have coats like carpets: you can’t really feel their skin through those rugs. Ruby, I don’t think, is infested…yet. But as for the other two: who knows?

I point out to him that some dogs seem to have a natural resistance to ticks. The German shepherds I’ve had, in particular, seem to bounce them right off, and over Cassie’s entire residence at the Funny Farm, I’ve only ever found one tick on her…right after an agility training class that was held on a grassy field in a semi-rural area.

We throw the little dog’s bedding and the cover for Charley’s bed into the washer; he pledges to vacuum thoroughly the next day, and we hope for the best.

Some dogs, on the other hand, are decidedly not immune to ticks. One of my first dogs, a young Doberman pinscher, was a tick magnet.

You never saw so many ticks in your life as that dog had. He apparently came to us with the ticks, and apparently they were resistant to insecticide — presumably because the breeder had been overtreating for so long. That dog was covered with ticks constantly.

We lived at my parents’ house in Sun City, which had gravel landscaping, like every other house around it. So there was no grass to harbor the things. Chances are, they had gotten into the wall-to-wall carpeting, where they were living. They would climb up the walls and my mother would get hysterical.

We would then call an exterminator and make an appointment to have the dog tick-dipped while the exterminator was at the house.

The dog was allergic to tick dip, among the many things it was allergic to. (It was also allergic to bermudagrass.) So every time we would take the dog to be dipped, it would come back with hives all over its body. These would take several miserable days to subside. Within a week or two, the ticks would come right back.

We treated the house time after time, to no avail.

Some people believe, like the proprietor of this interesting website, that dogs are more susceptible to fleas and ticks when their health is not up to par, if they have allergies, or if they have a skin condition. That would explain why four German shepherds, two golden retrievers, a Labrador retriever, and two corgis would rarely get ticks — all those dogs were in top condition into their old age.

A dobe, on the other hand, is best described as “a walking vet bill.”

Even though mostly I tend to think of the holistic stuff as bullshit, in fact this writer has several good points:

1) Vacuuming up hard floors regularly — every day — helps to keep ticks at bay. It’s carpet that they get into: carpet is pretty much the same as grass, to the buggish mind.

2) Boric acid works very well against any crawling insect and, used sparingly, will not harm your dog. You can find it marketed as an insecticide in a handy poof-bottle at any drugstore that’s frequented by Latinos, and probably at Walmart; otherwise ask the pharmacist.

3) DE (get the food grade, which you can order from Amazon) is less harmless but not VERY harmful if used only along baseboards and around entrances. However, I believe it to be more effective against ants and termites, because insects need to range around a bit to walk through it, and to control infestations they have to take it back to a hive, meaning both DE and boric acid are most effective against social insect species.

4) Some essential oils in fact are effective insecticides. Which ones, I do not know. IMHO they stink to high heaven, but some people like the odor. A few latter-day exterminating companies peddle them as “organic” and “natural” spraying products.

Resistance to ivermectin has been observed recently in brown dog ticks. Ivermectin is  (to my knowledge) the most commonly used and least toxic of the insecticides used on dogs (it’s in heartworm pills). Resistance mostly has been seen in tropical areas — Mexico, Panama, Florida — but of course with airplanes and global warming, the little guys aren’t likely to be confined to those areas long.

Avoid the use of collars and spot treatments that are supposed to kill ticks. These can be highly toxic to dogs.

Here’s a good guide from the University of Florida. If you spot even one tick on your dog (to say nothing of five of them!) vacuum the house thoroughly. If your vacuum uses disposable bags, vacuum up a small amount of DE or boric acid first, since these chemicals kill insects by causing mechanical damage to their carapaces and are by and large harmless to human and dogs (don’t breathe the DE, of course) (and don’t overdo it: a little goes a long way).

Vacuum everyplace where the little guys are likely to hide — in their nymph form they’re tiny and can easily get into crevices and corners. Vacuum carefully along the walls and underneath all the furniture. Carry the bag out to the garbage directly after vacuuming. If you have carpets, resign yourself to doing this every day for some weeks.

Sprinkle a fine, thin layer of DE or boric acid all along all the baseboards. If there’s a little gap between the baseboard and a hard floor, take a broom or hand-held brush and sweep the powder into that gap. Ticks like to move up a wall toward the corners of the ceiling — remember that they spend 3/4 of their lifetime off the dog, and during that time they’re living on your floors, in your furniture, or inside your walls. Forcing them to cross a DE or boric-acid barrier to reach the wall will do them in. Not instantly…but just give it awhile.

Once you’ve accomplished these fun tasks, just keep checking the dogs regularly. If you don’t find any more ticks for a week or so, you should be fine. If you do, then call a bug guy and have him spray inside and outside; on the same day, have the dog tick-dipped. Keep the dog away from the house until after the exterminator has done the job.

Outside, hang up feeders to attract seed-eating birds, as most of these, especially Abert’s towhees and thrashers, eat insects…including ticks. Really, most birds will eat insects, even sparrows and house finches, but some are adapted to eat mostly insects. In our parts, these include towhees, thrashers, mockingbirds, and woodpeckers. If you can call them into the yard, you’ll have a lot fewer undesirable insects around.

Ridiculously cute little dog: Shamelessly ripped off from my friend’s Facebook page
Dog tick image: By Sam Droege – Flickr: Dermacentor variabilis, U, Back, MD, Beltsville_2013-07-08-19.15.11 ZS PMax, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27635912

Cats & Dogs & Diets

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Manning…Personing the barricades!

Cats

Some time back my friend KJG’s husband, The Fireman, was reflecting on our shared War on Cats. They have an obnoxious neighbor who thinks it’s just grand to let their damnable cats invade yards, kill birds, dig up gardens, piss and poop on vegetables, and stink up entryways, a problem that makes Other Daughter’s cats a trifle.

Here at the Funny Farm, I had fortified the castle battlements by zip-tieing carpet tack strips along the decorative tops of the cinderblock walls: the top row of block has a pattern of holes, highly convenient for this purpose.

A minor dilemma arose: to wit, a slender block wall like this has a heavier, supporting block column about every 15 feet. Each of these is topped with a flat, solid block, leaving noplace to get purchase for your zip-tied lashup. After a couple of experiments failed, I ended up having to paste pieces tack strips to the tops of these columns, using outdoor-grade heavy-duty double-sided sticky tape. This worked…sort of.

Two and a half years have passed, and the problem with Other Daughter’s tabby cat and KnitWit’s black & white cat has been defeated. Cats do not enter my backyard. The neighbors think a Crazy Lady lives here, but that’s just fine with me as long as their cats are not using my desert landscaping as their toilet and my dogs are not eating their deposits — and all the parasites and diseases that come along.

As you can imagine, carpet tack strips are not made to weather wind, rain, and 118-degree sunlight. They’re really nothing other than thin strips of laminate, about a step above cardboard. They’ve held up a great deal better than I imagined they would — I figured they’d fall apart in about one season. But no. Even though they’re looking a little tired, they’re still up there and still doing the job. Of course, they want to buckle and they want to de-laminate, but where they’re secured to the decorative cinderblocks, the zip ties have held them together. Atop the columns, though, they have warped, buckled, curled, and pulled up from the sticky tape. Ugleee, though still effective.

The Fireman suggested that the column toppers could be held in place by nailing the strips to pieces of wood cut to fit the block and then sticking the resulting solid piece down to the crowning cinderblock.

This, it develops, is a brilliant idea. It’s easy to accomplish — carpet tack strips come with handy little brads that you just tap down to hold them in place.

Under construction
The deed done

They’re sturdy, they stick on there firmly, and while they’re anything but elegant, at least they do look better than strips of tacks tied on with string and wire. 🙂

{Chortle!} Great WT stuff, isn’t it?

So today I plan to start replacing the weathered strips along the endless lengths of decorative cinderblock, a little at a time. There’s no hurry. While it’s cool in the morning, a few feet of old strips can be discarded and a few new feet installed. By the end of the week, the eccentric lash-up will be fully replaced.

Dogs

While I’ve been sick with this seemingly endless respiratory infection, I’ve again had recourse to rolls of FreshPet dog food, the commercial product that’s the closest I’ve found to the custom-made chow I feed the hounds.

The dogs like it, and gosh it’s so much easier than stewing and grinding and mixing up 10 pounds of dog food at a time. Since the dogs eat a pound of food a day, ten pounds goes fast. Usually I can make a week or ten days’ worth, and then it’s back to the kitchen.

It’s good for the dogs — you’d never know Cassie is over ten years old now — but it sure as hell is a PITA. Especially when you don’t feel good.

FreshPet is bracingly expensive — depending on the store, $12 to $14 a roll, plus 10% sales tax, for enough to last about a week.

So yesterday while I was at Costco, there to purchase some more dog food makings, I tried to calculate a cost comparison. It’s not easy, because custom-make dog food is not the same kind of apple as factory-made stuff. But after much tergiversation, I figured that buying pork, chicken, big bags of frozen mixed veggies, oatmeal, rice, and sweet potatoes is marginally cheaper, over the course of a month, than serving up premade dog food with the same ingredients.

Plus: the main reason I go to Costco these days is to buy dog pork, dog chicken and dog veggies. Really, I can buy everything else in other places, and absent the impulse buy factor, doing so saves money.  This month I’ve spent a ton of money in Costco, which I would not have done had I been shopping in grocery stores — the purple jeans come to mind as an example.

So, I dunno. It’s a nuisance to make dog food. But it probably is better for the dogs, and apparently it’s cheaper. If I could train myself only to buy the stuff that’s needed in Costco and not to grab a pair of colorful jeans or a package of oversalted pre-cooked lamb shanks or a couple of bottles of wine, it probably would be cheaper.

Dieting

In spite of past six weeks spent pounding at Death’s Door — or maybe because of it — I’ve put on enough weight to push the BMI borderline between “normal” and “overweight” (i.e., “fat”). The jeans still fit, but they’re getting tight.

So I determined to knock off the bread (every morning two pieces! With cheese or dipped in olive oil or smeared with butter and honey!!) and the pasta (comfort food of the first [salted] water) and the potatoes (mmmmmm hash browns!!!).

And it’s worked! By adding salad or fruit to each meal and subtracting the wheat products and the potatoes, I’ve lost two pounds in a week. This, without going hungry, without exercising significantly, and without knocking off my favorite potables (one beer or one bourbon and water per day). If I would get off my duff and bike or walk without benefit of leaf-sniffing dogs, I’d probably lose weight even faster.

Since only about five pounds need to go, I should be back to my former sylph-like self in another week or two.

One thing I did discover: if I arrive at the church about an hour before morning choir practice, I can sneak in a mile or so of strolling…  ahem, “power-walking”…in a different environment without the animals suspecting that I’ve made my escape.

One of our associate rectors came up with the idea of a virtual “walk to Jerusalem” for the weeks coming up to Easter. She mapped out a mile-long route around the church, and they tote up the number of person-miles walked by the interested group, to come up with a total equivalent to the distance between Lovely Uptown Phoenix and Jerusalem. This, she taped in a window, allowing me to see exactly where to walk around the church to rack up an even mile.

The area around there in fact is rather lovely. North Central Phoenix is full of expansive 1950s ranch houses on huge lots, each now worth in the vicinity of $750,000 to $1 million, and the main drag through the center of the district is flanked by what once were riding trails — and now are shady walking paths. So it’s a great place to walk and it offers some scenery a little different from the ’hood’s. When you’re there, you’re smack in the middle of Richistan, rather than having to hike through a buffer zone to get to a scenic upscale tract.

So I’m thinking that as part of the diet plan, I should do this every Sunday I go over to the religious HQ. It may even be light enough an hour before the midweek evening choir practice to pull this off (I wouldn’t walk on Central Avenue after dark) — so that would provide two monotony-defying, dog-free walks a week, instead of just one. 🙂

Welp, on to today’s exercise stint: pulling old carpet tack strips off the walls and zip-tieing new ones up!

Rioting in the Rain, and Assorted Frolics

by

Totally whipped! What a week!

Friends over for dinner on Thursday… That turned into something strange. First off, the meat I bought at Costco was SPOILED, something I discovered about an hour before folks were supposed to show up. Fortunately, I’d bought another couple of smaller packages at Safeway, and that product was fine. And equally fortunately, my son came to the party, and he kindly took over the grilling of the burgers. Otherwise I probably would’ve been undone.

Since Thursday is a workday for him, he brought Charley the Golden Retriever over to my house at the lunch hour, so he could come straight here from the office.

CharleyCharley, Cassie the Corgi, and Ruby the (former) Corgi Pup get along swimmingly. There’s never been any problem with these pals.

Now people start to show up for dinner, and of course there’s a great deal of Dog Joy elicited by the arrival of several colorful new humans.

Then my friend Connie arrives…with her dog in tow. This, in theory, should be good. Silver the Weimeraner has been here before and she gets along with the corgis about the same way the retriever gets along with the corgis: no problem.

Cassie-and-verbenaSo this all goes along pretty well…until…

About the time the five of us sit down for dinner, all four dogs start to bark…nonstop. In chorus. Nothing we do interrupts this. I put Cassie in the back room, where her beloved nest resides — this usually is a sure-fire bark-stopper. Not so much, this time. My son puts Charley in the back yard, where he continues to bark frantically. Connie eventually puts Silver in her Jeep, but that doesn’t help because Charley, Cassie, and Ruby keep up the din.

The barkfest is so so loud and so uninterrupted that literally we cannot hold a conversation at the dinner table — because we can’t hear each other talking. NOTHING discourages our doggy friends from holding forth.

I do not know what set off this frenzy…but it pretty much ruined the dinner party.

Oh well.

Saturday I went with five friends down to the State Capitol, there to join the Phoenix sister march to the Women’s March on Washington.

It was awesome! An incredible twenty thousand people showed up! I’ve never seen so many people in one place in my life.

And it was cold. It had rained all day Friday and at 1 in the morning, it was just pouring rain. We got there at nine. A brisk, chilly breeze was blowing, but the clouds were breaking up, so as long as you stood in the sun, it wasn’t too bad. Except we were told to gather on the grassy lawn in front of the Capitol building. Well…that had turned into a swamp. A very COLD swamp. Most people were wearing tennies or fabric hiking boots, and you can be sure their feet got good and wet. I had on a pair of Sanitas, which have inch-thick rubber platform soles. These kept my feet out of the water, but by the time I got home, they were coated in mud all the way up to where the leather last is stitched on.

But as the day went on, the clouds blew away and the morning turned very pleasant.

It was a positive event, very fun and supportive, with many vows to keep on fighting the evil impulses that seem to be overtaking our body politick. We shall see about that. But meanwhile, those women can make a damn hilarious sign. The signs were beyond great.

I don’t have a cell phone and didn’t carry a camera (because I didn’t want to carry a purse) — this being Arizona, the home of the hard-line right wing, I expected trouble and wanted to travel as light as possible. So the upshot of that is I have to rely on friends’ images posted on Facebook. 🙂

This morning was “Switch Sunday,” the one day a month the volunteer choir sings for the 9 a.m. service…meaning we have to show up at 8 a.m. Argh! Five-thirty is just too early to get up on a Sunday morning!!! However… This morning’s dawn was not to be missed:

Glorioski!

Friday, after taking the rotten meat back to Costco, I spent the entire rainy day working on academic copy. And all of Saturday afternoon. And after all of this Sunday afternoon. It’s almost bed-time, and I finally sent the second-to-last of a dozen anthology articles back to the client. {gasp!}

And what should pop up on the e-mail server but…lo! Another assignment from one of the Chinese mathematicians!

I haven’t even looked at the material sent by candidate assistant editors, which has been sitting there for days, weeks, god only knows how long.

Tomorrow. I am beat. I am off to do the ironing and then go to bed.