Pets | Funny about Money

Springtime Dog Tick Attack

May 15, 2017 by funny

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

April 12, 2017 by funny

~~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.

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

January 27, 2017January 22, 2017 by funny

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.

Charley, 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.

So 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.

Real Risk, Perceived Risk

January 18, 2017January 18, 2017 by funny

What a beautiful, peaceful evening. Venus, a brilliant diamond, shone in a deep sapphire sky when the corgis and I set out to jog a mile-long course through the ’hood. The dimming sunset, still glowing orange, backlit tall palm, ash, and pine trees to the west.

Two houses between here and Richistan, very nice houses, are on the market. One is a fix-and-flip, acquired from a very aged man who probably was the original owner. The other has been upgraded a couple of times over the past decade and is significantly further from Conduit of Blight than the Funny Farm.

I consider, as I pass each house, whether if I had a sh!tload of money I would wish to buy one of these places. And the answer is no.

In each case, the house’s next-door neighbor has two or three large, deep-throated barking dogs that go berserk whenever anyone walks by on the side walk with their own dogs, their children, their friends, or their door-to-door fliers. Across the street from each house was at least one neighbor harboring large barking dogs.

Now of course, I have barking dogs, too. But when mine are yapping, they don’t act like they’re going to come through the window and grab you by the throat. Nor are they left outside in the yard at all hours of the day and the night — most of the time if they bark at a passer-by, it’s from the living room. They’re not guard dogs and they’re not intended as guard dogs.

A lot of people in this area have large, fierce dogs — more than one of them — because they perceive that the area is unsafe.

But is it?

True, the district just to the north of us, less than a mile away — really, just a few steps across a main drag from the northernmost homes in the ’hood — is notoriously crime-ridden, the territory of a notable meth gang. The district to the west of us, where aging apartments continue to deteriorate and an abandoned golf course has become a campground for homeless drug addicts, also has a high crime rate and an increasingly sketchy ambience.

But that’s the nature of the City of Phoenix: it’s a patchwork of enclaves. Anywhere you look, you’ll find upscale neighborhoods full of doctors and lawyers and business tycoons cheek-by-jowl with drug-infested slums. If you want to live in uninterrupted affluent homogeneity, you pretty much have to move to Scottsdale…which, because everybody knows its inhabitants have plenty of money and plenty of loot to steal, is as much a target of burglars and thieves as any other part of the Valley. Apparently we Phoenicians like it this way: we do nothing to change it.

So it is that our neighborhood, flanked by blight on two sides, is a hotbed of risk.

Well… I’ve taken to walking the dogs every evening after dark. Nary a resident is to be seen outside: they’re all parked in front of their televisions or their computers. You could break into a car, steal a tchotchki off a front porch, peer in a window without anyone ever noticing.

Never once have I seen a bum wandering through the night or a likely burglar slinking by. Except for the occasional coyote — which isn’t any more interested in confronting you than you are in confronting it — after dark there is nothing out there that looks like a threat. Not a burglar, not a bum, not biker, not even a kid in a hoodie.

During the daytime, you see an occasional derelict. Once in awhile you’ll see someone who’s obviously casing houses. But not often. Usually you can walk a mile or more through the ’hood without every seeing anyone but a few workmen and some wandering neighbors.

That was not so 30 years ago, when my ex- and I lived in the then gentrifying Encanto neighborhood, a picturesque remnant of small-town Phoenix that, like the ’hood where the Funny Farm stands, was discovered all at once by a horde of young upwardly mobile urban adults. It quickly became known as “the lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto” — because it was within easy driving distance (even walking distance) of the downtown hospitals and law firms.

The Encanto area’s zip code had the highest per-capita drug use in the city, at the time. Despite the efforts of some developers to pave it over with a freeway, it survived a great deal of pressure to force the young would-be city-dwellers out to the suburbs. Today it’s one of the city’s bragging points.

Exactly the same thing is under way here: the ’hood is the New Encanto. But unlike Encanto, the ’hood is not overrun with derelicts and criminals. There are a lot of homeless mentally ill riding the buses and trains up and down Conduit of Blight Blvd., but not so many actually inside the neighborhood — local opinion to the contrary.

When we lived in Encanto, you couldn’t poke your nose outside the door without seeing a bum or two roaming up the street. One family, a block to the south of us, was baking cookies while watching television of an evening. Since everyone was in the house and they felt safety in numbers, it didn’t occur to them to bolt all the doors and windows. A bum watching from the alley noticed this and observed that the wife would come into the kitchen, stick a pan of cookies in the oven, and then go watch TV while they baked for 15 minutes. During one of those interludes, he just stepped into the kitchen, picked up her purse, and made off with it. 🙂

Not all these exploits were so funny. One of my neighbors was hacked to death by an ax murderer, having surprised the guy robbing her house when she came home from the beauty parlor. Another was studied by a man who knew a) where to find the only window in the house that was not alarmed and b) when her husband was out of town. He took the opportunity to spend an entire night beating and raping her.

We have never had anything like that happen here. We’ve had some close calls, but no real horrors. Yet.

But interestingly, few people in Encanto kept large, fierce dogs. I had a German shepherd that I’d inherited from a neighbor. The lady behind us had a doberman pinscher. Our babysitter, a street to the south of us, had a pair of airdales. One couple in our car-pool had a pretty ridiculous bloodhound. But otherwise, that was about it: I didn’t know anybody else who had big dogs.

Here, everybody and his little brother has a large, fierce dog with a threatening bark — or two, if possible. Cassie has been pounced twice by loose German shepherds. You can’t walk around the park without coming across someone with a big dog running loose — on Sunday mornings a bunch of locals bring about a dozen large dogs over there and let them run around, illegally, off the leash. Encanto Park was bum heaven, but you never saw a dog off the leash there. You didn’t see many dogs at all, come to think of it.

That says to me that people who live in this neighborhood are scared. The number of derelicts visible in these parts is a tiny fraction of the number of car-sleeping and window-peeping and yard-toileting natives who used to hang out in Encanto. Yet people apparently perceive a great deal more risk here than they did there.

Yes, we do have some incidents: the bum that jumped a wall to diddle with a couple of small girls being the most recent. And yeah, I did enjoy the Great Garage Invasion. But in the 13 years we lived in Encanto we had…

• The cat burglar on the roof
• The Night of the Screaming (in which I chased off a rapist by hollering “fire” at the top of my lungs)
• The burglar who was chased out of the house at 2 a.m. by our German shepherd
• The ax murder
• The night-long rapefest at the neighbor’s house
• The guy who took up residence in a neighbor’s car and was pissed when he was thrown out so she could go to work
• The guy who tried to push his way in through my front door even as not one but two German shepherds stared him down
• The guy who chased one of the nannies in Palmcroft
• The guy who followed me even as I was pushing a baby in a stroller (I dodged into a neighbors’ house)
• The couple who used our side yard as their latrine

It kinda went on and on. On Mondays, the head secretary at my office (yes, Virginia, in those days admins were called “secretaries”) would ask me what new story I had for them…and I usually did have one.

We hardly ever have things like that happen here. We have a hell of a lot more dogs than we do bums and criminals. Heh…maybe one fact follows the other as the night the day?

I doubt it. I think people are just scared. Unduly scared.

It doesn’t do to be scared of the bogeyman, you know. You’re usually bigger than he is, and nine times out of ten you’re a hell of a lot smarter (your brain not being clouded by dope or booze). A dog is nice company, but it’s not real protection. A gun is reassuring until you consider the fact that you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than to wing the burglar.

The best protection? Keeping your wits about you.

Venus over the Ocean: Brocken Inaglory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Venus_with_reflection.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5223759

How to unlock a Toyota…and other small miseries

December 16, 2016December 16, 2016 by funny

All you need is a small Allen wrench. Our friend Mike the Ukrainian Contractor, a co-conspirator at the Scottsdale Bidness Assn, locked himself out of his Toyota truck a couple days ago. After waiting an hour & a half for someone to come get him back in, he started to rummage around the Toyota’s bed. There he found a fairly small-sized Allen wrench. Stuck it in the lock, turned it, et voilà! the lock popped open.

Furthermore, this morning we discovered that my two-year-old Toyota key, which is cut exactly the same way his is cut, also will unlock his seventeen-year-old truck’s door. Noooo problem: just as if the key were made for the lock.

He bet that his key would open my Venza, but given the damned alarm system and all the wacky electronic stuff on the thing, I declined to test it. All I need is to be stuck in Scottsdale with a car alarm screaming and not be able to get into the damn vehicle.

Ruby is suffering from some kind of enteritis. It doesn’t appear to be distemper, because right this moment she’s flying around the house like a racehorse at full speed, leaping over rocks and running circles around Cassie. If she were seriously sick, she wouldn’t be up for that. I think the last batch of food I made contained too much rice and that’s what’s done her in.

Night before last, she barfed off the side of the bed. Despite her care to avoid listening to me bitch about having to strip and launder the bedding at three in the morning, she did manage to get a few drops of barf on the comforter and a sheet. Since that’s my thickest feather comforter, getting it clean is a chore even with the new washer. Took all day to get the damn thing dry.

Last night she and Cassie woke me twice. After the second elevator trip to the floor, I left them off the bed. Don’t like to do that, because I don’t run the heat at this time of year (by way of making up for the astronomical summertime air-conditioning bills), so if you’re not on or under the heated throw that tops the comforter, you’re very cold, indeed. Especially if you’re camping out on bare tile. But up-down-up-down-up-down all night long doesn’t make it.

So, mighty bleary-eyed when the alarm went off as dawn cracked, I ran off to the wee-hour meeting without my purse.

That meant I couldn’t run the errands I’d planned to do on the way home. And that means I now have to go out again and drive from here to Hell and back to buy gasoline and groceries. I was pissed about this and pissed about having to listen to more depressing bellyaching about our new fake President and REALLY pissed about having screwed up a manuscript so that I have to re-index 425 pages, a job I’ve already performed twice thanks to a prior screw-up.

As you can imagine, then, I was not pleased to come home to find Ruby’s rear end covered in dried-on dog sh!t.

She nests behind the toilet in the back bathroom. So the wall, the baseboard, the shower frame, the floor, and the toilet base were all smeared in dog sh!t, too.

Shee-ut. To coin a term…

So now in addition to feeling tired, cranky, and incompetent, I had to carry the dog into the bathtub and scrub her butt and thick furry “panties” clean, dry her off as best as possible (it’s still damn cold in the house), get out the disinfectant, and scrub down the walls, baseboard, shower frame, floor, and toilet in the back bathroom. Then open the windows back there and set up a fan at full blast to blow out the noxious disinfectant fumes.

This was really not how I wanted to start my day.

Admittedly, I did not want to make an extra trip out to shop for groceries and gasoline. In a car that anyone can open with an Allen wrench. Nor did I look forward to the first of four or five days of re-indexing chores. But this, I wanted to do even less.

Never Rains but It Pours…

August 19, 2016 by funny

😀 Literally! Along about 2:15 this morning, the dogs and I were lifted off the bed by the C-R-A-A-A-A-C-K kerBLAAAAAM of a lightning strike that sounded like it hit right outside the window.

The puppy was totally terrorized. I had to restrain her from leaping off the bed, which is one of those extra-deep things that you practically need a ladder to climb into. Cassie didn’t like it either.

The storm continued to grow, the thunder rolling in, most of the time, about four to six seconds after the flash — suggesting most of the storm was up around North Mountain. But three more blasts were very close, indeed.

Cassie decided dogscretion was the better part of valor and moved from her normal position at the foot of the bed up to the pillows, bringing her dog hair with her. Thank you very much. This was after Ruby concluded that the appropriate response to the commotion was to growl. Extensively. No amount of assuring her that everything was allll riiighhttt persuaded her to quit growling.

Oh well. Eventually the storm blew away and sleep (after a fashion) returned.

Meanwhile, the amount of work that has poured in would, on its own, submerge Louisiana. Yesterday I sent off the last of a 100-page dissertation written in Chinglish, most of which entailed variance analysis. That was a challenge.

But mercifully, it was an interesting challenge. The author’s project actually had some meaning — unlike about 90% of Ph.D. theses and dissertations — and although the standard dissertation format instills a great deal of redundancy, as it developed she’d come up with something that may have some practical use.

Now it’s back to the other project, an amateur novel. Although the content is a great deal more comprehensible, it’s probably harder to edit, because it entails having to…well…what can one say? To tutor the author in the basic skills of writing fiction. And that, my friends, ain’t easy.

A-n-n-d this morning what should come in but an inquiry for an indexing project!

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters. At this rate, The Copyeditor’s Desk will stay afloat long enough to see the New Year. Get out the oars and row!