Pets | Funny about Money

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.

Image: Depositphotos, © tigatelu

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!

Of Weather, Dogs, Budgets, Stir-Craziness, and Taxes

July 29, 2016July 29, 2016 by funny

At 5:15 a.m., it’s 93 degrees on the back porch, and overcast. Was going to jump in the pool but then heard thunder and thought better of it. Turned around, came inside, fed the dogs, thought better of the better thought, ran outside, and plunged in the pool, thunder rumbling through the skies.

Leapt out, grabbed the hose, watered the withering plants, and flew back inside.

Now at least my hair is wet and braided, which will provide some convenient personal air conditioning for the next several hours.

Damn near 95 degrees at 5 in the morning means no exercise for the dogs. Cassie, with her thick coat and lion-like mane, has never been able to withstand that kind of heat for more than half a mile. Ruby probably could, but it might not be great for her. The prospect doesn’t thrill the human, either.

It means I don’t get any exercise, either. Could do some physical therapy exercises and yoga, but that ain’t the same as two brisk miles. Oh well.

Y’know, in all the years I’ve fed my dogs Real Food, I’ve never kept track of how long a batch of cooked meat, veggies, and starch lasts. Probably scared: I don’t wanna know how much this is costing me!!

However, we now have a hint. On July 15, I made a Costco run that included a giant package of frozen dog veggies ($6.49), a lifetime supply of chicken thighs ($12.64), and a massive amount of pork ($35.55), for a total of $54.68

Divided the pork into three packages. ONE of those lasted 10 days, when cooked with a sweet potato (on hand) and a few handsful of frozen veggies. So that means the $36 worth of pork alone, in theory, should last the dogs for a month.

It’s almost the end of the month. I’ve cooked 1/3 of the pork, half of the chicken, about half the frozen veggies, and embellished the results with about one cup of rice and two sweet potatoes. We have 1½ Tupperware-type containers of chicken-based dog food left — more than enough to last past the 31st. The first chicken cooking will cover 10 days. AND we have the other half of the packaged chicken thighs, still in the freezer: another 10 days! The remaining pork will make another 20 days’ worth of dog food.

30 days: pork
20 days: chicken
50 days: total days covered by Costco run

That means $55 and change is feeding two dogs for almost two months.

Holy sh!t. I had no idea feeding them actual, real food was that economical.

I’ve been adding a few bites of kibble (Whole Foods’ house brand) to both dogs’ meals, because I’ve not been confident that my dog food recipe sufficed for a puppy. (And of course Cassie will not put up with Ruby getting anything that she doesn’t get.) But now that Ruby is over two years old, she can go wholly on real food without risk. I think we’ll switch her over to 100% real food, which will cut the length of time the supply lasts by about 50%. But that should be tolerable. Especially since we won’t be buying expensive kibble.

Cassie is now 10 years old, and she’s incredibly healthy. You would never know she’s advanced in age. Her teeth are good. The terrible dog breath she had when she came to the Funny Farm is gone. No aches and pains seem to bother her. She races around the backyard with Ruby — and believe me, despite the short legs (or maybe because of them) a corgi goes like a rocket. Her coat is gorgeous. She eats well. And when the weather is tolerable, she can walk a mile at a fast clip with no problem.

My son’s dog, who gets nothing but the very best high-end kibble, has red swollen gums and bad breath. He obviously needs an expensive dental job. My son can’t afford that and so continues in denial. And (btw) that dog gets the doggywobbles every time he turns around. A vet claims this is because of a congenital intestinal problem, but that speculation has never been proven; one wonders if the issue would resolve in the absence of commercial dog food.

Cassie and Ruby eat everything in sight, and they never, ever get sick. Doggy diarrhea is rarely seen in these parts, unless one of them finds something weird to eat outdoors.

I first discovered this dawg wellness phenomenon when I started cooking Real Food for the German shepherd and the greyhound, during the late Chinese melamine fiasco. The difference in Anna, the decrepit German shepherd, was startling. She had been so crippled with age that she could barely haul herself off the floor. Shortly, she was chasing her ball around the backyard again, something she hadn’t been able to do in many months.

The budget is looking pretty good despite some small overruns.

Last month, on the first, I bought a $50 Costco cash card, solely to buy gas. The first tank of gas lasted until just a few days ago. I now have a full tank, which will probably last until the middle of next month — especially if I opt next month’s junket to Avondale. So apparently in my dotage, it’s costing nothing like $50 a month to buy gas.

As we’ve seen, I indulged myself with a gardening purchase (the composter), which would have led to a budget overrun without the other small surprises. But that may pay for itself this winter when I use it on the proposed vegetable pots.

One reason the budget is so tight at this time of year is that the utility bills are astronomical in this heat. In the winter, though, they’ll drop to almost nothing: both electric and water will fall into pocket change category.

The reason I don’t allow the power company to prorate the electric bill is that I like having a lot of extra budgetary play in the winter, when I want to buy Christmas presents and have to pony up money for church donations. I wouldn’t feel I could afford those things if I had to pay for part of the summer bills all year round. Plus it’s a good idea to be eminently aware of how much air conditioning actually costs you at any given time…

We’re basically heat-bound here. I feel like I’ve been in jail all summer. Choir is out during the summertime. I suppose I could go to Church on Sundays and socialize a bit…but organized religion per se is not really my thing. I commune best with the Ineffable in nature, not under a roof. 😉

With recreational shopping out (permanently, it seems), hiking out because of the heat, and the cultural scene in estivation, there’s really nothing to do here but read the news on the computer and work. Hence: a 400-page book in draft, in a matter of days. Amazingly enough.

Thank God for the swimming pool. This summer was the first in two years that I’ve been allowed to get in the water. It’s a life-saver.

Wish it had some kind of shade screen over the top, so I could swim in the heat of the day. When I was young, dumb, and didn’t give a damn, I used to drop into the pool several times a day, just to keep cool. Now…not so much. Too scared about melanoma.

Adventures in Medical Science do that to you: create fear.

The weather this summer has been a real bear, and it looks like this is going to be a permanent thing. My son figures the Valley will remain livable until the mid-2020s, which is about when we’ll run out of the water the Central Arizona Project has been quietly pumping back into the aquifer. But water or no, if this kind of heat continues, the low desert really will become uninhabitable.

He’s talking about moving to Oregon, if his employer will allow him to work from home — as apparently is in the cards. I don’t know if I could afford to live there…the taxes, I fear, are too high.

SmartAsset.com calls Oregon “moderately friendly” for retirees. It’s a little hard to tell, though, because they don’t seem to take sales taxes into consideration. In Arizona, sales taxes are around 10% — depends on the municipality, because some cities tax food and some don’t. Property taxes are apparently higher because the cost of real estate is higher, and Oregon has no sales tax. It does have an estate tax, starting at $1 million — that presumably would not apply when I croak over. Or I could just start maxing out transfers of assets to my son before I die.

If you believe SmartAsset, it looks like Oregon is comparable to Arizona. In Oregon, you supposedly will pay $1,598 on a $40,000 income. In Arizona, the figure is $480. Huh…how do you suppose they have the chutzpah to put those two in the same category? They can’t possibly be figuring the sales taxes in there. Sales tax amounts to hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year here!

Must say that the prospect of moving across the country doesn’t appeal. I’d have to sell all my furniture, since the cost of a moving van is pretty prohibitive. Once there, I’d have to refurnish with Ikea junk or spend months searching for replacements in estate sales. Ugh! Not much fun, either way.

Heh… In the “very tax friendly” category, SmartAsset lists Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming. :-0 Talk about “out of the frying pan, into the fire!” None of those are places I would jump to live in.

Hm. Ordinary unexceptional “tax friendly”:

Colorado is considered tax-friendly: that’s interesting. I could stand to live in Colorado. None of the others appeal, though, with the possible exception of Idaho and maybe New Hampshire.

Colorado: $1,852 taxes on 40 grand. Idaho: $837. New Hampshire: $0.

Zero? What are they smoking over there at SmartAssets??

Ah: here’s the explanation: SmartAssets’ figures don’t include property taxes. Well, hell. Then their calculations mean exactly nothing. It’s the property taxes that do you in when you’re retired!

Hilarious.

All these gingery calculations you see in the media about where to retire on a shoestring are pretty silly. None of them compare apples with oranges or take all the factors into consideration. For example: how much is it going to cost you to fly back and forth to visit grandchildren? If a state doesn’t have property taxes, how is it paying for its infrastructure? You can be sure the Tooth Fairy isn’t covering the cost of roads and schools…

So, let’s move to Mexico or Colombia, hm?

Those schemes fail to mention that Medicare doesn’t cover you when you’re out of the country. And as sad as America’s healthcare system is looking, our doctors and hospitals are still a lot better than what you’ll find in most of those “affordable” countries. Assuming you survive, say, a stroke or a heart attack, how much will it cost to fly you to the US for quality care? And how much more will your care cost you after medical attention has been delayed for the period it takes you to get transportation back to Medicare Heaven?

Welp. I don’t know if Arizona will remain livable for the remainder of my assigned years. If it doesn’t, I suppose Oregon or Colorado would suffice.

Wherever my son goes…I probably would follow him. Oregon, though: that would be good.

Why Your Insurer Asks about Your Dog…

June 28, 2016 by funny

Why does a prospective insurer ask you if you have a dog and, if so, what kind of dog it is before issuing you a homeowner’s policy?

Well, the obvious answer is that some breeds have a reputation for biting — no matter how much you love pit bulls and other kinds of molossers, you can’t deny the statistics. Dogs bite: some 4.7 million times a year, leading 800,000 humans to seek medical attention, of whom 386,000 will need emergency treatment. A third of all homeowner’s liability claims result from dog bites, at an average cost per claim of $32,072. Every year, the insurance industry shells out over a billion dollars for dog-bite claims.

Figures related to breeds can be confusing — even the placid golden retriever has been responsible for dog-bite fatalities, although a 2000 CDC report showed pit bulls and Rotweilers accounted for 67 percent of fatal attacks.

My son, a claims adjustor for a major US insurance company, once remarked that the most serious injuries insurers cover result from dog bites.

So, on the surface, it sure looks like dogs are a menace on four ~~wheels~~ feet, eh?

Well. Yeah. However…

The problem, IMHO, is not so much the ferocious dog as the stupid human. What we’re looking at here are statistics largely related to human stupidity.

• Dogs allowed to roam loose or walk off the lead
• Dogs that have been abused
• Energetic working dogs cooped up in someone’s house or apartment
• Dogs that have never been adequately trained
• Dogs not given enough to do to work off energy
• Dogs left unattended outside in a yard, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month
• Dogs bred to fight
• Dogs bred as “guard dogs”
• Dogs whose innate aggressive tendencies have been encouraged
• Children not taught how to behave around dogs
• Adults who don’t know how to behave around dogs
• Kids allowed to tease dogs
• People who get drunk or stoned around dogs, putting themselves at risk
• Humans who overall lack good sense

Oh yeah — and the occasional hapless burglar.

If you look at media reports — many of which admittedly are dramatized by way of selling papers and baiting clicks — you see that the vast majority of dog attacks involve some degree of human stupidity.

• Leaving a tiny infant accessible to a large dog.
• Keeping pit bulls with young children in the house
• Having six dogs around an 87-year-old woman
• Keeping a male pit bull, a female pit bull in heat(!), and a 12-year-old in the same house
• Keeping dogs (time after time after time!) that had previously demonstrated aggression
• Chaining dogs outside in yards
• Letting dogs run loose around a neighborhood or in rural areas
• Allowing small children to approach food-defensive dogs while they’re eating(!!)…one could add “keeping food-defensive dogs at all after a child is born”
• Attempting to feed strange dogs
• Keeping six pit bulls(!) around the house
• Mother sleeps through attack that kills 7-day-old infant sleeping next to her in the bed (what do we drink? what do we snort? what do we shoot up?)
• Mother sleeps through dachshund chewing both legs off an infant (ditto)
• Keeping nine dogs with a three-month-old baby
• Starving dogs until they attack to obtain food
• Leaving six-month-old baby alone with large molosser-type dog
• Bringing nine-day-old infant into home with five molosser dogs
• Interfering in a dog fight involving pit bulls, armed with a garden rake
• Allowing six-year-old to try to ride a pit bull like a horse

Oh god. You could go on and on.

A tiny minority of these reports involve people who are just going about their business and dogs that have never been a problem and apparently never were abused. But about 99.9 percent of the cases entail some kind of stupid behavior on the part of the humans involved.

This brings us to the stupid human incident of the day. No: to the two stupid human incidents of the week.

Stupid Human Incident the First

At this time of year, the corgis and I have to leave the house by 5 a.m. if we’re to get in anything like a dog-and-human walk. So a couple of days ago, we’re out the door shortly after the crack of dawn. About a half-mile from the house, as we enter Richistan (the upscale part of the ‘hood to the east of us), we come upon our neighbor Josie and her daughter with their three Chihuahuaoid dogs.

Josie has the hilarious custom of rolling one of the Chihuahuas around in a baby carriage, on the theory that even though the critter is too old to walk very far, it loves to go out and get fresh air. This is very cute, and as you can guess, Josie is imbued with a degree of charm.

Okay, so Josie y su hija, also a grown woman and, to boot, a law-school graduate, are standing around schmoozing with a neighborhood fixture, a sweet and lonely old guy who amuses himself by driving around and feeding the local cats. If you pass by while he’s out of his car sprinkling cat food on the pavement, he’ll waylay you and feed a treat or two to your dog.

One of the Chihuahuaoids is a mean little bastard. It threatens to attack anyone who comes within ankle-biting distance.

So when I see this clutch up ahead, I veer out into the street to get around them, it being a little early in the morning to enjoy breaking up a dogfight.

Josie & company take the opportunity to slip away.

Naturally, Old Guy pursues me and my dogs.

He asks if it’s OK to give the dogs a treat. I say, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

This is far from the first time I’ve asked this guy NOT to give Milkbones to my dogs.

Why am I such a Scrooge that I don’t want some random guy giving my dogs treats? Let us count the ways…

They are corgis. Looking at a Milkbone causes them to put on a pound. Possibly a pound per glance.
They have their own treats. Load them up with Milkbone calories, and when I reward them with their treats for this or that achievement they get too many extra calories.
Ruby is all over the guy, jumping up on him and totally out of control. I do not want her to get the idea that strangers will give her treats for jumping on them.
My dog is not your teddy bear.

Ignoring “I wish you wouldn’t,” the old guy grabs a Milkbone out of his car, snaps it in two uneven pieces and tosses them to the two dogs. Ruby grabs the largest piece, which is about 2/3 of a Milkbone made for a Great Dane.

Forthwith, she starts to choke.

Actually, she’s having a reverse-sneezing attack, a common spasmodic condition among corgis. A mild incident looks like this:

When it comes on her with this thing in her mouth, unsurprisingly the crud goes down the wrong way.

Now she’s choking and horking and choking and horking and choking and horking and choking and horking. I realize I’m going to have to get her to the emergency vet — at five in the morning! — but we’re a half-mile from my house and that facility recently moved. I’ll have get her back to the house, look up the veterinary, figure out where the place is, and drive her down there. Meanwhile, my dog is choking to death.

Cassie’s lead tied to a belt loop, I snatch her up off the pavement and start hiking home as fast as I can go. About the time we get to the point where I think I simply can NOT carry her another step, she finally stops heaving.

This has gone on for a good ten or fifteen minutes. But once the spasms stop, she recovers well enough to walk the rest of the way home.

You realize: not only have I told this guy repeatedly not to give my dogs Milkbones, but this is not the first time such an episode has happened! Is there a reason the guy can’t remember that she had a spasmodic attack the last time he handed her a “treat” over my objections?

See what I mean about stupid humans?

So I figure that as long as it’s hot, Cassie and Ruby and I will have to stay out of our favorite part of the ‘hood, since this guy haunts at sunrise.

Stupid Human Incident the Second

So this morning we head south and end up in the park.

I know better than to enter the park at dawn because a LOT of people let their dogs run off the leash there. There’s the constant risk of a dog fight, because these folks don’t seem to understand that the leash laws protect their dogs and them as well as their fellow citizens who pay taxes for the privilege of using the park, too.

It looks clear, though, so I figure we can stroll through one quarter of the park, then come back around and loop through the ‘hood to the south of the Funny Farm, easily racking up a mile or so on the way home.

But naturally, pretty quick along comes an old guy with an aged black lab wandering around loose. Very nice dog: it’s too old and too mellow to argue.

So I’m standing there chatting with him, when along come some dog-walking friends from the Richistan Trail with their strange and funny-looking mutt.

This adorable dog, which is about the size of the lab, is the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It has champagne-colored curly fur all over and weird blond eyes. I mean, its eyes are a sort of pale transparent tan, very light.

Before they rescued it from the Humane Society, it had been abused. It’s afraid of people, especially men. They’ve been socializing this dog over the past year or 18 months, and the critter has come a long way.

One thing they do to try to convince the dog that it should be happy is take it to the park and let it run around on about a 50-foot lead. The dog loves this, and the interaction it has with other people and their dogs seems to be calming its neuroses considerably.

The old guy wanders off with his lab, and we’re standing there chatting. The ill-trained Ruby wants nothing more than to jump all over this dog (as she jumps all over everyone and everything). Dog is afraid of other dogs, too, but has pretty well overcome this fear and seems to recognize she’s playing.

As I’m about to go on my way, the dog takes off for a romp, dragging this long leash behind. He’s run around me and now wrapped my feet like a Maypole.

And when he shoots off across the park, he yanks me off the feet before his humans can stop him.

I manage to avoid falling on the ground, which has just been irrigated and is your basic pool of mud. This is good, because I have osteoporosis in one hip and would likely have broken that hip if I’d hit the dirt.

What I get instead is a rope burn around both ankles:

leash burn — Doesn’t look like much, but lemme tellya: THAT HURT!

Is this their stupidity, my stupidity? Yeah: combined human stupidity. They should’ve had their dog at heel and not let it race around until they were clear of other people and dogs. I should have been paying attention instead of yakking with my friends and letting Ruby bounce around.

Note to self: Stay out of the park, stupid!

It doesn’t leave a lot of places to walk in the neighborhood: Can’t go through Richistan. Can’t go anywhere near Conduit of Blight, which thanks to the train construction is now awash in bums and creeps. That leaves an area to the north of us, not the greatest part of the ‘hood, and a small area to the south. Boring.

About the only way to get any variety, then, as long as it’s hot, will be to put the dogs in the car and drive to the canal or take them to the Murphy Bridle Path along north Central. And between you & me, stuffing the dogs in the car, hauling them someplace, getting them out, stuffing them back in the car, and hauling them home is counterproductive. It’s enough hassle to discourage me from taking them out at all.

Hence, this rant.

Can anything constructive come of a rant? How about this…

How to Avoid Dog Bites

• Never leave an infant or small child sleeping where a dog can reach it.

Close the bedroom door if the dog is at large in the house with you while the child is napping. Crate the dog or tie it by a leash to a doorknob if you intend to nap while the child sleeps.

• Never allow a child to tease a dog.

• Never let a child to try to ride a dog.

• Never leave a child unattended with a dog, in the yard, in a vehicle, or in the house.

• Teach your children to stay away from dogs that are eating.

• Crate-train your dog so that it can be kept out of harm’s way and gets a break from the kiddies. Train your children to leave the dog alone when it’s enjoying some private time in its crate.

• Teach your child always to ask permission before petting a dog.

• Teach your child not to wave her or his arms around when near a dog (dogs perceive this as a threat).

• Teach your child to avoid unknown dogs and leave the vicinity if they see a loose dog.

• Don’t allow your child to drag a small dog around, pick it up, or play “dress-up” with a dog.

• Do not keep a pack of dogs in a household with children.

• Never let your dog run loose. Anywhere. No, not even in dog parks. Especially not in dog parks.

• Do not chain your dog outside in the yard.

• Do not idiotically train your dog to be aggressive, and never keep a dog that has shown aggression toward humans.

Mmmm! Love human...for dinner... — Mmmm! Love human…for dinner…

• Unless you’re an experienced trainer and you have exceptionally good sense, avoid molosser breeds. Many or most of these dogs have been bred as protection, fighting, or herding dogs; they are large, powerful, and potentially dangerous. Some are unpredictable and have a short fuse.

• When you reach the age of decrepitude — say, over the age of about 60 — choose a pet dog that is not big enough or strong enough to overwhelm you. Bear in mind that you will not get any stronger as you get older, and that most large dogs can easily overpower an elderly or disabled person: not necessarily in an aggressive mode. Accidents happen…don’t invite any that are worse than they need to be.

• Do not drink when you have a dog around.

• Do not use drugs when you have a dog around.

• Try to use common sense, forhevinsake. If you don’t have any, see if you can buy some! Maybe you can get an inoculation or something. Arghhh!

Image: Cane Corso, By Kumarrrr – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1688119

How to Freak Out a Dog

May 18, 2016 by funny

🙂 The secret: Birds. Birds raiding a feeder are total Dog Freak-Out.

It’s a San Diego morning: cool, slightly overcast, occasionally misting a little sprinkle. Absolutely gorgeous. After a mile’s walk with the poochies, I felt inspired to refill the hummingbird and the real bird feeders.

Couple of weeks ago (or more?), I dumped the rest of some old bird seed in the two plastic feeders that lurk around here, habitually disused. With two of them filled and the cat barriers holding off the neighbor’s predator, we were rushed with flying bug-eaters of all kinds: finches and sparrows and thrashers and towhees and mockingbirds and doves of three varieties and a number of things that I have no idea what they are.

It was really quite lovely. So I decided I should do that more often. Having used up the bird food and sunk under another tsunami of work, that plan was forgotten until yesterday, when I serendipitously stumbled upon some bags of bird food at the Walmart. Hallelujah!

So the birds are now fed and I’m in the Leafy Bower enjoying a very pretty morning, and the dogs are going BATSH!T chasing the birds.

Cassie, who will eat anything (it’s a corgi trait), is trying to hoover up seeds that drop when they spook the birds into flight.

Doesn’t take much to amuse a human, does it?

Yesterday I started working on the client’s book layout at 5 a.m. Flew to a doctor’s appointment at 10, running late and carrying page proofs for the book I’m supposed to be indexing. Couldn’t find a place to park at the Mayo; parked illegally and raced up three flights of stairs, only to be told they’d moved to a new building. Ran down the way to the new building, raced up another three flights of stairs.

Got there so late that there was exactly zero wait time, putting the eefus on the plan to get at least a little mark-up done on the textual study of umpty-umpteen centuries of Semiramis narratives. Oh god.

Back to the Funny Farm; back to work on the book layout. At a little after 7 p.m., sent word to the client that page proofs had been ordered. Bolted down some food and then went back to work on the Semiramis index.

And that is what I should be doing right now. But I’m not. Because I’m beat. And it’s totally too nice a day to be mining salt.

How would I like to be fooling with my next novel idea? Let me count the ways.

Over at Plain & Simple Press, I posted another excerpt from a work-in-progress in the Fire-Rider series.