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Pets

Ruby-Doo Ascendant

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So Ruby the Corgi Pup seems finally to have thrown off whatever was afflicting her with chronic doggy diarrhea. She’s  no longer squirting brown puddles all over every flat surface she encounters, and she’s gaining weight apace. The floors have been soaked with enzyme odor remover — I hope not to smell that lingering schmell the next time I walk in the front door — and all is quiet at the Funny Farm.

Uh, well…no. “Quiet” is probably not le mot  juste. Now that Ruby is feeling much, much better, she’s rising to full puppyhood. Where before she was a mild, well-behaved, and mostly silent little dog, now she has learned to pester and to BARK. Just now she’s driving Cassie nuts, which is good because it means she’s not driving me nuts. They’re chasing around the yard like rockets. Cassie knows, by instinct, that the way to control a kid is to run ’em!

With her newly discovered Voice, Ruby is also coming into her own as a watch-puppy. Holy mackerel, is that dog turning into a watch-puppy!

Last night my neighbor María called. I didn’t pick up the phone until the voicemail had started to record her, which meant (for those of you who have forgotten how land-lines speak to humans) the base phone and all six little walk-around phones flashed a reminder light. I forgot to delete that message, so the base phone in the room across the hall was still flashing when we all went to bed.

Four o’clock in the morning:  FRENZY FROM THE FOOT OF THE BED! The pup is growling — as in really growling, deep and fierce — and she’s on full alert, every muscle in her little body tense. Cassie is trying to sleep, leading me to think this is not very serious. But the pup will not be calmed.

Finally I realize she can see the light flashing in the other room. Dunno what she thinks it is, but apparently she’s never noticed it before. To quiet her down, I had to pick her up off the bed, carry her across the hall, let her inspect the flashing phone, and erase the damn message to make it quit nagging.

Within the next day or two, I need to wean her off the “bland diet” of hamburger and rice with the daily vitamin pill supplement. I’m thinking it would be good to start by adding a teaspoonful or so of yogurt to her food, by way of jacking up the calcium content — beef and rice are devoid of calcium, and a growing pup needs that for bone health. The vitamins have a dose of the stuff, of course, but I’d rather rely on real food than on pills by way of nourishment.

Cassie needs some more fiber in her diet just now, and so whenever I get out of class, come back and check on the cleaning lady (yes…today is CL Day), and check the e-mail, it’ll be off to Sprouts to pick up some butternut squash and yams.  So those can be the first additions, too, to Ruby’s expanding diet. Want to try one item at a time, to ascertain whether any one ingredient makes her sick.

In my experience, when a dog eats real food (meat, starch, and dog-friendly veggies) it does not experience the intestinal upset that happens when you switch commercial foods. Cassie can eat virtually anything and switches between chicken, beef, pork, and turkey without a problem. The same was true of the German shepherd and the greyhound, both of which, before I discovered real food, would get violent diarrhea anytime I had to change commercial brands.

I suspect this was the case with Ruby, too. She got switched among a  half-dozen dog foods as she came off the prescription diet and I tried to find a similar canned food that would sustain her without bankrupting me. I should’ve been a little more confident — or, shall we say, a great deal more resistant to Big Pet Industry’s propaganda — and simply have gone directly to meals of real food.

Also I would like to get rid of the space-eating X-pen in the family room. Ruby no longer needs to be penned up when I’m gone — she’s fully housebroken, and she’s not inclined to eat the furniture, ô mirabilis! But just now it serves the purpose of keeping her from raiding Cassie’s food dish during the dinner hour. All she has to do is look crooked at Cassie, and Cassie will back away from her food. So I’ve been feeding Ruby inside her X-pen and Cassie in the kitchen.

Dawned on me that I could set Ruby’s food outside the back door and close the security door while they eat, at least in the mornings. On a 110-degree day, of course, it’s too hot to banish her to the porch for noon and evening meals, but the mornings are plenty cool enough.

The crafts room and the storage room are both barricaded off with step-over baby gates, thereby reducing the number of square feet for Ruby to pee and poop on. Those gates could go away, I think, now that she’s house-trained. But just now Petsmart has a hinged gate on sale. I’m thinking to replace one of those inconvenient stationery gates with a gate that opens and closes, and then Ruby could go in a back room to eat, until such time as she learns not to bully Cassie. That, of course, may be never…but kulawahed. With a gate that the pup doesn’t have to be lifted over and that won’t trip me and land me face-first on the floor, I can feed them separately for as long as both dogs are living.

How exactly these animals are going to be dealt with when I’m convalescing from surgery remains to be seen. The appointed date is a Thursday, and my son is going to take off a day or two to watch out over me. So if he’s here on Friday, he can feed the dogs and pick up and refill the heavy water dishes. Maybe he can help on the weekend, too. But after that: ?????

Oh well. More pressing matters await: to wit, it’s time to get ready to go to class.

Only two more days of class left! Thank goodness.

Somethin’s gotta go…

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And I think it’s about to be this puppy…

Today or tomorrow, the biopsy report is supposed to come in. If it’s cancer, the first thing that’s gonna happen is Ruby is going straight back to the breeder. I certainly can’t care for her if I’ve got half my boob lopped off and am looking at weeks of irradiation and subsequent radiation sickness.

Even if it’s benign, I may have to return her. Mortal illness or no, we’re rapidly reaching the point here where I can’t take care of her.

She barfed all over the bed again last night. So at midnight I had to pull ALL the bedding off and remake the bed. This was after she’d had me up about once an hour from 10:00 forward.

Of course she went back in her crate at that point. Briefly. For the rest of the night, she was up about once every hour. I finally had to put her back on the bed to get her to settle down long enough to get 90 minutes’ or an hour’s worth of  uninterrupted rest.

I think her UTI is probably back, since I can’t find any new dog mounds in the yard, which means she’s not wanting to run out to squirt brown puddles on the ground. And what causes the barfing, I can’t imagine. This was SIX HOURS after she’d been fed. Normally, a dog’s food moves through its stomach quite fast. The entire digestive process takes six to eight hours. So she shouldn’t be woofing up virtually undigested food after six hours. Since the food does seem to be undigested, she actually may be regurgitating rather than vomiting, but if that’s the case, it’s mighty weird that the food would sit there without moving for all of six hours. In either case, it sounds like an expensive fix. Or a lifelong nightmare struggle.

{sigh} So. To add hassle on top of headache on top of worry, I’ll have to call the vet this morning and make an appointment so as to get in the door if I don’t have cancer (50-50 chance, we’re told), and then explain that if the biopsy results are positive, we’ll have to cancel because the puppy is going back where she came from. First thing, though — like right this minute — I’ve got to wash the sheets, blanket, and doggy throw.

In any event, the pup’s health issues are starting to drive  me crazy. I can’t deal with all this sh!t at once. Last night I didn’t read the stoont papers that came in — figure to read those while the students are in class today, since they’ll be in the computer commons putatively working on their 2500-word final papers (read “playing computer games, checking in at Twitter & FB, and surfing the Web”).

Even if the stress of the cancer scare goes away, come next Tuesday I’ll still have 62,500 words of drivel to read in a matter of maybe three days. Fortunately my associate will be back in town pretty quick, but since one invariably becomes sick after riding on airplanes and since she’ll be coming in from halfway around the world, it remains to be seen whether she’ll be in any shape to help out.

Day from Hell? Or Day from Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

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I have exceeded my capacity to write much further about yesterday’s little drama, so feel free to go to the my corgi blog and read all about it. [?? I do not know why this link isn’t working. Enter this URL instead: mycorgi.com/profiles/blogs/parvo-really]

Not for an instant do I believe Ruby has parvo (forgodsake!). For the past hour she’s been flinging herself around pestering Cassie, barking at the neighbors, racing up and down the hall squeaking a toy, stealing a sandal and banging it on the wall, climbing on top of me, grabbing Cassie’s ball, and (let us never forget) chasing cockroaches around the backyard. This is not the behavior of a dog that is trying to slip past Cerberus and sneak into Hades.

What I do believe is that last night I encountered an unethical veterinarian who took one look at an old lady with a puppy of an expensive breed and heard the cash register ring.

The pet industry in this country (and make no mistake: that is what it is officially called — even vets will tell you they’re part of the pet industry) is a vast cash cow. There is so much money to be made in fleecing people who are besotted by their animals, it cannot even be estimated.

I should have known when I drove up there and saw signs in the parking lot reading “Reserved for Pet Parents.”

Pet parents! SNORT!!!

That is a trope whose purpose is to encourage people to conflate their animals with their children. Once they have you thinking about your dog or your cat as though it were your child, it’s easy to play on your emotions and get you to fork over any amount of money the various merchandisers in the pet industry choose for whatever service, medication, food, tool, doodad, or piece of kitsch they can come up with.

Parvo, indeed. I’m still so mad, just thinking about it, I could throw this computer across the room!

Doggy Tunes!

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So this morning it’s off at 5:30 to M’jihito’s house. His luggage, his dog, and he are piled into my car, in that order. Thence, to the airport, where the son and the luggage were unloaded. And now Charley the Golden Retriever is here at my house for a week.

Charley and Pup are hilarious, because Pup brings out the two-year-old Charley’s lingering latent puppitude. Around Ruby, Charley is still, unmistakably, a puppy. A great deal of frolicking takes place, and much mischief is plotted.

One of their Looney Tunes schticks has to do with food. They both love it. They both desire it. They both require it. And neither one can stand to see the other get it.

Pup gets fed inside an X-pen so that Cassie can’t take her food away from  her, but a glance at Charley and a glance at the X-pen will tell you that the contraption is too feeble to keep him  out. Another scheme had to be contrived. As soon as I opened Ruby’s can of expensive urinary tract prescription dog food, Charley knew something was up. He was beside himself with excitement. No way a bowl of the stuff was going to get on the floor without him inhaling it

HUMAN: Come on this way, Charley!

HUMAN walks down the hall.

CHARLEY and RUBY follow human.

CASSIE flies up the hall and dodges into the bedroom.

HUMAN: You stay, Ruby.

RUBY ignores HUMAN but is muscled aside by CHARLEY, who strong-paws his way into the bedroom.

HUMAN dodges out the door and closes it before RUBY can squeeze in.

HUMAN: Dog food, Ruby!

RUBY races toward kitchen, a bundle of joy. CHARLEY slams self against door in despair.

Heeeee! He’s a nice dog. But not the brightest rhinestone on the fancy collar.

Speaking of Looney Tunes, I called the gynecologist’s office to be sure I understood correctly that the radiology department would call me to make an appointment for the pending torture sessions. After punching through two punchabutton nuisances, I get stuck on hold. And hold…and hold…and hold…and hold…and hold…and hold…and hold… This wouldn’t be so annoying if one could wait on the damn phone in SILENCE. But noooo…they have to subject you to vomitous muzak and endlessly annoying blather advertising the many services they would like to persuade you that you need. After a good ten minutes on hold — I’ve answered e-mail, posted an announcement on my class’s Canvas site, unloaded the dishwasher, and am reloading the washer with new dirty dishes — the phone rings through and someone answers and the first words out of her mouth are “WILL YOU HOLD, PLEASE?”

Well, no, thank you.

How much, again, are you folks charging Medicare for this?

 

Bigfoot: The Year of the Unplanned Expense

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Unknown terrifying critter? Or unknown terrifying expense?

Ever think of the unplanned expense as kind of like the sasquatch? There’s no such thing as a bigfoot, eh? Surely if you spotted one, it would be a fluke. It would be a long spell, indeed, before you ever happened upon another one.

So one would think. The year 2014, though, has been the Year of the Bigfoot Expense around the Funny Farm. I swear: every month one unholy monster or another has jumped out of the brush. This month’s AMEX bill came in: $3420. Three times the budget!

Now, part 0f that was over $1700 for the car and homeowner’s insurance. But the rest of it? Mostly veterinary bills. Vet bill after vet bill after vet bill. And then the MasterCard bill came in: another $150 for the new vet, who won’t take American Express!

Every single month this year, starting in January, has brought bills like that: $2,000, $2,500, $3,000, now almost $3,500. Costs are out of control, and I don’t seem to be able to do much about it.

Some of these expenses were predictable: the insurance bills, of course. The Medigap bill that’s rising by another hundred bucks. The cost of pruning the accursed palm trees that flower and fruit and drop tons of equipment-busting beans, sharp little dried blossoms, icky worms, and filth into the pool. Gerardo reported that he talked the tree guy down to a mere $180 from his initial offer of $240.

Last week I had to buy a new pool cleaner. Granted, Harvey was ten years old, a very superannuated Hayward Pool Cleaner. But forgodsake: the bill was FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS! The alleged $100 “rebate” is one of those mail-in rip-offs, and you don’t get cash back with which to pay your American Express bill. No. They give you one of those fake Visa cards, so you have to go out and spend the money needed to pay the bill on some other junk!

The puppy is costing a lot more than I planned on. It’s one thing to pay the breeder’s fee and then to get the usual shots and spaying and the like (she’ll have to be spayed in just two more months! That’ll be another two or three hundred bucks, presumably). But this little dog has been one constant drain on the checkbook. From what I can tell, too, once a dog gets a UTI, it’s likely to be a chronic condition that ultimately leads to bladder and kidney stones, which have to be treated with expensive and painful surgery.

Now I’m about to have a low fence put in to block her from the pool, since she will not stay away from the water and there’s no way I can train her to get herself out of there.

In the first place, “trainable” is not her middle name. UTI or no UTI, she’s still not house-trained and shows no sign of ever becoming so. Part of the problem is that she doesn’t indicate, the way most dogs do, when she feels the urge — it’s unclear whether she even does feel an urge, or whether she just kind of leaks. She doesn’t sniff around. She doesn’t circle back and forth. She just creates a puddle. Last night I had her penned in the office with me while I sweltered through another piece of Chinglo-academicese that needs to be returned to its authors within the next few days. In spite of being right under my nose, she peed under the chair, silently and seemingly motionlessly leaving a great puddle for me to find when I got up to let her out.

Given her general stubbornness, training her to get out of the pool is highly problematic. There’s only one spot in the entire, large pool — which must look like an ocean at dog’s-eye level — where either one of the dogs can get out. That’s the topmost of three steps at the shallow end. The corgis’ legs, even in adulthood, are too short to reach any of the other steps or to reach the bench at the deep end. That one, single step is only about three feet long and eighteen inches wide. The chances of a panic-stricken dog finding that thing, once it fall into the drink, are slim to nil. And “panic” is the operative word. Both dogs are so frightened by the water they can’t think.

In the second place, this proposed fence has to be custom-built and will cost $1,100. I am not at all sure I should spend eleven hundred bucks to protect a dog that I probably ought not to keep it all. Really, if I had any sense whatsoever, I would return her to the breeder. It’s painfully obvious that this dog came to me with something wrong at the outset, that she probably will never be well, and that I’m going to be dealing with yellow puddles all over the floor for as long as she lives.

Hate to do that, because she’s such a sweet little gal. But probably I ought to cut my losses while I can.

Because…more losses lurk on the horizon.

Sooner or later I’m going to have to get a car. The Dog Chariot is now almost 15 years old. It won’t run forever.

The pool has grown a permanent coat of algae. Nothing I do is getting rid of it. The best hope for a DIY fix is to pour an entire container of PhosFree in there and hope for the best. That will require having someone come and clean out the filter again (just had that done a month or so ago): another $150. That’s on the low end. And it’s a temporary fix.

The house needs a paint job: inside and out. That’s likely to cost around four grand.

The cracked tiles in the living room need to be replaced. And most recently, the kitchen cupboards or the wall next to them have settled, opening a big crack along one countertop and splitting a whole row of Mexican tiles. So, at best a couple dozen tiles need to be pulled out and replaced — quite a trick, with Mexican tile! At worst, the cause for this subsidence needs to be determined. God only knows what that will cost. And the middling possibility? It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the tiles can’t be replaced and so the whole countertop will have to be yanked out and rebuilt.

Those damn palm trees need to be removed. There are four of them. Cost could be, all told, as high as four grand.

So…think of that. We’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars in potential upcoming expenses. And we’re probably already pushing ten grand in unplanned expenses so far this year. It that’s not a sasquatch, I’d like to know what it is.

Ga$p! House Drama, Dog Drama

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7:00 a.m.: FLY out the door.

Dear friend takes me to breakfast and delivers lovely gifts for Birthday. {love love love}

From there, it’s off to the Vet with a container of edifying dawg pee, and from there a bounce-fest from vendor to vendor to freaking vendor.

Take Harvey to Leslie’s, where he’s usually repaired for free.

Cute (cute, cute, BORN THIRTY YEARS TOO LATE CUTE) tech: “Uhmmmm…  Well, the easiest fix is to buy a new one.”

$450 later, Harvey’s reincarnation is in the back of the car. To be fair (sort of): there’s a $30 in-store rebate and an $100 rip-off mail-in rebate. Meaning the gouge is a mere $320. Plus 10% tax. On the $450.

FLY in the house. Call the insurance broker; explain annoying predicament to his voicemail; point out that as of 4:30 this ayem the house stank so much the schmell woke me out of a semi-sound sleep.

Feed Pup expensive urinary dog food. Dump remains of yesterday’s attempt to cook new Real Food for Cassie into garbage whilst Pup is distracted with inhaling third-rate canned dog food. Decide to try to rescue expensive goddamn pan, even though hope looks forlorn; put same (pan, not hope) to soak in heavily enriched detergent water.

Prepare human food on grill: piece of lamb, asparagus sprinkled with balsamic, lovely little salad, more bourbon and water than is good for anyone.

Sit fanny down in chair.

Instantly get up to answer effing phone: Insurance broker.

Abhorred, is he.

[Graphic Designer has already been abhorred, by e-mail. Sister-in-Sin has already been abhorred, by e-mail. Son has been rendered, as usual, stylishly blasé, by e-mail.)

Insurance broker to look into costs of a) replacing microwave; b) hiring out smoke damage repair; c) replacing $10,000 worth of cabinetry and God only KNOWS how much in counter surfacing. Insurance broker to call back.

Sit back down to try to eat congealing mid-day meal. Add a little more bourbon to depleted bourbon & water.

Instantly get up to answer effing phone: Veterinarian.

Pup’s urine still has blood, although she’s much improved. He wishes to keep Pup on expensive special dog food for at least four more weeks. He suspects the ailment is a function of her runtiness, although there could be a physiological issue, expressed in old-guy language as “vestigial hymen.” Liberated human interprets this as old-guy lingo for “hooded vulva,” but whatEVER. Feel amazingly grateful and worshipful that he took time out of a very busy day to telephone me. He wants to delay another round of antibiotics because he thinks she may outgrow the issue.

Sit back down to magnificent mid-day meal.

Think of STAGGERINGLY GREAT exchange between two future Fire-Rider characters. Drop fork, run for computer, write down notes.

Come back to magnificent mid-day meal.

Think of COOL DIALOGUE after STAGGERINGLY GREAT exchange in novel. Back to computer: write down more notes.

Finish dinner. Realize chicken put to simmer is now cooked. Remove from heat, remove meat from bones. Place in container; refrigerate.

Put surviving pans and dishes into ’shwasher. Turn to “sanitize” (giant spoon for collecting you-no-what from Peeing Pup is in there, after soaking in Intense Detergent for several hours).

Collect Pup. Collect Cassie. Place on Bed.

And it is now time for a siesta. Thank heaven for the Mediterranean Lifestyle, to which I intend to adhere until I fall over dead while blogging at this site at the age of 110.

Hunker down. Instantly get up to answer effing phone: Insurance broker.

He’s sending an estimator over: determine what can be done, whether the fix is simple or whether (gawd forbid) all the cabinetry needs to be ripped out and replace. (Holy Sh!t) He believes this will be covered by homeowner’s.

Hunker down.

Please, God: NO MORE PHONE CALLS!!!!!