Coffee heat rising

Pets

Lovin’ Cats…

by

Did you see the image of the kitty that chased off a mean dog that was attacking a small boy? Entertaining video, isn’t it? And pretty amazing, considering the general nature of cats.

LOL! Maybe not, too.

My mother used to have a Siamese cat that would sit on the wall that surrounded the backyard of the house where she lived in Long Beach, California. The neighbor had a German shepherd that was just driven wacky by this cat. Oh, how it wanted the cat. Every time it would walk by (in those days, the early 1940s, there was no such thing as a leash law — people let their dogs run around loose the same as they still let their cats run around loose today), it would see the cat perched on the wall and would fling itself at the wall trying to catch the cat.

One day the cat decided enough was enough. The dog came trotting along, minding its own business as much as a dog can, and all of a sudden the cat dropped of the wall onto the dog’s back, dug its claws and fangs in, and hung on like a gigantic furry tick! The dog shot off down the street, yowling, with the cat clinging to its back.

Ever afterward, my mother said, whenever the dog would come walking up the street it would cross the road and walk on the other side to pass her house! 😀

Naturally, cat superhero episode has triggered all sorts of foolishness about the joys of owning a cat that you allow to roam around the neighborhood. Here’s one that’s especially syrupy…snark! God, people are such morons!

“Cats are for life,” quoth the silly woman? I don’t think so. What an infelicitous turn of speech. They are the exact opposite of “for” life…

Cats are extremely efficient predators. They are obligatory carnivores, meaning the many feral cats roaming our cities, towns and countryside have to kill to live. In many parts of the world they are an invasive species. They devastate native bird populations, small mammals, and insect-eating reptiles. They carry toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease that induces spontaneous abortions in pregnant women.

If you MUST have a cat, keep it indoors. Otherwise, cat ownership is about as irresponsible as…oh, say, letting a mean dog run loose so it can go after a little boy.

Entrepreneurship, Work, Dogs, Life, the Universe, and All That…

by

Entrepreneurship is one helluva lot of work. So are dogs. So is life. And if the Universe cares, it would be nice if it would, just once, transmit a message to that effect. 🙂 I hope you appreciate how SEOly I just put every key term in this post’s title into its first paragraph. But honest to god…I am so tired I could weep. Over the past few days (weeks? months? years?), the sheer amount of physical and intellectual work has damn near killed me. The business, the dogs, the lifestyle: hoooleee mackerel!

Bidness:

Client 1: due back in-country after several weeks of hanging out in the country where he lives as a contented ex-pat. Promised to surface Friday or Sat’day. Translate: bigawd, get my project ready for me to review and jaw about no later than about 4 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Human: Yessir.

Client 2: decides to utterly, totally, completely, MASSIVELY rewrite his book. Emits a chunk thereof. Holy shit.

Prospective Client 3: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much would you estimate it will cost to edit this project?

Life (Interrupted by Business):

Choir director: Missing rehearsal for what? For only one regular service and the annual concert? Uh huh. Lovely.

Puppy: Doggy water bowls make the best swimming pools ever! And RRRROOOOO how I DO LOVE a mop!

P1030060

Business:

Designer 1: sends a new set of page proofs: please read these soonest.

Designer 2: sends two new sets of graphics: please respond soonest.

Designer 3: sends new design with new cover lines: please respond soonest.

Bluehost: down at 7:30 this morning. Down at 8 this morning. Down at 8:45 this morning. Human gives up.

Life:

Son: Bringing sick dog to your house soonest. No need to respond; will let self in.

Human: Deconstructs Pup’s X-pen and turns it into a fence to keep Pup out of the pool, using X-pen’s gate to provide an opening through which Human can pass without tripping on the goddamn dog barrier.

P1030053

Veterinarian 1: AARGH crash thud growl bite hit scream yowl THROW!

Veterinarian 2: Bring her in at 2:45 Monday afternoon, with a fresh bottle of dog pee. The bottle itself and the collecting instrument should be freshly sterilized…

Son: Forget small differences that seemed to foretell alienation at best, homicidal frenzies at worst. En route to your house with flowers, special bourbon (!), dog, and my own extraordinarily charming company (the only good thing to happen this week).

Business:

Human to Associate Editor: And this will get the number of assignments for you and the underling to read during the four-week summer course down to four. Think you and Underling can handle some (read “most”) of these?

Associate Editor to Human: That will leave only two of the four for you to have to do.

Life:

Gerardo: We’ll be there at noon to undo the horrific mess Richard the (now-FIRED) landscaper inflicted. Ai, caramba! “What does that mean in analogue time?” Gringa! What do you think it means? See you whenever.

Doctor’s Office: So you say that surgical incision incision is infected? You must come right in! Whaddaya mean you can’t come over here right this minute??? Okay, you must be here as dawn cracks tomorrow.

Human: Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby come ON come DOG we have to fly out the door to the veterinari…

BING  BONG! Gerardo: Bueno! Here we are! Donde the job?

Veterinarian 2: Uh huh. Yeah. This dog indeed does have blood in its urine. It has white blood cells floating around, too. And it has crystals, despite its obscene youth. Otherwise, it’s swimmingly healthy. Take this antibiotic. Take this prescription dog food full of shit no one in their right mind would think of feeding a dog if they had any clue what really goes into dog food.  Call in one week. Come back in two weeks. That will be 58 dollah.

Business:

Human to Associate Editor: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much to edit behind me?

Human to Client #2: Palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver…

Human to Client #1: Nothing. Where the heck is the dude? But…silence is golden and do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Human to  Client #3: And that will be $60/hour…

Human to Designer 3: Fix the cover lines so they’re visible, ALL of them are visible in an Amazon thumbnail.

Human to Designer 2: {discreet silence}

Human to Designer 1: {discreet silence}

Human to Departmental Secretary: Please review the attached 25-page syllabus, as required by the Department and District policy…

Life:

Swimming Pool to Human: CONK!

ogodogodogodogod

Gerardo the Chinese-Mexican Miracle Worker kindly rescued the backyard from the unholy mess Richard left. By the time Richard was done with his answer to the French well I asked for, which was what local landscapers call a “river of rock” (i.e., it was something he and his underlings know how to do), he had bifurcated the yard in such a way as to put anyone who wished to take out the garbage at risk of a fractured ankle. Fortunately he flat-out refused to carry off the mountain of dirt he excavated by way of creating this little fiasco.

Gerardo showed up with two of his slaves (how does he pay these guys on what he charges? He must have something on them!). They pulled all the ankle-twisting rocks up from Richard’s stupid “river of rock” and used them to reinforce the berms around the citrus trees. They shoveled the crushed-granite top dressing off the area around the ditch Richard’s guys excavated, shoveled it off the mounds of dirt they left, hauled the dirt over to the ditch, filled up the ditch with said dirt, stomped it down, filled with more dirt, stomped it down, regraded the yard manually (this is what is called a “Mexican grader”…heaven help them), spread crushed-granite top dressing over the repaired area (you do not want to KNOW what a cubic foot of crushed granite weighs, to say nothing of a cubic yard), and finally spread the remaining crushed granite over what remained of Richard’s mounds, which wasn’t much by the time these guys were done.

P1030062

I paid Gerardo about twice what I thought he’d ask. That is about half of what his and his guys’ labor is worth. I wonder if he would be insulted if, for next winter’s Christmas gift, I paid his tuition for the Spanish-language Master Gardener’s Class at the Desert Botanical Garden. Probably. At any rate, it would be counter-productive: six weeks in that thing, and he’d come away knowing what he actually could earn for his services.

My yard is now back. It is now possible to carry the trash out to the alley without risking a broken ankle. The dogs can now walk across the backyard without risk of incurring a vast veterinary bill. Once again they have a space in which to chase balls and flying toys and each other. Enough of Richard’s rock-flled ditch survives to serve as a half-assed version of a French well, probably reducing this summer’s patio flood by about 50 percent.

The man’s a saint.

Lists as…Transcendental Meditation? Last Grip on Sanity? Other?

by

So as (unfortunately) usual, I fail to get my act together at 5:30 in the morning but instead stumble into the office, directly across the hall from the Queen of the Universe’s reclining room, where she allows the human to sleep at night. By quarter to seven I’ve spent over  an hour working on the client’s stuff and on some PoD formatting for one of my own books. I have not (not, not, no indeed NOT) made the one- to two-mile walk necessary to shuck off the two or three-pound gain I would dearly like to rid myself of.

Dogs are not fed.

Pup has hunger-barfed (so I imagine…more to come) because she was not fed (I think) when we rolled out of the sack as dawn cracked.

M’hijito is supposed to show up a bit before 8 a.m. with Charley, the inveterate amuser of puppies, and so it is now too late to go for a walk. I will remain fat another day.

Must race to get resident hounds fed before Charley shows up, and so race around doing that. To avoid having to chase one of them to Yuma, I sneak out into the garage and slam the door behind me, there to open the garage door and run out and grab the newspaper before The Queen realizes what’s up.

That’s when I notice the cage thingie I put down to deflect dogs from the ant bait I put down yesterday is…moved. Like…REALLY moved…as in pushed all the way to the front of the garage.

Whaa?

AND…there’s no ant baits inside there.

Holy shit. Did Ratty get back into the garage and steal the ant bait? Hm. I know Ratty’s signs, and I can’t see any indication that she’s come visiting. She could easily squeeze in around the security door or the garage door, neither of which fit well when regarded as part of the Roof Rat Universe.

Ratty likes ant baits? Really?

The raccoons could not have weaseled (heh!) their way in: they’re way too husky to wriggle in through the cracks around the door.

BUT…Ratty leaves certain unmistakable signs, wherever she goes. And…there ARE no Ratty signs to be seen.

So that leaves only one suspect: DOG!

Cassie has never shown the slightest interest in ant bait, nor has she ever shown any skill at relieving my home-made ant traps of their bait. Now we have narrowed our suspect list to one: PUPPY!

Pup has consumed two packets of ant bait: lock, stock, poison, plastic container, and barrel.

Sumbitch.

So I look up the ingredient of said ant bait and discover it’s the same gunk people in tick- and flea-infested parts of the country smear on their dogs to kill and repel external parasites. In the amounts Pup ingested (assuming the Ingester was Pup and not Ratty), the stuff is relatively harmless. I mean, it could kill her, but it probably won’t. What’s much more likely to kill her is the plastic she chewed up and swallowed.

Pup is eating well. Cassie is eating well. I’m on the Internet.

M’hijito calls: running late; begs off delivering Charley the Golden Retricver and Perennial Puppy. Thank god.

Call the vet; too early.

With no Charley en route, I realize there’s time for that one- to two-mile walk after all. It’s too late and so too hot to bring Cassie, so I throw on some clothes, grab a hat, and fly out the front door, dodging the enraged Sovereign of All Creation.

While walking…walking…walking, the mind gyrates. So damn many things to do…  Beloved client has sent a large quantity of hugely revised (we could say “wholly rewritten”) copy, expecting an answer along about yesterday. Got less than halfway through the set of page proofs I was supposed to return to the designer yesterday. MUST pay that AMEX bill that’s been gathering dust on the desk for…how long? Why did I not send a receipt to the New England client? Local client paid about half of what was owed… Can I figure out, from my English-major record-keeping, a) how much she actually owed at the outset; b) how much she paid; and c) how much she still owes?  Can I express this without pissing her off? Must take checks to credit union. While up there, better drop by the middle-class Costco up on the freeway, restock. SDXB is supposed to show up here tomorrow; the house is dirty. He especially hates dirty bathrooms, of which I have two (2). Cassie needs tennis balls. I need more CereVE; is there a Walgreen’s on the way to the credit union? Where? I haven’t finished formatting Fire-Rider for the designer. I forgot to post grades. The wound left by the dermatologist’s procedure, performed yesterday, will probably preclude today’s scheduled mammography; why didn’t I call the boob X-ray people yesterday afternoon? The puppy has petrified pee all over her butt again; must be washed. The plants are parched, now that temps are over 100 degrees. Water plants; adjust irrigation schedule. Must call vet about ant baits. Must write new copy: describe landscape from very depressed protagonist’s point of view.

Pup slept all the say through till 5:30. Is that a good sign? Or is she too sick to roll out of the sack for her usual 3:33 a.m. reveille? Pool is getting green; must clean. Plants are dying; must water. Cactus is paling out; must water.

Must finish the current scene: describe the landscape in front of the marching troops, as they drop down the eastern face of the Sierra Madere in about the year 5200 A.D., from the point of view of the very tired, discouraged, and homesick protagonist. Say what? Describe an imaginary scene as seen through an imaginary man’s eyes in an imaginary time? And…how, pls?

AUUUGH! All this in 20 minutes???????

Evidently I’m getting hysterical. Must get a grip.

When I get home, I write a list:

√ Call mammography clinic; try to get out of mammogram
√Call vet
. . .Call Pet Poisoning Hotline
. . .Failing that (which does FAIL), find out about poison online
. . .Figure out what to do
Wash pup
√Pay AMEX bill
Enter data in Quickbooks
√Take $960 worth of client checks and $775 worth of paycheck to credit union
√Send receipts to clients
√While in northwest Phoenix, go to Costco on I-17
Look at local client’s new material
√Bathe
√Clean bathrooms
Continue formatting project
Continue writing current chapter
√Reset irrigation system
√Water parched plants
vTurn on irrigation system for emergency run today
Sweep down pool walls
Return call to KJG
Finish reading page proofs
√Fend off student whining
√Post grades

It’s 3:30. Pup, not yet dead, is sleeping on the bed with Cassie. I’m about to join them in the afternoon siesta. The checkmarked items are done. Didn’t get everything done (yet)…but equilibrium is marginally regained.

Lists. The grappling hook to Sanity.

What If Ruby Doesn’t Make It?

by

So it develops that Ruby’s stealth peeing apparently results from something wrong. Possibly something really wrong. This afternoon the vet found she had blood in her urine.

This is a symptom that raises all sorts of very depressing possibilities.

It could be a urinary tract infection. That would be the most positive choice: it can be treated.

It could be a cancer.

It could be a kidney infection.

It could be a genital abnormality, cancer, or disease.

It could be diabetes.

It could be porphyria.

And on and on and on…

The vet guessed it’s probably a urinary tract infection and sent me home with a large bottle of antibiotics in liquid form. She thought a tumor would be “uncommon.”

But of course, she doesn’t know that “uncommon” is the story of my life.

I suppose if there’s some unholy congenital thing wrong with Ruby-Doo, the breeder will take her back and (maybe) refund my money. If that’s the case, or if the pup dies of one of these many potentially very serious ailments, then…what the hell.

Cassie went batsh!t at 2 a.m. the other morning; I heard it, too: some sort of weird scratching. Decided it was probably a roof rat or raccoon, because none of the outside motion-sensitive lights were on…but then, the ones on the west side, whence she seemed to think the noise emanated, are not working.

I guess if I’m going to stay in this house and I lose this puppy, I should go on over to the German Shepherd Rescue and apply for one of their dogs. They have a couple right now that don’t look too demented, appear to be more or less manageable, and probably aren’t going to start racking up huge vet bills for a few years.

One thing you have to say about a German shepherd: There’s nothing like a nice friendly GerShep to send Mr. Burglar down to the next house.

Stormy Day, Puppy Day

by

Mighty stormy-looking skies out here on the back porch with the dawgs. Hasn’t started to rain yet, but it will. Snow is expected in Flagstaff, and the wind started whipping around yesterday. Nothing like the tornadoes expected in more beleaguered parts of the country. But still: 68 degrees and pregnant clouds amount to quite a change from high 90s, sun, and the pool about ready for a plunge. The pups, however, are unfazed. If anything, they prefer weather in the 60s.

Charley, my son’s two-year-old golden retriever, is still a puppy in mind and heart. So Charley and Ruby the Corgi Pup have found something in common: they’re both children. They play and play and play and play — hilariously! They’ve become inseparable except when they’re sleeping, and even then, Charley sleeps in the bedroom to keep watch on Pup in her crate.

These storms are passing inconvenient. Pup still pees about every 20 seconds — she remains to be housetrained in the number-1 department, the only dog I’ve ever had that I couldn’t train easily and fully within a couple of weeks. It appears this is a corgi characteristic. One issue seems to be that she doesn’t consider widdling worth her attention. She’ll get up out of her squat and start wandering around before she’s finished, the result being that she soaks the fur around her rear end. And dog urine sets up like…well, cat food. Forthwith, you have this stinky, tarry stuff all over the pup’s rear end.

I don’t like to wash my dogs when it’s less than 90 degrees outside. But this morning there was no putting it off. So…into the bathtub with Ruby-Doo.

Fortunately, she doesn’t hate bathing the way Cassie does. Today she decided it was a great game. She’s already learned to blow bubbles in her water dish. (True! Did you know dogs can hold their breath, stick their schnozz in water, and blow out through their nose and mouth?) She was having a grand time bubbling and chasing around. And that meant she stayed in the tub long enough to help soak the gunk off.

Now, of course, I need a bath.

But more to the point about the weather, M’hijito has to drive home from southwestern Colorado tomorrow. It can get real unpleasant in southern Colorado, Utah, and northern Arizona when it’s snowing. He’ll hit Flagstaff about sunset, right about when the roads freeze. And he’s driving his dad’s piece of Ford junk. I would really like it quite a lot if that were not happening.

He seems to have been too little to remember when his dad and I would drive home from Grand Junction through crazy blizzards in near-whiteout conditions. Maybe he was sleeping. Whatever. He shrugs it off and doesn’t think it’ll be anything. Hope he’s right.

Men! 🙄

Welp, pup has run out of steam and climbed into her X-crate for a nap. It’s 8:19 a.m., and I am going back to bed. The two clowns have been rousting me out of the sack around 3 a.m. for a midnight excursion to the backyard. If Pup so much as squeaks in the dark, nothing will do but what Charley has to get me up. This morning I never did get back to sleep. That would be 4.5 hours of sleep, thank you. Need to work on the client’s project but don’t think I’ll be doing him any favors trying to do the job in zombie mode.

Happy weekend! Hope you’re not getting stormed on.

P1030035

How Mu¢h I$ That Puppy…

by

Killed the better part of the day cleaning house, a job made bigger and longer and far more tedious than usual by the amazing puppy mess. Had I started the day feeling well enough to get any productive work done (which I most assuredly did not), we could have added a substantial opportunity cost to the price of owning Ruby (as she’s made herself known).

Turns out that corgis in general tend to be a little slow to house-train. Add to this supposed characteristic the theory that small, runt-like puppies such as Ruby may (or may not) be underdeveloped at birth and so “younger” in a way than their chronological age, and what you get is a gigantic mess. I’ve never had a dog that peed on the floor so extravagantly.

Fortunately, the entire house is paved with ceramic tile. But still: even though it’s relatively easy to clean up, it still has to be cleaned up. Ruby pees by mental telepathy — today I cleaned up a dried patch on the far side of a kiddie gate, where one would imagine the dog has never gone. So puddles get missed. And puddles get stepped in and tracked around the house. What a gawdawful mess.

So today I took it upon myself to sanitize the Funny Farm from stem to stern. Normally I would vacuum first, then dust-mop, then steam-mop. But because there was so much dog urine on the floors, I felt I ought to smear it around with some detergent. So, the order of business was

1. vacuum 1860 square feet of tile;
2. dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile;
3. wet-mop 1860 square feet of tile with a hot solution of Simple Green; and
4. steam-mop 1860 square feet of tile.

In effect, that is the equivalent of cleaning 7440 square feet of flooring (1860 • 4). By the time I finished, I thought I was gunna die. It took hours! Hours in which I did exactly zero paying work.

LOL! Father, forgive me, for I have $inned in what I have done and (especially!) in what I have left undone.

• I have not graded student papers.
• I have not responded to the 16 messages from benighted li’l students.
• I have not registered ISBNs for the diet guide/cookbook or Fire-Rider.
• I have not created a for-reference-only “chronological” list of events in book 1 of the Fire-Rider series.
• I have not finished compiling the formatted copy for the print-on-demand version of Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education.
• I have not tracked down the guy who runs The Adjunct Project and begged for a plug.
• Nor have I asked said guy to let me contribute a post to his free-for-all website.
• I have not nagged BlueHost to remove the unused Beady-Eyed Babe site for which I continue to pay.
• I have not transferred incoming cash from PayPal to the corporate checking account.
• I have not billed the client for the latest unholy frenzy of work.
• I have not sent to another client a discussion of a relevant passage in John Gardner’s Art of Fiction, which, IMHO, would help him a great deal in framing his current revision.

Of these, only one is an immediately paying task. But all of them either cost me money or may one day create money for me. Instead, what have I been doing?

Scrubbing floors.

If that’s not an opportunity cost, I’d like to know what it is.

This puppy is cute. Very cute. But as it develops, one pays for cuteness. The other day, in a moment of desperation, I asked the vet for a recommendation to a trainer who might help expedite the house-training process, at which I felt I was failing abjectly.

She recommended a franchise outfit whose strategy involves using a remote collar to jolt the message home to the offending dawg. The woman who showed up at my house to give me a “free demonstration” (i.e., a sales pitch) explained that this thing works with a vibrator that indeed does feel very much like your cell phone vibrating, or with an electric shock comparable to a mild static zap.

(Ruby, by the way, has begun to get the idea. She hasn’t widdled on the floor today, and we managed to get through yesterday with only one puddle.)

Today the woman followed up by calling me on the phone to prod me to sign up. I explained (with only slight exaggeration) that I’m living on Social Security and cannot pay their silly prices.

They want — hang onto your hat — $795 (!!) for a package that entails two or more private lessons and “unlimited group classes” held in public parks. For only $695 (!) you can get the same with only one private lesson; any extra private lessons will set you back $145 apiece. Then they have an “Indoor Only Training” package for — wait for it…are you ready? — $1,299 (!!!!).

If you want to buy the whiz-bang remote collar, you have to pay $225.

Understand…remote vibrator/shock collars can be had from Amazon for about $65. For two of ’em.

I hafta ask you: Is it or is it not amazing that people will spend that kind of money on their pets? For services and products they can get for a fraction of the money? Or for free, if they’re willing to look up the instructions on the Internet?

The pet industry is a freaking gold mine, isn’t it?

P1020977