Coffee heat rising

Pets

If You’d Asked Me, I Would Have Told You…

by

Water-saving, power-saving appliances are about as ecologically unfriendly and consumer-unfriendly as it is possible for a device to be.

P1030121How d’you like what came out of my washer this morning?

The new, fancy, water- and power-saving EXPENSIVE clothes washer creates a massive tangle if I have the chutzpah to put a shirt in with a pair of blue jeans. To avoid a huge wadded mess, I have to put anything that has a strap or a sleeve into a mesh bag.

Today that strategy didn’t work. The entire load of colored clothes came out in a single gigantic knot.

This annoyance is characteristic of the Samsung top-loading high-efficiency goddamn washing machine I bought a year or so ago. I’m told it’s characteristic of front-loaders, too.

Before Samsung (BS, appropriately enough), I could run a load of colored clothes through the old-fashioned top-loading actually functional Kenmore washer, hang the knit tops and cotton bluejeans on ordinary clothes hangers, and let them air-dry on a laundry-room rack. Now, to beat the wadded-in wrinkles out of them — after I’ve spent ten minutes untangling the mess — I have to run them through the dryer!

BS, I hardly ever used electric power to dry my clothes. Most of them dried, with no need for ironing, on clothes hangers that could be carried, once the laundry had air-dried, from the wash area to the closet. Now all the jeans and most of the shirts have to be run through a dryer, wasting electric power and running up the power bill.

A twenty-minute wash cycle has morphed into an hour and ten minutes.

One might avoid the knotting conundrum by washing all of one’s pants separately from all of one’s other clothing. Consider what this would do for you (or to you):

Now you would have to separate out every pair of pants from every other category of clothing. This would, at best, present you with four loads of laundry: colored pants, colored shirts and underwear, white & beige pants, white & beige underwear. Two 20-minute loads (one white, one colored) now convert to four one-hour-and-10-minute “high-efficiency” loads. Four hours and forty minutes to do a forty-minute laundry job! At least two of those loads — the ones including the pants, whose legs will knot together willy-nilly, will have to be run through the dryer whether you prefer to do so or not, to get rid of the knotted-in wrinkles. This more than doubles your water and energy use on the washer, and if you are one of those wily consumers who figured out that few clothes really have to go through a dryer, it increases your power bill accordingly.

It’s in the same category, isn’t it, as the water-saving toilet. You know, the one that supposedly needs 1/3 less water to flush than real toilets used to need, but that has to be flushed three times to get the stuff down. And the ugly fluorescent light bulbs that make everyone in the room look green, that dump mercury into the landfill (and all over your house if you drop one), and that give you a migraine whenever you turn them on.

Big-Brother-Knows-Best good intentions lead people to find workarounds with counterproductive consequences.

The high-efficiency clothes washer and the water-saving toilets are obvious cases in point.

Another one: we know that in 2015 the city probably will institute water rationing. From California’s experience, we know the strategy will be to tell people they will face fines  unless they cut water use, as measured by the present smart meters, to 60% of their prior use. Some folks, then, realize  they need to use about 40% more water than necessary now, so that when the cutbacks come, enough water will be available to keep their citrus trees, energy-saving shade trees, and vegetable gardens alive.

More immediately, though: Our dearly beloved paternal city has installed counter-intuitive roundabouts up and down the ’hood’s main north-south feeder street, and they’ve put infuriating, alignment-wrenching speed bumps along the east-west feeder street. The result? Pass-through traffic is diverted off the feeder streets onto smaller, once-sleepy neighborhood roads. In the few weeks since I found my way around the damn things, I’ve noticed that LOTS more drivers are joining me in the several routes that take us around the stupid speed bumps and the wreck-inviting traffic circles. (Ever had anyone try to pass you in a one-lane traffic circle? I have…)

Want to slow down the passers-through who don’t give a damn about our kids, our pets, or our old ladies trying to walk off a few pounds? Two easier, cheaper solutions: a) install traffic cameras; or b) station a nice, sturdy traffic cop in the neighborhood during rush hours.

Dogs, like humans, should eat real food.

That means actual balanced, unprocessed diets consisting of cooked meat, vegetables, fruits, and healthy starches — not the junk food humans normally eat these days.

Ruby the Corgi Pup has made the transition, at last, to a diet of full-blown real food. Shortly after losing the ultra-premium dog food, she lost the chronic diarrhea. And now, a few weeks after having made her escape?

Her fur is so shiny it practically glows in the dark. Her eyes are bright and clear. Her mood is happy, rambunctious, and funny. She radiates good health.

Cassie the Elderly Corgi, who has never been off real food since she entered my precincts, continues in good health. Her fur is rich and radiant; her eyes…yes, bright and clear. Her teeth, good. Her everything, healthy and strong. No vet has ever been able to find anything wrong with her.

The difference in the pup since I took her off the commercial dog food is incredible. Reminds me of what happened when I started feeding real food to the aged German shepherd and the aged greyhound, in response to the Late, Great Melamine Scare. The Gershep, who at the time was so advanced in decrepitude she could barely haul herself to her feet, suddenly was chasing her ball across the yard, something she hadn’t been able to manage for a year or more. Both dogs thrived on a diet of 1/2 cooked meat, 1/4 cooked vegetables, and 1/4 starch (such as sweet potatoes, rice, or oatmeal).

Folks. Dogs do best when fed a diet approximating a healthy, balanced human diet, less the onion, the garlic, the sugar, the salt, and the chocolate.

Commercial dog food is a huge scam.

This morning I threw out a half-dozen cans of ultra-premium dog food. At $2.60 per can plus tax, that came to a little over $17, directly into the garbage. That expensive commercial dog food made Ruby good and sick — she had projectile diarrhea for a good ten days, until I finally gave up and took her off the stuff.

Do you think it’s in the natural order of things that when you switch a dog from one food to another, it should get gastritis, manifested by diarrhea and possibly even vomiting?

Well, no, my friends: it is not. When a dog  becomes accustomed to eating real food, it can shift easily and with no ill effects from one type of protein to another, from one veggie or fruit to another, from one source of starch to another. Ruby has readily adjusted to the following:

chicken
hamburger (i.e., beef)
pork
sweet potato
rice
oatmeal
peas
carrots
winter squash
banana
blueberries

But moving from Castor and Pollux ultra-excellent canned dog food to Wellness ultra-excellent canned dog food gives her a violent case of the doggywobbles???? Excuse me? What IS wrong with this picture?

Welp, think about it. Dogs have lived with humans for some 15,000 years. Along about 1860 — about 157 years ago — some entrepreneurial human came up with the idea that doting pet owners could be persuaded that their “pet children” should be fed special pet food! This idea redounded to the vast profit of said entrepreneur, and to that of all the pet industry entrepreneurs who came after him.

Before this genius came up with a scheme to persuade us that nothing would do but what we must feed our animals special pet food, unrelated to anything we as humans would ever dream of eating (would you put a piece of dog kibble in your mouth?), dogs ate whatever people ate. Humans, who at the time did not overindulge in Big Macs, french fries, pizza, and soda, would put down whatever was left over from their own meals, or whatever offal they took out of the animals they hunted for sustenance. Over the millennia, dogs evolved to eat what humans eat.

In just 157 years, they have not un-evolved. Dogs still thrive on the kind of food you and I would thrive on, were we not presented with over-processed, over-sugared, over-salted junk food! We would thrive on it, too, if we could be persuaded to fire up the stove and cook our own food.

At $2.60 per 13-ounce can, a puppy that needs to be fed 2 1/3 cans per day racks up a much, much higher food bill than she does when her human goes out and buys some hamburger, pork, or chicken on sale (it’s a myth that pork is bad for dogs, BTW), a few sweet potatoes or a bag of oatmeal, and some frozen vegetables. It is far cheaper to cook your dog’s food than it is to feed comparable food out of a can or a refrigerated roll. And the results, in terms of your dog’s health, appearance, and temperament, are far superior.

And now for the Conspiracy Theory of the Day: Does it not strike you as odd that once a dog is acclimated to real food, it can switch readily from ingredient to ingredient with no distress, whereas a switch from Purina to Science Diet or from Castor & Pollux to Wellness will cause spasms of doggy diarrhea?

Odd, indeed. IMHO, the only reasonable explanation is that dog food manufacturers spike their product with ingredients that cause gastritis when the consumer switches abruptly from one brand to another. It is, in a word, a scheme to scare consumers into keeping their dogs on the given commercial brand they start with. Dog food is jiggered to make dogs sick when they’re switched from product to product.

Real food decidedly does not have that effect.

Way too often, veterinary bills are  inflated by unnecessary testing, unnecessary “wellness” exams, and unnecessary procedures.

Remember when your vet tried to get you to come in once a year for an annual pet exam? Well, they’re accelerating that: today when my vet’s assistant left me on hold to listen to the endlessly annoying, uneasy-making advertising tape, I was informed that he now wants customers to bring their pets in twice a year!

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that many of the vaccines we’ve been told our pets must have, over and over world without end, lest they die of some dread disease are truly unnecessary. Endless annual booster shots operate, at many veterinaries, as a tool to get you back in the door, where you can be subjected to the Big Upsell: persuaded that any number of unnecessary procedures, from expensive dental cleaning to daily medications that require expensive semi-annual blood tests to routine over-vaccination…to god only knows what. These procedures, many of which may be unnecessary, cost pet owners some very big bucks.

And while we’re on the subject, humans also are subjected to massive unnecessary medical examinations and testing.

I tire,  so let’s abbreviate:

The annual physical exam (thank god) is going out of style.

Annual physicals are unnecessary.

Unnecessary, we say.

Annual pelvic exams for women are unnecessary.

Routine physicals lead to invasive, dangerous, and unnecessary procedures, even among the one-percenters.

Routine screening tests lead to exorbitant unnecessary costs.

Studies show unnecessary tests rack up 40% of Medicare spending.

Do I regret allowing myself to be subjected to the “routine” mammogram that has sucked me into a mutilating surgery and an uncertain future? Maybe. Maybe not. From what I can tell, the extremely low-grade entity discovered in my boob may or may not morph into an invasive cancer. Apparently no one can tell. If I were six or eight years older, cutting open my breast and yanking this thing out would be a destructive, pointless, harmful exercise in futility — I would die of some other natural cause long before this thing could kill me, if it ever decided to spread around. But because I’m  not quite 70…it’s ambiguous.

Probably nothing would have happened if this thing had never been discovered.

On the other hand, getting rid of it may insure — provided that I’m not subjected to radiation therapy, which over time will elicit some unpleasant and possibly life-shortening side effects — that I’ll have a shot at a ripe old age.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

P1030120

 

Ruby-Doo Ascendant

by

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…

by

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?

by

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!

by

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

by
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.