Coffee heat rising

Pets

Gin and Ginger and Serious Heat

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It’s only 112 degrees on the back porch just now. Balmy, yet. They say it will reach 118 today. This gives the local Play-Nooz nabobs something to write about, and an excuse to pepper their copy with exclamation points!!!

LOL! What foolishness. Every time the weather breaks 105 degrees, we get another hysterical EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING!!!!! As though this weren’t a desert. As though we were all basking in a Midwestern summer with mosquitoes as big as F16s. WTF? What part of “deserts are hot in the summer and warm in the winter” needs repeated explanation to the stump-dumb public?

Oh well.

Here at the Funny Farm, the human and the dogs laid on extra water come dawn, knowing the potted plants will fry by midday unless they get at least one dose of water. Most of them will need to be watered twice today, actually. So about 45 minutes ago I set the watering system to come on a second time, which should up the chances that most of the plants in the front courtyard will live. Under the supervision of the Queen of the Universe, who is feeling preoccupied with having to herd Charlie the Golden Retriever around while coaxing the human to play with Ball, I deep-watered all the citrus, ran extra water on the roses, and manually watered the front flowerbeds.

This month’s water bill should be interesting.

All this heaving around comes at a cost: excruciating pain. The accursed back hurts so much I can barely limp up the hallway — and limp is the operative term. I can’t walk normally unless I consciously force myself to do so, and then it hurts even more. Driving is highly problematic, since I can’t easily shift my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.

This has gone so far as to detach me from my usual science-based thinking and push me to call a chiropractor, whom I intend to visit on Monday. He was on his way out of the Inferno when I reached him this morning and so couldn’t see me today.

In the interim, we’re medicating ourself with a new analgesic. Sorry not to have a photo…that would entail limping into the back room to get the camera.

I’m sure I’ve written about the pain-relieving effect of ginger, which can be steeped in water or tea to make a tisane or even soaked into olive oil to create a topical ointment. But to reprise, here’s how you make a ginger tea:

Take a good-sized chunk of fresh ginger. (The one I used for today’s batch was about three or four inches long). Trim off any crusty or mildewed parts. Wash. Do not bother to peel (puh-LEEZE!). Cut it into several small pieces, about 1/2 thick, more or less. Just chop it up, remembering that the cut surfaces will leach ginger juice into the water you’re about to pour over them.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Place the pieces of ginger into a teapot or other heatproof serving vessel. If you want to drink the tisane straight and are not on a diet, pour a bunch of honey or sugar in there with the ginger chunks. For today’s effort, I added no sweetener.

When the water comes to a rolling boil, pour it over the ginger, to fill the teapot. Let this steep for upwards of 20 minutes (the longer the better). You can store it in the refrigerator after it cools enough to safely set it on a fridge shelf.

Now for the ultimate analgesic:

Get yourself a fine bottle of gin. Scare up a cucumber and some fresh mint.

Slice off three or four thin disks of cucumber. Punch them with a fork or knife to sort of macerate them.

Place some ice in a favorite tall drinking glass.

Pour enough ginger tea in there to fill it about a quarter of the way. Add more ice if need be. Toss in the cucumber slices.

Add a jigger of gin. Stir the mix around to macerate the cuke a little and blend the ginger tea with the booze. Fill to the top with club soda. Add a few macerated leaves of fresh mint.

Consume.

Very palliative.

Mijito and his band of friends are convening in Chicago as we scribble. I understand the weather’s a bit problematic in the Windy City, but whatever is going on there, barring a tornado it will be a welcome break from the low desert’s July heat. In the meantime, Charley the Golden Retriever is hanging out at my house.

Charley has grown into a mellow sort of golden retriever. Not real bright, in human terms, but laid-back and easy enough to have around. This thing, whatever it is, is not a German shepherd. Not a corgi, either.

P1010041 The corgi has no problem lording it over poor ole Charley, despite the fact that he’s about four or five times her size. He doesn’t seem to mind being herded around. But on the other hand, he waits for his opportunities and visibly rejoices whenever he gets a chance to grab a toy, scarf down some extra food, or distract the human’s attention his way. Cassie has to work to maintain her sovereignty when Charley is around, whereas with only the human to cope with, she’s unarguably the Queen of the Universe.

Well, it looks like the pain is down to about a 4 now, on the famous scale of 1 to 10. So I believe the cold pack can return to its place in the freezer and I can retire to the bed, where I’ve spent most of the past three or four days, thereinat to bake the chilled back on a heating pad.

 

Funny, the German Shepherd, and the Dog Behavioralist

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AnnagarlicJestjack’s comment on last Saturday’s post, about the vet who opined that the wide-ranging pisser of a cat had “anger issues” (heeee!), reminded me of Anna the German Shepherd, a dog for whom “trainability” was an alien term.

Actually, Anna was highly trainable. But she was a working dog with a capital W and a capital D, and she had so much drive that she really needed a full-time doggy job to run off her bottomless reserves of energy. This was an animal that needed to herd sheep. Or cattle. Or camels. She was so strong that for many months I faced quite the challenge keeping her under control.

A woman who trained search dogs and drug dogs for the police had been the most successful of a largely unsuccessful lot of dog-and-human trainers. By the time Anna was about 18 months old, she was marginally leash-trained, despite daily efforts on my part. This police dog trainer favored a vicious pinch collar, something that just made me cringe…but I couldn’t afford to have the dog drag me into the traffic, or to have to let her go as she charged in front of an oncoming vehicle. Since she craved to bring cars and trucks down by their oil-pans, suicide by car was a likely end for Anna. The pinch collar at least put a damper on that activity. To a degree. A low degree.

One day I mentioned this to Jerry Jenkins, a now-retired veterinarian who over the years had become a friend. He said he knew a “dog behavioralist” that maybe I should try. Silently thinking “holeee mackerel, what next?” I took the guy’s phone number. In a moment of desperation, after having been dragged around the neighborhood again, I called him.

Now, you should bear in mind that another friend of mine, at the time, was a lady who claimed to believe in astrology and who was in the act of hanging out her shingle as a pet astrologist and mind-reader. No. Yes. She was serious. I think. Who can tell?

At any rate, you can imagine the eye-rolling over the “dog behavioralist.”

So I call the guy up, and it turns out that under the silly psycho-babble veneer, what he really does is teach owners (not dogs) how to behave. Abhorred by the stainless-steel pinch collar, the first thing he did was demonstrate how to get Anna to heel using nothing more than a leather leash and her ordinary everyday rolled leather collar. It wasn’t very difficult. The trick was, you had to do it several times a day. Didn’t matter whether you did it in the house, did it in the backyard, did it on a sidewalk, or did it in the park. You just had to do it for a short period, over and over, every day.

Here’s how to do it:

Get a rolled leather collar (it’s better for long-haired dogs and it will work better for your purposes). Get a sturdy leather leash (not nylon). Place the collar on the dog and hook the leash to the collar. Have the dog sit next to you. Step forward with the dog at your left side. Each time the dog surges ahead of your knees, say “HUP!” and give the leash a sharp jerk. Always precede the jerk with the “HUP!” sound. Never jerk the leash and then say “HUP.” Walk steadily and confidently forward. Never let the dog get past your knees without going “HUP” and giving it a jerk.

This won’t hurt the dog, but it will get its attention. Reward the dog with friendly noises for heeling correctly over brief periods. You may heel and sit, heel and sit, heel and sit if that’s necessary to underscore the idea that the human walks the dog, not the other way around. Do not fail to do this for a few minutes at least three times a day — five or ten minutes per session will suffice.

After awhile, the dog will start to expect a jerk whenever you say “HUP!” You can then use the word “HUP” to mean, approximately, “heel.”

It works.

Wounded Dog Dodges Bankruptcy

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The other day Cassie flew into the air, chasing Ball up the driveway, and came down wrong on a hind leg. She yelped once, licked her foot, and then went on about her frenetic business.

She seemed OK. Maybe a little sore but not enough to slow her down. She’s still racing around like a rocket, lobbying for doggy walks, and throwing stuffed teddy bears, stuffed vultures, stuffed Angry Birds, and tennis balls at the human in an unceasing campaign to get all of the above airborne.

And yet…and  yet, she’s been off her game a bit. Instead of harrying the human every waking moment, she’s taken to moping in the back room or the office. Her enthusiasm for trotting outdoors at the drop of every hat is limited.

A close inspection of the offended foot reveals a worrisomely lopping toe.

P1020406

Notice how that toe on the inner side of the foot on the left looks deformed? The corresponding toe on the other foot looks straight and smooth, and it lies tight against the foot. The bent toe is loose and stands away from the other toes.

Looked this up on the Internet and came away abhorred: vet bills running into the thousands of dollars; dogs wrapped up in casts under which any number of infections and mildew grew; dogs who ended up having to have infected legs amputated; dogs developing gangrene under too-tight wrappings; dogs ripping their own foot off trying to remove the damn cast; dog owners reporting that casting the leg in such injuries appears to be a scam whose main purpose is to milk the owner’s bank accounts; dog owners reporting that some vets say to just leave the dog alone and let nature take its course; dog owners hacking off casts themselves, to find the dog was just fine without it and healed up with no problem when left alone…. Oh, shit.

Well, by this morning she didn’t seem great. So I took her to a vet M’hijito found by way of his father’s current wife. This lady practices in a part of town called “Little Mexico,” where most of the shopping consists of Dollar Stores and Goodwill outlets. Which is to say, she doesn’t cater to a clientele with deep pockets. The vet I’ve been using, referred to me by La Maya (who has an actual income and a partner with an actual income), is what we might call a thousand-dollar-a-day vet. She’s close, and that’s nice. But she knows how much dog lovers living in the $400,000 to $1.5 million houses that populate North Central can be persuaded to pay.

Vet looked at the dog’s foot and opined that it was either broken or dislocated. In either event, the best course of action was to leave it alone. She said she would try to pull it back into place if she were sure it was dislocated, but without an X-ray, she didn’t want to do that — because it could, after all, be broken. She thinks the best thing to do is let nature take its course. Gave me an anti-inflammatory, handed me a $58 bill, and said good-bye.

In six days, I can afford to have the dog X-rayed (can’t just now, unfortunately: am at the end of the budget cycle and all is pretty much spent). I may call again then and ask if they’ll X-ray her, just to see what the story is.

Maybe not, too. The vet said the dog will recover. Maybe less really is more.

You know, consumers have to be careful with veterinarians. It’s no less true that you should get a second opinion when a vet recommends some pricey procedure than that you should when a dentist does the same. Yesterday I talked to a young fellow who came by to provide an estimate for pruning a hugely overgrown carob tree in M’hijito’s front yard. By way of chatting, we found we each had wounded small dogs. His family’s lab had landed on their chihuahua during a frolic. Whacked the little dog’s leg.

Wife took the lap-dog to the vet, where several hundred dollars’ worth of X-rays ensued. She was informed that the dog needed $1700 worth of surgery “to round off” a hip bone, and that was just for starters. When he recited this story, I said, “Look. Really: get a second opinion. I had a German shepherd that a vet said needed dual hip replacements, to the tune of thousands of dollars. I took her to another vet for a second opinion, and he said the X-rays the first outfit had done were not good enough to diagnose anything about the dog’s hips, and that the dog most certainly did not need surgery.”

This tale got his attention. He said he would do that before giving the go-ahead for this elaborate procedure.

Most vets are good people who do not want to cheat you or inflict unnecessary treatments and pain on animals by way of fleecing their owners. However, there’s no question that some of them are in it for the money. In general, U.S. and British pets are over-vaccinated, over-examined, and over-treated.

Caveat dog owner…

 

Queen of the Universe in Action

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The Human, also known as lady-in-waiting to the Queen of the Universe, is whipped. What a day!

P1020085Did you notice that the Queen hit the big time? Yes. Hufflepup, newest entry in the Cuteness Derby, was amused by her Majesty’s habit of ordering the lady-in-waiting around. So, if Her Majesty needed a moment of fame, now she has one.

The Queen approves Hufflepup’s attempts to train his own Human, who apparently is even more refactory than the lady-in-waiting. Gawdawful amount of work, these humans, aren’t they?

This afternoon her Queenship deigned to bathe, the weather having reached an acceptable 80 degrees. The Royal Bath is always quite a production, involving the human trying to soap and rinse the Queen and the Queen taking off like a rocket. The Queen has an allergy to water.

Luckily, I learned a few handy clues from this video illustrating the grooming of another member of the corgi aristocracy.

First, I nabbed the idea of giving her a preliminary spray of diluted hair conditioner (don’t be fooled: conditioner is conditioner is conditioner, doesn’t matter whether it’s dog or human). As suggested, let it sit on her coat for 20 minutes before pouncing her for The Bath.

Then, I really like the idea of scrubbing her, without wetting her down, using a wet sponge with a dab of shampoo. This worked very well, with a lot less doggy trauma than soaking her in the hose and scrubbing her with large squirts of soap.

This was an easy way to clean fur in general and desperately filthy spots in specific, and it worked without disturbing her noticeably.

That meant the only real moment of terror for Her Majesty came when I had to rinse her off in the hose. First I poured a half-gallon of vinegar water over her soaped fur, which helped, in our hard water, to speed the horrible rinsing process. The result: it didn’t take long to rinse out the shampoo.

P1020091The Queen’s fur looks very lovely: fluffy and bright white (as appropriate) and rich brown and frightfully clean. And damp…she takes forever to dry. Blow-drying her this afternoon took some of the water out, but as usual it’s required a full day for her to come back to about normal.

Spent two hours at physical therapy this morning. While the boss was away, the mice decided to play: an excellent new employee decided to focus on whatever the hell ails me. She showed me a bunch of new exercises and worked on the endlessly painful hips, which seemed to help a lot.

Wrestling with the Queen didn’t help to preserve that improvement, alas. And there there was the fact that I haven’t cleaned in three weeks and so was reduced to vacuuming, dust-mopping, and steam-mopping 1860 square feet of tile this afternoon. This, after a bookkeeping frolic and a file-updating frenzy.

Since I worked until 2 this morning, I started out tired. And now am very, very tired.

And so, to bed…

 

The Ambivalence of Doggy Love

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After M’hijito returned from his seaside vacation, he decided that Charley the Golden Retriever is now old enough to stay on his own all day, and so the dog-sitting gig has come to an end. Seems to be working out pretty well for him: he hasn’t complained about any furniture being eaten, and when I dropped by su casa over the weekend, I noted that Charley seems to have regained all the lost weight and looks great.

Funny thing about humans and dogs and their symbiotic relationship. Every time I lose a dog—and most of them will pass on to their furry fathers before we do, with any luck—I feel really bad and miss the dog a lot. It’s been four years since Anna departed and I still miss that dog. And yet weirdly, at the same time there’s this huge sense of relief. All that work comes to a stop.

It was reasonable to feel relieved when Anna passed. The cost of the meds and vet bills was well-nigh crippling, and the amount of work involved in taking care of a large, sick animal is substantial, indeed. When Anna got so blind she fell in the pool, the workload surpassed ridiculous—I built a jury-rigged fence around the Sink of Death to keep her away from it, but that kept me and the pool cleaning chemicals and gear away from it, too. Everything had to be hauled over the fence, several times a week.

Charley, except for the size of his dog mounds (cleaning up Cassie’s rabbit pellets is as nothing!) and his chronic gollywobbles, was far less of a burden than Anna. But…I’d resuscitated the old wire fencing (and bought a lot more of it!) to barricade my plants and the bubblers he loved to chew, barricading myself out of the flowerbeds, too. And pups, unlike older dogs, track in a phenomenal amount of dirt. I tend to get discouraged when faced with a lot of dirt in the house: often as not, I’ll just give up and ignore it. That makes me even more depressed, because I don’t like living in dirt. Then there was the frenzy generated by his pulling up and eating a half-dozen irrigation sprinklers and drippers, most of which I couldn’t then find and still haven’t found to repair. Half the irrigation system is now nonfunctional.

Hm.

Dog out, cleaning and yard repair in.

This weekend I spent most of Saturday and the entire morning Sunday scrubbing the filthy, filthy house. Finally got around to seriously vacuuming the floors, moving and sweeping under the furniture and sucking the dead insects out of the window casings and vacuuming the dust off the baseboards and on and on. Then the entire 1860 square feet of tile had to be dustmopped, especially under pieces that I can’t move, like the bed. Toward 9:00 p.m. I was running out of gas and so as a shortcut dragged out the Simple Green and the janitorial-sized mop and wet-mopped the sticky, stained kitchen, dining room, hall, and living room floors.

Mopping, though, really does nothing to clean the floor. It just moves the dirt around.

So, after a night’s sleep, it was time to haul out the good old floor steamer. This thing actually does pick up the dirt. Because dirt gets absorbed into the microfiber rag I clip to the steamer head, the rags usually have to be changed two or three times during a routine cleaning. Yesterday I went through seven rags, each of which turned black before a room was finished. Even then, in the dirtier rooms the floors finished smeary and streaky and had to be redone until they were closer to clean. Had to steam-clean the kitchen floor twice and the dining room three times to get them to the point where they look clean.

And truth be told, they really need to be steam-cleaned another couple of times. And I really need to get down on hands and knees and scrub the grout clean. Later.

All this was made so much the more pleasurable by the bout of sciatica I’ve cleverly inflicted upon myself. A week or two ago I spent altogether too many hours parked in front of the computer, sitting in my habitual contortionist’s position, feet propped on the desk and rear end resting on the sacroiliac. Must have pinched a nerve. Back and hip and right leg hurt like hell. This antic also caused the plantar fascitis and accompanying Achilles tendonitis to flare up. The right heel hurts so much I can barely walk.

Tough nougies, though. There’s nobody else to do all this work. So I just have to put up with it.

My pretty little flowerbed by the pool has turned into a weedbed, but in the extreme heat and endless goddamn drought, even the weeds out there are dead. Because the doggy fence made it too difficult to reach in there and dig out the weeds, I’ve  just let everything die.

The dried-out, weed-infested ground is so hard that I couldn’t pull the dead weeds out at all—they were just stuck in there. So last night I let the water run in there, to soften up the soil. Flooded the flowerbed after dark, went to bed, got up at 4:30 a.m., and started to work.

Mercifully, we’re having a brief cold snap. This morning we had a little cloud cover, and by 8:30 it was only 90 degrees out there. This provided several hours of clean-up time.

Pulled out the wire fencing, inflicting a nice hematoma on a finger when I had to force a section out of the solidly baked clay on the east side. Good riddance to that: now I can get water on the hopseed and orange jubilee I planted there to reconstitute a privacy shield, and do it without tripping and falling on my face. Now that I’m old, the leg doesn’t swing as high as it used to…I’ve gotten tangled in that stuff twice and both times fell to the ground. Fortunately, I fell in the dirt and not on the concrete; otherwise I would have hurt myself good. Now that little menace is gone.

The young hopseed plants that went in last winter are now almost up to the top of the wall. By  next summer, for sure, they’ll be tall enough to block curious neighbors and passers-by from peering into my yard. The orange jubilee has survived, by dint of extravagant watering—apparently Texas yellowbells and their cousins are not well adapted to Arizona’s extreme conditions. Looks like it probably will survive the summer, but I’m sure it will freeze back next winter. The vitex, shown here on the left in its winter nekkidness, has run amok in the absence of the sun-hogging Devil-pod Tree. It’s now a huge shrub. Next time the arborist is here, I’ll have to ask him to trim it up into a tree shape. It also will help a great deal as a privacy screen.

Back to work, though: shoveled, troweled, and pulled the weeds and as many rampant roots as I could grab out of the flowerbed. Filled a giant black bag with that stuff. Realized the reason the Lady Banks rose looks like it’s barely clinging to life by the tips of its roots is that the damn thing is barely clinging to life. It hasn’t been getting anything like enough water. The weeds that took over the little flower garden I put around its base also were dried out and dead, the ground hard as concrete. Soaked that area with water (understand: water has been running on the landscaping every day since the heat came up! but the drought has been so extreme—one day humidity was 2 percent!—that I’ve had to drag hoses every single day to keep plants and trees alive) and figured I’ll come back tomorrow to dig up and clean out that area.

Dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses… The irrigation system came on. Spotted one dripper hose that Charley had nipped off below grade, now visible by the fountain it made. Dug the dirt out around it so I can come back in the cool of another morning and repair that. Think I’ll need to buy another package of sprinkler heads to fix it. Never did find where the other four or five chewed-up sprinklers and drippers came from.

Now I’m thinking I’ll go over to the Depot and buy a few flowers to brighten up the abandoned flowerbed, and while there pick up a couple of plants to replace the indoor plants that had to go when Charley came to stay. It would make sense, though, to wait until I’m in Scottsdale for the Thursday a.m. meeting and visit the HD out there, since Home Depot outlets, like most mass retailers, offer a better selection and higher-quality goods to more upscale demographics. Especially in the house-plant department, I’m likely to find nicer specimens in Scottsdale than I can up the road.

Most of the morning is now gone and I have not begun to address paying work. We planned to return nine chapters to the honored client today, and I see by the notices from Drop Box that Tina has been laboring assiduously on that project.

And so…to work.