Lording it on his throne (a.k.a. M’hijito’s back room sofa)…
Meanwhile, the serfs are reduced to working. Having shoveled a stack of student papers off the desk yesterday, now I’ve got to catch up with the editorial work again. Ugh.
Pets
Queen of the Universe in Action
The Human, also known as lady-in-waiting to the Queen of the Universe, is whipped. What a day!
Did 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.
The 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
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.
Dog$! Grrrrrrrrrr….
Well, I finally managed to get Charley’s attention this morning. How? By flying into a stratospheric rage and yelling at him for about 30 minutes, that’s how.
He now seems to understand “NO!” “STAY GODDAMMIT!!!” “OFF!” “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” and “STAY AWAY FROM THAT THING!!!!!!!!!”
The “NO!” part has been a long time coming.
During the week he’s resided at my house, he has pretty well dismantled a $5,000 irrigation system. This morning I caught him contentedly chewing on the fourth dripper sprinkler of the week (you can get little sprayers to attach to dripper hoses, which work a lot more efficiently than the stupid drippers that have to run 8 or 10 hours to put enough water on a plant to keep it alive in 110-degree heat). He loves those things. He chews them off the dripper hose and then carries them to a comfortable spot where he can lay down and chew them into plastic confetti, presumably swallowing a fair number of chunks of plastic in the process.
Did I mention the vet bills for his chronic digestive upset? Did I happen to talk about the extravagantly expensive special food and the future of having to prepare 14 pounds of dog food a week in the kitchen of whichever house he ends up occupying, now and forevermore?
Oh. No…I see I didn’t.
The dog has had intermittent diarrhea since M’hijito got him from the breeder. He’s been tested for parasites and infections repeatedly, always negative. Just before M’hijito left on vacation, the vet put him on one of the blindingly expensive Hill’s P/D canned diets and handed M’hijito an expensive prescription and an expensive bottle of probiotics and then told him to feed the dog chicken and rice after the P/D runs out. Permanently.
So on the morning appointed for him to leave for San Diego, my son showed up with the dog, the dog’s mattress, a crate of staggeringly expensive canned dog food, instructions to feed a full can each morning and another full can each evening, a lifetime supply of Costco chicken thighs, and a sack of bulk rice from Sprouts that needed a camel to carry it into the house. He handed me a hundred-dollar bill with which to purchase more lifetime supplies of meat while he’s gone.
So most of the week I’ve been cooking dog food, which Charley consumes at an incredible rate. He’s getting better (although if he actually has IBS, the least drastic of the possibilities, my yelling at him for half an hour or 45 minutes will give him a relapse), and I think he may have regained some of the 4 pounds (that’s 6% of his body weight!) he lost during the last episode.
Meanwhile he’s chewed up at least four sprayers and drippers and snipped off lengths of hose at the ground, making it damn near impossible to repair the damage.
Several of these things, I can NOT find. They were installed before the plants grew up, so they’re hidden underneath shrubbery, where Charley can insinuate himself but I can’t even see. To aggravate things, the water pressure in his favorite part of the system is weak to begin with, so when I turn the system on, I can’t spot any geysers that would tell me where the broken parts are. Underneath there, the break that’s closest to the main is dribbling away, and everything downstream from that is dry as a bone.
This means I won’t find the broken parts until my (established! years old!!!!) plants goddamn DIE.
After I yelled until my throat hurt this morning, I went out and fought with the system for an hour—at 5:30 in the morning it was at least relatively cool out there. Yesterday while I was running around the city I bought a dozen new sprinkler gadgets and so was able to replace the ones in the potted plants (sort of…he’d shortened the dripper hoses enough that I couldn’t position them where they’d get all the pots) and dig a dripper that was watering a spot where a cape honeysuckle had been removed and seal it off and bury the dripper hose (which Gerardo’s ignorant sidekick will soon dig up again…he pulls that stuff up from the crushed granite and then just leaves it sitting there, the idiot).
The drippers are as nothing compared to the late-model kitchen cabinetry, into which Charley has dug great gouges in spite of having been told OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF OFF to the point of blueness in the face. Yes, he does know what off means. He knows what no means. He knows what stay means. He will do those things when it suits him. Problem is, it rarely suits him.
And when it doesn’t suit him, he simply ignores the human in question.
Anyway, one of the cabinet doors now needs to be replaced. God only knows what THAT will cost. Those are custom cabinets that Satan and Proserpine ordered from Home Depot.
Interestingly, after this period of throat-scorching nuclear eruption, the dog responded to NO! by leaving it, by stopping, by not proceeding with whatever he was focused on doing. He responded to OFF! by sitting quietly with a contrite and respectful look on his doggy face. He responded to STAY! by actually staying long enough for me to dodge out the door. And he responded to STAY AWAY FROM THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!! and to MINE, GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!! by standing down from his contemplated exploit.
Temporarily.
I should be ashamed for yelling at a helpless dog. But I’m not. And he’s not.
The Coyote’s at the Door
LOL! We know the wolf’s at my door about half the time. Now we can add another critter to the menagerie: Coyote.
The other day Cassie and I went out, as usual, to pick up the newspaper. Opened the front gate and she went bounding out. Luckily I was right behind her, because she bounded straight into the face of a coyote that was skulking around the driveway.
Grabbed her by the mane of hair around her neck and dragged her back inside the courtyard. In the process, I made such a commotion, hollering at her to get back inside, that the coyote spooked and took off like a hungry greyhound.
Here’s a fellow who says a coyote can sprint at 65 kilometers an hour. That’s about 40 mph. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hit that speed in four strides. Before she got past the edge of the wall she was a streak, and when I walked down to the corner to see if I could spot her, she was long gone.
If I’d dawdled inside the courtyard after opening the gate, Cassie would’ve been breakfast!
Coyote profile: Christopher Bruno. StockXCHNG. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Charley’s New Sport: Counter-surfing!
Prince Charles recently discovered that he’s now tall enough to surf counters. Not only can he reach the top of a counter easily, with little effort he can grab things that are set way back from the edge. He also noticed desirable things often reside atop the dinner table.
This is what the Human calls “not a good development.” We might even say I hate that!
Loud exclamations of No! Bad dawg!! QUIT THAT!!! only add to the fun. A squirt in the face with cold water gets the dog’s attention…very, very briefly. Food trumps face-squirt, any day.
Luckily, the Human is not without resources. From deep in an old, dusty drawer came a tool I once used to get Anna the German Shepherd to stay off her favorite perch, a white sofa. It’s called a ScatMat, and it’s a strip of plastic-encased wiring that emits a mild shock—feels like that jolt of static electricity you get when you touch a doorknob after schlepping around on wool rugs. Here’s one available at Amazon: it’s longer than the ones I have, and I know I didn’t pay $60 for it, and so if you’re interested, you may want to check your local pet store or, if Skimlinks puts up a live link to that first mention, see if you can get one cheaper there. They come in different sizes and shapes—you can get them in rectangular shapes
These ScatMat things are awesome. They really work, and they don’t hurt the dog. No whapping with newspapers, no hollering, and best of all, no sandwiches or donuts carried off between canine jaws. They’re most effective when you catch the dog in the act and emit a firm “NO!” just as he’s raring up to explore the countertop. But because the mat is always on, it will deal out a reminder even when you’re not in the room.
Another device that I’ve used with mixed results is a shrill motion-sensitive alarm that squeals when the dog (or cat, or anything) touches the sacred piece of furniture. For the Ger-shep, I bought both the Scraminal
* * *
Holy God! Somebody just tried to open the front door and Charley went BATSHIT CRAZY!
Hey, pal. You’re a freaking golden retriever, not a pit bull.
He started the alarm and then Cassie went off, too. As I went trotting into the living room, I could hear someone messing with the outside security door…and OMG, the inside door was unlocked!
Flipped the deadbolt shut, grabbed the shilelagh that resides next to the door, and ran for the phone. By the time the 911 operator answered, they’d wandered into view of the front window: a couple of middle-aged women, neither of whom looked very bright.
Probably religious nuts or political canvassers, though they didn’t leave any propaganda at the door. Usually the fruitcakes will leave a Watchtower or some similar litter on your doorstep, and political shills will drop brochures or fliers.
Annoying. And stupid! To get to the security door, they have to go through an iron gate and enter a courtyard, which pretty obviously says “private property.” They probably were trying to open the screen door to knock on the interior door, since the two (!) doorbells (one outside the gate and one next to the front door) are often overlooked by the dim of eyesight or brainpower.
Well. Good dog! It’s amazing that he’ll do that at this young age. And reassuring: Cassie yaps—when she gets up a head of steam, she sounds like an enraged poodle. But when Charley barks, he sounds like something that means business. Honestly, when he gets mature enough to stay at M’hijito’s house all day, I may go out and get another one of that breeder’s dogs. Especially if she ever wants to get rid of one that’s grown and trained.