Pets

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

6:00 a.m.: Student turns in late paper, with a viable excuse.  A new raft of papers scheduled to come in today, this paper must be read now to prevent total melt-down later. Naturally, it’s the most difficult paper of the entire set. Takes forever.

7:15 a.m.: Knock off reading paper so as to get breakfast and feed Cassie before M’hijito shows up with Charley the Pup.

7:16 a.m.: Out of food. Make Costco list. Scrounge breakfast from leftovers; cook pasta to throw over leftovers and add to Cassie’s pittance.

7:40 a.m.: Go back to reading impossibly tangled student paper.

7:45 a.m.: M’hijito shows up a little early. Pup is berserk.

7:50 a.m. forward: Sit down, go back to reading student paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs…repeat, ad infinitum. Realize I can’t answer all the e-mail pending; triage. Squeeze in a bath and hairwash.

10:45 a.m.: Out the door.

11:30 a.m.: Meet 101s. Lecture.

12:30 p.m.: Meet 102s. Lecture.

1:30 p.m.: Counsel student on life/career/education strategies.

2:00 p.m.: Meet another set of 102s. Lecture.

3:30 p.m.: Let 102s out early; head for Costco to replenish larder.

4:45 p.m.: Return home. Let pup out of crate. Pup is berserk. Let him out into the yard to destroy things while I unload car. Return La Maya’s phone call; tell her I can’t go with her to a Scottsdale estate sale and then dinner because I have choir.

5:00 p.m.: While explaining this over the phone, pull a leg off the Costco roast chicken; parboil and butter some asparagus. Notice a smell. Clean up Cassie’s shit from under the family room desk, while still talking on the phone. Continue to chat while walking outside to see what the pup is up to and see…Charley standing over the shrubbery vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. Dog is clearly distressed.

5:16 p.m.:  Get off the phone to attend to dog. He staggers off. Look of fear dissipates from animal’s face. He seems more or less O.K. Goes in and drinks water. Get hose and spray back at least a gallon of vomit, with little luck.

5:20 p.m.: Put food on table. Tie fractious dog to doorknob so as to break loose enough peace to bolt down piece of chicken and asparagus.

5:20:30 p.m.: Dog is pawing at eye. Dog paws at eye and ear. Dog frantically digs and scratches at throat. Not good.

5:21 p.m.: Leave food and beer on table. Throw dog and wallet into the car and race for the vet’s office.

5:30 p.m.: Reach vet. Drag dog into lobby. Vet’s office is full of people with dogs and cats. Pup goes berserk. Wrestle animal under control and explain what’s going on.

5:32 p.m.: Get parked in a waiting room. Pup hates vet and is frantic to get out. Throws himself against the door repeatedly trying to escape. Nothing calms dog. Tell my story to the vet’s technician. Get left to wait for the vet. Dog continues to throw self against doors.

6:00 p.m.: Vet appears. Have to repeat the whole damn story again, for the third time.

6:05 p.m.: Vet observes dog. Vet believes dog has been bitten by a spider or bee and is suffering an allergic reaction. I remember the plant growing between the damn palm trees that is a member of the deadly nightshade family…damn! Should’ve pulled that thing out of there before Pup ever showed up at my house! She thinks he would have thrown it up before it did much harm. She sticks to her theory that it’s an allergic reaction to insect or spider venom. She proposes to shoot him up with an antihistamine and another shot.

6:15 p.m.: M’hijito shows up at the vet’s, just as the vet is about to haul Charley off to be medicated. Repeat the whole story again: fourth retelling. Vet describes her theory and how she proposes to treat it. M’hijito looks at dog, notes swelling on jaw, notes  bouncing behavior.

“Nothing is wrong with this dog,” says he. “I don’t want him dosed with medications if it can be avoided. Also, we can’t take the financial hit. Is this really necessary? I doubt it.”

Vet wavers. Vet lobbies for shots of antihistamine and whatever.

M’hijito stands firm.

Vet looks at me. “It’s his dog,” I say. “It’s his decision.”

Vet now fesses up that probably if the dog were going to go into anaphylactic shock, it would have done so by now, although there’s still some risk for the next two hours. Vet’s office is open until 10:00 p.m. She suggests giving him Benadryl and watching him closely. If he gets worse, come back.

6:30 p.m.: Exit the vet’s office, $45 lighter. Drive Charley to M’hijito’s house. Drag him inside and wait for M’hijito to return from the Walgreen’s with a bottle of Benadryl. Chat for a few minutes.

6:45 p.m.: Drive to choir rehearsal. Practice singing for two hours.

9:15 p.m.: Arrive home. Feed Cassie. Make sandwich out of congealed chicken. Throw out stale beer. Wash sandwich down with a stiff bourbon and water.

9:30 p.m.: Pick up kitchen, wash dishes, try to restore a little order to the chaos. Let Cassie out. Put heating pad in bed and turn it to “high.”

10:00 p.m.: Answer a few e-mails. Read Google News. Celebrate exit of evil Russell Pearce, recalled from legislative office by hordes of angry voters; celebrate election of several Good Guys to city council. Has the electoral worm turned?

10:30 p.m.: Dope self with Benadryl. Crash in the bed.

Tuesday Thursday a.m. [jeez…how distracted AM i? I can no longer tell the difference between Tuesday and Thursday!]: Benadryl worked—slept a nearly unheard-of seven hours. Am now late for Tuesday Thursday a.m. meeting. Tuesday Thursday agenda:

7:00 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
9:30 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
11:30 a.m. meeting, Tempe
1:00 p.m. hair stylist appointment, Tempe
2:30 p.m.: arrive back here. Spend rest of afternoon struggling with dog and trying to grade papers.

Ain’t retirement grand?

Endless, endless work and hassles and pains in the beautocks and twinkling starfields of interruptions! Haven’t found even a few minutes…

….

….and didn’t even find enough to finish that sentence: Puppy barked to go out (and is now doing…what?). While out, he had to try to excavate the paloverde tree; then, back indoors, had to gouge some new claw-tracks into the kitchen cabinetry…..

…where was I? Yes: haven’t even found a few minutes…

…oh, he’s chewing something…i can hear it…

….

…haven’t even found a few minutes to punch out a short post.  So it’s been going, hour after hour, day after day.

Yesterday felt I’d accomplished a lot because I finished entering elaborate instructions on a set of stoont drafts and altering the rubrics in both courses to specify 50 points off the 100-point final version for those papers whose authors ignore all advice on their drafts and just stick the same illiterate stuff into a Word file and send it in. Posted the new rubrics; harangued the stoonts.

Meanwhile, as I was wasting my time with these activities two last-minute-hurry-up projects awaited on my desk amid all the other trash I haven’t been able to get to. The pile to the left is just a small sampling of the mountain of paper that has come to rest in my office. What a mess!

Finished one rush project about 7:30 this morning.

Meanwhile, among many other things I’d arranged to have the trainer KJG uses come over to help us with a few puppy issues, like flinging himself at the kitchen cabinets, which are now wrecked (so the cost of having her come over is pretty redundant…) and tupping Cassie and nipping hard enough to draw blood and depositing more pee on the floors than Noah had floodwaters. At the time we made this appointment, he was still peeing on the floor, but he seems to have gotten past that, so there’s another redundancy. But we could use some help with the beginning leash training, so I guess it’s not a total waste.

However, what IS a ding on our time: she was supposed to get here at 10:00 a.m. She called at 9:45 to say she had a headache and wanted to put off the appointment for an hour. Well…this shindig is supposed to go on for a minimum of two hours, and KJG says you have to tell her you need to be out the door by a specific time or she won’t stop talking. So now we’ve gone from a 10:00 a.m.-to-noon time slot to an 11:00 a.m.-to-1:00 p.m. (at least) time slot. Since both M’hijito and I have a LOT to do in our respective lives, this is not so good. I suggested we put it off for another weekend. She was having none of that (her urgency hints that she needs the money).

So I called M’hijito, and of course he wasn’t answering his cell. I e-mailed. Of further course, he didn’t see the message.

When he showed up a few minutes before ten, he was distinctly annoyed. So he left the dog with me so he could race off and run some of his errands. This means my dog gets locked up and I don’t get to do the things in the house and yard I need to do. Specifically, I can’t do the laundry, because Pup will pull it off the line; the laundry needs to go out early enough in the day to get the sheets dry. If the new dog trainer indeed hangs around until 1:00 p.m., it’ll be 2:00 p.m. before the sheets come out of the washer IF and only if I kill an extra hour around the house waiting for the washer to run.

I don’t have an extra hour to kill, unfortunately, because I have about a billion errands of my own to run, and so that means the bedding won’t get washed today and very likely won’t get done tomorrow, either, because once I get back here after the Sunday songfest I’ve GOT to shovel out the mess in the office and attend to all that paperwork that I’ve dropped there thinking some one of these days I’ll get to it.

Getting to the endless chores I need to do next week will be delayed by  another foray into the effing Medicare bureaucracy. Every  year Medicare has “open enrollment,” which gives the schools of private insurers an opportunity to raise the bills. So every year you have to plow through the details of 60 or 70 policies, trying to figure out how to get yourself covered at the lowest cost. It’s a monster time-consuming nightmare, and it means, to boot, a nice little disruption in your bookkeeping, too—something else to kill your time.

Three minutes before the woman is supposed to show up. No sign of my son. The laptop has gone offline and I don’t know how to reconnect it. Still haven’t had time to scan the $310 check from a client and e-deposit it (takes about 10 minutes to make the scanner work and then…

…

So the trainer surfaced in the middle of all this, within minutes of the son’s reappearance. Dog peed on the floor not once but twice in the hour-long interim.

Yesh. Peed not once but twice on the floor that I stayed up until 11:30 last night cleaning.

It’s been a good six or eight weeks since I cleaned the house. Ran a dust-mop over the gritty floors a couple of times, when poor Cassie’s eyes started to run from dust allergies. But otherwise, have had time for no cleaning, none, zero, zip. So last night it was FIND TIME after dinner to vacuum in a cursory way, pull the stove apart and scrub up the grease, move everything off the kitchen counters and scrub up the grease, dust the furniture, wet-mop the floors, scrub the woodwork, clean the bathrooms, fall exhausted into bed, continue copyediting the ASAP assignment, fall asleep over it, wake up at 1:00 a.m. with it spread across the bed, pick up the debris and stack it on the floor next to the bed, turn off the light, go back to sleep.

Bedtime around 11:00 p.m. is about the only quiet period a person can expect to be able to focus on a job without an unending series of interruptions.

…

The trainer was much as KJG advertised: chatty, eccentric, and amazingly savvy in the workings of the dog brain. She demonstrated several effective techniques for getting Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy to join civil society and dispensed much practical advice about living with a dog and coming out on top.

Some of the things she suggested, I already knew but had allowed to lapse. Others were fresh ideas, in a couple of cases unique ideas she had come up with herself. Among them:

• Keep the dogs’ water dishes outdoors. Take the dogs out frequently to pee and let them drink while they’re outside, but do not leave ammunition sitting on the kitchen floor with which to reload the puppy bladder.

• Banish the dog from the kitchen. This is safer for the dog (less likely that you’ll pour boiling water over the critter as you carry the pasta from the stove to the sink, stumbling over the dog on the way) and obviates the destruction of your kitchen cabinetry by flailing dog claws.

• Do not lock up Cassie to protect her from Charley’s exuberance. Instead, put Charley in his crate when he gets rambunctious.

• Discourage attention-getting barking by ignoring the dog and by withholding the response for which the dog is lobbying. (Weirdly, this worked!)

• Teach sit/wait before sit/stay; use “wait” to control behavior and as a training device.

• Keep Pup on a leash at all times, so he cannot get out of your sight for his floor-pissing frolics. Place your foot on the leash to help keep the dog where you want him while leaving your hands free for typing and other tasks.

• Rather than limiting crate time to the periods when you’re out of the house, put Pup in the crate whenever you need to focus on a job that requires uninterrupted attention or time.

• To discourage nipping and biting, hold him firmly by the nape of the neck until he quits it.

• Grasp Pup’s collar under his neck rather than at the back of the collar, to avoid injuring the esophagus.

• Want to sleep in past the crack of dawn, when dogs think the day starts? Set your alarm to go off about a half-hour before Dog’s customary awaking. Take the dog out to eliminate. Put the dog back in its crate and to back to bed. Get up at your convenience, not at Dog’s.

Gave the trainer the 30-year-old crate we had, the one that fell apart. She was pleased; says they’re better made than newer ones. She’s probably right. Got it out of my house, anyway.

6:59 p.m.: I can’t hold my head up another minute.