Coffee heat rising

How to unlock a Toyota…and other small miseries

sickdogdepositphotos_90817268_m-2015All you need is a small Allen wrench. Our friend Mike the Ukrainian Contractor, a co-conspirator at the Scottsdale Bidness Assn, locked himself out of his Toyota truck a couple days ago. After waiting an hour & a half for someone to come get him back in, he started to rummage around the Toyota’s bed. There he found a fairly small-sized Allen wrench. Stuck it in the lock, turned it, et voilà! the lock popped open.

Furthermore, this morning we discovered that my two-year-old Toyota key, which is cut exactly the same way his is cut, also will unlock his seventeen-year-old truck’s door. Noooo problem: just as if the key were made for the lock.

He bet that his key would open my Venza, but given the damned alarm system and all the wacky electronic stuff on the thing, I declined to test it. All I need is to be stuck in Scottsdale with a car alarm screaming and not be able to get into the damn vehicle.

Ruby is suffering from some kind of enteritis. It doesn’t appear to be distemper, because right this moment she’s flying around the house like a racehorse at full speed, leaping over rocks and running circles around Cassie. If she were seriously sick, she wouldn’t be up for that. I think the last batch of food I made contained too much rice and that’s what’s done her in.

Night before last, she barfed off the side of the bed. Despite her care to avoid listening to me bitch about having to strip and launder the bedding at three in the morning, she did manage to get a few drops of barf on the comforter and a sheet. Since that’s my thickest feather comforter, getting it clean is a chore even with the new washer. Took all day to get the damn thing dry.

Last night she and Cassie woke me twice. After the second elevator trip to the floor, I left them off the bed. Don’t like to do that, because I don’t run the heat at this time of year (by way of making up for the astronomical summertime air-conditioning bills), so if you’re not on or under the heated throw that tops the comforter, you’re very cold, indeed. Especially if you’re camping out on bare tile. But up-down-up-down-up-down all night long doesn’t make it.

So, mighty bleary-eyed when the alarm went off as dawn cracked, I ran off to the wee-hour meeting without my purse.

That meant I couldn’t run the errands I’d planned to do on the way home. And that means I now have to go out again and drive from here to Hell and back to buy gasoline and groceries. I was pissed about this and pissed about having to listen to more depressing bellyaching about our new fake President and REALLY pissed about having screwed up a manuscript so that I have to re-index 425 pages, a job I’ve already performed twice thanks to a prior screw-up.

As you can imagine, then, I was not pleased to come home to find Ruby’s rear end covered in dried-on dog sh!t.

She nests behind the toilet in the back bathroom. So the wall, the baseboard, the shower frame, the floor, and the toilet base were all smeared in dog sh!t, too.

Shee-ut. To coin a term…

So now in addition to feeling tired, cranky, and incompetent, I had to carry the dog into the bathtub and scrub her butt and thick furry “panties” clean, dry her off as best as possible (it’s still damn cold in the house), get out the disinfectant, and scrub down the walls, baseboard, shower frame, floor, and toilet in the back bathroom. Then open the windows back there and set up a fan at full blast to blow out the noxious disinfectant fumes.

This was really not how I wanted to start my day.

Admittedly, I did not want to make an extra trip out to shop for groceries and gasoline. In a car that anyone can open with an Allen wrench. Nor did I look forward to the first of four or five days of re-indexing chores. But this, I wanted to do even less.

Image: Depositphotos, © tigatelu

3 thoughts on “How to unlock a Toyota…and other small miseries”

  1. The car lock story reminded me of the one a couple of months ago where a girl went to pick up a friends car, and ended up taking the wrong one, and got arrested when she took it back the next day. All because the keys worked to unlock and start both cars.

    Hope the dog feels better.

    • That is an amazing story. We didn’t try to start Mike’s truck with my key, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t have worked. If you looked at the two, except for the electronic buttons on mine, the shafts looked identical. His car predates the electronic hoo-haw, so the top of his key is plain.

      Pooches seem better. As the day went by, Cassie started to get sick, too. And so did I. So I assume it’s some epizootic shared by humans and beasties…giardia, maybe? Boiled some chicken and gave them just that, unadorned, which seemed to soothe their little doggy bellies.

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