Lo and behold! At the crack of dawn this morning I learned that Cox has finally broken through its inertia to make the NoMoRobo nuisance call blocker available to its customers.
Along about 6:45 this morning, the phone rang. Goddamned robocall. Worse yet, it went through, within a ring or two, to Cox’s accursed voicemail system, where the recorded blat is recorded and whence fucking Cox emits little bleeping lights to your phone, pestering you to go listen to the recorded ads.
Apparently this damn system has been in place for quite some time. WHY it suddenly decided to intercept phone calls before they ring though to my answering machine is an unanswered and apparently unanswerable question.
After some hoop-jumps, I get through to accursed Cox’s web page. And I also manage to reach a human being or three.
These worthies eventually clue me that I have to physically go onto the damned web page and physically disable the damned voicemail function. WHY this should suddenly be so was never explained. Why would they think I would want this “service” if I didn’t specifically ask for it?
BUT…along the convoluted way, one of them remarks that NoMoRobo would solve the nuisance call issue. I point out that Cox has steadfastly refused to implement NoMoRobo. He now says — admitting, finally, in so many words that their modem-driven connection we were all required to take on is, contrary to Cox’s claim, VoIP — that yes, as of the 15th Cox gave up and made NoMoRobo available to its victims customers.
DamNAYshun!!!
So forthwith it’s over to the NoMoRobo website — it takes all of about two minutes to sign up, if that long.
NoMoRobo has existed for several years; it won a contest sponsored by the FTC to persuade entrepreneurs to create programs or devices to block the 2.4 billion nuisance calls that bombard consumers every year. Cox, however, declined to make it possible to install.
I could get it on Ooma, but as long as I had copper land lines — that is, real land lines — I declined to switch over, because the hard-wired service continues to work through a power outage, which is not even faintly true of VoIP. So I’ve stupidly stuck with Cox, like a donkey in the traces.
It was good to get the NoMoRobo attached to the phone service. It’s free.
However, it was not so good to find my upcoming bill on the Cox website and discover the bastards have jacked up the base bill to $133 a month — a $16/month increase, slated to go up again in February.
So…I just got off the phone from Cox’s “loyalty” department (no kidding! 🙄) and got them to drop the rate back down to just two bucks more than they’ve been charging, for the next year. Very, very, very fuckin’ tired of this game!!
Anyhow, except for a call from Connie the Long-Haul Trucker and a reminder to pick up new glasses from Costco, the hated phone has been SILENT all day long! It’s kind of eerie, actually.
Pooches: Cassie the Corgi is having a much better than usual day. She’s been running at about 80 to 90 percent since she rolled out of the sack at 6:30. This is not to say she’s magically cured. Far from it: she still has this little problem with breathing… But it’s a somewhat improved problem. She slept all night, far as I could tell, and today has been alert and highly barkifarious.
Do I think she’ll recover? No. Not a chance. She still needs another round of antibiotics for the UTI, which has returned. And the vet is unhappy with me for having taken her off the doxycycline just because it made her royally sick. So how exactly that is going to happen escapes me. And she certainly isn’t over the lung thing, which yes, certainly could be lung cancer. I guess I’m going to have to take her to yet another vet to see if anything more can be done, but just now she and I are both so exhausted it seems like the best and kindest course of action may be to let nature take its course.
If nature has a course in mind…
My wackshit neighbor,Tony the Romanian Landlord, who may or may not own the house across the road, is up to no good. Tony is the guy who moved into the ‘Hood about 15 or 20 years ago, before the run-up to the Bubble, and bought up a half-dozen houses by fast-talking the elderly owners out of the places’ real value and lying to mortgage lenders about what he intended to do with the properties. He turned them all into rentals, which didn’t do the neighborhood any good. To put it mildly.
During this period, he bought two houses, one across the street from my present abode and one two houses down from me. He installed his two daughters in these. Both women have lived there without incident, pretty much. The one he calls his “Pretty Daughter,” across the street, has led a fairly normal life and now her kids are grown and out of the house. Other Daughter, who herself has mental problems but who is quite a sweet person, was married for a long time to a paranoid schizophrenic — he’s the one that Anna the German Shepherd went after when he tried to break into my yard. Poor Alan…fortunately, he survived unscathed. Physically, anyway…. 😉
All that shrubbery in front is tree limbs…
So, of late Pretty Daughter seems to have drifted away. Various relatives come and go at that house, but it’s unclear whether she or either of the kids lives there. At one point, a year or two after he bought the place, she had quite the little conflict with her dad. He had told her he’d put the house in her name. But after she’d been in there for awhile, she learned — apparently by accident — that he had not done so but that it in fact was fully deeded to him.
She had a flying shitfit and, we are told, he was pretty much forced to sign it over to her.
This story, however, is neighborhood folklore. In fact, we do not know whether he or whether Pretty Daughter owns the place. But…
Over the past three days, Tony has been over at Pretty Daughter’s with a crew of itinerant workers, who have taken a chainsaw to the big tree on the front yard. They’ve buzzed and buzzed and buzzed for hours, and hacked the big old shade tree down. They dumped the waste in the yard and now have gone off and left it. A-L-L-L over the yard and driveway!
Today they’ve dragged the debris off the driveway. Yesterday you couldn’t even have gotten into the house: all ingress was blocked. Tonight there are no lights on in the place, suggesting it’s vacant.
That leads me to suspect that Tony has reacquired the house (or never really forked it over to his daughter) and is planning to turn it into yet another flicking rental.
Tony hates trees. Every time he bought a house in the neighborhood (he sold all except the two occupied by his daughters at the very height of the bubble, literally just a few weeks before the crash), he went in and chopped down all the trees on the property.
One of his rentals became known locally as “the boob house.” He felled two gorgeous Aleppo pines in the front yard and then, puzzled about what to do with the large stumps, finally decided to cover them with mounds of the same gravel used to xeriscape the property. And yeah: the result did look like a pair of boobs sticking up out of the ground.
😀
Well, it wasn’t funny for what the rentals did to our property values. But still…it was pretty stupid.
Tony pretty much got out of the rental bidness, to the best of my knowledge. Instead he built and operated a nursing home, which he only recently sold. Exactly how he pulled this off remains unexplained. The bastard bought a nice house in Lower Richistan that needed remodeling. But instead of fixing and flipping, he tore it down and turned it into a commercial property: a nursing home. (Turns out Romanians are big in the nursing home business…). I cannot even imagine how he managed to force rezoning of a residential property in the middle of a residential neighborhood…but he did. So now there’s this two-story monstrosity in the middle of the nicer part of our neighborhood, set up as a settlement house for the elderly.
That’s Tony.
Well, if Tony is wanting to convert Pretty Daughter’s house to a rental, you may be sure it is specifically to do a number on me. He hates me even more than he hates trees. And that’s a lot.
When Sally (directly behind me) put her house on the market, Tony showed up at the door the instant the sign went up. Fortunately, she had listed with a cousin who’s a realtor, and she had told him, expressly — even before said sign went up — that she would not sell the house to him. So the guy, being a relative and not giving a damn about any anti-discrimination laws (Romanians are, après tout, decidedly white), told him no. Tony threw a gigantic shit-fit. He apparently threatened the guy, who told him to take a flying eff at the moon.
So. If he turns that place across the street into a rental, as I think he’s about to do, he will rent it to the grossest, most obnoxious sh!theads he can find. The place will soon be a mess, probably occupied by Harley-Davidson aficionados who own large barking pit bulls and blast the neighborhood with ear-splitting “music.” His aim will be to drive me out of my home.
And he may win. I frankly do not feel much inclination to hold my ground against whatever sh!theads he finds to put in there. (And trust me: he does rent to sh!theads. The place he bought behind SDXB was occupied by child abusers; the neighbors across the street expressly said they were moving because the kids’ screaming and crying was terrifying their own children).
You understand: the people who owned this house before me moved out because they were afraid of Tony. Owning a German shepherd and certain armaments (and not feeling hesitant to engage either), I am not afraid of much. But…I tire of bullshit. And I’m not much in the mood to put up with any more sh!theads.
There aren’t many choices of places to move. Conduit of Blight, which runs just to the west of the ’Hood, holds property values down here — that’s why so many young couples with kids are moving in. It’s the last centrally located neighborhood that’s middle-class and also reasonably affordable. Because of the downward pressure on prices from the Blightrail and the drug-addled slums to the west of us, there’s no way I can afford a similar house — or even one several hundred square feet smaller — for what I can get for this house. One that’s centrally located, that is.
That leaves as my possibilities….
Sun City, where the houses are a similar vintage and construction
Fountain Hills, where the houses are a decade or two newer and proportionately more ticky-tacky in construction (more stick-and-stucco, fewer block houses)
Far north Phoenix, up around Deer Valley Road or Carefree highway: elbow-to-elbow cookie-cutter styrofoam shacks that define ticky-tacky
Every one of those represents the end of my social life.
This is because my social life is centered around the church and the choir, and there’s no way in hell I’m driving in to North central from the boondocks two or three times a week. Not on your life! And especially not at night.
I might be able to afford a house in my son’s area. But that neighborhood is close to even worse blight than we have up here; the highest rate of violent crime in the city occurs around an intersection within walking distance of his house. Plus those houses were built in the early fifties. In 1951, when my son’s place was built, there as no air-conditioning. The only cooling available was swamp cooling. No one ever heard of insulation. Consequently, trying to make one of those houses livable in the summertime is prohibitively expensive — his AC bills on 1300 square feet are now pushing $400, and he leaves the AC off or jacked up around 90 degrees during the summer, struggling to make the place more or less livable with heavy-duty fans in every room. For comparison: mine runs around $225 to air-condition 1868 square feet to around 80 degrees — 78 at night.
Why, you might reasonably ask, would I abandon friends, family and activities just because I moved to the far side of the galaxy?
Because that’s exactly what it is: the Phoenix metropolitan area is larger than Los Angeles County! And that, my friends, is vast.
And…driving in this place is a species of Hell. I simply hate driving in the city of Phoenix. Don’t mind driving on the open road — in fact, rather enjoy it. But do passionately loathe despise and hate driving around this place. People here go batsh!t crazy when they get behind a steering wheel.
Today, for example, I had occasion to drive first up to Home Depot and then, shortly thereafter, down to the nearest Costco. Streets were relatively empty: a lot of the locals have left town to visit relatives over Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, the remaining drivers were no less off-the-wall than usual. I amused myself by writing down their antics:
A guy shoots out of a side street and streaks across five lanes of traffic moving at 50 miles an hour.
A pick-up tailgates me down Cave Creek Road — also at 50 mph, with plenty of room in adjacent lanes for him to get around if 10 mph over the speed limit was just. too. slow for the poor guy.
I drive through mile after mile of dreary, creepy slum — to say the ambience of Sunnyslope and the lesser parts of Paradise Valley is “creepy” is to understate. Am amused by a guy with hair dyed cherry red wearing a blanket like an Indian robe. He’s walking toward a bus stop, where he probably plans to take a nap.
A bus pulls over into the bicycle lane along said 50 mph road, where he’s stopped. He isn’t blocking traffic, but the nitwit behind him sure is: this clown stops in the center of the outside lane and…just stands there, causing drivers behind him to dodge and swerve around him. At 50 mph.
A fucking school bus is on the road at 11 in the morning. Why? State law requires all traffic in both directions to STOP every time a damn school bus stops. And they will get on a main drag and stop at every. single. corner.
Beside me, I see a driver apparently smoking dope. I don’t think he was vaping. I have a friend who vapes, and her devices look nothing like the gadget this guy was using to inhale delectable fumes…at 45 mph in a crowded commercial district.
A yard guy backs his pickup out onto 7th Avenue (45 to 50 mph, on average) from a blind driveway.
Two lanes of Bethany Home Road, a major thoroughfare, are shut down.
I count 10 bums’ carts along the north side of the park across the road from the Costco.
Get trapped in the parking lot by a Controller…you know the type. Moron!
The signal at 15th Avenue and Montebello, which you have to navigate to get north and west when you leave the Costco, has an interminable red light. The only sanity-preserving way to go north there (assuming you don’t spend your idle driving moments sniffing interesting fumes) is to turn south, then dodge east into the neighborhood, then make your way north to Bethany home, then turn east (or west, depending on which way you’re going), then turn north on 7th, 15th, or 19th. Total. Crazy. MAKING.
This, amazingly enough, represents an uneventful ride through Phoenix traffic, about 20 or 30 minutes on the road, all told. It’s just effing typical. And that, my dears, is why there is no way in Hell I’m driving in to the central city twice a week from Sun City or Fountain Hills. Or Cave Creek.
So. We’ll see what the SOB does over there. If he turns it into a nuisance property, I may change my mind about moving. It’ll mean some major changes in my life. But then…change is what life is about, eh?
One of the houses next door to that place is occupied by a military man, a guy who commutes out to Luke AFB. And his wife, and his two kids. Chances are, he’s not going to put up with a lot of sh!t from Tony. The other next-door neighbors are elderly, possibly even original owners. They will have neither the strength nor the inclination to fight Tony or complain much about obnoxious renters. They may just give up and move to Sun City themselves.
Is that soap opera still extant?Days of Our Lives… A fine time-waster, right up there with Facebook and Twaddle and Google News. 😀
So here’s a question: how do dogs KNOW you’re touching food when they’re around the corner and cannot see you, and when you have not introduced any new food smells into the environment?
There are only two possibilities: either they can hear your fingers moving or they have dog-lepathy. My money is on the second: the beasts can read your mind faster and more accurately than a mosquito can. And as anyone who has ever tried to swat a mosquito senses, few creatures are more telepathic than those bugs.
At breakfast time I usually set a small package of blueberries on the table, first because I like to munch them and second because I use them as high-quality dog treats. This morning after sponging a few of those and a few pieces of kibble (also used as bribes), Ruby retreats to the kitchen, there to perform the wacky little dance she uses to lobby for a higher-value treat: to wit, a strip of chicken jerky. The human is not getting off its duff: the stubborn creature persists in chowing down on its own food while reading the current issue of TheEconomist and ignoring the puppy.
With Ruby out of the line of sight on the far side of a set of kitchen cabinets, the human reaches for a blueberry.
Like a SHOT the dog is at the table, the familiar look of expectant joy beaming from her furry little face.
HOW DID SHE KNOW? I didn’t touch the plastic. I’m wearing nothing that can rustle with movement, and even if I were, how would she know what movement was made? I have not bitten into the berry and so have not released any delicious parfum de myrtille.
Really. Seriously. There is no other explanation than dog-lepathy. The damn dog reads minds.
Cassie the (Ailing) Corgi seems…sorta OK today. Not so very bad off. Not so great. Both hounds are both off snoozing just now. Just as with cats, dog life seems to consist mostly of lobbying for food, eating, and sleeping.
She coughed a little this morning, so I sprang the Robitussin DM on her. That was a trip! 😀
Go ahead…just TRY to dose your dog with red-dyed artificially sweetened goop flavored with essence de faux fraises! You never saw so much red sticky stuff all over the floor since the time you dropped a mixing bowl full of freshly mixed cherry Jell-O on the floor when you were eight years old!
She just walked in to deliver some barking. And happily enough, she can bark without falling into a coughing frenzy now. That surely is some kind of progress. She’s looking more and more emaciated, though, which is progress of a different sort, I expect. In a different direction.
The other day I was wondering when it was that I first noticed Cassie was beginning to take on the old-dog look. And lo! WordPress conjured the answer at the end of yesterday’s whinge, in the list of “related posts” it automatically generates. It was just short of a year ago: late December, 2017.
Cassie came along in June of 2008, at which time the Humane Society claimed she was two years old. Those rescue society estimates are usually pulled out some volunteer’s tail end, so anything’s possible…even the possibility that she was more like three. Until very recently, she’s been exuberantly healthy, so it would be easy to figure she was younger than she might have been. But by last December, she was starting to take on that “old dog” look, graying a bit around the schnozz, beginning to look a little sunken around the eyes. If she was sick, though, it didn’t show in her behavior.
Next year is 2019. So if she lives that long — and if we believe she was two when I got her — then she’ll be about 13 next year. That is longer than any of my canine room-mates have ever held forth, with the possible exception of Greta the GerShep. I guessed Greta was about seven when I inherited her from the neighbors. But those people were exceptionally feckless. My guess assumed they got her when she was a small pup, but neither of her adult humans was competent to train her as smoothly and perfectly as she was trained. Greta, of course, was a genius among dogs. But even geniuses must have some sort of learning curve. She could have been a year or two old when they got her from someone who knew what they were doing, in which case she was well over 12 when she shuffled off this mortal coil.
But otherwise, I’ve never had a dog live longer than 12 years. One died of a spinal tumor. Others just expired when they reached what for a large dog is old age. Anna was a wreck when I finally dragged her into the death chamber. And I’m afraid that will be true of Cassie, unless we’re lucky and she dozes off into the other world during the night.
The weather is beautiful. I should go out and buy a flat or two of flowers. But of course that would entail getting up and moving around.
Yes. Walmart, bless its corporate heart, managed to bring a quick, neat end to what started out as a Day from Hell, morphed briefly into a sad but real Day from Heaven, and then began to slide downhill again.
Cassie the (Ailing) Corgi had a pretty good day yesterday — at some moments possibly even rising to a 10 on a scale of 1 (about to expire) to 10 (back to normal). Foolishly, I thought, oh gosh! she’s gonna be OK!
You’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn’t you? 🙄
Beginning about 1 in the morning, she started coughing again. And coughed the rest of the night away. By morning she was so exhausted she was immobile.
I call the New Vet at 8 a.m., the instant they open.
In the interim between the time the dogs and I roll out of the sack and the time I can reach the vet, I pick up the laptop and, in the course of glancing at the news and waypoints, visit a complicated draft “page” at Plain & Simple Press where I store material waiting to publish it. Yesterday I spent HOURS updating and fully formatting it, an endless, tedious, mind-numbing job.
This morning? It was A.L.L. G.O.N.E.
Yes. Hours of brain-banging work, disappeared. And no, I couldn’t retrieve it for love nor money. But there wasn’t much time to fret about it…
The vet’s staff asks me to bring in the dog at 8:45.
This was pretty tight because I had to sing at a funeral at 10. And this was not one I was about to miss, since it celebrated the life (and presumed afterlife) of a lovely friend.
Okay. Brush teeth. Wipe off yesterday’s make-up. Throw on some fresh make-up. Lift the dog into the car, where she collapses in a limp pile. Fly through the rush-hour traffic, to the extent that one can fly through such a thing, and make it with eight minutes to spare. Time ticks by as the vet and I and her underlings discuss. It’s pushing 9:15. I still haven’t fed Ruby and still am not dressed in the requisite black duds and still have a half-hour or more to get back to the house and another 15 minutes to get down to the church. Nor, we might add, have I had breakfast or even so much as a swallow of coffee.
Seeing that I’m getting anxious, they suggest I leave the dog at their clinic, where they will test her again for the alleged, never-proven Valley fever and test for heartworm, which can cause the same kind of coughing, lassitude, exercise intolerance, and bloating. At this point, the new vets persist in the theory that the problem is not the diagnosed adrenal tumor but in fact is yet-to-be-provable Valley fever. This is entirely possible: dogs frequently test negative on the first try at Valley fever testing. It has, however, been more than 4 weeks (by far) since the first effort, so if she does have the disease, by now she should test positive. They want to put her back on fluconazole. I tell them I’d rather put her down, it made her so sick. They propose another concoction that has even worse side effects.
I fly out the door and arrive at the funeral rehearsal right at 10 a.m., to the director’s surprise (since I’d emailed her that I’d be late). On the way there, I reflect that she was also taking prednisone during the last go-round with fluconazole. Prednisone had some mighty baleful effects on the dog. It occurs to me that there could be some drug interaction.
The funeral comes off very lovely. Dear friend and leader on the choir who just had hip surgery showed up and, amazingly, managed to get up the stairs and participate in the whole ceremony. Old friends who have been off the choir, beautiful voices, also attended: a joy to sit with them and listen to them sing again.
Later, when I get back to the house, I look the drug interaction question up and discover — from Pfizer, the horse’s mouth — that discontinuing fluconazole causes increased metabolism of prednisone, which leads to adrenal insufficiency. Which would explain quite a lot…possibly we could try the fluconazole in the absence of prednisone to see if it will go down any more easily.
Along about 3 p.m., I get back to the veterinary. Cassie is barking and looking pretty perky. WTF? She was at Death’s Door in the morning…I had to carry her through the house to the car and then carry her from the car in the vet’s door.
They did another chest X-ray, since they never were able to extract the image I paid for from MarvelVet. They also did a heartworm test and sent off for another Valley fever titer.
However, it’s beginning to look like the dog probably does not have Valley fever. The white area around the lung and heart that MarvelVet cited as proof of his hypothesis was gone; the sound of her chest has been clear for several weeks, and still is. New Doc believes the problem is and has been a bronchio-pneumonia, probably of bacterial origin because the doxycycline we gave her for the UTI she developed seemed also to help clear up the cough…and doxy is the drug of choice for doggy pneumonia.
Unfortunately the doxy made the dog so sick I had to take her off it after 19 days (of 21 prescribed). She thinks, though, that the dog may be on the mend, and she’ll be OK if we can soothe the cough.
So she suggests Robitussin DM, in a dosage she specified.
As for the adrenal tumor, this new intelligence just in:
New Vet doubts that any of the dog’s symptoms have been caused by the adrenal mass, which the sonogram doc believes to be nonmalignant. New Vet says most adrenal tumors in dogs have no symptoms (this is not altogether accurate, but let’s put our money on it for the moment.)
She thinks the bloat probably originated with the prednisone, which should not have been given in conjunction with fluconazole.
Other more classic fluconazole side effects, including anorexia and stupor and obvious misery and diarrhea and labored breathing, were caused by…yeah: fluconazole.
Taking her off the prednisone without titering her off even more slowly than I did would have caused adrenal symptoms, and giving fluconazole at the same time as prednisone can cause adrenal insufficiency that may or may not go away in the absence of the drugs.
Read: we’re talking about an iatrogenic problem aggravating a misdiagnosed ailment…
She doesn’t seem to have an explanation for the extreme swings in the dog’s well-being: yesterday Cassie was at a 9 or even a 10 on the 1-10 scale; this morning she was back down at a 1 or 2.
The dog does not have and probably never has had a collapsed trachea.
So…if our furry friend picked this up while nosing around in the grass during a doggy walk (which is how such infections spread among dawgs), I guess I should feel lucky Ruby didn’t get it, too. Actually, Ruby did cough some, very mildly and for just a few days; she may have had it and thrown it off because she’s so much younger.
This poses the possibility, though, that Cassie could recover. Maybe.
Now, as for that Robitussin DM: for veterinary purposes, the stuff has to have 20 mg of dextromethorphan and 200 mg of guaifenesin per 10 milliliters of sauce. Ohhkayyy…
So I figure I’ll trudge down to the Walgreen’s, stand in line till the cows come home, ask a pharmacist to direct me to the correct concoction, and…ugh, how awful does that sound?
Why do that when I can order it up from Amazon?
Right.
Right?
R-i-i-g-h-t.
Amazon offers approximately 87 gerjillion variants of Robitussin DM. The only one that has this particular proportion of active ingredient-to-active-ingredient-to-inactive-ingredients comes in “prepackaged spoonsful.”
Say what?
I do not want spoonsful, prepackaged in plastic waste or not. This stuff has to be hoovered up into an oral syringe so it can be squirted down the hound’s gullet.
Now in the middle of evening rush hour, whereinat you can not turn east out of my neighborhood because of the effing stupid “reverse lanes” the city has inflicted on us, I set out for the nearest Walgreen’s, which rests near the corner of GangBanger’s Way and Commuter Nightmare Parkway East. This, I dread, because I’ve been harassed in that store’s parking lot before and do not look forward to more harassment. The other nearby Walgreen’s is here in the ‘hood — couldn’t pay me to unlock my car doors in front of that place, especially not at dusk. The third Walgreen’s is way on down East Commuter Nightmare Parkway; though I can turn into its parking lot (where I also have been harassed), turning out of it in a direction that will bring me home is, shall we say, highly problematic.
O shit o hell o damn i do NOT want to do battle with any one of those dreary Walgreen’s.
But…right about then it dawns on me that I don’t hafta. There’s a Walmart on the way to Nearest Walgreen’s. It’s on my side of the road (no illegal or risky left turns across torrents of traffic) and its exit guides me straight to a left-turn lane that sets me on my way home, via Gangbanger’s way. Hot dayum!
Get into Walmart. It’s crowded — I have to park a long way from the front door. This — crowdedness — is a good thing, because drug-addicted panhandlers tend not to pester anyone when there are a lot of people in the parking lot. Into the store without incident. Quickly snab a fine young pharmacist; tell him the challenge. The kid is ready to rise to it. We sally forth into the cold nostrum aisle, and darned if he doesn’t find a version of Robitussin DM that comes close to the required proportions.
I say this is 20 mg of dextromethorphan and 200 mg of guaifenesin to 20 milliliters of sauce, not to 10. He points out that the solution to this is simply to give the dog twice the suggested dose.
Yeah. Well: we do have the possibility that a rushed vet could have the proportion wrong.
I say the solution is even simpler: give her the suggested dose and see if it works. Often OTC stuff like this will work with less than the recommended dose. If it does: bully. If it doesn’t, so then I just give the second half of it. He allows as to how this is an acceptable plan.
I grab the dope, head for the door, and in spite of a hectic scene find a cashier standing there all by his little self. Pay and shoot out the door without having to wait a minute.
Traipse to the far end of the crowded parking lot: not a single panhandler in sight. Yes!
Okay. I admit it: my mood has become altogether too goddamn glum. But…helle’s belles. Why not? We have a clown in the White House. California is burning down (and believe me: whither goes California, thither goes Arizona. Every time!). The ice caps are melting. Common sense has gone the way of the dinosaur…which, speaking of thither, is the general direction we can expect our near descendants to go. Hate has become stylish. Our educational system is in the trash heap. Decent jobs are to be had only in China, for those willing to work for prison inmates’ wages. Our idiot leadership and their bigoted fans imagine this will be fixed by blocking cleaning ladies, yard workers, and agricultural laborers from entering the country. You can’t buy a decent cup of coffee for love nor money. And my dog is dying.
Grump!
Somehow I’ve got to find a way to come out of the present blue funk.
This challenge usually involves spending more time around people. Though I must admit, people are not my métier. SDXB and NG wanted me to go with to the Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival, which I really would have enjoyed doing. But some other demand superseded…I believe it was that I had to take the dog to the vet. Again.
Nor, really, could one responsibly have left the poor little beast alone in the house all day.
If I were sane, I’d get off my duff and go for a hike in the mountain park. Except…well…the Phoenix Mountain Parks are no longer what you’d call a joy to visit. They’re SO thumped by the sheer volume of humanity tromping through them that you’d probably do better to go for a walk in a parking lot. Plus with everybody and her little sister yapping on cell phones everywhere you go, the endlessly annoying background chatter has become downright aversive.
Alternatively, I suppose one could accomplish something constructive. That’s always cheering. I could…
•Get the chipped paint on the entry to the living room matched, buy a can of it, and touch up the dinged wall. •Do the laundry. Wheee! •Post this week’s The Complete Writer chapter and update the TofC for that thing •Retrieve the book proposal I left to languish out of brain-banging laziness, find a new potential publisher, write a new cover letter, and send it off. •Go to the nursery or the Depot and buy some winter flowers to replace the summer blossoms that have croaked over. •Or better yet, since I now can’t afford to buy so much as a loaf of bread, beg borrow or steal some flower seeds. •Figure out how I’m going to get enough coffee to last the rest of the month. Gets more and more cheering, doesn’t it? •Prune the roses. A thrill a minute! •Lock up Cassie and take Ruby for a very long walk. •Bake some bread in the grill. •Feed a few of the local homeless drug addicts.
Precious few of these are free… I do have some flour in the freezer, I think, so I could make bread. And a mess to clean up… Posting bits of various magnum opi is free, except of course for the web hosting charges. Mailing off book proposals: free, thanks to email…well, except for the associated connection charges, which, we might add, cost one helluva lot more than a couple of postage stamps, even at today’s inflated rates.
Hm. Precious few seem especially cheering.
Think I’ll go sit in the hall closet with the vacuum cleaner and close the door behind us…
Holy mackerel, didthat shotmake me sick! If the extortionate price doesn’t make you sick, by golly, the vaccine itself sure will.
Growing up on the shore of the Persian Gulf, about as third-world as you could get in the 1950s, I enjoyed a lot of shots. Every malign disease known to prey on personkind was endemic in Arabia, and Americans living there had to take shot after shot after shot after shot. Every six months, I was hauled down to the hated clinic for yet another round of jabs: typhus, typhoid, cholera, tetanus, diphtheria, smallpox, whooping cough… They didn’t have polio shots yet, so whenever there was an outbreak, every kid in camp was dragged down to a portable and stuck with a vialful of gamma globulin — and lemme tellya, that stuff hurt! Of the routine shots, though, typhoid and cholera were probably the most painful.
But none of them hold a candle, for lengthy acute aftereffects, to this accursed Shingrix concoction. Holy shit!
Administering it is actually not very painful. But shortly after it’s been pumped into a muscle, your arm starts to hurt magnificently. This spreads up your neck, across your shoulders and back, down into your legs. Before long every muscle in your body aches. And your head? Wow, what a headache!
Unfortunately, I can’t take aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen. So these little aches and pains are just something I get to enjoy.
Hardly slept at all last night. I probably fell asleep for about an hour around 1 or 2 a.m., and that was it.
Then this morning I had to get up, climb in the car, and traipse across the city to the dermatologist’s office, south of Sun City(!!). At 9 a.m., the rush hour is still on…so that was jolly fun. Really, I shouldn’t have been driving the car at all, that’s how sick I was. BUT…I managed to shoehorn myself in to the doctor’s schedule this a.m. to have them look at a recrudescence of this damn thing on my hand. They insist it’s not growing back and that it’s healing up. Yeah. Right.
Soaking in a hot bath for awhile helped some — which was surprising, since the stuff made me feel like I had a fever of 110 and I thought what was needed was cool water. But it’s damn cold in the house — we’re having some kind of a cold snap — and I just couldn’t force myself to stand in a cold shower. Surprisingly, the hot water helped.
That notwithstanding, I still hurt from stem to stern by the time I had to roll out the door.
God, how I hate driving in this city! It’s just like Southern California now: mile on endless mile of bumper-to-bumper, aggressive traffic through tracts of ticky-tacky housing and shoddy strip malls. And wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here without an endless trek. Horrible place!
Especially when you feel like hell… 😀
To get out of the ’hood, I had to pull an “Arizona turn.” That’s when you dart out in front of traffic bearing down on you from the left, floor it to keep from getting hit, veer into the center turn lane, and make a Uie. This was the only way I could turn west on Gangbanger’s Way this morning. Ultimately, I had to do two Arizona turns: one to get out of the clinic’s parking lot and turn east to come home.
You wonder why I insist on a six-banger? Yeah.
All that notwithstanding, I was happy to be able to get a vaccine that at least has (heh!) a shot at providing some protection from shingles.
Shingles is decidedly not an ailment you want to enjoy.
Some years ago, I met a woman in Portal, a little dump in the Chiricahua Mountains. The Chiricahuas host a research station run by the American Museum of Natural History. It’s quite a place, and it attracts droves of high-powered scientists. These folks arrive there and fall in love with the place. The Chiricahuas form what is known locally as a “sky island”: with its own ecology, the area looks much like Bali Hai.
As a result, a number of very high-octane scientists take up temporary residence in Portal, and some of them retire there. This woman and her husband were among those who decided to retire. They built a home in a beautiful little canyon and took up bird-watching.
Shortly after they arrived there, she came down with shingles. A bad case of it. By the time I met her, she’d had it for two years, and it wasn’t getting any better. It had wrapped itself around her torso, so that she could not breathe or move without constant pain. About all she could do was huddle on the sofa, trying to stay still. She was, in effect, crippled.
At that time, there was no immunization for shingles. If you’d had chicken pox and you were pushing old age, you had a good chance of getting it. In fact, one in three older Americans get shingles. Some, obviously, are not as severe as her case. But…there’s no way of knowing who is going to get a crippling vase of it and who is gonna get off light.
I remember looking at that lady and thinking, holy shit! whatever you do, DON’T GET OLD!
Well. The alternative is fairly drastic, and so far I haven’t felt inclined to take advantage of it.
So even though the present episode was a passing miserable moment, and even though I’m really pissed that something so important to public health should be priced exorbitantly and not covered by Medicare D, I’m really, really glad to live in a time where the shot is available.
Image: Chiricahua hoodoos: By Zereshk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4171231
So here’s a question: 
Cassie came along in June of 2008, at which time the Humane Society claimed she was two years old. Those rescue society estimates are usually pulled out some volunteer’s tail end, so anything’s possible…even the possibility that she was more like three. Until very recently, she’s been exuberantly healthy, so it would be easy to figure she was younger than she might have been. But by last December, she was starting to take on that “old dog” look, graying a bit around the schnozz, beginning to look a little sunken around the eyes. If she was sick, though, it didn’t show in her behavior.
Some years ago, I met a woman in Portal, a little dump in the Chiricahua Mountains.