Coffee heat rising

DIY Back Massage

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People who live alone have no one to give them a massage when the old back goes out. Argh! What to do?

Well, you could do contortions trying to reach your own back, or you could pony up $50 or $80 for a massage therapist to try to knead out the kinks.

Or you could try this:

Take a tennis ball or a hard rubber ball about the same size. Back up against the wall with the ball placed between your back and the wall, as close to the sore muscle as you can get it. Lean on the ball and move around so as to roll the roll up, down, back, and forth across the affected area.

Gives you a great massage, and after you’re feeling better, you can use the ball to play with the dog.

Month of extreme frugality (NOT!)

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Wow! If there’s any question about whether Karma is mad at me, the laughable effort at a month of extreme frugality answers it! Not only did I fail to save extra money to apply toward the Renovation Loan Payoff Fund, for the first time since I started the weekly budgeting system, I ended the month-long cycle in the red!

I was $23.57 in the black on May 16 and thought I might make it to the end of the billing cycle, but just couldn’t do it. The main reasons were the dog and the astronomical cost of gas.

The dog went off her feed, causing her to barf up the meds. So I had to go by Sprouts to pick up some ground lamb and lamb neck bones to persuade her to eat; while I was there I got some hamburger for myself (totaling $15.89). Then I had to buy a new prescription antibiotic for her, relatively cheap at $26.80 but still more than I had left in the budget, even without the cost of food. These two trips consumed just enough gas that I wasn’t sure I could make the 36-mile round trip to the office on what remained in the gas tank, plus I had to come home the long way to go by a client’s office and deliver a completed project. My van gets 18 miles to the gallon, so I bought about 2 1/3 gallons at Costco: 13 cents a gallon under the going rate, but still $3.47 a gallon. These expenses put me in the red.

This compares abysmally with the first three months of this year:

Before this disastrous month, the worst I did when I wasn’t trying to save had me $151 in the black!

What did the job on my budget was the cost of veterinary care: $379.75 to my old vet and $278.08 to the new vet, plus assorted extra meds. Plus special food. The cost of gas didn’t help-really, if gas were not exorbitant, I might have ended in the black despite the dog headaches.

Luckily, I kept $500 of the previous months’ savings in the money market checking account used to pay these costs as an emergency “cushion.” So when the American Express bill arrives, there will be enough to pay it. But it frosts my cookies.

At this point, it looks like the only hope of getting the vet bills under control is to put the dog down. The vaginal infection is better, but the nose thing just keeps getting worse. She can barely breathe through her nose. Just the cost of diagnosing what ails her starts at $300, to X-ray her skull. If she has a tumor, then she should be put to sleep right away, because it’s terminal and there’s nothing effective that can be done: $300 + $379.75 + $278.08 = $957.83 that I might as well have run through the shredder. If she doesn’t have a tumor but probably has something stuck in her nose, they have to thread a lighted tool into her nasal cavity, which in a dog is an extremely complex maze, to try to fish it out. The vet said this would be “expensive.” When a veterinarian calls something “expensive,” you can be sure the term an ordinary mortal would use is “ruinous.”

So, it may be better just to put her to sleep now. She’s had a long run: she’s almost 13 years old, two years past the normal life span of a German shepherd. I hate to contemplate it: a stuffy nose shouldn’t be a capital offense. On the other hand, heavy panting and rapid breathing are signs of doggy pain, and with the vaginal infection pretty much healed, we know the pain isn’t coming from that. The fact that her nose doesn’t appear to be congested while she’s sleeping (i.e., unconscious) suggests the noisy breathing isn’t caused by a nasal blockage but indicates discomfort or pain. She keeps me awake half the night every night, and I have to get up and get out of the house by 7:30. I’m running on fumes myself at this point-this has gone on for a couple of months-and I’m starting to get sick from the stress and fatigue. If she’s in pain, at her age chances are the cause is cancer. It may just be time to say good-bye.

Poor old lady.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

Jennifer

What a tough call on the dog.We were in this boat a few years ago and you are right about when a vet says “expensive” that means it is ridiculously expensive.our dog had a thyroid tumor, i.e. cancer, that spread to her heart.Well once that happens there is no hope.It is sad either way, but it is important that the dog not suffer.And it is hard to tell if a dog is suffering because they can’t talk.Good luck with the dog, that is hard to deal with.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 06:03 PM

Allergies

I went through the same thing with 2 family dogs.It sounds like allergies.I got a lot of help by going to the online medical sites for dogs and humans too.What the vet doesn’t tell you is that dogs can tolerate most of the same medications people do, just in lower doses for their body weight.I would try a childs brand and dosage. Todays dog foods are not very good for your dog.You are better off feeding them meats and oatmeal with fruits and vegetables.or meat and potatoes.An allergy may be to meat also because of the amounts of chemicals they treat foods with today.Have a little patience and you will find the right combination to make your dog feel better.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:11 AM

vh

Alas, this dog isn’t given to allergies. When the Great Dog Food Scare arose, though, I started feeding her and the greyhound real food. They indeed do perform a great deal better on human food: dog food is substandard and provides substandard nutrition.

However, turning out 28 pounds of dog food a week is no joke. Unfortunately, I have a job and I have no partner to help me with shopping, food preparation, and cleanup, and so even if I could afford the cost of buying huge quantities of better food than I eat myself, converting my kitchen into a dog-food factory is not a practical option.

Subsequent trips to the vet show that what’s causing the manifestations of pain is pressure sores. She refuses to lay on her soft blankets–about the middle of last winter, she developed an aversion to dog beds, of which she has a half-dozen scattered around the house and back yard. Washing them did not help. Buying new ones did not help. She is so averse to a soft place to lie down that she will not even walk on them–she walks around them. Lay one down in the hall, and she treats it like a roadblock. As a result she lies on the tile flooring, which is throughout the house. The yard is desert-landscaped, and so there’s no grass to lie on out there.

Pressure sores are extremely difficult to treat, even in humans who can understand instructions not to lie on them. Eventually, they eat through to the bone. They are very painful. They get infected, and such an infection can and will kill the victim. Old folks in poorly maintained nursing homes routinely die of the effects of pressure sores.

There’s evidently nothing I can do about this. I tried tying an object to her torso so that it would force her to lie on her side. This worked for about 30 minutes, after which she just lay down on top of it.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:28 AM

Beelzebub Central

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Great Zot! What have I done to tick off Lady Karma?

Last night I encountered a vast fly infestation in the house. Thought I’d killed them all off-something over a dozen. Disinfected the kitchen countertops with Mr. Clean, I product I just loathe for its vile perfume, and so went to bed with the whole house stinking of that stuff.

This morning: MORE flies! The place was just swarming with them! After swatting and swatting and swatting and SWATTING, I finally gave up and got out the spray. I hate that stuff far more than I hate Mr. Clean, and I really, really don’t want to use it in the house-especially with a famously sick dog at hand. But there really was no choice. Flies quickly learn to avoid a fly swatter, and my hand-eye coordination and speed are no match for the little guys.

So I sprayed around the arcadia doors and then opened them up with the screens shut. This didn’t come anywhere near killing all the critters, but at least slowed them down so I could hit them. Did in about three dozen flies.

I found more of them clinging to the security door in the garage. Spraying in there is highly problematic, because of the gas heater, but the door is a distance from the heater. So I sprayed the security screen and then slammed the wood door shut on it.

Off for the morning walk. When I got back: MORE FLIES. More inside the house, and another gigantic swarm inside the garage, clustered in a great buggy mob on the closed wooden door.

I guess the spray in the garage had stunned the survivors enough that I could whack them: I killed over two dozen in there.

So I’ve done in about seven dozen flies, all told. . .and counting.

But WHERE are they coming from? The dog mounds are picked up outside and stay picked up. There’s no garbage inside the house. The trash in the garage, yes, was a little ripe (yesterday, it was 109 degrees outdoors, hotter in the uninsulated garage, whose big door operates as a radiator), but there’s a screen door between the garbage and the outside, and I don’t leave the door between the kitchen and the garage open. ????

Dragged the garbage out, along with a few dried-out flowers, to find an enormous stench in the communal garbage can in the alley. The neighbor behind me uses adult diapers, and her companion dumps them in the garbage. And of course there were plenty of flies there. I doubt if they’re breeding there, though: Sally wraps everything up tight in plastic bags. At any rate, I sprayed the rim and lid of the giant garbage can.

It’s almost as if they’re breeding inside the house. There just aren’t that many flies in the yard for seven dozen of them to get in while the dog is wandering in and out the door. I wonder if they could be breeding in one of the plant pots? Guess I’ll have to haul those outside and inspect them.

Meanwhile, it was hotter than the hubs of Hades when we went for our walk. I haven’t been able to get in the pool (which needs some tending, too) because of the fly fiasco.

I had to disinfect the countertops and dishes in the drainer all over again.

Then I put my back out-again!-wrestling with the dog while trying to medicate her nether parts. She threatened to bite-again!-so I had to muzzle her-again!-and personhandle her down to the floor. That was jolly fun. Dang! My back was almost better. Now for another week or ten days of that…what fun.

Guess I’d better drag the plants onto the patio before breakfast. If the flies are coming from a plant pot, the sooner it’s outdoors the better. It’s already close to 100 out there, and the house plants won’t tolerate much of that. So…better get moving.

Then I have to clean all the windows where I smashed flies, vacuum up some more corpses, and take the fly-splattered curtains down and wash them.

<<Chortle!>> Woe woe pore li’l me!

Well…it’ll be a good excuse to have a beer this afternoon, eh? By 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., I’ll have earned it. :-))))

On the Run: Report from our roving reporter

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Racing from pillar to post:

Gasoline: $3.47 a gallon at Costco, over a dime a gallon below the average rate in Phoenix. Lines out the wazoo. Across the street: $3.59 a gallon. Bought $8 worth, 2 1/3 gallons, enough to guarantee I could get to work and the client’s without getting stuck on some godforsaken freeway.

Real Estate: Neighbor’s house on the market: $399,000. What are they smoking?

Great Desert University: Not a soul in sight. Peaceful. Too bad you can’t have a university without the students.

Client: Forks over $300 for proofreading a detective novel. I’m in love.

Food: La Maya back from Costco, $200 down and almost nomeat purchases. Reports toilet tissue and aluminum foil prices up $2 per package; believes price of dental floss has doubled since last purchase. Food prices out of sight.

Heard in the Costco: Dad to young adult son: “Well, with the cost of groceries like this, we won’t be able to keep having Melvin over for dinner all the time.” Son to dad: “Uh-huh.” Inflation bad for parasites?

Seen in the Times: Jim Lehrer News Hour loses Archer-Daniel-Midland sponsorship; budget woes worst in program’s history. U.S. in danger of losing last adequate daily broadcast news program on the air.

Bargain of the Day: GDU offers vehicle-sharing program to employees, s’pposed to save you great wads of cash: $35/year plus $9/hour. What are they smoking?

Dog: Infection looks better; appetite improved; nose still ominous. Sound of dog’s breathing: huffadollar huffadollar huffadollar….

Big Brother Visitation: In 40 minutes, City shills report to neighborhood association on decision about which structures will be ripped out to make way for trolley rail route. Tune in same place, two or three hours hence.
***

Big Brother Revisited: We heard distorted statistics from a half-baked survey that purported to show the neighborhood consensus was the exact opposite of what it actually is. With a bar graph that represented 16 people’s survey responses in a different proportion from the responses of 150 people, they tried to tell us the 16 people carried the day. Conclusion: we want the City to tear down an entire row of houses, reroute feeder street traffic through three small neighborhood roads, and build a ridiculous “barrier wall” between the survivors and the mess they’re building on 19th Avenue. Neighbors are now planning to riot at City Council chambers next week. Funny will be there. We also will waylay our councilman at his monthly Marie Callendar’s breakfast on Thursday.

Welcome, Life-Hacker Readers

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Mighty glad to welcome those of you who just came here from LifeHacker! To learn more about me and how this blog came into being, please see the links at the top of any page. Click on “categories” for a sort of index that groups posts by various topics.

And don’t forget the RSS feed at the top of the Funny about Money home page! Comments and feedback are encouraged and read with interest.

-vh

1 Comment left on iWeb site

Sridhar J

Hi

I did come from Lifehacker and am mighty glad I did :). I came to the featured page and stayed here for quite sometime. You write from the heart and it shows. All of us have problems ranging from mildly irritating to no-sleep-at-night types. Dealing with them rationally and logically is the only way out. Your Poison Poppy representation was on the mark.

An alternate revenue stream would be for you to monetize your writing, like freelance writing. I am sure you would do well.

All the best in your life.

Regards

Sridhar

Sunday, May 18, 2008 – 09:51 PM

Time and tide . . .

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Gosh, but my shape has changed since the last time I wore this Eileen Fisher outfit. It still fits, but somehow the effect is…less willowy, shall we say.
I’ve been summoned to a brief reappearance in my old life as a society matron. A delightful and wonderfully competent woman who was a staff member when I was on the board of the Humanities Council is retiring from the executive directorship, a position she succeeded to over time. They’re having a to-do for her at the Arizona Biltmore, a hangout for Old Wealth and a place I haven’t visited in many a moon. Declining didn’t feel right, so in half an hour it’s off to the environs of the Richistani.

Problem is, I don’t have many clothes appropriate to events at the Biltmore: just a couple of old Eileen Fisher separates, and that’s about it. Since I don’t deal with the public, my job doesn’t require that I dress decently, and so I live in Costco jeans and washable knit tops. In public, anyway; around the house it’s swim-suit cover-ups in the summer and fleece tops and jeans for the winter.

I was surprised to get the invitation. I haven’t felt welcome in those precincts for quite a while. After I got off the board, it was made clear to me that my further participation was unneeded, since a) I don’t earn enough to make the large donations expected of board members; b) my politics are a bit iconoclastic for that set (believe it or not!); and c) among those in the know, my image is a shade racy.

>So, my friends: Andrea’s Closet, if you will.

It’s very hard for me to rev myself up for this sort of happening. Always was: one of real stumbling blocks for me as a trophy wife was that I don’t much enjoy social events-make that Social, with a capital S. They make me feel utterly out of place, even though I know that none of those people has anything on me. In general, too, it’s hard to break through the inertia that says thank you very much, but I‘d rather take a swim in my pool, finish editing the copy I didn’t read on Friday, and read another chapter in the John Adams biography. Usually I end up enjoying myself once I get there. It’s just getting there that’s the problem.

Update:

My! What a strange experience. It was like going to a high-school reunion: “Fred? Fred? Is that you, Fred?” Many of the folks in attendance hadn’t seen each other in any fewer years than I have, and some people have changed so much as to be barely recognizable.

It was a select group. Not all that many, but among them at least two old-line Good Ole’ Boys, one of them still in full moving-and-shaking mode. Lots of money in that room, rubbing elbows with the creative types and the certified intellectuals. Jeez.

2 Comments left on iWeb site:

Annette
Did you know that Lifehacker references your post of May 12th.Just saw it.

http://lifehacker.com/391448/make-your-budget-easier-to-grasp-with-targeted-accounts

Congratulations
Sunday, May 18, 2008 – 06:15 PM

vh
Zowie! Thanks for letting me know. That’s awesome!
Sunday, May 18, 2008 – 07:33 PM