Coffee heat rising

And real-life headaches…

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Virtual headache

Apple’s MacHeadache hit the New York Times this morning: the roll-out of the new iPhone hit a pothole or two, one of which was the complicated switchover to new servers. It’s this very pothole that Funny has fallen into-I have no idea whether today’s post will publish or not. Desperately confused, iWeb claims nothing is posted. But the published site itself displays everything I’ve written since July 9. If you don’t get the Times’s edition printed on ground-up trees, check out these entertaining pieces online.

Paper headache

Speaking of headaches, avert your eyes from your investment fund statements unless you enjoy migraines. When last seen, mine reported a $23,000 loss-that was before the market crashed through the 11,000 floor yesterday. Any ideas I might have had about retiring before the age of 70 just went <<POOF>>

Thank heaven we have a 30-year fixed mortgage on the Investment House, and my own mortgage is paid off. That notwithstanding, with the market plummeting like a meteor and the probability that we’ll have to hold the house for a good ten years, I can’t afford to keep rolling money out of my IRA into real estate. I’ll need to come up with a new way to generate $12,000 a year to cover my part of the mortgage payments.

Matter of fact, I happen to have one in the wings. Watch this space for more on that

And real-life headache

Meanwhile, in the stress department (one of this blog’s co-topics), I woke with a real, biological headache-no metaphor here-from once again kicking the Killer Caffeine. Dang!

The month-long spate of indigestion has three likely sources (that is, if you quietly overlook cancer, which we will do): caffeine, booze, or salmonella.

Any of these is possible. The epizootic started the day after a friend and I visited a popular New Mexican-style restaurant, where we did have a nice jalapeño-laced salsa. Some startlingly unpleasant manifestations occupied the next week or ten days. Our defanged federal regulators are now speculating that the source of the salmonella plague we’re now witnessing may have been jalapeños or cilantro. However, my friend didn’t get sick, so I kinda doubt this is the cause of my present ailment.

Noooo. Ever so much likely is one (or both?) of my favorite potables.

I live to drink coffee. No mere coffee, mind you, but the highest of the high-test. I use fresh-ground espresso beans-because espresso demands a better variety of coffee-to fill a ten-cup French press every morning. And do I drink all that, all by my little buzzing self? You bet! Whatever is left over in the morning gets consumed as iced coffee later in the day.

Well, in a body that dates from the Cretaceous period, the effect is cumulative. As you age (memorize this, you young pups), your metabolism slows, and so it takes a lot longer than it used to for drugs, prescription and non-, to clear out of your system. During my misspent youth, coffee had little noticeable effect on me. These days, though, guzzling enough of it before noon will keep me awake at night; especially after a couple months of drinking it daily.

Then there’s my other favorite swiggle: the daily boozie-poo. Because the lime tree is dropping beautiful, juicy, delicious ripe key limes, I (naturally!) had to have some Coronas. Matter of fact, I’ve been forced to take advantage of Costco’s incredible price on 24-bottle cases of Coronas. Neither limes nor beers have gone to waste: typically I drink two bottles around dinnertime.

Lately, though, I’ve also had a bourbon & water…or two…later in the afternoon. On a 112-degree day few things call out to you more appealingly than an ice-cold bourbon and water on the rocks. The other day I realized I’d swiggled two beers with cheese & crackers after coming home from work and then poured myself two Maker’s Marks a few hours later, with a late dinner. Uh oh!

So, it’s off the sauce and off the coffee.

I have no problem kicking the beer and bourbon-iced tea, V-8 juice, or fruit juice all substitute handsomely.

Kicking caffeine, though, is a whole ‘nother matter. Caffeine deficiency anemia causes a screaming real-life headache that can last a full week. I’ve learned, though, that a couple cups of caffeinated tea will take the edge off. It doesn’t contain enough of the drug to keep you awake at night, but it does stop your head from hurting. After a week, you can eliminate the tea, and voilà: caffeine-free existence.

The laundry remains to be laundered, the ironing to be ironed, the house to be cleaned, the plants to be watered, the pool gadget to be repaired, the garbage to be hauled, the dog to be tended to, a novel to be proofread, a new business to be launched… And so, my friends, to work.

Dog Hilarity: The wacky things people do for their pets

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OK, OK, I know: it’s not nice to laugh at other people’s foibles, especially when you have your own foibles. But oh, it’s hard to resist.

The weather having cooled into the 80s at dawn, I settled into the backyard lawn chair with tea and the Times Sunday magazine, a cherished weekend ritual. My dog, having developed a limp, milked it for all it was worth while chasing after me to make sure I did not escape her eyesight. What should greet me but a cover story titled “Pet Pharm.” You think I overspend on my dogs? As nothing. Collectively, Americans are forking over millions of dollars on psychoactive drugs for their pets.

We make the animals nuts by forcing them into distinctly noncanine, nonfeline, nonavian living quarters and behaviors, and then we medicate them because they’re nuts.

Dog and Human Nuttiness

Here’s a guy whose German shepherd has developed a neurotic fixation on him: it has an “overpowering need to be near people, especially Allan. If they put Max outside, he quickly relieved himself and then rushed back indoors; he raced into rooms that Allan was about to occupy; he rested his head against the bathroom door during his master’s ablutions.”

Sounds familiar. Little does Allan know that if he adopted Max out, Max would instantly develop a similar fixation on the next human, much as one Cassie the Corgi has done. Hm. Maybe Cassie needs a few doses of Eli Lilly’s chewable Prozac that tastes like beef. Max goes a little further than Cassie does, though: he throws a fit if Allan hugs his wife, and he chases his tail obsessively, hour after hour. To address these neuroses, Max is being put on a tricyclic antidepressant commonly used in human psychiatric care.

Some of the nonsense humans will put up with defies belief: “Doug noticed that his cat would attack if he smelled strange, so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his khaki pants lined with ballistic nylon.

Doug, Doug, Doug. Can you spell “put to sleep”?

Follow the Money Trail…

This amazing behavior—on the humans’ part, that is—redounds hugely to Big Pharma’s benefit. The rich get richer and the adoring pet owners get poorer. According to the Times, surveys by a pet products manufacturing group show that 77% of dog owners and 52% of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up about 25 percentage points from 2004—that’s a 25% jump in just two years! (My late Ger-shep may have accounted for most of that.) Eli Lilly has created a special “companion animal” division, and Pfizer’s Animal Health has seen its revenues grow 57% since 2003, to nearly a billion dollars. In 2005, according to marketing research firm Ipsos, in 2005 Americans spent at least $15 million on behavior modification drugs for their pets.

The trend thrives on a cast of mind dubbed “humanization,” whereby pet-lovers come to see their animals as little furry four-legged people. The cat becomes a member of the family for whom we would do no less than we would do for our children. The pet industry, of which Big Pharma owns a substantial portion, exploits this sentimentality to separate humans from cash.

Is this good for pets? Maybe. Some of them get to live a little longer than they might have, had their tendencies to rip up the furniture and bite passers-by gone unchecked. They may live on in a drug-induced stupor; they may live on in neurotic or even psychotic misery. I’m not sure that’s good for a dog or a cat.

Is it good for the humans? I doubt it. Forgive my lack of empathy, but I do not believe that calculated exploitation of your emotions is good for you. Au contraire.

My take

Cassie the Corgi does have a few bats in her doggy belfry, no question of that. She never lets the human out of her sight. She sticks to me like a burr in a hound dog’s coat. She will not eat unless I stay nearby. She will not go outside to do her doggy business unless I accompany her and stand there until she’s done.

This could be a problem, come rain and frost. Just now, it’s OK, but I’m not very interested in standing in the rain or freezing my toes on a 30-degree night while I wait for a dog to decide to pee.

Unlike many dogs with separation anxiety, she doesn’t chew or rip up the furniture. But she is afraid of loud noises—the sound of distant July 4th fireworks nearly put her into a frenzy, and a passing thunderstorm alarmed her significantly. The other night a violent monsoon firehosed the house; the sound of heavy rainfall made her nervous, too.

This is not normal dog behavior. Whether it’s inbred or the result of something her previous humans did is irrelevant: a healthy dog does not behave this way.

Am I going to give her doggy Prozac or canine clomipramine? Not a chance! If she can’t adjust to normal life, she can’t adjust. Since she’s not aggressive or destructive, she’ll just be a wacky little dog.

But I can tell you for certain: anyone who goes around in bullet-proof long johns to protect himself from his demented cat is crazier than the cat is! Anyone who puts a dog on psychoactive meds instead of putting it down after it delivered a serious bite to its owner over a cheese plate (as one couple interviewed for the Times piece did) has got more holes in his head than an entire wheel of Swiss cheese.

A dog that is dangerous is a dog that is dangerous. Same is true of cats: although cats are smaller, they can do some serious harm. Dogs and cats are carnivores. Predators. They are built to inflict terminal damage—videlicet, the French woman who had her face ripped off by her pet dog.

No amount of mind-altering drugs will change that basic truth.

Back

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It sez here I’m not published, but it sez there I am. Funny is up, though iWeb thinks it’s not. Whatever! This means the Carnival of Money Stories is still on, assuming that by the 15th I can still publish-but-not-publish through Apple’s new servers

Yes! Carnival of Money Stories, No. 68! July 15! Remember to get your stories in by July 14…I’m looking forward to reading them!

Moments of Fame

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J.D. Roth kindly featured, on today’s Get Rich Slowly, one of my comments responding to his post on careers and jobs. That is quite an honor. Thanks, JD! Some of the reader responses to this post are awesome — well worth a trip to GRS just for their insights.

Kevin at No Debt Plan placed Funny’s suggestion that there really is no “crossover point” among the editor’s picks for the sixth Finance Fiesta! This round-up includes some very interesting articles, including an eye-opener from Ask the Tax Pro, who outlines a way to “bank” cash with the IRS at rates higher than you can get at your bank or credit union, and Daily Money Hack reminds us that we can deduct capital losses. Florida Realtor Joe Manausa has been tracking data that suggests Tallahassee real estate inventory may finally be dropping— a tiny point of light in the dark news we’ve heard over the past couple of days. Will someone please tell Wall street?

Pinyo has posted the 19th Money Hacks Carnival at the Money Hackers Network site. Thanks for including Funny’s report on outfits selling futures at the gas pump. Gasoline is on many frugal minds these days; in fact, one of the editor’s picks is Christian Personal Finance‘s highly entertaining survey of hypermiling techniques, complete with assessments ranging from “not worth it” to “worth it” (elaborated with comments). Some very interesting websites and techniques surface here, plus some hilarious ones. Over at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, Jim has discovered a way for nonmembers to buy Costco gas…a loophole that probably closed about three hours after he posted it! Cash Money Life also holds forth on ways to save on gas.

MacHeadache

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Well, I’m off the air.

Apple has decided to decommission Mac.com, a service for which I was “automatically” charged another $100 a month ago, and migrate all the data on those servers to a new service, adorably called “MobileMe.

Yech! Steve: spare us the cutesiness.

And spare us the hassle. The reason I bought a Mac specifically was to get around the endless updates and security panics and virus-checker gum-ups and ever-shifting anti-malware programs served up to us daily by Microsoft. For naught: the Mac has been downloading software updates-to Safari, iTunes, and Intel security-for almost two hours and still has a ways to go.

But today’s supreme annoyance is this elaborate migration, which has taken down my Website and may have brought an end to my blog. Turns out you must have the Leopard operating system to operate the new Mac.com, and I only have the Panther system. (ohhh aren’t those names cu-u-u-u-u-t-e?) So how do I get access to the $100 service I just paid for? Shell out some more cash for a new OS.

When I expressed my rage about this to one of Apple’s service folks, she arranged to get me a free upgrade to Leopard (something that thrills me not, since I’m told it gums up the works just as surely as will loading an upgrade from XP to Vista into a PC). She also arranged an appointment with an “Apple Genius” to get the upgrade done and to try to get my blog back online.

That will be next Sunday. I’m told this process will take upwards of an hour and a half. Remains to be seen whether it works.

Not that I don’t appreciate the “free” upgrade, you understand. But today is Thursday. Sunday is the 13th, three days hence. On the 15th—a workday!—I’ve committed to do the Carnival of Money Stories. How, really, am I gunna do that in two days, both of which I’m supposed to spend at a paying job?
Well, if I can access the submissions, I obviously can write them in Word, do some but not all of the formatting in Word, paste into iWeb, and then finish the job after the weekend. We are talking hassle here, major hassle.

This may be even more infuriating than the BS I’ve been through with Microsoft over the years. Maybe. Possibly not, but it’s very, very close. I will say the newer versions of Office are enough to inspire plots of terrorist attacks on Microsoft HQ. But Mac’s versions of Word and Quicken are already so aggravating that if you haven’t blown up MS or Intuit over those, you probably never will.

And how can I describe the love-hate relationship with iWeb?

It is, in short, software for tyros. Blogware for hobbyists. Playware, not real software. It’s fine for displaying a few photos to your extended family, but very weak for daily blogging. SEO? What is that? “Senior Executive Officer”? The iWeb program is hopeless for search-engine optimizing, because unless you are techie to the extreme, you can’t break into the code to add the HTML snippets needed to get yourself registered with outfits like Technorati and Google.

The program does allow you to enter snippets to make buttons, but about 90% of the time they don’t work. I can’t, for example, create a StumbleUpon button. Well, I can, but it looks pretty bizarre, and “functional” is not a term I’d grope for to describe the result. I can’t move the PF Buzz button to a place on the page next to the list of tags—if I do, it stops working. I can’t put an RSS feed button on every page-it resides on the index page and only on the index page. But if you select one of iWeb’s photo templates, on those there’s an RSS feed on every page. Gee, thanks, Steve. And I dare not-oh, I do mean dare not!-subscribe to Feedburner. God only knows what that would do.

I am so angry at being made to jump through these hoops—and with such perfect timing!—I could bite! This is stupid, unnecessary, and a GD nuisance. And I’m disappointed to the stage of fury at the cheesiness of programs billed to be superior to Microsoft programs. They’re not. Not by a long shot.

The next computer is gunna be an $800 PC.

1 Comment left on iWeb site
Pete

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – 12:49 AM

Live and Learn

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Little Dog and the Human have been under the weather the past few days. Cassie has given her sore leg a hot spot by licking it. I’ve been sick at my stomach for upwards of a week; starting to wonder if I got into some of that salmonella the press has been dramatizing.

The vet and I collaborated to make things worse for the dog by giving her a couple of doses of an overpriced prescription NSAID called Metacam, which knocked her for a doggy loop. She’s refused to eat for two days, and all day today she could barely wriggle.

Now that the drug is wearing off, though, she’s returning to normal. Just got back from a very zippy doggy-walk.

Personal finance hook

I dreamed up a frugal way to bandage a hot spot on a dog’s leg, by way of discouraging the licking that gives rise to such wounds. Having no gauze or tape in the house, last night I stuck a Bandaid over the sore. To my amazement, she not only didn’t rip it off instantly, by this morning the bandage was still in place. After a while, though, she figured out that she could lick around and under it. With a queasy belly and a ton of work to do this morning, I just didn’t feel like driving through the heat in search of still more stuff to buy.

Stashed in a drawer, what should I find but an athletic bandage made of a slightly tacky, stretchy material-instead of securing it with Velcro or little metal hooks, you just press it together and it sticks to itself. But unlike surgical tape, it doesn’t stick to your skin and pull out your hair-or fur. Perfect.

A bit of a clean cotton ball with a dab antibiotic ointment placed over the sore spot, and then I wrapped the dog’s leg with the sticky athletic bandage. And voilà! After a moment’s annoyance and a small adjustment, she didn’t seem bothered by it. Kept it on all day without trying to chew it off. This evening the limp is about gone and the hot spot looks much better.

Personal finance hook no. 2

If you wouldn’t put it in your mouth, don’t put it in your pet’s. Would I have taken a prescription drug for a minor ache? N-O-O-O-O! So what possessed me to give it to the dog? Especially after a baby aspirin did the job with no problem the other day, for a tiny fraction of the cost. This Metacam stuff can kill the dog’s appetite; cause nausea, diarrhea, and lethargy; and damage the liver. Charming.

Well, we got the appetite loss and the lethargy. Hope that’s all.

It was another bad buy from Big Pharma. If your ailment (or your dog’s) is neither life-threatening nor excruciating, try a nondrug treatment first; then move to an over-the-counter nostrum before rolling out the heavy pharmaceutical armament. Probably the dog needed no painkiller at all, just rest. But if she did need a pill, an inexpensive baby aspirin would have sufficed