Coffee heat rising

dog

Fear and…Cleaning?…in the Time of Cholera

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Yipes! It’s 10:30 at night and I’ve written exactly nothing at Funny!

One could claim one was busy all day…but other ones would know one was cooped up in the house all day and sooooo… 😮

Truth to tell, though, the house can keep one busy, if one were inclined to take care of it properly. I laid off WonderCleaningLady at the start of the Corvid scare, and so she hasn’t been around for a couple of weeks. And you could tell: the dog hair was ankle-deep.

So I broke out the vacuum cleaner and filled up its dirt holder twice with poochie puffs. You never saw so much dog hair in your life!

To complicate matters, the penicillin the endodontist prescribed for the endless post procedure caused my hair to fall out. Fortunately, I have plenty of it. Because plenty was on the floor…whence it ended up wound tight around the vacuum’s beater bar. Took some doing — and a pair of needle-nose pliers — to prize that out.

Swiffered up after the vacuuming expedition; then mopped the kitchen floor. Scrubbed the dog paths off the hallway walls. While at it, cleaned the baseboards in the bathroom, where Satan and Proserpine replaced the builder’s dust-resistant, easy-to-keep clean bullnose baseboards with something that looks sort of like crown molding. The worst dust-catcher you’ve ever seen…what on EARTH could they have been thinking? Cleaned the bathrooms. Sorta cleaned the kitchen (it doesn’t get very dirty when most of what you cook is grilled outside!). Fixed an awesome meal of scallops, spinach, tomatoes & tomato sauce (with lots of garlic, o’course) over tagliatelle. Drank half a bottle of wine.

Waited until after dark to walk the dog.

Yes. After dark is the perfect time for a doggy-walk! We ran into only one (1) human with only one (1) dog in an entire mile of trotting along. Hooo-ray! It’s a lovely evening, even if, yes, one could do without the cop helicopter. Mostly he was over Meth Central, though…by the time he came our way, he’d turned off his spotlight, apparently headed back to the heliport.

Otherwise spent most of the day cruising the Net. Gavin Newsom expects FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of California’s population will have come down with the coronavirus in the next six or eight weeks. Meanwhile that idiot in the White House keeps sniping at governors who ask for federal assistance, and his nitwit followers dream up conspiracy theories about his medical advisor, the only one in the whole bunch who can utter an accurate statement. In other (brown…) fields, our moron Sleaze-in-Chief is using the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to suspend environmental laws! And also meanwhile, the CDC supposedly came out with a recommendation that all Americans should wear face masks (contravening earlier advice that they do little or nothing to stop you from catching the disease) while medical workers who need face masks are struggling with a shortage…but now denies they said that. Oh, and a tornado blasted an Arkansas town.

Holy mackerel. Thank God it’s past time to go to bed.

From Bad to Worse…

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Okay, so…This gets better and better.

What we have here is a dog that’s been pounding on Death’s door for the past two weeks. Pee pads all over the floors, because she’s only marginally continent.

So there’s the underlayment of “bad.”

Moving on toward “worse”:

Vet decides the dog has Valley fever: puts her on a drug that nearly kills her. I take her off the drug, but continue with an antihistamine-con-prednisone, which seems to soothe her some. She improves.

Vet remains convinced that the problem is Valley fever, even though we have no empirical evidence to prove it. He wants to see her at 8:30 Sunday morning. I have to be at choir at 10 a.m., and it’s a half-hour each way to the vet’s office.

Saturday we have a half-day choir shindig. During the five-hour absence this engenders, the dog pees and craps all over the family room. The pee pads worked…but…hell.

No, I can’t leave the dog outside in 100-degree heat. And now it’s raining: no, I can’t leave the dog outside in the rain.

Dog is better, but far from dancing on the top shelf. I learn to bribe her to eat by doping her food with baby food. This works, within limits. She still is obviously pretty sick. Is she on the mend? Maybe. Or…is she just showing the salutary effect (highly temporary) of the antihistamine/corticosteroid combo?

Haven’t gotten any writing done: missed the whole week’s worth of posts at P&S Press.

Sunday morning my son shows up to drop off his dog — the dog that can not ride in a car without having a nervous breakdown — so that he can drive to Colorado to visit his 104-year-old grandmother. He appears as I’m trying to bolt down breakfast before I have to leave for the vet, hoping that if I can just get fed and get my makeup on and my hair up, maybe I’ll be able to race direct from here to the church and get there in time for the 10 a.m. rehearsal.

In the ensuing chaos, of course, I get neither painted nor combed.

Off to the vet, who is kind despite little-womaning me and who suggests I bring her back on Tuesday for a full-body ultrasound scan, which he will deliver gratis. I don’t feel I can turn this down despite my nagging suspicion that this is a device to pull me into still MORE fabulously expensive treatment on this poor old dog, whose time would be about here even if she did not have some as-yet-undiagnosed ailment.

Fly home, drop the dog in the house, paint my face, slap up my hair, and fly out the garage. Turn the corner and…my hair falls down. Park the car and struggle until I get it back on top of my head — have NO idea what it looks like except that it undoubtedly is not good. Shoot into the choir room right at 10 a.m.

Sit through a long, VERY high-church service. You’ve heard Episcopalians are a dime short of Catholic? That’s wrong. We leave Catholic in the dust.

Okay. It was a very beautiful, very affecting, and amazingly wonderful service and I wish we could do those all the time. Our musicians leave everyone of any persuasion, religious or otherwise, in the dust. 🙂

Drive to AJs, buy enough tomatoes and stuff to cook up some pasta for lunch. Having had it, buy a four-pack of Guiness. So much for that damn wagon!

Race home. Pick up the soggy doggy pee mats. Clean up the dog mound that by now has glued itself to the floor so that I have to soak it loose by covering it with a paper towel saturated in Simple Green and letting it sit.

Fix a pretty damn good lunch/dinner. Consume two of the beers. Feel richly justified in doing so.

Fail to get much else done yesterday.

Rain starts to fall. Charley, who’s not too bright. likes to stand in it and then track in fresh mud. In the middle of the night, he goes out through the dog door and forgets how to get back in. I have to roll out of the sack, track him down through the downpour, and coax him back into the house.

Today: Wake up, as usual, around 4 a.m. AC is pounding away. I think I hear the motor shut off upstairs, but…the fan keeps running.

And running. And running. And running…. WTF?

Get up, stumble down the hall, and try to figure out the hated Nest contraption. Finally ascertain that even with the unit shut off, the fan continues to run. Nothing that I do will shut off the effing fan.

Get on the phone to the Nest people; reach a tech in Idaho. Nice thing about Google is they make their people work 24/7. Great place to work, eh?

With him directing my sticky little fingers, I fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around. I want my Honeywell old-fashioned mercury-driven no goddamn digital crap REAL THERMOSTAT back. Nothing works. I draw the line when he asks me to go out in the rain (it’s pouring), shut off the breaker switches, and fool with the wiring in the thermostat. I say I’m calling my AC guy. He resists — they do NOT want other techs fooling with their equipment. I say I am not fiddling with the wiring in this thing. He says if I’ll let him know when the guy gets here, he’ll get on the phone with him and coach him. And if we do that, they will cover the cost of the service call. I do not say I have a service contract, which may or may not cover this antic.

I get off the phone with this guy, having failed in every way to shut off the fan, along about 5:40. At ten til 7, the fan finally shuts off on its own.

No wonder, I think, noooo wonder my AC bills have been so high: the damn thing has been sucking hot air into the house whilst trying to cool the interior air 20 degrees below the ambient temperature,.

At 7 a.m. I reach the AC company. They call back to say one of their guys just walked in the door and they will send him over to work on my fiasco before he starts his full (!!) day of jobs.

I email the Nest/Google guy to let him know, as instructed, that the AC dude is on his way.

Cassie, having been made to choke down a quarter of a blue pill with a chunk of the present pork chow, is unhappy and can’t get through the whole dish of food. I decide to try one of the cans of PD MarvelVet foisted on me. Fake stew.

The stuff stinks to high heaven. Charley and Ruby fly into a BERSERKER ecstasy at the first whiff. Fight my way into the back bedroom, slam the door on Ruby and Charley, set the dish down in front of Cassie.

She sniffs at it tentatively, refuses to get up out of her reclining-Sphinx position. Takes a bite. Stands up and starts scarfing. She inhales the stuff, which leaves the bedroom stinking like an abbatoir.

She now has consumed two full meals, one of home-made dog food and one of made-in-China foodoid. This is good because she’s lost so much weight her spine is sticking up.

Meanwhile, I realize we’re almost out of said home-made food. Good GOD I don’t want to drive back down to the AJ’s in the rain to buy a roll of Freshpet dog food. Fortunately, one package of chicken thighs is left over from last month’s Costco run. Get that out to start defrosting it. I figure starting this evening I’ll spike her regular ration (1/4 pound) of real food with a half a can of commercial food, and in the interim give her a half-bottle at a time of the baby food I bought to lure her into eating her regular food.

Quarter to ten: AC tech shows up. Never did hear anything from Nest’s precincts. Wouldn’t matter anyway: our guy has been trained in the Nest and knows how to fix it. He takes the thing apart and discovers…the wires are wet!

Holy sh!t.

Onto the roof with our guy. He finds the wiring is sun-rotted and a mess, and the low-voltage stuff has worked loose where it enters the attic. He rewires the unit, gets the system to working fine again. Seals up the open-air feature as best he can with a LOT of silicon (it’s supposed to keep raining through Thursday) and says to call a roofer and get him up there to seal that thing up good with tar.

That’ll be two hundred dollah, please!

So much for this month’s budget. Which was overdrawn anyway…

He mentions that they’re looking for an office lady to answer the phones, book calls, and do some light bookkeeping. That would allow me to pay bills like this and even buy an iPhone. I think about it. 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. My favorite hours, actually, for an 8-hour day — I used to work that shift on my first job and loved it, because it left a bunch of time before everyone else got off work to run errands and generally enjoy life.

On the other hand…it’s..{choke gag!} a JOB. Don’t much like the idea of leaving the dogs (possibly singular) alone for 8 hours at a time. And…truth to tell…I don’t wanna work anymore.

Speaking of the which, in the middle of all this my beloved Korean journalist emailed: would I edit an 8,000-word paper that needs to be at the publisher by Friday?

Should I say no, given the madness ongoing?

Did I say no? Not on your life!

On the way out, AC tech leaves the gate hanging open. Ruby somehow slips out the front door and escapes! I do not notice this. The AC guy has to turn around and go back out rather quickly, and when he does so he spots the dog. She bounds over to him and he captures her. That’s a God’s miracle…under normal circumstances that dog would be half-way to Yuma by now.

He is so distracted by the corgi sideshow — as am I — that he forgets to pick up the $200 check I was writing as these antics were under way. He leaves the premises unpaid.

Today I have to try to figure out if a payment I made to renew the New York Review of Books has gone astray and an AMEX charge account number stolen. I paid through bill-pay but, in the glory of its new Web interface, the credit union screwed up and bounced the payment. So I used a renewal form, charged it to the corporate card. I did not have time to drive this piece of paper to the Post Office — normally I would go in person to the PO to mail anything even remotely financial. In a hurry, I decided to take a chance and put it in the outgoing slot in my mailbox.

Error…error…error….

Day or so later, I notice the mailbox flag is still up. WTF?

Often the mailperson doesn’t even bother to come down our street, especially if the only thing to deliver is trash. So I figure he probably didn’t come by, so I’d better retrieve the thing and carry it to a post box.

Empty. SOMEBODY has picked up the envelope. But if it was the mailindividual, s/he should have pushed the flag down by reflex. We get as much mailbox theft here as we do car break-ins and petty theft from yards, so the natural thing to surmise is that a meth-head ripped it off.

Another day or so later I checked AMEX online. The charge hadn’t gone through, but neither had any unauthorized charges. Today I have to back into that thing and try to figure out whether the drug pushers have got my credit-card number. Shit. I should’ve known better.

Phone rings as I’m sitting here typing this. 800 number. Eff you!

<click> <click>

I really need to get rid of this land line and replace it with an iPhone. But that will require some concentration and a lot of time to learn to use it. And hassle. Lots and lots of hassle.

Thank goodness there are two more beers in the fridge! 😀 If you can’t see the sun through the clouds, do you have to wait till it’s over the yardarm?

Ghost stories

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Now, I’m not a believer, as you know, but…

Who’s to say there are no ghosts?

When I was pregnant with M’hijito, his father and I lived in beautiful high-ceilinged old house in an elegant midtown historic neighborhood. Being centrally located and full of pretty 1920s and 30s homes, the area was very hot with the young professional set…and it was a playground for the homeless mentally ill, had the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city, and was served by an unsafe and unusable public school. With a baby on the way, we considered moving.

But we loved the house—loved it to the point of distraction—and really didn’t want to leave. So instead we decided to add on to create a little more room for the new family member and then hunker down and learn to live with the facts of life in the big city. We hired my best friend’s father-in-law, an underemployed architect, to design the addition.

Bob came out of retirement (it’s hard to be “retired” when you’ve never worked, to speak of) and created exactly what we wanted: two large rooms added to the back of the house, one a spacious nursery and bedroom for the pending baby, and one a custom-designed office for me, appointed with a vast built-in desk, matching cabinetry, ceiling-to-floor bookcases covering an entire wall. What we didn’t know—no one knew—was that during this project Bob was suffering from terminal cancer. He seemed perfectly well as he supervised our contractor and ran interference with the city inspectors. But within a few weeks after the addition was completed, Bob died.

By the time we moved into the rooms, my son was born and six months old. Because I was finishing my dissertation, M’hijito was farmed out to a wonderful, grandmotherly neighbor for several hours a day, so I could write uninterrupted. I had a big old German shepherd, Greta, the only dog I’ve ever known that truly rose to the level of greatness. Greta saved my son’s life once…but that’s another story.

So on this quiet autumn day, I was working in my office, writing, frantically writing, with Greta dozing in her usual spot near my chair.

Suddenly, Greta sat up, her ears at attention and her gaze fixed at a point in space near the door to the room. She seemed to be watching something. But nothing was there. Not that I could see, anyway.

Her eyes tracked across the room, as though she were watching someone or something enter and walk across the floor.

She rose to her feet. And I rose to my feet. She didn’t appear to be alarmed. She made no sound. She didn’t lift her hackles. Strangely, I didn’t feel alarmed, either, even though this was very odd behavior. She started to walk around, in the same way she always followed me around. She moved back and forth in the room and then walked out through the door and into the baby’s room, where she paused, walked around a bit, paused.

I knew it was Bob. He’d come back to look at the rooms. He hadn’t seen them after we moved in—he’d died soon after the project’s completion. He came back to see what the place looked like with people living in it.

So convinced was I of this conceit that I actually spoke his name aloud. Greta again moved across the room as though she were following at someone’s side. At that point I said something like “Thanks, Bob. You did a beautiful job. We love the new rooms.” A few seconds later, just as abruptly as she’d gone on the alert Greta lost interest, came back to me, and sat at my side. Whatever it was that had happened was over.

We walked back into the office. I sat down and went back to work. Greta went back to sleep.

Who knows? Maybe she was having some sort of waking doggy dream, a canine hallucination. But the sense that someone was there—and the sense that it was Bob—was inescapable.

Still: if humans can have dreams and visions of the dead, why can’t a dog? It’s easy to understand how people living in less skeptical times believed the dead could return to visit in dreams. Dreams like that can be extremely vivid.

The other night, I experienced such a dream. For me to dream at all is unusual: as you get older, you dream less and less, and in my dotage I hardly ever dream, and almost never in color. But here was this dream: not only in color but with imagery so tangible it felt three-dimensional—not at all like the usual movie reel.

In the dream, I had gone to Texas to attend a professional conference, which took place in the hotel where I was staying. I hate going to conferences. Few things bore me more intensely than sitting through endless presentations at conferences. So I was less than thrilled to be in this old-fashioned, historic-looking hotel, though it was a handsome old place, its walls painted a creamy color with deeply polished walnut trim complemented by thick, rich carpeting.

Morning having dawned on what I expected would be a tedious day, I got up, showered, dressed, and walked down the stairs that led from the upstairs rooms to go to breakfast. Already pre-bored, as it were, I dawdled on the steps, playing like a little kid with the wooden banister. When I reached the bottom, where the staircase curved out into the lobby, I looked up and there was my father.

My father, a Texan fond of saying the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get, has been gone for so long that I can barely remember what he looked like. In a waking moment, I couldn’t conjure his face to save my life. But there he stood, clear as day, in full color and three  dimensions, absolutely recognizable.

He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t give voice to the words in my mind: What are you doing here? You’re dead!

He said he was in town to see his mother, who was ill and needed someone to visit her.

My grandmother died long before I was born.

Shortly, I awoke. The image of my father’s face and the sound of his voice were as clear and sharp as if I had just seen him alive.  And who knows? Maybe I did.

Have you ever had an experience where you thought, seriously, that you were visited by the dead?

R.I.P. Anna H. Banana

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This morning I finally had to give up the fight and take Anna on her final chariot ride to the vet. She was in so much pain, it just wasn’t right to continue trying to keep her going.

Even when I’d made up my mind and SDXB helped me get her there, I still wasn’t sure…maybe if the pressure sores were what hurt so much, maybe there was something else to try. The vet, Dr. Brooke Hoppe, examined the sore spots carefully. When she manipulated them, the dog evinced no discomfort at all—didn’t blink an eye.

Dr. Hoppe said the large sore on her right hip was not a pressure sore and that there really was no sign of infection in it. She concluded that it was a patch of somewhat inflamed skin, and that handling it did not cause any pain. That was why Anna could lay on the hard floor on top of it—because that was not what hurt. Ditto the elbow pain: her elbow patches were just the usual calluses. One had been a bit abraded, but it was not a pressure sore.

The pain was not on the skin: it was bone-deep. Her spine was effectively calcified into an inflexible rod, and her hips were becoming deformed from the arthritis and probably, too, late-stage dysplasia. She could no longer sit at all, and to lay down she had to cantilever herself halfway there and then slide to the floor with a thud. The hair on her hocks was dirty and worn where she’d had to slide to a down position. Dr. Hoppe said there were a couple of other painkillers we could try, since the Tramadol was doing little or nothing for her. But it was unlikely they would help much, and if they did, the effort would be strictly palliative: there was nothing we could do for the condition of her bones.

So, it was time.

It’s going to be pretty lonely around this place. While I was vacuuming out the double-sided dog door preparatory to sealing it into its burglar-proof mode, I looked up and expected to see Anna standing in the door to the room, where she would be watching me whenever I indulged any such behavior. And throwing away poor old worn-out Toy was pretty hard.

But on the other hand… Now I can go out of town for a weekend. I haven’t even made a day trip in longer than I can remember, or visited my friends on the far west side, because I’ve had to be back here by six o’clock to feed and medicate the dog. I have exactly no one who can be imposed upon to come over here and feed the dog twice a day and medicate her upwards of six times a day. By the time the end finally dragged around, I was giving her 16 pills a day, smearing two different ointments on her twice a day, and administering four eyedrops every day. No one is gunna do that so I can take off for Flagstaff or Santa Fe. Now I don’t have to scour dog poop out of the porous CoolDecking around the pool-almost every day!-and now I can take down the jury-rigged fence that kept her from falling in the drink. Now I can trade in the gas-guzzling Dog Chariot for a more fuel-efficient car. Now when I clean the house, it will stay clean for a few days. And now that I don’t need a big fenced yard, I can sell my house and move someplace smaller and easier to care for.

It’s amazing to think that dog has been with me through several major phases of my life. When I brought her home as a puppy, I was solidly middle-aged. Now I’m old. That was part of the dilemma about putting her to sleep. Hey! My bones ache, too—my back aches when I get up, and my shoulders hurt and my neck hurts, but I’m not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil because of it. Why should anyone think she would be? But I have to allow, I can get up, which she could barely manage.

Now what? On the one hand, I think no more dogs!!!!! On the other, it’s hard to imagine being without a doggy companion. I’ve had dogs—big ones, shepherds and retrievers and a dobe and a greyhound—all my adult life. If I get another dog, it can’t be another 85-pounder. It will have to be small enough that I can pick it up to get it into the car if it’s sick or hurt, small enough that I can pick it up to take it out of harm’s way (oh! the aggressive off-the-leash curs Anna and I engaged!). Since I don’t much care for little yappers, I can’t imagine what kind of dog that would be.

So for the nonce I’m done imagining.

I probably won’t post tomorrow. The rest of this weekend will be spent in a cleaning frenzy.

Later!