Broken Dog, Air Conditioner and Irrigation System

Can you believe it, the dog has been on a diet for only one month and he has already lost an impressive amount of the weight, dropping from 31.4 to 30 pounds. Three more pounds to go and he’ll be at his ideal weight. He was so cute when he sat on the scales, looking pleased and lapping up all the praise lavished on him by the technician at the vet’s office. We were there to get Levi’s teeth cleaned. I had to drop him off at 8:00 and when I called at noon to check on him he was just going into the surgery room. It ticked me off that he had to spend that much time cooling his heels in a cage. Last year he had so many teeth pulled it’s a wonder he can still eat. This time, He got to keep all the teeth still left in his mouth but they put some junk (like cement) along his gum line to help him keep the teeth he still has left. Schnauzers and other bearded breeds have a reputation for having bad teeth and gum issues. 

That day---Tuesday---on the scales was the last time I saw Levi happy and pain-free. The day after Levi’s dental procedure he was still acting like a burned out druggie. He didn’t want to move, drink, eat, pee or poop and he acted like his leg was broken only he didn’t whimper in pain when I poked around his leg and paw, looking for a reason for his reluctance to put weight on it. I could have understood it if it was the leg where they put the IV line in but it was his other front leg. I've had to keep an ACE bandage on the shaved patch where his IV line was attached because otherwise he licks it until his skin is beat red. I wish Levi could talk like Martin in the new TV series, Downward Dog. Have you seen that new summer ABC series? It’s really cute. 

Thursday I took Levi back to the vet. She checked out his joints, range of motion, shoulder, and paw and she felt around his bones and muscles. She couldn’t find anything to explain why he’s impersonating a three legged dog. Mostly he’s been sleeping, with me waking him up once in a while to try to get him to eat and drink or to carry him outside for potty breaks. By evening he finally did it all. The vet gave him some pain pills and me instructions to virtually keep waiting on him hand and foot all weekend so he stays as still as possible. The hope is that whatever is wrong with his leg will heal itself. That will be $55. Thank you very much. It's a good thing I’ve been working out at the YMCA because I can actually lift a drugged out dog. Friday (today as I write this) he barked for the first time since his saga started. Just one pathetic bark when someone came to the door but that’s progress. If he continues not to want to put weight on his leg by the time Monday rolls around I have to make an appointment for him to get x-rays. 

This has been a weird and expensive week. One day I had the air conditioning guy come out to do a routine check on the unit. I didn’t want to turn it on this year because I could look down into the housing for the outside fan and see where mice had spent the winter. I was afraid if they chewed on the wiring it could start a fire or compound any problems that damaged wiring might cause. We’ve had weather in the 90s and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to endure it without being too miserable without the AC running. That $84 base for the call turned into $210 which included topping off the Freon, the pricey part. Of course, the guy tried to talk me into their ‘membership program’ where you pay a monthly fee but your service calls are all supposedly free. I hate those programs. When you do the math you’re just paying in advance for service calls you may or may not need in any given year and you know they wouldn't offer the program if they weren't making money on them. If I was on a tight budget or had trouble saving money, maybe I’d make a different choice but I’m not and I don’t. 

Another day I had an appointment with my irrigation company. What a frustrating mess that company made out of my yard this year! My grass is burning up and one of my neighbor is getting too much benefit from my water. I’ve used the same company since the day we moved in over fifteen years ago but something has changed and the crew they’ve got working this year are not up to their usual professionalism. They had my watering times set so short a yard full of cactus would have had a hard time living out there. Before my sister-in-law moved into a nursing home she used to say she wanted to go because she didn’t want to deal with the endless chores around the house and yard anymore and I’d tell her, “At our ages all we do is make calls and write a few checks. How much trouble is that?” Fast forward a couple of years and I’m beginning to understand her point of view. I’m not there yet but having the irrigation company reschedule me three times and having me getting up at the crack of dawn twice for nothing really was a pain in the patootie.  ©

First World Problems and Trump Era Conversations

My Red Hat Society chapter did their annual thrift shop crawl this week, an event where they carpool to a sting of secondhand stores with a break in the middle for lunch. I’ve been on the go so much lately that I am burning out so I just met the group for lunch at a Mediterranean grill. The service was so slow I think I grew an inch long chin hair while waiting for my chicken shawarma. (I’m quite sure it wasn’t there when I left the house.) And if I’m being entirely honest here, I’m not fond of carpooling with other drivers my age and older. Once in a carpool, the driver was running on fumes---that point where your dashboard says you only have one mile to find a gas station. I’m too old for preventable stress, I get enough of the other kind. Another time the woman driving joked that her family wanted her to stop driving and I could see their point. Still another time the carpool driver hit a cement pillar in a parking garage. Car size is an issue with carpooling too. I recently learned I can’t fit a walker in my Chev Trax unless I put the back seat down. One problem with that: The back seat won’t go down without pulling the driver’s seat too far forward for me to get in and drive.

My problems are so first world, middle class that I feel guilty writing about them, but it’s my life and I can’t write about someone else’s who may be living with incurable diseases, violence in the streets, famines, water shortages, in refugee camps, touched by natural disasters, etc., etc. I can empathize and some might say my empathy runs too deep and that’s why it seems hollow to me when we wear our colored ribbons of support and solidarity, hold candlelight vigils, maybe donate some money then we go about our middle class lives believing we did all that we could, effectively pushing our caring thoughts aside until something else happens that primes the pump and spills our empathy all over the place, muddying up our comfortable lives again. These days, we are getting fewer and shorter periods in between those pressure-cooker-blew-its-top moments around the world. And now we have the pressure cooker sitting on the stove in Washington D.C. 

Sitting with some friends recently the Trump tweet criticizing the mayor of London was brought up and one lady was quick to announce that she is firmly behind the president and all he wants to do and she saw nothing wrong with his tweet. Shocked by that, I made a joke about looking for devil’s horns on the top of her head because, I said, “I thought all Trump supporters had them.” She laughed as I knew she would, but it didn’t lessen the tension in the air as another woman made an anti-Trump remark. Since I was the one who brought up the tweet---I honestly thought the five of us were all democrats---I felt it was my responsibility to avert a heated conversation. I took out my imaginary pen and notebook and announced that we should make a list of topics we shouldn’t talk about. “Shall we put politics at the top?” I asked and several others at the table quickly agreed. “How about religion and money?” I joked, the three Victorian no-no topics of conversations in mixed company. The Victorians meant ‘mixed’ as in men and women but in this decade, in this country mixed company is quickly getting redefined as politically mixed. 

I’m beginning to wonder if politely avoiding these kinds of conversations among friends and family isn’t a mistake. Maybe by not talking it out with people we otherwise like and respect aren’t we encouraging the polarization that is driving our country off the cliff? It’s easy to visualize devil’s horns on no-name strangers but not so easy when we know and like someone. How can we ever understand where each other is coming from if we don’t listen to one another? I was brought up to find a way to lessen tensions that come up, not encourage them, so I’m a fish out of water to do anything different than what I described above. But as the British statesman, John Morley, once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” So maybe people like me who try to avert or avoid potential confrontations are just as guilty of intolerance as the people who shout others down into submission. We each get the same results: We are silencing the voices of people who don’t have a carbon copy view of our own. The danger in that is, of course, we are eroding a fundamental building block of democracy, of civilized societies---our ability to compromise and build a consensus at all levels of human interaction---as messy, annoying, maddening, exhilarating and wonderful as that process is. ©

“Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, 

for it permits us to assume superiority without personally boasting.”  

 Sidney J. Harris

A Widow’s First World Problems

It was raining on Friday when my house cleaner came for my monthly appointment. I’m to the point where I’m thinking it’s more trouble than it’s worth to have someone clean. The service charges me $27 an hour but the girls who actually do the cleaning only get paid $10 so there isn’t much incentive for them to work, should they want to take a long weekend off and lately I’m getting a different girl every month. Having a cleaning service was one luxury widowhood brought into my life that I really enjoyed at first. The girl who was assigned to me was a college kid studying to be a social worker and we had the best conversations while she worked but she’s moved on and all I’ve gotten since is a string of strangers. Can you believe I’m sitting there getting all bitchy, old person cranky about a first world problem? The strangers have done a passable job cleaning and I have no right to expect them to be able to carry on a decent conversation, too. But I do. Are humans ever truly happen with what we have? When we have luxuries not everyone can afford, most of us still want more. And that admission reminds me that all roads lead back to gratitude. When we don’t have gratitude, we become sourpusses. When we do have it we’re on the Zen Lane of life, seeking and often finding the fragile balance that keeps us happy.

I was so far from being Zen-like this past week when I was at my new monthly Write and Share MeetUp that I’m amazed I could even spell the word. At least I think I could. I didn’t try it at the time. Reading out loud freaked me out---again---and half way through the reading I realized I needed to slow down. I was making too many mistakes and I had to let go of the fear if I wanted to live to tell about it. I had picked a blog entry from my old caregiver days to share, one of my favorite humorous pieces that I’m thinking about putting in a book about living with language disorders. I started writing that book last year but quickly decided my widowhood was too fresh to be re-reading what I wrote about my life before Don died. Now, I think I can look back at that chapter of my life using an editor’s eye to hone my blog material into a story without me getting pulled into another round of grief.

When I finished reading to the group a conversation broke out about how people deal with stress. I knew my friends in the stroke community where I was blogging at the time I wrote the piece got my use of humor to convey stressed-out emotions but I wanted to find out if my writing style was strong enough to convey that to people who aren’t familiar with language disorders. The people in my writers group were my guinea pigs and they passed the test, they got me. If you want to see if you’d pass, click on this link to read: You’re in the Dog House Now!

Switching Topics: My new young neighbor guy is like a friendly puppy---energy in motion, feet too big for his skinny body and a perpetual grin on his face like he's been drinking goofy juice. But we might be having “an issue.” Last week a crew of young guys were like honey bees on a hive, swarming all over the hated two story deck in his back yard but in the process of taking it down and moving trucks and trailers back there one of them hit a 3’x3’ electrical junction box on the property line that services the whole the cul-de-sac. The tire tracks to the “crime” were as plain to see as Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore. They also took out one of my irrigation thingamajigs. The next day I called the power company to report the junction box being off its cement foundation and within a half hour they came out with a boom truck to reset it. “That’s a dangerous situation,” one of the workers told me. He also said their “detective team” will study the photos he took and probably call my neighbor “to get his side of it. He may claim your lawn care service hit it.”

Oh, crap, that’s no way to start out a relationship with a brand new neighbor. (I had already decided to eat the cost of the service call from my irrigation company in the spirit of getting along.) It seems the electric company detectives, though, do their best to find someone to pin the bill on and I’m not going to be happy if it’s me since I’m the one who called it in. Another first world problem. Breathe, Jean, breathe. I have electricity every day. Regularly without interruption. I have enough money in the checking account to pay for a boom truck bill, should I begrudging have to pay it. And I have a new, young neighbor who has already borrowed a wrench which means he’s obligated to open my next new pickle jar. And those are all good things to write down in a gratitude journal. ©