Tag Archives: diary

A Terrier Hears Horton, or cpap with varmints

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This year, for our fifteenth anniversary, Mr Moth and I treated ourselves to a new bed.  After years of being all Dan and Roseanne in a double bed, we went for the king, even though it pretty much eats up all the floor space in our room.  Mr Moth gladly gave up floor space on his side in favor of more sleeping space.  I can’t, because doing so would leave me unable to open the drawers on my dresser, and of course we had to have room for dogs.

The bed is amazing, wonderful, awesome.  We have so much less pain–bordering on none.  I still have my beloved familial bursitis, but pretty much nothing else hurts when I get up in the morning (unless it’s my head, which is either apnea, sinus, or both).  Mr Moth was able to stop wearing his knee braces, of which he has two.  One being for his actual knee, and the other being one of those sold-on-tv things for back pain.

Yes, that actually worked, right up until he didn’t need it anymore.

To save floor space, we went with a bedframe that has no headboard and no footboard.

Dealing with lack of storage was an issue, but more serious to me–hello, Crazy Dog Lady–was discovering the new bed was too high for Kelly.  She used to use the tiny footboard as a toehold and come up over the end, but now she was just grounded.  Furthermore, Cobie was being a giant territorial ass about it, jumping up on the bed and prancing around, lording it over her.

I surfed the internet extensively looking for ideas, but didn’t really find anything that appealed.  While it seemed an obvious solution, there’s no longer enough room in the bedroom for some of those doggy steps, and I think I may have already reported how the bedding I thought was going to fit the new bed did not.  We went to Ollie’s looking for a bedding set that would fit, and when I saw one of those storage ottomans one of my remaining braincells fired off, and I thought aha!  And we got one.

The ottoman fits barely on Mr Moth’s side of the bed.  It gives him a place to charge his phone while he sleeps, and provides a place to stash clutter where I don’t have to look at it.  One turned out to not quite be enough, because Kelly is longer than one ottoman, so we bought another.  The arrangement might look a little odd, but it fulfills all the requirements.

(My own phone charging arrangement is even odder because of the need to keep the dresser unblocked on my side, but that is perhaps a topic for another day.)

So fast forward to Project Horton.  Someone on FaceBook suggested that Cobie, my spooky dog, might be alarmed by the CPAP machine.  I tried not to worry about that, but I worried about it a lot.  He doesn’t do well with change.  If I even change my text message alert tone, he spends days running to the basement every time it goes off until he gets used to it.  When I was setting up Horton, both dogs watched, and Cobie actually jumped up on the bed, so I showed it to him.  He sniffed it for a long while, then went and laid down on his bed.  Kelly was completely disinterested and entertained herself my licking my pillow.

Then, at some point on Day Two, after Mr Moth had gone to work, Kelly climbed her ottomen–haha–and got into bed with me.  She hadn’t done that on the first night I wore the mask, but some nights she doesn’t.  She kept her distance, although that is also not unusual.  Oliver (the cat) has a “territory” on the bed, and even when he isn’t in it, neither dog is anxious to infringe.  If you knew Oliver, you’d understand.

At some point, Oliver joined the bedzoo.  At yet another point, the mask resumed its leaking and farting*.

Kelly went wild.

She started yarking and charging my face, and Tiggering all around the bed.  Oliver was displeased.  He squalled like a ninja.  Kelly bounced and yarked and went gromma gromma gromma.

I lay there thinking about Elmer Fudd and the fly in his bedroom and how one little distraction escalates until he ends up blowing holes all in his house with a shotgun.  That always seemed ridiculous to me before.

Now, not so much.

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    *  Since Zor’s childhood, we have called blowing razzberries on someone’s belly a “zerbert” because at some point she saw it spelled on a cartoon as ZRRBRRRT.  Among classier people this farting/razzberrying is also called burping, and I am ridiculously glad that my family and other people’s families (as reported on forums) notice how hideously loud it is.  People in other rooms can hear this.  Ergo I can conclude I am not being a princess about it.  It is a thing.  A nerve-wracking obnoxious thing.

table war

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This day is off to a bang. First a little dog got caught in my underwear while I was trying to get dressed. So I decided to go let dogs out and THEN get dressed, except I discovered there are linemen up the pole out back, and so I had to backtrack and get dressed anyway so I could make sure the linemen didn’t leave the gate open. Then Artemis the Ckatten decided she wanted some of Oliver’s special gooshy fudz which conflict at least brought Cobie in from trying to eat the treed lineman. Separate dishes interrupted the War of the Gooshy Fudz.

I took a pic of the two cats eating in proximity, but my kitchen table is the only open horizontal surface out of dog range that Oliver can leap to, and it’s currently a shameful disaster area. I mean, expect FEMA at any minute.

Any day that is going to involve running the dishwasher twice is also going to involve a second cup of coffee.

woowoo at casa del pooch

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Last night, around 2:30 a.m., as I was finishing up in the kitchen before heading to bed, I heard a sound.  It was a *TING* sound, and if you have dogs with tags, and those dogs have stainless dog dishes, you know what sound I mean.

I can always identify which dog is at the dish, and whether it is a food dish (there are two) or the water dish (one) by the quality of the TING.    (Kelly’s ting is duller, I assume because she’s shorter and the tags rest against her chest.  Cobie’s ting is more melodic, probably because when he bends down to drink, the tags dangles.)

So not an unusual noise, except it sounded…off.  A water dish TING, but not Kelly’s ting and not Cobie’s ting.

Also, I was looking at both dogs.  Specifically, I had them in a sit because I was about to give them each a baby carrot.  Which I did.  Then I investigated, but found nothing.  (I thought maybe a June bug, ugh.  But no insects were in sight.)

Oliver doesn’t wear a tag, or a collar.  Furthermore, he had gone out.

I wrote it off as my imagination, but the water dish was a little low so I refilled it.  Then, as I prepared to leave the room, I heard it again.  TING.  And it did not sound like either dog’s tag at either dish, yet it had to be, right?  Except they had both gone down the hall to lie outside Zor’s door and sniff kittenfumes.

Again I checked for June bugs.  Again I found nothing.

Oliver scratched to come in, so I let him in, and then, as he brushed past my ankles, TING.

I was getting creeped out.  Odd, considering that I am not an easily creeped person, and that the sound was so ordinary.

I heard Zor coming sleepily down the hall, past the dog patrol.  She had kittenfumes (aka Artemis) with her, so the troops followed.  I watched her come into the kitchen and get a drink.  I felt compelled to stay put until she was done in the kitchen; I used the excuse of kitty sitting.  In due course she finished, and we all went to bed.  I didn’t hear anything else.

Weirdness…

pretending to be blind

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Every night for several years now, as I walk to bed in the dark, I say to myself, “Self, you should blog about doing this.”  And then it comes daylight, and I forget.

Today I remembered, lucky lucky you.

It started when I found out about the first cataract, which came on abruptly and advanced aggressively until, within a year, I was nearly blind in that eye.  And by nearly blind, I mean when I took the eye test at the BMV, I couldn’t see anything at all through that eye.  Not a shape, not a shadow…nothing.

I would have to have surgery, and I was terrified.  What if I went blind?

Back in juinior high school, and I forget whether it was seventh or eighth grade, in the English reader (how I loved the reader every year) there was a story about a man in ago times, a meek clerk of some kind, who had his dominant hand crushed in some act of violence, and who taught himself to use his non-dominant hand for writing so he could work.  I don’t recally any more about the story than this, which was the most important aspect to me apparently.

It worried me mightily that I could lose my ability to write if something happened to my right hand, so I began at once to practice writing with my left.  I never became good at it, but I can make moderately legible scratch marks.  And of course, now, if I lost my right hand, I could probably just do most of my writing at one keyboard or another, typing slowly and one-handedly, and it would be legible, but at the time typing everything on a typewriter would have been a huge hassle.  So I practiced.

Which is why it was completely in character for me, faced with a loss of eyesight, to practice being blind.  And now, still, although the first cataract–caused, Drs L & P say, by an injury–is gone, and a second in the other eye–caused by age and sunlight–is both miniscule and not avancing, and is thus of no account, I still nightly practice being blind by turning off all the lights and walking to bed that way, navigating from corner to doorway to dresser, with dogs felt trotting along before (Kelly) and beside (Cobie).  They’ve gotten quite good at this over the years.  Even Kelly, who trips me about eight times a day, manages to stay out from under foot while we’re practicing being blind.

Anyhow, now I can stop thinking I should blog about it, because now I have.  There’s one thing off the to-do list…

on seasons and glasses

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Today we all have appointments with the eye doctor.  I don’t really need new glasses, but it’s that time.  Tim doesn’t think he needs new ones either, but I say it would be good for him to have a second pair.  He could leave one at work and not have to worry about forgetting them anymore.  Zor, well.  She’s suggestible.  Ever since I made the appointments she’s been complaining she can’t see.

We’ll be “trusting” Kelly to stay home and not destroy her own heinie–I hope that’s not a huge mistake.

Also there’s a huge weather situation pending.  Snow, sleet, your basic happy swell almost-spring fun times in Ohio.  8 to 10 inches worth!  It’s not supposed to get truly nasty until this evening though, so here’s hoping.  We have T-Moth to do the driving, which in nasty weather is always a plus.  And Berta has new-ish tires on the front and decent ones on the back.

Lying black wooly-bear caterpillar notwithstanding, this has not been a very ferocious winter.  And every season–we are blessed to have four of them–is welcome when it arrives.  But as we wear toward the end of each season, I am ready for the change.  At the end of spring, I am ready to stop sneezing and to sit outside in the stuffy dark and listen to the nightbugs.  At the end of summer I am ready for cool air and warm colors.  At the end of fall, I am tired again of sneezing, and I am ready to see the world blanketed in purest white. 

At some point the snow melts or turns gray, and we enter our second “deer season”, not a hunting season, but just a period of time where all of outdoors is the color of deer–which is probably why deer are that color.  And when this time comes around, I begin to crave color like it’s air.

I need yellow and pink and green and blue, and white in the sky instead of on the ground.  Bring on the violets and the robins and the cardinals and the jays.  I need gray to be a design choice and not a relentless sky color.

I need spring.

And maybe glasses, although perhaps I should postpone my appointment until July so I don’t come back with some neon green frames with rhinestones or something.

fire

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I learned via facebook that an old friend’s computer had crashed.  She recently moved back to town, and is still living with relatives.  She’s disabled and hasn’t found a car yet.  Her computer is her major means of contact with the outside world.  And my husband has a couple of older, but snappy, dinosaur computers that he has been meaning to part out.

It’s so rarely somebody has a problem I can actually help with.

So yesterday, even though I’m nuts busy (major meltdown earlier this week, I’m completely drowning in school this term) when I got out of class but before I went to pick up the spawn, I dropped by C’s house with an Aldi bag full of dinosaur.  I hadn’t been there before, and it’s been a while since I was in the pizza biz, so I came from the wrong direction.  I almost flipped around to park on the same side of the street–dinosaurs being heavy and all–but for no reason I said to myself, Ah, screw it.

We had a fantastic, refreshing visit.  She lives in a neighborhood like I always used to live in, by which I mean poor but not bad.  Lots of people on disability, people who should be on disability but don’t qualify due to the randomness of the system, the unemployed, the underemployed, students whose families are too dysfunctional for one reason or another to support them while they go to school.

I know it sounds stupid, but I felt like I had gone home to some other country where the people are my people. 

We sat on the porch and talked about old times and new, while heavy traffic roared by a sidewalk’s width away.  I felt more at home in that neighborhood than I ever have here.

Oh, I like it here plenty.  I like how safe it is, how quiet it is.  I like the space and the peace and the fenced in yards where dogs and children can zoom around.  I like having windows that keep the weather and noise mostly out and the climate control mostly in.  I like not worrying about home security because my neighbors are cops.

I don’t feel community here, though.  Here community mostly seems to consist of fussing at the neighbors if they let their grass get high.

Besides the neighborhood, there was C.  Although it’s been over fifteen years since we lived near each other or communicated regularly, It seemed to me that we fell back together as though it had been last week.   This, in my experience, is something that only happens in novels and lifetime movies.

Too soon it came time to end the visit; the spawn was waiting, dogs were waiting, and the endless tide of homework was waiting for me to start bailing out my educational lifeboat with a spork.  I stood up, and caught a whiff of something.  I thought it was a neighbor’s homerolled cigarette and thought, What on earth is that poor woman smoking? It smells worse than cloves.

Saying goodby, among my people, isn’t a quick exchange.  You say you are going to leave, and stand up.  Then you talk some more, then you mention again that you really must be going, and edge toward the door.  More talk.  Finally, after several rounds, you actually leave.  A close friend or family member will often follow you to your car if you have one, and the last exchange will take place with someone leaning with their elbows braced on the driver’s side door of your car.

As I stood on the porch, I smelled the worse-than-cloves smell again, worse.  “What is on fire?” I asked, but I was mostly kidding.  I was still half thinking about that cigarette.  I thought crack, but this was worse than crack, and not quite the same.

C answered, “It was that truck that just went around the corner.”  I looked and saw a bluish haze that reminded me of old Fords with bad rings, and thought wow, that is one sick Ford.

Mere seconds of chatting later, someone said, “[So and so]’s car is on fire.”

Sure enough a young man was grabbing a backpack and some other items (I’ve forgotten what) from a GMC Jimmy and was hurling them up into the yard.  He was swearing profusely.  I looked and saw, through the vehicle’s open doors, the glow of burning wires and drip of melting insulation under the dash.

Oh.  Smell identified.  Shit.

I was in a Domino’s Pizza company delivery truck once when the wires to the cartop sign caught fire down around my shins.  The driver of the truck (youngest spawn’s father)  extricated me, the stack of pizzas in my lap (not in that order) and then yanked out the wires, ending the problem.  (And neither of us ever ran a lit cartopper ever again.)  That was my single experience with a wiring fire.  In an instant I recalled that and dismissed the wiring fire as not that big a deal.  Yank the wires and it goes out, right?

The first tongue of flame appeared.

Ok, SHIT.

The owner of the car took off running.

Flames licked.  Cell phones came out (because poor people have them now; they are as cheap as landlines) and calls went out to 911.

The flames grew.  Now there was a good little campfire under the dashboard in the SUV.

More calls went out.  Voices were raised.  The inevitable crowd began to gather.

From my spot on the porch I began to hear crackling and could feel heat, real heat.  I thought of Pele, the Hawai’ian volcano goddess, because my most pressing homework assignment is about Hawai’i.  Smoke was rolling pretty good.

“I hope your van is going to be all right,” C said.

SHIT!  The van was parked across the street.  Flames and smoke almost blocked it from view.  MY HOMEWORK IS IN THERE!

I thought, if I have to tell Miss H that my homework was destroyed in a fire, I want evidence!  I got out my phone to take a picture.  I stepped forward to get a better shot.  Something hot hit my arm and my career as a war zone photographer ended right there.  I got a shot, but it was a bad one.

The heat was ridiculous, it was hotter than if you open the lower deck of a stone pizza oven in August, the kind of heat that can melt your mascara and make your eyes stick shut.

BOOM!

People screamed.  C tried to sooth everyone.  “It’s just a tire.  It’s not going to explode.  No, it’s not going to explode.  It’ll be all right.”

My chest hurt.  Apparently my heart had tried to escape through my sternum.

Another boom reverberated around the neighborhood.  Flames shot up higher than the roof of the two story houses.  Heat baked.  More calls to 911 went out–calls of increasing hysteria.  Where are they?  Where is the fire department?

I remember doing this, but I don’t remember when, but I let Youngest Spawn and Husband know that I was stuck and Husband would have to pick up YS from school.

Fire started spreading across the devil strip.  If it jumped the sidewalk, those old firetrap houses…

The woman C lives with is pregnant and has a toddler and infant twins.  She was freaking out loud on at least the same level I was only freaking internally.  Someone at 911 suggested getting the children out of the house.  She didn’t really want to take them outside into the smoke, but.

“Yeah,” I said, or something like that.  When you freak hard enough, I now know, it’s hard to remember details of dialogue.  “Can we go out back?”

Going out front, and away AWAY would have meant going past the inferno.  After the booms, I didn’t want to do that, and I don’t think anyone else did either.

Kids and dogs were herded through the house and into the back yard.  The little mother actually apologized for the state of her house.  Some calm kernel of myself thought, You have a toddler and twin babies and you’re pregnant.  Also you have dogs.  Yet, there is a clear path through your house.  You’re doing amazing.

From the back yard we could see the flames, still higher than the houses, but the heat and smoke were much less.  Somebody handed me a baby, and although I never inherited the Aw, It’s a Baby gene, he was very cute, very charming, and completely unfazed by all the commotion, even though I was shaking like the leaf cliche.  I don’t know how long we stood there, but finally there were sirens, and at some point there was a third boom, which I thought was another tire but which turned out to be the windows blowing out of the burning vehicle.

A billow of steam let us know the FD had arrived.  The steam smelled at least as sick as the smoke, and spread outward instead of mostly going straight up.  When the fire seemed out (they would keep putting water on flareups for some time) Little Momma decided it was safe to take her small fry back indoors, so we did.

Cleanup took a long while, partly because of the flareups, and I couldn’t leave because there were fire trucks blocking the road.  So we stood and watched.  While we watched, someone came up to us and told us that the vehicle’s owner had gone (when he took off running) to two nearby businesses and asked to use a fire extinguisher and been told NO.

I am still so stunned by this that my outrage is diminished by it.

A flatbed came and couldn’t get close enough to haul the carcass away, and when they scraped up the slag blocking their access, big chunks of asphalt came up with it.  The vehicle had literally fused into the pavement.

No, you can’t use my fire extinguisher.

Really?  Bitches.

Some people complained about the fire department taking so long to arrive.  I don’t know if they did take long to arrive or if time was doing it’s thing.  Time obeys no rules that I have ever been able to discern; maybe it only seemed like it took forever because of how fast the fire grew.

Or maybe the local station was already on a call and a more distant fire station had to respond.

Budget cuts, whether necessary or not, have repercussions.

Like all real stories, this one has no ending. The truck carcass was hauled away, the fire department packed up and went away, the people whose car it was…well, I’ll probably never know. The girl is a nursing student at my school. Her boyfriend works. They had saved up to buy this flaming death trap just a short time before. I hope they find a way to get to work and school, but I may never know. I hope their lives aren’t wrecked in the long term.

But I’m not sure. When you’re poor, even molehills are often mountains, and a loss like this is no molehill.

That’s what happened.