Sleeping in the fridge.

Regular readers (you delightful souls (everyone says so)) will know that I am being treated for terrible back pain with the SNRI antidepressant Cymbalta (duloxetine), which miraculously made the terrible pain go away. Of course, my back may be healing as well, but as I have not had an MRI since February, my current status has not been assessed.

But you regular readers also know I am obsessed with having a clean refrigerator. Not that I always keep it clean, but I often sit around and think about keeping it clean, which strangely does not automatically make it so.

Further, this cleanliness has been difficult, since my back started up last summer and continued until the winter crisis. No one else in the house is interested in doing the job, except the dogs, but they can just lick the inside and only about halfway up.

So yesterday I rolled up the ol' sleeves -- metaphorically; I was in short sleeves already, which would have hurt -- and got in there and got to it. I had picked up tips from expert Schar Ward, and from Mrs. Key fave Melissa Maker, but it looks like I have pretty much been doing a good and efficient job already. And, a couple of hours later, done!

It looks good. Plus, we set a new record for fewest condiments that had to get thrown away with four. It would have been two, the ones that expired, but the onion relish and the maple chipotle BBQ sauce were pretty bad and I finally gave up on finding a use for them.

How did I get motivated? It was that or work. I have a book sitting here that I'm supposed to edit, and it's not long or dull or bad, but it is focused on a subject that irritates me. So I told myself if I was not going to use my time to make money, I would have to use it to clean. Generally I am a creature motivated by fear, so sometimes I have to make deals to set priorities.

The problem is, as I mentioned before, the duloxetine makes me drowsy quite a bit -- two-naps-a-day type drowsy. I can usually fight off a nap with coffee, but following the fridge job I wanted two things very much: 1) a parade and 2) a second nap. And not in that order. Further, I often wake in the night and have trouble getting back to sleep.

I'll be talking with the doc later in the month to see if I should consider coming off the pills. Today I have exactly two things I need to do beyond my usual duties, neither of them difficult, but the idea of doing them makes me want to sleep now. I hope I can make it to the sofhkghjk

A new-rosis.

"I mean, when Donna says I'm kind of weird, does she

mean good weird or weird weird?"

Kevin had reached the point in the pandemic where he
couldn't talk to anyone except on Zoom, even himself. 

Doggie drugs.

I mentioned the other day that large club-size dog Tralfaz has a hot spot, poor guy. A hot spot is an area on the skin of inflammation and bacterial infection, and this is the first one he's gotten that we know of. The vet gave him a thorough look-over on Tuesday and sent me home with instructions -- keep it dry and clean, don't bandage it or cover it or put any ointments or anything on it. And give him these pills. And these are some pills.

First, the corticosteroid, prednisolone, which is meant to control the inflammation and ease the discomfort. He gets 1 1/2 of them a day, tapering down over 12 days to 1/2.

The second, cephalexin, is an antibiotic. Ten days of that, three pills twice a day.

These are big pills. Granted, he's a big dog, but how to get them into him? Fortunately he will eat anything if it's in a treat, and the greatest treat in the world is cheese. So, these seemed like a no-brainer.

Smaller dog Nipper has a tendency to work the pill out of treats, and eat the treat and leave the pill, but fortunately he will let me shove a pill down his throat without too much grief. Even more fortunately, he has not had to have any pills in a while. Even more fortunately, neither dog has needed any treatments that have to be administered in the buttular area. That's a bridge too far for me.

One further pharmaceutical note: Readers of the Great Lileks's feature on Chain Store Age may have recalled learning this fact about medicine bottles:

As I noted at the time, nowadays Plastainers for human drugs are orange and animal drugs a bright emerald green.

Cheery, huh?

(Now I'm wondering if the modern pill bottle is a Plastainer or some other trademarked name. The original Plastainer had no childproof cap. I can barely keep up with my own business, let alone the varieties of materials science in the prescription drug trade.)

BONUS DOG-RELATED PIC! The local robins made an unprecedented second nest under the deck this year, and Nipper sort of helped:

He often gets brushed outside, leaving fur around, and the white fuzz on the right side looks like some of his. Further, the yellow streak on the left side looks like a piece he has torn off one of his tennis balls. Way to go, Nipper! It's the Circle of Liiiiiiiiife!

Engineers to the rescue.

Yeah, I know the history of the Frisbee. But that doesn't make a good cartoon.

Fred's Book Club: Get 'Er Done!

Welcome to another Wednesday Hump Day meeting of the Humpback Writers, thus the stupid name. No one has humps, although some may have lumps. We all take our lumps in life. Anyway, you could call it Fred's Book Club, but that might be even dumber. I don't mind either way.

I was barely able to get a post together today because Tuesday was nutty, with work coming in and the router acting up and a dog needing to go to the vet (Tralfaz got a hot spot from the injury I mentioned on Monday, but he'll be all right after pills pills pills). Anyway, it was a good excuse to look at time management, which brings us to:

Alan Lakein is no slouch when it comes to time management -- which, for that matter, is not a field that really rewards slouches. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, first published in 1973, is a plan for the scatterbrained to do exactly as the title says. In 160 pages, Lakein gives a brisk run-down of all the principles one really needs to decide on priorities and goals and give them the one thing that cannot be bought or sold: time.

"Time is life," he writes right up front. "It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste your time is to waste your life, but to master your time is to master your life and make the most of it." He goes on to outline his plan in a way any writer could envy, with powerful, economic words.

I'm not a "time and motion" organizer, trying to get everything done in the shortest time with the fewest waster motions. That kind of efficiency means taking the thinking out of an activity and reducing it to a series of mechanical routines. There is no attempt to keep it fun or interesting, so you might even say that such extreme clockwatching takes the life right out of an activity, along with the thought.

Lakein is all about deciding what your priorities are and planning your time to push those first. "Control starts with planning," he writes. "Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now." He is impressively quotable.

Of course he is aware that plans go awry, just as I didn't intend to spend an hour and a half at the vet yesterday. That's not what this is book about. This is planning over the long haul. Know your goals, resolve their conflicts. set lifetime priorities.

Take your Lifetime Goals list in hand and spend one minute selecting your top three goals. Label the most important of these A-1. The second most important is A-2. The third is A-3. Do the same for your three-years list, and your six-months list.
     At this point you have nine goals culled from the three lists. To pick out the three most important long-term goals of this nine, write on a fresh piece of paper, "My three most important long-term goals are..." Then write them in order: A-1, A-2, A-3. You have now finished a preliminary Lifetime Goals Statement. You have zeroed in on just what it is you want to do with your life as you see it at this time.

It doesn't get much more complex than that.

I don't think there has been a single book on organizing for success that really had more to say than Lakein has here, but most authors pad their books with cute names for complex tasks, endless anecdotes and testimonials, and misattributed quotations swiped from the Internet. If you just want to get your life in order, I say, stick to Lakein.

And there is the rub. I bought this book more than twenty years ago, when I had a demanding job and a scattered personal life and was trying to get things in order. The problem is, like any good program, it only works if you put it into action. I don't know what became of the notebook I was using to work out my life plan back then, but it is gone. It may be in my desk. The fact that I have no idea tells you how well I practiced the program.

In fact, one glance at my desk (which I shall spare you) is enough to prove that I have never followed any advice on organization for long. I won't say that my desk looks like you took a bunch of books and papers and pens and things, stuffed them in a huge ballpark T-shirt cannon, and blew them at it. I will say that if you did such a thing, the results would be indistinguishable from the current condition.

Perhaps I ought to give this book a second glance. If I can find the time.

Puzzle Key.

Lookit this dumb thing.

Personally, I don't believe that only 3% of adults can find the different 'KEY.' I think only 1% of adults with normal vision can fail if they take the time to do it, and that 1% is dumber than a sack of cannonballs.

When you have a name like Key, people tend to send you things like this that connect with your name. Usually jealous people, people who have spent their lives spelling out names like Protheroe or Yevdokymenko or Bhattacharyya or Constantinides or Luxuryyacht. (All real names.) (Well, almost.)

There are worst things than having the name of a common object, even if it's an object that has some bad associations, especially one known for always getting lost. In college I knew a guy named Cash, and always wondered if people were hitting him up for money. He's made of money, right? Of course some names are a lot worse, like Wiener, which seems to have been the former congressman's destiny as well as his burden (alternate spelling). On the whole, animal names like Fox or Wolf or even Buffalo would be better. Then again, I never met anyone whose last name was Chicken or Turkey.

Are you familiar with any bad object family names? Or animal names? I'm always curious about this. Not that I'm sulking over the vicious attack on the statue of my dear relative Francis Scott Key, to whom I am not related. I do think they should melt the statue down and make prison bars out of it for the people who destroy public property, That's one way to lock 'em up and throw away the Key.

I'll be curious to hear your thoughts. Meanwhile, I'll be waiting patiently in my usual spot, under the doormat.

Ta ra ra boom.

This has been a challenging week. And I say challenging because we've all known really bad weeks, and people who fought for America in hellholes all over the world know what really really bad weeks are like. I'll run it down quickly so as to not belabor the point. We start last

MONDAY: Guys come to install the "fenceless fence" system to keep dogs on our property. Installation is no big deal; training section gets off on the wrong foot and remains there. Our big hairy dogs have to have patches on their neck shaved off so that the connections (prongs) on the collar (at choking tightness) would make contact (poke) the skin to issue corrections (zaps) when the dogs ignore the warning (beeps) and go into the danger zone (near the wire). They do not like that correction. Tralfaz shakes his fuzzy head like he just can't believe what his life has come to. Nipper rears up like Silver with the Lone Ranger really digging in the spurs. Training at this stage largely consists of tapping little perimeter flags and yelling NO. This is embarrassing. Plus, a big job I was told to expect from a big publisher fails to arrive.

TUESDAY: My old supervisor at my oldest freelance client packs in the job at the end of June, so I meet with him and the staff at his place by phone to try to figure out what will be going on as we move forward. I make jokes to fill the silence like a soft-headed idiot. No one laughs. Is this a business meeting or an oil painting? I think these new people figure I am a mercy hire, despite working for them for eight years. Dog training held up by my wife's insane schedule as her job blows up. I do training in a sheer downpour, standing by the sidewalk, tapping flags, yelling NO, feeling like I really am a soft-headed idiot. That night we find red skin and scabbing on Tralfaz's neck where the patch was shaved.

WEDNESDAY: Tralfaz's grooming appointment, made last April. We can bathe him but we can't clip him, and he only gets groomed every three months. He is a tangled mess. I would have taken him in today if I were coughing my spleen out from Chinese Death Virus. Also had other business that took me across the border to Pennsylvania, where every New Yorker was loading up on fireworks but me. By the time we get home, Fazzy is so tired that he is essentially a great-smelling hairy 130-pound paperweight. Nipper is losing the desire to do anything outside, because he keeps getting shocked.

Places Nipper may go
Places Nipper wants to go

THURSDAY: Wife's job continues to blow up. Training still going poorly, although it's hard to tell. Did not use the correction collar on Tralfaz because he is still all scabbed up. Still expecting big freelance job but it does not arrive. Nipper seems to be reconsidering the long-held theory that peeing on the carpet is bad.

FRIDAY: Start the day by emptying the dishwasher. Put Corningware bowl and lid in closet on other Corningware bowl, which in a jealous rage throws the other bowl to the closet floor. Shattered Corningware bursts into approximately one bazillion tiny sharp bits. Having cleaned that up, I continue my winning streak by going out to run some errands, spurred on by the need for a new relief valve for the water heater. EVERYBODY IN TOWN IS OUT THERE. Absolutely crazy everywhere I go. I actually abandon a shopping cart in one store, something I never do. (There were no cold or frozen foods in it, though, if that makes me look better.) I will remember this for next July 3: Do not shop on July 3. Nipper seems to have lost the will to live.

SATURDAY: Saturday is okay, except for the blood. Tralfaz scratches himself real good with hind paw, as dogs do, and tears the scabbing on his neck. Now his nice clean fuzz has bloodstains; it hurts him to lie down, and he has completely broken training, roaming around with no collar at all. Nipper is retaining pee like it's his life's ambition to have a UTI. Aaaaand here come the fireworks. There are usually about a dozen fireworks shows in the county on or around the Fourth, and especially if it falls on a Saturday. This year there is one. But that's okay; our neighbors have all bought illegal fireworks and deploy them in stages between five p.m. and two the next morning. Ta ra ra boom de ay, and I do mean boom. If the Spanish had this kind of ordnance in Cuba ca.1898, they'd have won the Battle of San Juan Hill, and American history and the presidency would be very different. Nipper has discovered that he does not want to die, because he thinks he is going to lose his life any second. I try to remind him how the dogs of Gettysburg suffered for three days with cannons going off all the time, but he is not comforted. Fazzy may have lost too much blood to care, although we're keeping his injury clean and sterile as best we can. Everyone goes to bed really late.

ooh. aah.

SUNDAY: I finally get to put in a new valve on the water heater, which promptly begins leaking much worse than the old valve. Well, that's a revoltin' development. Being unable to control the situation, I turn off the water and call a plumber. The wife, stressed out by a terrible week at work, wakes up to no hot water and considers joining the French Foreign Legion because everything sucks anyway. Plumber comes, thank God. I pretend I did not just change the valve; he changes the valve again, but also gets a gallon of black sediment out of the heater by applying pressure in some secret plumber means. Hot water restored; he will be back to install an expansion tank later in the week. Money I did not expect to spend, but cheaper than a new water heater. With all this, we miss Mass on TV. Soup blows up in the microwave. We bandage Tralfaz's neck, which is not his new favorite thing. I fall in a heap on a chair and write this, as I look forward to seeing my ear doctor at eight a.m. tomorrow. By Sunday night, the big job I was expecting the previous Monday has still not arrived.

Two notes:

1) There is a very funny bit in Woody Allen's play (later movie) Don't Drink the Water. Walter, a caterer stuck in a foreign country, hears from his partner by phone that a catering event went poorly because some guests got food poisoning. Walter's wife says, "Be thankful nobody died." Walter responds, "Yes, Marion -- we're thinking of making that our slogan." On weeks like this I want to make that our family slogan.

2) If, like me, you feel like the song "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" just came out of the ether, has always been around, and evolved organically without creators. Wikipedia tells us that "The song's first known public performance was in Henry J. Sayers' 1891 revue Tuxedo, which was performed in Boston, Massachusetts. The song became widely known in the version sung by Lottie Collins in London music halls in 1892. The melody was later used in various contexts, including as the theme song to the television show Howdy Doody." You can find out more here, but not who wrote it. Maybe it did spring out of the ether after all.