The dog ate my phone.

Okay, not really, but really enough. 

I could actually blame it on the wind as much as the puppy, or on my bad back, or on my annoying friend whom I'll call Roger. But the worst thing is, it's probably my fault more than anyone or anything else's. 

Let's take it from the top. 

📱🐕

You may have thought I was kidding yesterday about baby dog Izzy eating ornaments, but I'm totally serious. There isn't much around here that he has not at least tried to bite. If you drop anything around this guy--food, tools, tissues, bottles, papers, gold Krugerrands, radioactive ingots--anything at all he will be on it before you can bend over to pick it up. He's discovering the world by biting it, one thing at a time, and he drives me batty. So no, I don't think he'd try to bite a glass ornament, but I'm not ruling it out, either. 

I mentioned last year that since my brief but wildly expensive hospitalization for crushing back pain I have been prescribed the antidepressant duloxetine, which hasn't helped my mood at all but has done wonders for the musculoskeletal pain. I've wanted to get off the drug, though, because it often leaves me very sleepy. Since I work at home I can take a nap if I absolutely must. And when the dogs are a whimpering mess or fear because of a windstorm outside all night long, you can bet there will be a nappin' come the dawn.

That's what happened on Saturday night. The boys took turns being fearful or just wakeful, and I thus had to take them out, soothe them back to sleep. So Sunday morning came, the wind eased up, and I was dying for a nap. So were the dogs. So I crashed on the sofa, as I often do.

Somewhere in there Roger called. Roger usually has little to say but chooses the most inopportune times to say it. Am I asleep? Check. On the highway? Check. On the can? Checkeroo. In the shower? Check and recheck. He's not a bad guy at all, but his timing is just terrible. So he woke me from my nap, we spoke briefly, and I went back to sleep, tucking my phone in the pocket of my sweatpants. 

OR DID I?

Because sometime later I awoke to my wife shouting and Izzy chomping away merrily on my iPhone right on the floor in front of me.

The good news is, he didn't completely break it, and he didn't get hurt. This is because I have broken a phone in the past by dropping it on the floor (yeah, real galaxy brain here) so I have an Otter Box to protect this one. The bad news is, he broke the Home button anyway. You can see the chomp marks around the button on the Otter Box. 

Those clever chaps at Apple have a workaround, though, and once I'd cleaned the slobber off the phone I discovered that my iPhone had self-diagnosed the breakage and put an on-screen Home button where I could use it. There is, however, no way to fix the actual Home button.

So, at my wife's urging, I did not punt Izzy like I was at my own five-yard line, but rather got on my laptop and ordered a new phone. I can use all the features on the old phone in the meanwhile, so Roger can rest assured that it will be taking his call next time I'm in the shower.  

Was it Izzy's fault? No, he's just a kid. Was it my fault for leaving the phone out? I think it may have fallen out of my pocket while I was sleeping, but if that was caused by the fatigue I was suffering, can I blame the windy weather? Or the makers of duloxetine? Or can I blame Rog, without whose call I would have left the phone safely where it was? 

It simply seems that these kinds of dumb expenses come right at the most expensive time of year. The credit card was already steaming, and now it's got to carry the freight for a new phone, thanks to my goat-like puppy. This is the kind of thing that makes people turn off the Grinch cartoon right as he's about to dump all the Who gifts off of Mount Crumpit and yell "That's a happy ending!"

Anyway, I'm blaming Rog. He can take it.

Bingle balls and whofoo fluff.

Trim up the tree with christmas stuff

Like bingle balls and whofoo fluff

Trim up the tree with googoo gums and bizzle-binks and wumms...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the Whos down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot. Why? Because they could just throw crap on a tree and it would stick. 

Who's Who among Whos of Whoville

Don't get me wrong; I love to decorate for Christmas. It's fun, satisfying, and gets great acclaim and gratitude. But what it doesn't get is help. For a variety of reasons, none emanating from me, I decorate alone these days. And it's very time-consuming. Everybody wants to see it; nobody wants to help. Unfortunately time is in short supply, especially as I am having to YES every job that comes my way to keep the wolf from the door. (I told the wolf I now live at Nancy Pelosi's place, but he doesn't believe me.)

One thing that's changed the dynamic is new puppy, Izzy. Izzmeister deals poorly with separation anxiety and makes high-pitched whines when left alone, which drives my work-from-home wife nuts. And I can't have him with me while I decorate, or he'd eat ornaments. Best-case scenario there, he poops tinsel but is otherwise unharmed. I've cut back on the overall decorating plan, since he can't be trusted near decorations. But I've also had to cut back on the opportunities to get the bizzle-binks and wumms up because he needs babysitting. So, the time is still crunched. 

I wish I could just 

Trim up the tree with fuzzel fuzz

And whiffer bloofs, and wuzzel wuzz

Trim up your uncle and your aunt

With yards of whofut flant

Which, in the Chuck Jones Grinch cartoon, is just hurled at trees and walls and ceilings and sticks beautifully. Not the case here.

🎄🎄🎄

Tangent: Is the Grinch microscopic?

Think about it. In Horton Hears a Who!, the presumably normal-size Horton the Elephant discovers that there is an entire civilization of Whos living in a dandelion or something. (I hated that story. Terrifying.) That civilization contains a town called Whoville. Does that mean that Mount Crumpit is also in the speck? Is the Grinch himself is so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye? Perhaps microscopic to the level of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's TEAM 0.5 electron microscope? Makes you think, doesn't it?

I don't know about what, but doesn't it?

In the meadow we can build...

 

Elves I have known.

Anyone can claim to know Santa Claus. "Sure, me 'n the big Ho Ho Homeister go back to when I was a little tot," one might say. And why not? Santa goes to every house that celebrates Christmas and dumps some gifts, he's available for visits in public shopping centers everywhere, and he even makes appearances at parties. He may be stealthy, but he's not exactly shy. 

I, however, can claim to have known a number of the North Pole elves, due partly to my work with the Elves Tool and Dye Union Local 34. They liked to have their meetings off premises where the bosses wouldn't be able to butt in, so they would go to one of the watering holes frequented by the Teamsters and other mobsters in the city. I met a few of them there. Most of them were lightweights, drinking wine spritzers and frozen daiquiris, but a few of them could hold their weight. 

Pretty typical scene at the end of the night.

Here are a couple dozen of the gang that I got to know over the years. Most of them were all right, but some, sheesh, you shouldn't meet in a dark alley. At least not if you're under two feet tall. 

Alex Zingy

Fat Joe (shop steward)

Splink

Frenzy McGee

Little Pierre

Stiiv McQuiin

Fat Joe Jr. 

Godzilla

Zesty McGee (a real knockout)

Pow-Pow

The Yuling Idiot (not sure what his real name was)

Hasty Puddin'

Elrond

Cornhole

The Situation

Meriwinkle (kind of quiet, drank sherry)

Texas Prairie Chicken

Flangepart

Pesky McGee

Fat Joe III

Rondo Hatton 

Peewee 

Little Peewee

Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Duck Bharma

Like I say, nice guys for the most part. However, Pow-Pow and Godzilla still owe me bail money. If you see them at the mall with Santa, let them know I haven't forgotten. 

Dog vs. CAT.

As you may recall, our beloved effervescent knucklehead Nipper was lost to us at the age of four last February, concluding the trifecta of February crap that has plagued us for the last three years ('19, concussion; '20; hospitalization for back injury; '21, sweet dog gone from lymphoma too soon). When we heard of another puppy available this past summer, we decided we had to get him, lest we lose our momentum and just get old with ol' Tralfaz (he's a story for another time). 

So we have Izzy, the baby who just turned seven months old, fresh as a yellow dandelion and bouncy as a crate of Tiggers, and guess what? I have to take him for a CAT scan on Monday. 

No, not that type.

Looks like hip and elbow dysplasia. This was all very surprising. We got him from a responsible person who checks back four generations for these kinds of conditions, since developing them at a young age usually means inheritance, and there was no sign of this. His eight littermates are perfectly normal. And we can't help but think his continued bad puppy behavior (biting, mostly) may be linked to the possibility that he's just in pain, even though he's now on the (non-cheap) painkiller/anti-inflammatory Galliprant. 

It all started when we noticed him limping in October, and now Monday morning I have to drive the poor dude to an animal hospital in Jersey to be sedated and have his elbows scanned. This following the $1,400 worth of X-rays he already got from our local vet. I will say, though, his upcoming CAT scan is about 10 percent of the cost of the ones I got when I was laid up in '20.

The lady we got him from is willing to take him back, full refund, but it's too late now. We love him, and his behavior is not a danger to himself or others, so we have to see this through. Wish us luck--when he is good he is very very good, and that's the boy we want to nurture and free from pain.

Where my head is. At.

Actually, this is pretty much the way I am all the time. Is it business? Busyness? Bidenness? Am I just so full of trivia that I can't make room for new data? I'm voting for the last option, as you can see.  

Christmastime is here!

 I'm back! And slightly lamer than ever!

ho ho ho

What a year this has been. So full of... Crap, mostly. But worry not! Your old friend Fred is here to try to pick up the thread on Your Daily Dose of Vitamin Fred. Why? Because you're showing signs of grippe, my friends, as well as catarrh and pox and housemaid's knee. All these are well known to be caused by a deficiency of vitamin F.

But mainly, because I missed you! 

In a nutshell, for those who have not followed the whine trail through the comments on the site of the Great Lileks, or just been personally close enough to hear me, we got a new puppy named Izzy in the summer and he is part cupid and part angel of doom. Mostly all dog, but there are issues beyond mere dogginess. Elder dog Tralfaz has not been well, but that's another story. There was a financial crisis, and much gnashing of teeth (gnash gnash). Which reminds me--I haven't been to the dentist in ages. So it's been a tough year. I'm sure I'll be addressing a lot of this stuff in bite-size pieces going forward.

I'm still crushed for time, as in under the famous Letterman 80-ton hydraulic press, so I don't think I'll be able to revive the Wednesday book feature anytime soon. If I do, I'll finally stop calling it the Humpback Writers. 'Twas a silly name.  

Anyway, that's all for today, and thanks for visiting. Going forward we can expect to see the usual snide remarks, dopey anecdotes, goofy commentary, and poorly rendered cartoons. Hope to see you around!