You Can Step On the Mean Ones

What is there about chasing after a slimy, saliva-covered, squeaky ball that holds such fascination for my Golden Retriever? Exhaustion is never a reason to stop, nor is the pain and bleeding from having ripped up the pads on the bottom of her paws. On occasions too numerous to count, she has been so laser-locked on retrieving a ball, that she has run head first into walls, cement columns, and the occasional Mack truck--hard enough that lesser beings would have been knocked out cold for days;  but she just shakes her little head and continues on, grabbing the ball, and bringing it back for more, while trotting on temporarily wobbly legs. We’ve even joked that if Comet were dead and buried two weeks, and someone walked over to her grave and squeaked one of her favorite balls, she’d find a way back just so she could run it down one more time. One thing my dog is not, is self-aware. What on earth would drive anyone to continue zooming around well beyond the point of pain? She needs to learn how to pace herself and enjoy life a little.

When I call Comet’s behavior an addiction, unlike most other things I write, this is not exaggeration.  A friend of ours who is a psychologist said it’s like chocolate for you or me (mostly me). But frankly, I don’t think I’d come back from the grave for anything less than Lindt Excellence Dark Chocolate With Chili--or maybe a good Godiva truffle...or Ghirardelli’s Dark and Sea Salt Caramel bar, and maybe the Limited Edition Dark Peppermint Bark Bar...and in a pinch, I’d settle for Junior Mints, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, or a Snicker bar...but not M&Ms because there is nowhere near enough chocolate in that pitiful little candy shell, nor a Tootsie Roll (I don’t even know whether that is supposed to BE chocolate, but it is brown and it has sugar in it)--because if there’s any drive stronger in my little brain than the Lindt Excellence Dark Chocolate With Chili Drive, it’s the Nap Drive, and death does seem like the ultimate excuse for a good nap. My will specifies that I am to be buried with a moderate assortment of Lindt bars and Godiva truffles, because I am way too lazy to come back and haunt anyone just to get some chocolate.

Which, by the way, is why I run--the part about chocolate that is, not the part about coming back from the dead. But truth be told, I also run because I enjoy it. No, really. I love being outside running in the warm, fresh air and sunshine, even when it’s rainy, cloudy, dark, or bitterly cold. I’ve run in rain, snow, sleet, and hail, with temps as low as the teens, although since moving to Florida, I’ve decided to draw the line at running in anything colder than about 64 degrees. There really is so much to love about running, including many well-documented benefits (meaning I saw them in print somewhere):
1. It’s great for your overall mental health, and it helps you feel good about yourself (except when people twice my age blitz past me like I was walking...backwards).
2. It burns fat and improves many other aspects of physical health: it’s good for your heart, helps with blood pressure, lessens the effects of asthma, and increases bone density, cures male pattern baldness and warts, decreases the buildup of earwax, and is a good substitute for flossing.

So what if running leaves me a little tired and sore sometimes?  Bursitis is no reason to cry--most of the time. Jogging with that air cast after I broke my foot was a little inconvenient, but as I’ve said, I crave the outdoors. I’ve only occasionally been chased by dogs, and that really mean one was in a stroller anyway. And what does it matter if I had to wear dark purple nail polish on my toes for 12 months straight because it was the only thing dark enough to cover the bruises...and later, the slightly unsightly look of the old dead nails growing out and sometimes falling off? Midnight Plum is lovely. And it’s really no big deal that I can now no longer sit for more than 11 or 12 minutes in a row without sharp stabbing pains exploding like lightning through my legs and butt.  Once I get going on a good run, having popped three or four Advil, the pain more or less subsides. And then my Nap Drive kicks in. Life doesn’t get much better than this! Eat a pound or two of chocolate, pop a few Advil, run a few miles, and take a big fat nap. If only Comet was a little more self-aware, like me....

On Cutting Employees and Other Nefarious Behavior

Being the civic-minded do-gooder that I am by nature, I felt impelled to brief both of my readers (in a not-so-brief fashion) on the latest health-law mandate update. I know that in the past I have gone to great lengths (meaning I have trouble with succinctness as a general rule) to reassure potential readers that my blogs have absolutely no resemblance to anything educational, helpful, beneficial, valuable, worthwhile, or instructive--and rarely to anything based in Reality.  However, I have decided that the following article fits those guidelines quite nicely, and may in fact severely impede brain function in the reader, or readers. What I lack in originality and clarity, I make up for in plagiarism.

On Monday the Treasury Department, in regulations outlining the Affordable Health Care Act, said many things which do not make any sense whatsoever. However, in an attempt at Appeasement Though Mathematics, they did say that companies with more workers than the companies with fewer could avoid some of the penalties in 2015 if they showed they were offering 70% of the coverage that 70% of the full-time employees, who were not employed by the companies with fewer than 70% of the uncovered insur-ees, would or should have been enrolled in if and when they understand, or understood this sentence, its grammar, its syntax, or its punctuation?

This carefully worded, not to say poetic, move came after employers pressured the Obama administration to peel back the law’s insurance requirements which, under the original 2010 law, stated mathematically, if not scientifically, that employers with the “equivalent of at least 50 full-time workers” had to either offer coverage to the equivalent person or persons or pay a penalty starting at $2,000 per worker, whether or not they were considered a person or simply the equivalent thereof, and ending somewhere after the completion of this sentence or the equivalent thereof.

To understand the economic and bureaucratic impact, it behooves us to list and/or enumerate more numbers, numerals, figures, and integers.  To put it simply, if not gnomically (which may or may not even make sense in this context), the new rules for companies with 50 to 99 workers would cover about 2% of all U.S. businesses, which include 28% of workers (although what 28% of a worker looks like, I shudder to imagine), or 7.9 million people according to 2011 Census figures and numerals, and companies with 100 or more workers representing a further 2% of businesses, which employ more than 74 million people, adding up to a whopping 81.9 million, which one then divides by 2% and then a further 2%, unless the rule of multiplicative inverse applies, in which case, many employers would begin trimming employees to the equivalent of 30%.

I believe that Neal Troutwinner, a vice president and lobbyist for the National Retail Foundation, expressed it best when he said, “I’m pretty....”

Finally it is noteworthy to note that Unidentified Senior Treasury Officials from the Department of Capitalized Titles stated emphatically that all firms should “consider the number of hours their employees worked, and whether they should be cutting them”! I would like to go on record as stating vigorously and vehemently that neither math nor politics nor poor grammar is no reason to injure persons, even if they are uninsured. 

If you care to join my rant, I invite you to do so, but only if you promise to have almost no idea what you are talking about, nor how to express what little you do with anything but unfeigned verbosity.

Do Ewoks Have Earwax?

The other day, as I sat with my Golden Retriever in a headlock, doggedly digging out her earwax, I confess that the thought crossed my mind, “How much could I get for this dog?” Okay, not really. That is usually the thought reserved for the many times I’m standing outside at 10:00 p.m. in the freezing cold (read: “anything colder than 59 degrees”), waiting for her to remember the meaning of the command, “For Pete’s sake!  Hurry up and go already! I’m freezing to death!” Which, of course, is followed by my turning a little green plastic baggy inside out over my hand so that I can retrieve what the retriever left behind. The things we do in the name of being responsible pet owners! By contrast, we briefly owned the dog from H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, Boomer. After standing outside with Boomer in the rain, sleet, and/or snow of a dark, bleak, dreary, miserable Indiana winter’s night, begging him to do his business, I would eventually give up and bring him inside. At which point he would hop right up onto the sofa and relieve himself there! 

My ambivalent feelings toward Comet are sad really, when you think about what a loyal and happy little thing she is. Which is why I try not to. I have even forgotten on occasion that I own a dog. In my defense (possibly), there was a time when my second child was a baby that I started to walk out of the house with a group of family and friends, and one person helpfully asked, “Aren’t you taking Spencer?” Oh! That’s right! I have another child! 

Now where was I? Oh yeah. Dog. Some would say it is a sign of Comet’s devoted love and affection that the thing she wants most in the Whole Wide World: is a garlic crouton...followed in a close second by an eternal game of fetch...and somewhere in the back forty is just to be near us. Ha ha ha, just kidding! The eternal game of fetch comes first. I commonly wake up from a nap, face to face with a slimy, saliva-covered dog ball perched on my belly or by my shoulder, and a pair of big brown eyes peering up over the side of the bed, or the sofa, or the hammock, waiting for any sign of life. I have more than once backed up in the kitchen and nearly killed myself falling over the dog, who is quietly and meekly licking the OUTSIDE of the dishwasher door (“I can tell you’ve touched this--after holding a crouton.”) And once, as I sat on the steps with my hands in my lap, Comet came over and pushed her nose between my arm and my side, and steadily inched her way forward until she had succeeded in draping my arm around her as though we were old friends. Um, I mean, “because we are old friends.”

On the upside:

1. She seems to genuinely enjoy our company...when she wants something. (Oh wait. I’m thinking about cats. Never mind.) And generally speaking, she does not argue, whine, or talk back.
2. Dogs are good for your self-esteem, meaning I feel slightly better about my morning breath when she’s around. But whether that is by contrast to hers, or whether that is because she seems to dig it, you, gentle reader, may decide for yourself.
3. We can always tell when it’s time to vacuum. (Hint: Every Day, multiple times a day.)

I like to tell myself that Comet is glad for certain aspects of our relationship: that we don’t dress her up as a dinosaur, a clown, or an Ewok for Halloween; that we don’t include her in family photos by the Christmas tree; and that we almost never carry her around in a small handbag. On the other hand, Emma has been known to try out some of her clothes on the long-suffering Comet--t-shirts (with a little knot tied in the side so Comet doesn’t trip over it--at least I think it’s about safety rather than fashion), polkadot knee socks, her green bathrobe, and a cute little paisley two-piece swimsuit with a ruffle skirt. If we occasionally have mixed feeling about the dog, I’m pretty sure Comet occasionally has mixed feeling about us.