The God-Awful Bores

Happy to report that WeightWatchers has finally kicked and I lost weight this week.  Part of the reason may be stress since TootSweet had to have some cysts removed, and I went against medical advice and wisdom and did not allow the vet to dig out two probable cysts under his skin.

My reasoning is simple: If the two tumors are cancer and not seborrheic cysts, then the cancer has already spread and there is no point in subjected the dog to the procedure.  If it isn't cancer, nothing is going to happen to him by leaving the tumors there.  One has gotten smaller in size and become encapsulated, which doesn't happen with lymphoma (the most common kind of canine cancer).  Of course, it could be some other kind of cancer, but it is also a fact that standard poodles have a definite tendency to develop these cysts.  If he should have a cancer that is limited to just those two tumors, well, that will have been my mistake.

I almost never go against reasonable medical advice, but this time I did.  The Tooters is eleven years old and with the energy of a puppy, but if he has something serious, I'll know soon enough.  There are people who subject their dogs to chemotherapy and radiation in order to gain a few months of life, but the gain is for the owner, not the dog.  No animal should be subjected to chemotherapy unless you have a HUGE probability of curing the animal.  It is unlikely that pets suffer when sacrificed humanely, but you can bet your little butt they do suffer when subjected to chemotherapy, hair loss, etc.

On one of my WW message boards, with the theme of "Writers", a new guy has joined the group, a "Christian minister", no brand name given.  He has written a couple of "Devotional books", note that capital D, and he hopes we will check out his blog.  Fat, oh, so Fat chance that.  These purveyors of the word, or as they would say, the Word, have got to be the most boring people under the bright, hot sun.  They don't know it, of course, because they are so excited about having been saved that they think we haven't heard all this a million times before.  I can't think of a worse way to live than to slouch around wondering what sin you've committed today--does that extra piece of cake count, both in calories and sin?  Can I lust after Johnny Depp in my mind and get roasted in Hell for it?  It is always disquieting when someone comes up to you and claims to have foregone that chocolate fudge cake in order to support your dieting efforts.  Hey, I didn't ask for that, and if you think it puts me in your debt, you'd better think again--well, imagine the guilt trip when your figure of divinity says he sacrificed a child for you, and that child was tortured to boot.  The guilt alone would have you grovelling abjectly in the dirt, hoping against hope that your miserable, sin-ridden life will get the Big Reprieve--that being, of course, the reward for hauling around all that sinfulness from birth unto death and, in passing, making sure the word purveyors don't lose their jobs. 

Let's face it, if this guy's god was going to do him any favors, he wouldn't be fat.  He must writhe in misery at the idea of going to Hell for the sin of gluttony, poor bastard.

Keys to the kingdom

This morning, in spite of a bone-deep laziness, I took TootSweet to the park.  Once there, we warmed up for a kilometer and trotted a kilometer.  The Tooters behaved like a pro.  I walked toward home, planning maybe to leave the dog and go back to trot a bit more.  When I arrived at the front gate, I reached down to get the keyring attached to the dog's collar hook, only to find that the keys no longer formed a part of our ensemble.  Horrified, back I went to the park.  One of the team trainers offered to walk with me back to Narcissists' Corner, searching along the way.

Nothing.  We asked the other trainers at the Corner, looked on the bulletin board there where lost keys are hung (some had been there for weeks and weeks), but no sign of my keys.  I went home and left the dog--fortunately my husband was still there--and went back to the park to do a last search before calling for reinforcements to change the locks--four of 'em.

While I was searching, my son showed up.  He had finished his morning run, so I introduced him to my trainer.  Rodrigo will soon finish his master's degree and will have time to train again for half-marathons. 

When I told Rodrigo I had lost the keys, he had the gall to laugh.  He said it was just one more adventure of mine at the park.  He seems to think I'm the only person in town for whom the park is actually dangerous.  He may have a point.  Considering the times I've crashed and burned, tripped over my dog, had to fight off yowling beagles, and now this, well, there is a lesson here for us all. 

All I can say is that my knees are still holding up.

Shoot 'em dead, no matter who they might be

Anyone who wants a few moments entertainment should check out the NRA webpage.  They seem to be having a hissy fit over the movement to make gun shops register multiple assault weapons purchases along the border with Mexico, since the assault weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels mainly come from these sources--smuggled, to be sure, but purchased along the border.  The NRA tries to convince everyone the guns are coming from Guatemala, but hey, please, put down the Acapulco Gold and get real. 

You can certainly understand how they feel.  No red-blooded, big-dog Southern citizen wants to have home and hearth put at risk by having to register the purchase of machine guns, AK47s, bazookas, grenade launchers, ground-to-air missiles and other items necessary to stand off the....well, let me see...people ringing the doorbell?  Jehova's Witnesses?  A massive attack by...hmmmm...okay, a ravening, wife-raping gang of liberals, for example.  A bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth lawyers from the ACLU.  Or even, God forbid, some very pigment-blessed folks trying to register voters door to door.  The skin crawls at the danger, women swoon, men go around with solemn faces and glower determindly into the sunset while attempting to pull in that beer gut so as not to ruin the effect.

Who knows why they worry.  It is now legal to mow down that guy at the curb who gave your vintage Mustang a longing glance, as long as you claim self defense.  And that little girl two houses down in a brown uniform selling Girl Scout cookies...well, I mean, brown, for the love of Christ!  The very color suggests a nightime raid by some kind of mob determined to rip those stuffed animal heads from the wall and run off with them.  With that kind of danger looming, there is full justification for breaking out the bazooka and having at it.

You could stay up nights in a sweat just thinking about opening the front door to find an African American teenager standing there trying to get you on his newspaper route, or a Mexican gardener wondering if you'd like him to mow your lawn.  Nothing says "security" like a machine gun behind the door.

Nothing says "paranoia", either, as well, or "I've left the bonds of earth and now float several feet above Myrtle Beach, dressed in my cowboy outfit, because I stopped taking my medication."

The team picture

My training team got together at the park this morning with our new t-shirts and had our picture taken.  I think I managed to close my eyes for every shot.  Being shortest and oldest, I was in the front line.  Well, it was fun, no matter what I looked like!  And TootSweet was outstanding; our only problem occurred when an idiot with two untrained beagles on long leashes went by.  The beagles barked and went slightly mad, but I couldn't swear in court that the owner didn't bark too.

An article came out in a news magazine about the new "Christian right"; I didn't read it, I must confess, since I've had enough of Christians on the right to choke a hog.  They don't seem to understand the most basic precepts of their own beliefs, poor devils.  Starting with the fact that "Christian right" is an oxymoron, and in fact many of the said individuals are also morons.

For those who believe in the figure of Jesus, it should occur to them that he was a rebel of the first order, not some fundamentalist jerk trying to get people to believe the earth is six thousand years old and man walked with the dinosaurs.  Jesus didn't give a hoot how old the earth is.  He was much more concerned about not judging people because of their gender or occupation (Mary Magdalene, for example).  He was incensed at the economical exploitation of others, and he had the poorest opinion of the hidebound, the prejudiced, and the excluders.  The things that Jesus are supposed to have said make up an infinitesimal portion of the writings in the Bible; everything else is editorializing, politicizing, and pure fantasy.  As far as actual history goes, the accuracy of what Jesus is supposed to have said is no more reliable than the flood of "pieces of the True Cross" that circulated among the royalty during the middle ages and later. 

But among people who take him seriously, they should realize that he was an enemy of orthodoxy, yet they have now turned his figure into an excuse for out-Poping the Pope.  They are a form of American jihad, willing to sacrifice anyone who doesn't believe as they do, willing to subordinate half of humankind to the category of slaves devoted to reproduction--since this half of mankind, according to these people, has no right to govern its bodies or determine how they are to be used.  These folks are willing to accord a collection of cells incapable of living outside the body of the mother more rights than the mother herself, who is not a potential human being, but is one already.  Jesus never said a word about reproductive rights, by the way.  This stuff has been invented since his time and to serve other interests.

To end on a positive note, the NYTimes had an article last week about how Cheney's heart treatments have more or less followed the entire history of heart health.  Funny, isn't it, how someone like Cheney doesn't seem to have any trouble at all getting a heart for transplant while others have to wait unto death?  But, as one perspicuous reader noted in the comments section, settling the issue once and for all, Cheney's heart transplant is to be celebrated since he didn't have one before.

Ever onward, sort of...

There are many, many message boards and groups at WeightWatchers online, but one in particular has put its finger on the problem: It is a group of short gals who "only" have 20-25 pounds to lose.

Not only is it harder for short people to lose weight, but the less you have to lose the harder it gets also.  The WW program (it is excellent, let's face it) has a number of ways to allow the obese to manage their weight loss program without getting sideswiped by terrible cravings: You are allowed a number of food points per week that you can chose to use for desserts or whatever your weakness happens to be, and you can also use your exercise points in exchange for food.  This is fantastic if you are a million pounds overweight, but if you are only a little overweight, use those points and you'll wind up fatter than when you began!  I know, I used them last week and gained back half of what I lost. 

Meanwhile, TootSweet is swiftly becoming the smartest dog on the planet.  Perhaps I exaggerate slightly, but not much.  We have a training session this afternoon, and he has already learned to turn right and left on command, stop, sit, stay, heel...The trainer is proud of him, and it is fun to have a long walk with an obedient dog and a trainer who can discuss any topic under the sun (he's from Mexico City, where mental agility is necessary for survival).

I am off to find danged batteries for my camera, some that will actually work.  And tomorrow, horror of horrors, my training team gets its picture taken, and I'm supposed to be there.  It's ridiculous, all I have managed to do is buy my running shirts, on the outside hope they will work magic and make me run like the wind.  Only a tornado would accomplish that particular feat, and then only if it manages to engulf me...

Nature strikes back

First of all, to my astonishment, I've lost weight this week, much more than I would have thought.  At least is serves as motivation to keep on.

On Saturday we went to the quinta and stayed overnight.  Sunday morning, in the cool of the front porch under a lazy ceiling fan, I began to wax poetic in my mind about Nature.  The sky was a washed, water-color blue, clouds of butterflies (pale green, yellow, orange, white) jostled with hummingbirds around flowering shrubs and the rose bush, high in the air hawks glided gracefully, dipping and soaring, and the horses grazed calmly in a far field.

As if it weren't reality aplenty that there were enough cattle ticks around to supply a major feed lot, and when the wind was right the eau de steers knocked us off our feet, as I sat there ignoring these minor inconveniences, a dove suddenly came whipping under the porch roof and tried to land on my head.  Discovering at the very last minute that the landing place was a living creature, in a frenzied flurry of wings and feathers that caught in my hair, it took off again.

That was all it took to break up the moment of poesy, by dang!  My main concern was whether it had pooped on my head.  That it hadn't seemed almost miraculous.  (I have a long history of being pooped on by birds...)  It also confirmed my opinion that doves are unbelievably dumb and it is amazing there are so many of them.  They are the last birds to get out of the way on a road or highway and the only ones my cats caught often enough so as to supply themselves with a complete meat diet.  Every other kind of bird in our yard seemed to know exactly where the cats were hiding out, except for the doves.  The starlings would even flutter around scolding the cats, sounding warnings, or occasionally divebombing them, but doves don't seem to speak starling.

No poetry, but poetic justice, I suppose, considering that I fed my dog braised dove breasts the other day.

Dog Days

The hour set for dog training couldn't be better for our purposes: There are what seem like hundreds of people up and down the running path, and plenty of pooches.  TootSweet did quite well, in fact, not once actually trying to pull off in another direction, although it cost him quite an effort.  There are some really good tricks this guy is teaching me, too, on how to calm the dog down; now if only he will get in his order of collars, I'll be able to take Toots with me in the morning without dislocating my right elbow.

We passed a woman jogging who shouted a salutation to the trainer and said she couldn't wait until her dog looked as obedient as the Tooter.  With a rather cynical laugh, the trainer told me it would be a warm day in Hades when that finally happened; the woman has an Italian greyhound fueled by atomic energy, and it ricochets off the walls of her home.  He said the dog can be trained but it will take a long and determined effort plus a massive amount of regular exercise (no wonder the woman is running, she's got to get in shape for the dog). 

On this morning's very short walk/run for me, sans the dog, it again looked like rush hour in Seattle.  Either I'm going to have to get out there earlier, God knows how, or later when in the summertime I'll pass out from the heat and wind up hospitalized.  Waking up very early is not an issue, but people with fibromyalgia get up in the morning as if rising from a particularly severe train wreck in which they have fully participated by being hit by runaway derailed cars.  I don't even know what shape I'm in until after my cup of coffee, when my senses manage to fire up a bit and let me know which parts ache, which parts are okay, and which parts are probably missing.  I figure that in order to hit the park around five-thirty at the latest, I will have to have my caffeine infusion around 4:45. 

Somehow I've got to manage it or the summer is going to be a total loss.  The Tooters also needs to avoid the worst of the heat, and the more people on the running path, the greater the amount of information you overhear that you really don't want to hear at all.  This morning, for example, a couple of old codgers about my age trotted past me as one mentioned that he has varicose veins of the nose.  I wasn't feeling particularly good this morning anyway because yesterday I had a migraine and had to dose myself with a strong medication, but the overheard remark ended my desire to keep on.  I felt slightly sick, because in my altered mental state (thanks to the medication), I imagined some kind of nasal hemorrhoids.

I went home then, but perhaps that was a mistake.  I should have continued on, hoping that some other grotesque physical ailment would be revealed in random conversation, something that, by God, would put me off my feed.  Because ever since I've been on WW, no matter how delicious the recipes (and they are), each day I get hungrier and hungrier.  That would be fine if I were losing weight, by dang, but as it is, I am nearing the point of cramming every single one of the points allowed each day into one meal.  But stay tuned.