All of the Furs

I'm an animal lover.  I grew up with cats, once had a gerbil for a couple of years, and generally become enthused by all beasts with fur or feathers.  (And pigs.  And the bald versions of cats and guinea pigs, even though they look kind of weird.)

Unfortunately, Ken is allergic to all such creatures.  The fuzziest thing I get to pat in my house is my African violet.

(Apologies to Reed's Greenhouse for using your photo, however no other photograph captures the fuzziness of African violet leaves as effectively as this one.)

Because I am chronically pet-deprived, I'm a sucker for any opportunity to interact with animals.  I restrain myself from interrupting dog-walkers on their rounds, but it's not easy.  Even more challenging, my closest cat-person friends have a gorgeous kitty with silky soft fur... who absolutely detests being touched by anyone other than her immediate family.  You can't put a hand anywhere near her without getting hissed at.  :-(

Imagine my irrepressible glee when I heard about the Canadian Pet Expo!  Not only do they offer displays of cats, dogs, rodents, birds, and reptiles, attendees are welcome to bring their own pets, so long as they sign a waiver at the door.

Of course, most people brought dogs.  There were literally hundreds of (leashed) dogs in the building, sniffing each others' bums and frequently piddling on the floor with excitement.  (There were staff designated specifically to deal with this.  They wandered around with paper towels and disinfectant, cleaning up piddle puddles.  What a job.  I saw one dog in the midst of a poop accident, to the chagrin of the piddle police.  What can you do?  Poop happens.)

One little girl, I'd say around nine years old, brought a small, black cat on a leash.  The cat wasn't freaking out, but it's also fair to say that it wasn't relaxed.  

Someone else brought a pet pig in a special stroller.  The pig was around the size of Babe, and had a similar Mona Lisa smile.

Within Toronto city limits it's not legal to keep a pig as a pet, so people were going nuts over the pig in the stroller.  The woman who was pushing it around couldn't stand still for more than five seconds without drawing a crowd of would-be pig-patters and selfie-seekers.  The pig didn't seem to mind.  The woman ignored the hangers-on, more or less.  If I had been in her shoes I would have been annoyed by all the attention, but to be fair you can't bring a pig to a pet expo and not expect to be followed around like the Pied Piper.  

And now, here are some photos that I didn't steal.

"I would like to smell your phone please."

Beautiful Bengal cat.

"Why would anyone want a skinny pig when they could have cutie pies like us?"

This guy had the softest ears.

Miss Fuzzy-Face here was very friendly.

*snorty breathing*

Bull mastiff; weighs more than me.

This young kangaroo was so done with humans.  I'm pretty sure I heard him mutter to one persistent woman "Eff you and your endless attempts to get a roo selfie, mate."

And there you have it!  My compulsive need to pat furry beasts has been satisfied... for now.  

One Stitch

TGIALW.  (Thank God It's A Long Weekend.)  This week was...  I can't even.  Dentist appointment.  Angry clients at work yelling at me, followed by angry staff yelling at each other.  Step-dad-generated unnecessary drama: two incidents, on Wednesday and Thursday.  Generally depressing weather following by an ice storm.  Hormones.  Existential angst.  Etc.

Alongside all that, I had my annual, dermatological mole check.

**If you are LL Cool Joe, you are officially excused from reading the rest of this post, as it contains some medical details which could give you the heebie jeebies.  Everyone else will probably be okay; it's not super-gross.**

I have never minded going for my mole check, because there's nothing to it.  Show up, put on a paper gown, get looked over by the nice lady doctor, get dressed, and go home.  No injections, no blood draws, nothing invasive or embarrassing.  Until this time, obviously.

Last year she took a photo of a funky mole on my left arm that's shaped like a donut.  This year it had gotten a little darker.  She looked at it through a magnifier and pronounced that it looked "completely fine", but that she'd like to take it off just to be safe.

"Lie down on your right side, and I'll grab my sharpest knife so that I can gouge that sucker out of your skin right now."  I am paraphrasing, but that's the essence of what she said.

What could I do?  People have died of melanoma on both sides of my family.  When the dermatologist tells me that she wants to cut me, I'd better go along with the plan.  Dammit.

It didn't hurt.  I got a local freezing, and after that I couldn't feel a thing.  That didn't stop me from having an anxiety attack, because that's just how I roll.*  The doctor was super-sweet to me.  She put a cold cloth on my forehead, got me a cup of water, and patted my leg maternally.  When I continued to shake, sweat, and hyperventilate, she asked her just-as-nice receptionist to come and keep me company so that she could move on to her next patient.  The receptionist gave me cookies, and did a great job of distracting me from myself so that I could settle down.

*I did warn the doctor, before she even gave me the local freezing, that I might go faint on her because of my medical phobia.  It's not within my control once I get triggered, but at least she had fair warning.  I do what I can with soothing self-talk, but I can only prevail for so long against my hyper-terrified subconscious and clearly very effective adrenal glands.

I survived, finally got my act together, and fled the office, with instructions to get the stitch removed in ten days.  The teeny-tiny wound isn't sore unless I accidentally knock it against something.

Now I am minus one dot, which is weird.  All my life I have been accumulating brown spots.  I have never lost one before.  I wonder if my arm will look significantly different to me without it.  RIP dot! You will be missed.

The Dad Bod

The last time I wrote about my step-dad, I complained that he was sleepy, forgetful, and occasionally confused.  I thought that he might be suffering from a sleep disorder.  Turns out it's congestive heart failure.

He had an episode a couple of years ago during which his feet and ankles swelled up, and he had to take a course of diuretics.  Then he decided that he was fine.  He never followed up with his cardiologist.  Of course the diuretics didn't cure his heart problem; they only treated the most visible symptom.  His heart failure progressed.  He should have continued to take medication on a long-term basis.  Instead, he neglected to visit a doctor until last month, when he was so weak and tired that he could barely walk up a flight of stairs.

He thought that he had asthma, which he has suffered from in the past.  Actually, it was pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation in the lungs), which was slowly suffocating him.  No wonder he looked 75% dead.

He finally went to see a cardiologist and a respirologist, who scolded him and put him back on diuretics.  He'll be on a high dose until he's less waterlogged, then he can go on a maintenance dose.  It's not a quick process.  I just saw him for the first time in three weeks, as long as he's been taking the medication, and he still looks 50% dead.  He's up and shuffling around, but he gets winded after a few steps, and he's noticeably pale.

The hardest part is that he makes it harder.  He goes into denial.  He puts off seeing doctors.  He won't let my mother take charge of his appointments.  He insists on driving himself to the appointments he does attend, although I believe that, in the state he's in, he's not fully alert behind the wheel.  He also tries to hide his illness from people, but that's just crazy.  Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that he hasn't just got the flu (which is one of the excuses that I've heard him make for his fatigue).

What can we do, my mother and I?  Take it day by day.  We tell people and then tell them to pretend that they don't know, so that he won't be upset.  (We're telling certain people who should know for his own safety, in case he collapses in their presence and they need to have information for first responders.)  I asked the cleaning lady who is at his office in the evenings to keep an eye on him if she ever finds him there alone.  She was very understanding.  "I have a father too.  I know how it is." she said.

We put as much pressure on him as we feel that we can without triggering his rebel-without-a-cause impulse to dig his heels in and be contrary.  I asked him yesterday to please give my mother permission to make an appointment for him with a general practitioner, because he hasn't seen a family doctor in a dog's age or longer.

In the final analysis, he's still a responsible adult who will have to live or die with the consequences of his own choices.  If he ends up dying sooner than was technically necessary, I refuse to feel guilty.  We can only do as much as he allows us to do.  He'll be as stubborn as a mule until his dying day, whenever that comes.

Food, friend, or foe?

It's not always easy to discern the difference between food and not-food.  Here is evidence:

Dog or bagel?

Shar Pei or croissant?

Labradoodle or fried chicken?

Chihuahua or blueberry muffin?

Shar Pei or towel?

Admittedly, towels aren't food.  However.  I think I've made my point.

Segue to: the Jelly Belly candy company's product called Beanboozled.  The flavour menu on the box looks like this:

You picks a colour and you takes your chances.  

A co-worker friend of mine bought some for her kids at Christmas, but after about 5 minutes of taste testing, the kids were done.  My friend brought the two leftover boxes of crazy beans to work with her, to see if anyone would try them.  There were a couple of brave souls who took the plunge.  One guy was so grossed out by the mere thought it that he started retching and had to leave the room.  She didn't manage to give very many of them away.

So guess who got a whole box of these babies to take to Game Night?  This gal right here.  

Flavours vary from one one "edition" to the next, so my set didn't contain any Skunk Spray/Licorice or Moldy Cheese/Caramel Corn, but the remaining flavours quite were sufficient for our purposes.

If only I could share the videos I made...  But sadly I cannot, because ANONYMITY.  So you'll have to settle for a recap.

Toothpaste was the least offensive.  It's just strong mint.  Our box held very few pale green beans, and all of them were lime, no grass clippings. :-(  Even more disappointing, we got plenty of tutti-frutti, but no stinky socks!  Come on, beans, you should let us try at least one each of all the horrible flavours.

Baby wipes were in there, convincing but not too disgusting.  Booger was slightly worse.  "Salty", was how it was described.  We didn't find any rotten eggs, but there were some leftover beans at the end of our experiments, and some of them were yellow, so they might have been in there, lying in wait for us.

The worst two were canned dog food (super-smelly!), which made one of the kids almost puke; and vomit, which Ken described as "unpleasant".  "Like someone ate durian, threw it up, and mixed it with sugar, and I'm eating it."  I offered him a tissue, however, he wouldn't spit it out.  He bravely ate his whole vomit bean, and then complained that it was stuck in his back teeth.

I didn't eat any.  My excuse is that I was too busy doing the video.  Pretty good dodge, right?

Would you try these?  Which flavours would you risk?

Safety First

So.  Passwords.  Are a pain in the butt.  Despite the fact that I completed training as a computer network administrator; despite knowing full well that one is not supposed to use the same password for multiple websites... up until last week I was using the same password almost everywhere.  Including online banking.

I know, I know...  I should be ashamed of myself!

In my defense, at least it was a strong password.  It wasn't secret or 12345678 or my middle name.  It was 8 digits long, not a dictionary word, and easy to remember.  Like, you could easily remember the words to the song "Baa baa black sheep", and turn it into a password like this: Bbbs3bags.  My password was similar.

Fortunately, this is not a sob story about having my checking account hacked.  I was saved from learning my lesson the hard way by the miracle of password management software.  I ran across an online article comparing various apps, and 3 hours' worth of research later I decided to implement one.

A password manager allows you to use a different strong password for every site without having to remember them all.  The app can generate the passwords for you, or you can create them yourself. They are stored in an encrypted database.  When you log into your web browser, you also log into the app, and it fills in your usernames and passwords for you as needed.  You only need to remember one master password, for the password management app.  Mine is 21 characters in length, so it would be almost impossible to crack it by brute force (i.e. trying every possible combination of characters until you find the right one).

The benefit of this is that if any one of your websites is hacked, and the hackers discover your password, they can't use it on any other website.  For example, if my LL Bean online shopping account were revealed, the hackers couldn't then get access to my Facebook page (not that I would care much about that), or my bank account (about which I would care extremely).

The password management software itself is as safe from being hacked as it's possible to be with current technology.  They use a high level of encryption, which means that the above-mentioned brute force method would not be very effective at revealing users' data.  Also, on the off-chance that hackers managed to crack the encryption on one account, they wouldn't automatically have access to the entire database, because it is "salted", which is a jargony way of saying that every customer has their own slightly customized key to the vault.  Unless a determined hacker in possession of a powerful supercomputer (or the network equivalent thereof) were to go after me personally, I should be pretty safe.

I should mention that not all password management providers keep a database of their clients' passwords.  Many of them give you a database that you store locally, on your hard drive. You are responsible for backing it up yourself.  That type of program requires some effort to sync the database between all the locations where you are using it.  Being lazy, I opted for LastPass, which keeps a database "in the cloud" so that my work computer, my home computer, and my smart phone are synchronized automatically, and I don't have to worry about backups.

It was a bit of a pain in the butt to set up.  The installation process was easy.  Adding all my websites and then changing all the passwords to randomly generated character strings was a headache.  In order to assuage the anxiety I felt upon no longer "knowing" all my passwords, I was able to export the database and print it.  If the LastPass servers ever crash, I won't be SOL.  I'm keeping a copy at home in my fireproof safe.  (As soon as I completed the printing process, I deleted all the unencrypted text files from my hard drive immediately, in case you were worried about that.)

Now that the app is fully up and running, I'm feeling pretty good about the software, and much more secure in my online presence.  This is my PSA to you guys to encourage you to do the same.  LastPass, which was my choice, costs $1 per month, but you can also find free and open-source password managers.  Are any of you using password management software already?  If so, which one, and how do you like it?

Saks comes to Toronto

The new Saks Fifth Avenue in Toronto opened last week.  Ken was psyched to check it out.  Boy, is it ever fancy!  The pedestrian walkway between Saks and the Toronto Eaton Centre got a facelift.  Those are real plants, and the light fixtures are crystal chandeliers.  Oh la la!

You thought that Holt Renfrew (Canada's homegrown luxury department store) was upscale?  Saks takes it to a whole new level.  There were designer brands that I'd never seen or heard of before, and I hope they have defibrillators on site because sticker shock is going to give someone a heart attack.

I recommend clicking on these photos to see the big versions of most of them, for the details.  

See this unassuming little handbag?  Check out the price tag.  $ 2,710.00!  (That's Ken's manly hand.)

The mannequins are unimpressed.

There was the requisite perfumery, complete with one vendor who would assist you in mixing your own custom perfume blend, if you couldn't find anything you liked among the hundreds of pre-packaged options. 

The bottle on the left is a sesame-based scent.  That's different.

In keeping with high fashion's commitment to promoting unreasonable standards of beauty, the mannequins were approximately seven feet tall. (And size zero, of course.)

Men's shoe section: $500 flip flops.

Women's shoe section:  $1000 for unwearable heels.

Shoes made of plastic: $330 I can't even.

Dolce & Gabbana's O fell off, and couldn't be quickly replaced because a customer ran off with it.  Maybe they thought they could sell it for a profit on the street.  

There were eye-catching light fixtures in almost every department.  This was my favourite.

Finally, there was a ton of bling.  Diamonds everywhere you turned.  We were given a demo of the Happy Diamonds watch, which must be seen in motion to be fully appreciated.  So much sparkle - very flash!  What time is it? *checks wrist*  Oh, it's time for diamonds, again.  (It's always time for diamonds.)

If you have a personal assistant to keep track of the time for you, you could instead buy this bracelet for $50,000.

And that concludes our tour of Saks Queen Street.  No purchases were made, although I did quite like a pair of diamond pavé hedgehog-shaped earrings.  They were $8,000.  OMG.  However, we had a good time!  It was an intriguing adventure. 

She Calls, I Run

I arranged to see my 99-year-old grandmother, Bubbe, on Friday.  Setting up the visit was a shout-fest, as are all telephone calls with Bubbe, due to her deafness.  She has hearing aids, but most of the time they are not in her ears for one reason or another.  However, I was pretty sure that I had gotten across to her that I would be arriving for tea and a chat sometime after 7 pm.

After work I went to a mall that's four blocks away from Bubbe's home, to run some errands.  At 6:57 pm I was at the post office, buying stamps for her, when my cell phone rang.  It was Bubbe, all in a panic.  "Where are you?" she wanted to know.  She was breathless with anxiety.  "I'm 15 minutes away from you," I yelled, then mouthed "thank you" to the clerk who was handing me my change.  "I said I'd be there after seven, and it's not seven yet."

"But it's dark out!  I forgot that it would be so dark at this time of night!  How will you get here?"

"I can walk to you in 15 minutes.  20, tops."

But Bubbe was having none of that.  She didn't want me setting even one toe outside without a chaperone.  "Get in a cab!" she command-pleaded.  "Call a cab - it's dark!  I'll pay for it!"  She wouldn't let me off the phone until I promised.

I'm going to admit to you guys that I broke my promise, because honestly I felt that her fears were unreasonable.  I'm not a big fan of cabs.  I'll take them when I need to, but I'd always rather walk.  It's a hassle to call one and then wait around not knowing when it will show up.  Plus, I was at this big mall that I always get lost in, and the cab would probably go to the wrong entrance etc.

Instead, I ran.  I was carrying three bags and my down parka;  and I was wearing big, heavy snowboots; and I ran through that mall like my tail was on fire.  Well, I'm not in such super cardio shape that I could sprint, but it's fair to say that I jogged and/or speed-walked pretty aggressively.  I sweated, and cursed my awkward packages and elephantine boots, but I didn't slow down until I was at Bubbe's door.  I was in such a hurry that I didn't hear my phone ring as Bubbe tried to call me two more times while I was en route.

When I arrived at Bubbe's apartment, the door was unlocked, so after knocking and announcing myself, I went in.  She hadn't heard me, and was standing at her front window, intently watching and waiting for a cab to pull into the parking lot.  Good heavens, Bubbe!  She had herself so wound up.

To say that she was relieved to see me is the understatement of the year.  She has never been the type to get anxious, but now that she is becoming more helpless with each passing day, I can understand why she gets caught up in episodes of dread.  She was feeling incapable of protecting me from the existential threats that lurk everywhere in her consciousness.  (When she's not facing yet another distressing physical challenge - like the increasing difficulty of tying her own shoelaces* - or discouraging doctor's appointment, she watches too much bad news on TV.)

*(For the record, I did offer to find her Velcro-closure shoes, but she's not interested.  If it takes her 20 minutes, she's going to tie her own shoes until it becomes literally impossible.)

I settled her down and made some tea, and soon enough we were eating cookies and catching up on each others' news.  But still.  Visiting with her both fills and breaks my heart.  If only I could make life easier for her. Or maybe what I mean is that I wish I could make death easier for her; she's headed there by agonizingly slow but sure inches.  She just wants to get it over with already, and I understand why.

I was buying stamps for her because the last time I visited I thought I was being clever by sneaking away before she remembered to pay for my cab fare.  I underestimated how important it is to her to make the gesture.  The following week, I got an envelope in the mail with a cheque inside, and this note:

Not only that; she hadn't any stamps at the time, but managed to scrounge one from a SASE sent to her from a fund-raising group.  Then she wrote the note, the envelope, and the cheque with her numb, arthritis-hampered hands.  That is how determined she was to get that $20 to me.  I will never try to sneak out without cab fare again.  I will hand her her purse and request it, if need be, to make sure that she doesn't go to all that trouble again.

If there's anything that's not fading as she ages, it's her determination and willfulness.  Those traits will die when she does and not a moment sooner.  God bless her stubborn heart!