I realize saying all this makes her sound frail and many a family member and acquaintance have inquired as to whether or not I’ve though about putting her down. I have assured them that I will put her down the second I’m sure she wouldn’t figure out of way to hook me up to the juice instead. Which is to say, Lila is a fucking tank. Not in size or stature–she’s roughly 16 pounds–but in sheer will.

We recently switched internet providers, which meant we had to have an installer come over to free us from the tyranny of Xfinity’s paltry upload speeds. Lila is very friendly, but enthusiastic, so my plan was to lock her in one of her favorite rooms upstairs with some food and water. She doesn’t get to go in that room very often, so I thought she’d enjoy it. She didn’t.

Lila recently received a lifetime stair ban, because I watched her slide/roll down a flight of stairs and slam into the front door. She immediately got up and was ready to go outside for a walk, but I’m not interested in rolling the dice like that. So, lifetime ban.

The enforcement of the lifetime stair ban is carried mostly by two small shipping boxes kept on the first stair. Taking away any purchase her paws could get on the first step keeps her grounded, even if she sometimes scratches at the step just to make sure.

Though she used to love sleeping in the upstairs room, it turns out she only likes it when she goes there herself, not when I bring her there. When I shut the door, she started to make noises that made it sound like she was working on a one dog show about a Dickensian orphanage, so I opened the door to let her wander between the room and the bathroom with the mat she likes to lay/chew on. And to enforce the stair ban, I moved the shipping boxes to the top landing.

This was a mistake.

I put the boxes on the landing and went downstairs, Lila’s eyes just about peering over the top of the boxes. Then I saw her backing up. I screamed “Dog, don’t you fucking do it!” but again, she’s a dog and that doesn’t mean shit to her. Or maybe she does understand me, because she followed the letter of the lifetime stair ban if not the spirit.

She backed up, took a slight running start and jumped, almost clearing the shipping boxes, clipping her rear paw a bit on the takeoff. Lila, a 16 year old 16 pound ball of failing kidneys and hypertension tried to jump the entire staircase. The box threw her trajectory off, but she still cleared 7 or 8 steps before I did a long reach and caught her just as she was about to bounce off the 4th step from the bottom. I made sure her leg was okay and I hugged her, though she was interested in neither act. She just wanted to go outside. And I just want to sleep without seeing the hilariously horrifying image of a tiny dog flying down the steps towards me.

Multicourse Meals are Ableist

You can tell I’m bad at the business of writing, because I should have lead with the controversial hot take headline, but instead I’ve buried it second and I’m already trying to walk it back before I even explained what I mean.

Back when I used to go into the office, I was pretty good at weaseling my way into all kinds of dinners, some of them pretty fancy. I’d say up until 2013-2015 I never had a legitimate plated multi-course meal. Unlike Applebee’s and other chain restaurants that just want to get your fucking ass out of the booth, fancy meals often have a decent amount of space between courses. This is probably great for people who like to digest and pace themselves, but I eat on a timer.

I take at least 6 pills to digest food and between 12-16 units of insulin to process the carbs. Which means when I take the medication, the clock is ticking. It’s easy to add more pills to the process, though it may or may not be healthy AND the pills are fucking expensive. But the insulin is a one time deal: I take what I’m going to use and then I have to eat before it hits. Even now that I’m a work-at-home goblin, dessert in an hour isn’t going to work for me. Dessert now or I don’t get shit. Sometimes I’ll have ice cream before a meal and the salad after because that’s the way it has to go if I want to enjoy any of Tom Carvel’s gift to this world.

Of course, if I just avoided carbs altogether, none of this would be a problem, but I work hard for the insulin and goddammit I’m going to use it.

Things I Like

With the news of Tina Turner’s death, I decided to re-watch Beyond Thunderdome. The Thunderdome portion is tremendous, though the beyond is less so. But the real surprise was the opening song, a piece I had somehow completely forgotten over the years even though Tina won a Grammy for it. “We Don’t Need Another Hero”, which plays over the end credits, may be the “Thunderdome” song, but I’ll be goddamned if the opening track “One of the Living” isn’t my favorite Tina Turner song. I’ve listened to it a couple hundred times in the last week.