Conversation with the exterminator

"I have ants," I said. "Can you guys come back?"

The appointment scheduler at my pest-control company is not my number one fan.

"Well, ma'am, I'll see what I can do. It's more effective if we can get into the house."

I, on the other hand, am not a big fan of strangers in my house, nor of waiting around for services. Nor, come to think of it, of chemicals sprayed in the interior.

"Can't you just do the windows and foundation again? I just realized that I didn't see him do the windows last time."

The noise she makes is best rendered in text as "hrrrmph."

"If you were there, you could have let him in and done the spraying on the inside. Then you wouldn't have ants now."

"If he had done the windows, maybe I wouldn't have ants. Let's try that first."

"Are you sure all of your food is sealed?"

"It's a small house, but I have not yet taken to storing food in the bathroom. They're after water in the shower."

Hrrrmph again.

"I'll see what I can do. If you let him inside, it'll take care of the whole problem."

"Hrrrmph."

Mortgage thoughts

So, I've begun planning to take on a considerable amount of debt in the next few years go to grad school in the fall of 2010.

Because I am me, this involves a considerable amount of gung-ho studying for the requisite entrance exams and an equal amount of freaking out the financial side of the equation.

It's kind of exciting to be in charge of my finances, to be all-but-the-house debt free, and to be socking away money for emergencies and so forth. (For the record, I highly recommend J.D. Roth's Get Rich Slowly blog, which was tremendously helpful, as was Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover.)

For fun, today I calculated whether I would be wise to refinance my home loan from a 30-year to a 15- or 20-year and/or put the $288 that I put toward my car payment each month into paying down the principle each month. If I don't refinance, but do pay down the principle, I'd own the cottage outright in 11 years. Wow. Wow.

And then I realized that any move toward grad school — even if I only go part time — is going to make that plan more complicated.

I'm torn: Would that $288 a month be better spent on books and school fees and all of that stuff (i.e., reducing the amount of debt I would take on for school), or would I be better off putting it into the house? It will, of course, depend on the interest rates of the student loan package (and/or grants) I can get, but it will also depend on how I can wrap my head around the idea of taking on more debt.

(For the record, I know that this is a laughably small amount of money to a lot of people, but those people are probably not considering a return to student status.)

I am clearly going to have to spend some late nights crouched over Excel spreadsheets, fiddling and figuring. If I needed proof about how different my life is now than it was three years ago, it's in the fact that I'm kind of excited by the prospect.

Mini-rant

You know, I love kids. I love other people's kids. I like to play with them, I like to talk to them, I like to babysit and change diapers and go to birthday parties and have little kids (and bigger kids, and teenagers) in my life. It makes for a more interesting world.

So, in the tense debate between parents and the deliberately child-free, I hang out in the DMZ.

I think the child-free who think children automatically shouldn't be allowed in certain restaurants are being unreasonable twits. (Well-behaved children should, in my opinion, be welcome everywhere.)

At the same time, parents whose screaming, rude children are turning a restaurant into their own, personal playroom are, in my opinion, an entitled plague upon society. (Babies are exempted from this, as are the children. It's all on parents, I'm afraid.)

But that's the tender subject of good manners. I'd rather talk about taxes.

Something about this particular Momversation has been irritating the hell out of me.

I think it's the part where only Heather Armstrong was able to acknowledge the degree of privilege that families receive in our society.

There's an argument for this: Families are the base unit of society. Our society's mechanisms for growth are immigration and population replacement through reproduction. We don't want to die out as a society, the family is a stabilizing unit, therefore the government will incentivize reproduction.

This is why I, a happy taxpayer who supports education, am paying for public schools at the national, state and county level (the county part would change if I didn't own my own home), although I do not participate in said system.

I did, however, benefit from tax dollars funding education when I was educated. I continue to benefit from having friends, neighbors and a labor pool with a common baseline of education.

What I, a happy taxpayer, do not appreciate, is that parents are so thrilled to overlook the fact that the majority of easily accessible tax credits are based upon having children. Child care tax credit. Tuition reimbursement. Credit for dependents.

This isn't money that we don't need. It's money that the government returns to you as an incentive for having kids. Fine. But it does (slightly) gall that parents get all huffy about anyone who harbors the teeniest resentment for being relegated to second-class taxpayer status.

By the way: I think business and government should be working harder to support families. I think work-life balance and family support are critical to our national economy. I don't think it should be an automatic assumption, though, that the child-free are the ones who ought to pick up the slack.

Automatic blog post

Aw. An American soldier is greeted by his dogs upon returning from Iraq. Of course I got misty and laughed.

Bulletin

Further bulletins:

1. After almost four years at the E-J, I've made a discovery: It feels like heaven in the server room at the office.

I've been cleaning out the newsroom closet (Cameras that use film! Yellowing letterhead from the '80s! Claris software! Sadly faded holiday decor!) so I can build a morgue for the weekly papers that are presently creating a dense and ever-growing fortress around my desk. People joke about how messy I am, but those people? Do not have newspaper gremlins delivering stack after stack of newsprint in willy-nilly piles upon their desks.

Anyway, I had to put the software from the closet somewhere (god forbid that we get rid of the old boxes of Quark v. 2.1), so I am stacking them neatly in the server room. Unlike the rest of our heat-gathering old warehouse of a news factory, it's really kicking out the conditioned air. You couldn't hang meat in there, but you could lock a city editor in for a few hours with a book and, between you and me, she would not complain.

2. I've been on three parallel reading binges: magical realism (think Alice Hoffman, Sarah Allen Addison), non fiction (highly recommended: "The New Kings of Non-Fiction," edited by Ira Glass, and also "What Would Google Do?"), and Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series (always highly recommended).

3. I trimmed my own hair this week (about an inch) and lost a pound and a half. (One hopes the two are unrelated, despite my sentence structure.)

4. Beau's foot is healed (so he has been released from the satellite dish, which will henceforth be called "the cone of shame," courtesy of the move "Up"). He has also been reintroduced to the barking collar, which seems to have curbed his desire to fence fight with the dog next door. Apparently it's no good running up and down the fence line, snarling and snapping, if you can't do it at full volume.

Smitty seems to suffer from miserable heat rash. (He's getting lots of baths with oatmeal-based shampoo. This would be a second misery for a slightly less affectionate dog, but he seems to regard it as super bonus petting time. Love that little guy.)

5. I have been eating a lot of popcorn lately. The popcorn hierarchy goes: Popped in big soup pot on stovetop; air-popped with butter; air-popped with margarine; microwaved.

Mini-bulletins

A few things:

• I have a new bike! And I love it. (See above.) I tend to ride around town in a skirt and heels, in part because that's what I wear most days, and in part because I once caught the leg of my Very Favorite Pants in the chain/derailleur of my bicycle and they were ripped into uselessness. I am now very paranoid about wearing pants while riding my bicycle.
  
• I have somehow managed to break the decorative carving on one of my dining room chairs (the old, black ones -- not the new, oak ones) and am now (a) in search of wood glue and (b) very pleased that my dad taught me some basic principals of woodworking and minor home repairs. Every kid should leave home knowing how to fix things.
• My mom is coming for a weeklong visit sometime in the midsummer or early fall. I am extremely excited about this, and it's not just because we completely organized my house the last time she came for a visit (New Year's).
• I have decided to sprout an avocado tree, which is a time-honored family tradition for the O'Donovans. To date, no O'Donovan has succeeded in this attempt, but MY avocado seems to be splitting itself and getting ready to do ... something. If I succeed at this, I think I need a trophy or a prize or something.
  
• Beau continues to wear a satellite dish on his head. He's getting better at navigating the house, but he's learned to use it as a weapon when he wants something from me and I'm ignoring him. The edges of those things are sharp and painful when a dog decides to bash you with them.
  Oh! I should also mention that his recent stomach ailment turned out to be no big deal and cleared up immediately after they got the right meds in him. So, yay. My old dog is not yet my old, incontinent dog.
  
• So far, my planned travels for the rest of the year are going to include: Madison, Wis.; Omaha, Neb.; and Baltimore, Md.
• I am reading a lot. There was a brief period in May when I departed from character and was hardly reading at all, but I have returned to my senses (and usual form) and am back to my library criminal ways.
  

Problems

I confess: While I was on my hands and knees, scrubbing stains out of my stupid beige carpet for the second time today, I wondered whether it's time.

I was ready for that question at Christmas. No. Not ready. But resigned. Beau was in terrible shape, unable to rise from the floor, dragging his back legs around, in pain and filthy from falling as he defecated.

I didn't want it, but I really thought it might be time to call the vet and carry Beau over there, one final time.

Does that seem coldblooded?

I have actually stared at the ceiling some nights, trying to figure out how I would manage his death at home. There isn't a coroner to call, no canine 911, and when one's dog weighs almost 100 pounds, there are practical considerations. How would I move his body? Could I bury him? Is that even legal? I know I can find the answers. I'm not sure I care to look.

I know I am not sentimental enough to want his ashes when he dies, just his picture and my memories of a very good dog. Nor do I see any great virtue in going deeply into debt for hip replacements, kidney repair, or tooth brushing.

And yet, I am sentimental in my way. The beige carpet -- so impractical for a dog lover -- covers hardwood floors. It would have been a thing of the past, but for Beau's bad hips. The carpet helps him grip, gives him traction to stand up. He never walks through the kitchen; the linoleum is too slick. To help him out, I've added bath mats in front of his food bowl and in a short path from my carpeted bedroom to the back door. It looks like hell, but my dog can live in this house.

In some ways, the fast decline this winter, so rapid that it frightened me into tears on Christmas Day, was a gift. He was in actual pain, unmanageable pain, and my growing conviction had nothing to do with my convenience and everything to do with what was best for Beau. It would have been hard but, in some ways, so very simple.

Today? Today, I was not noble. Today, I woke up to find my carpet reeking and stained, despite the three times I let Beau out last night. Today, I scrubbed the carpet before I had my coffee, gagging from the smell and calling my vet. ("Ulcers," they said. "Keep giving him the medication.")

Today, while I was at work, he chewed open the foot that has already cost me more than $700 in surgical bills. Today, he bled all over the carpet.

Today, I scrubbed the damned carpet again, just eight hours after the first round. Today, after I dressed his foot and contemplated the coming vet bills, I looked at him and said, "Buddy, I have about had it with you," and he lowered his tail and head.

In the middle of all of this, Himself called. We've been at total radio silence for weeks.

"Remind me again why I love this stupid freaking dog," I said.

I glared at that noisy, accident-prone, smelly old thing. As usual, he was looking at me, and his eyes were the same sweet, melting brown that they've always been, eager and curious. I felt guilty, but torn. The practical considerations still apply -- the limits of my budget and my patience and my ability to keep him safe and healthy.

And ... Every dog loves his person this much. They're just built that way. It isn't love, really. It's pack instinct.

But.

But this dog is not every dog. He's mine, and he's been stubbornly, hilariously, misanthropically present through some of the hardest parts of my adult life. Does it matter whether he knew it? Does it change what I think I owe him? Right now, while I type this, he has collapsed next to my chair, flat and panting and, yes, smelly.

"Well," Himself said cautiously, "he sits still and hangs out with you. He's good company. And ... and he loves you."

I looked at Beau, and at the empty can of carpet cleaner, and at the pile of filthy rags, and at the picture of him that I took three years ago when he was swimming in the Ocoee River, golden and happy and old even then.

"Damn it," I said. "You're right."