Tag Dog

Shopping Math Again

Michael 9 Comments

I’ve written a couple of times about shopping math problems. They started here. If you have a minute, bounce over there and refresh your memory. I’ll wait.

Back so soon? Now you have an idea of what I faced again, not once, but twice last week, the one week in the year when I really want to give my brain some time off. I mean I had already gone through a harrowing experience trying to decide if a wine bottle gift bag that comfortably holds a 750 ml wine bottle, will it accommodate a 32 ounce emotional support water bottle. (It doesn’t and it won’t.)

I was in the pet supply aisle of the local super-duper market (one notch below mega-mart) trying to determine which doggie doodoo waste bag offering was the best buy. It brought back visions of those toilet paper math fevers I used to experience. (I’ve since rid myself of the need to do toilet paper math shifting to Who Gives a Crap mail order toilet paper. Good stuff and I don’t have to figure out nothing because it’s on auto-order) (Not an ad but if they want to thank me with a complimentary case or two, I have closet space.)

But back to the bow wow bags. I could get 120 bags for $15 or 270 bags for $14. Something didn’t seem right there. Did the cheaper bags have holes in them? On the other hand, at better than a dime a bag it seemed like a lot just to hold you-know-what. Here’s 4 rolls of 15 for $7 and they are compostable. That seems important considering what’s going in them is future compost. What about the purple ones? Their cheaper still but wait, they’re 2 rolls of 25. Hmm…

Why did I ask my daughter if she needed anything at the store? It’s her dog. Let her figure out toilet paper math for canines. But she was doing dog math of her own. And when I finally settled on a leash attachable dog waste carry-all (the multicolor, compostable, unscented 4 rolls of 30 for $8), I was asked to help settle her current conundrum.

You recall Jungle, her canine companion of the recent cancer diagnosis and front leg amputation. He’s doing as well as he can be but is beginning new drug therapy which like all things pet related, costs more than what everyone I know spends on their children today. Anyway… the question was does she spend $X on a bottle of 15 tablets, a 5 week supply  from a mail order pharmacy who doesn’t take her dog’s insurance (yes…) but will reimburse her 50%. Or should she spend $1.75X on a bottle of 30 from the local pharmacy, who take her insurance but her copy is $1.2X. Then we also took into consideration that the mail order pharmacy will take gift cards that she can buy at the local super market and get shopper points that will turn into discounts totaling X/10 that she can use to buy dog food (or dog waste bags if she wants a really really large number of them.).

We never did come up with a good answer to that question and decided to use the mail order pharmacy because it involved the most steps so by logic it had to be the right choice.

All things considered, it was nice to do something together for an afternoon.

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Are you looking for ways to spend time with loved ones. The new year is a good time to resolve to do just that. You can join in with us at ROAMcare as we prioritize sharing  our most positive moments with our loved ones. Read how we’re doing that in the latest Uplift.

 

It’s That Time Again

Michael 15 Comments

Yep, it’s time again to clear some of the cobwebs and other unwanted things and thoughts rattling around in my brain.

I’m happy to report to you this week that Jingle, aka the yointer, had his surgery last week and is recovering nicely. You will recall due to an osteosarcoma he had his left, front leg and shoulder amputated. The surgery was last Tuesday and by Sunday he is bounding up and down stairs (against his vet’s wishes for a quiet, and not overly exerted rehab. Try telling “don’t do that” to a dog.)

In other news, I hope everyone who has has hurricanes and tornadoes pass through their yards over the last couple weeks is well, not injured, and can take a few deep breaths while working on restoring life to normal.

The weather along the east coast reminded me of a favorite gripe of mine. Why are airlines so freaking stupid. There were flights from Nashville to Dallas delayed because Tampa was closed. What genius decided “we’re going route all our flights through and park all our planes at airports all along the coast so that at the first hint of weather, whether hurricanes in the south or ice storms in the north, we can cripple the entire country’s air traffic. [evil laugh].” There are perfectly good airports at Pittsburgh Cleveland, Cincinnati, Nashville and other inland cities that are relatively weather safe and could serve as eastern hubs, but no, they have to pick an airport within sight of the ocean. Delta made a little more sense sticking with Atlanta. If only they weren’t Delta they might actually be able to keep an on-time schedule going.

Speaking of airlines, has anybody seen jeenie.weenie on either Instagram or YouTube? She’s probably on other sites too but those are the two I know for sure. (Hey, I don’t make up these peoples’ handles, I just write what I see). Jeenie is a current or former flight attendant and has some of the most “scratch your head and say dayam, if they ain’t right” posts about stuff, mostly air travel, but other things too. It really makes you think about how we really do that crap. Here’s a link to a random YouTube video.

That’s all I have for this week. It’s been a a little crazy but slowly getting back to normal. What would really help is if all the particularly stupid people running for office would stop sending me text messages about how dangerous, extreme, and radical their opponent is, I’d have lots more time to get things back to normal.

Oh, that reminds me…I put this little news nugget out there every couple of years and nobody believes me, but this year I have proof. Do you know political ads do not have to stick to the truth? Yes, not only can politicians lie, they are allowed to lie. Below is a little snippet from the paper (a real news newspaper) to a television columnist’s weekly Q&A column. Yes, politicians can lie, and stations must run it, if the ad is from the politician’s campaign. Third party ads can’t lie. Politicians themselves can. How can you tell the difference? If the ad includes the words “I’m [an old guy with a bad fake tan] and I approve this message” or something like that, it is a politician’s own political ad and it is also a good chance that it is a lie.

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See you next week, same approximate time, same equivalent channel.

Here we are again at the place where used to seeing a blurb here about the latest Uplift blog post. That post is about how you can Make Me Happy, and it might surprise you how.

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The Search for Bigfoot

Michael 22 Comments

Believe or not, that title is not a tease. Click bait is beyond my scope of operations. Or maybe behind. Either way, it’s a legitimate topic. For now.

My daughter has a dog. He’s fairly normal-sized for a dog of indeterminate origin. He’s part pointer, part husky, and looks those parts. But he has feet the size of an ottoman, which has always led me to describe him as a yointer. Part pointer, part Yeti. It seems that could be accurate – technical differences between Himalayan abominable snowmen and hairy North American cryptids notwithstanding.

Sasquatch, or good, old Bigfoot, the overly tall, overly hairy, overly plodding biped, bipedalling his way through dense forests has been sighted all over North America. But then, so have UFOs. Anyway, Bigfoot’s big believers see him everywhere, but usually in the Pacific Northwest. One of his names, Sasquatch, comes from the Salish Saquits indigenous people of that region.

But my daughter’s dog is an eastern U.S. mutt, raise from puppyhood in Western Pennsylvania. Where would a Bigfoot find his way into that animal’s lineage. Well, Pennsylvania apparently is a hotbed of Bigfoot activity. So hot there’s an annual Bigfoot Camping Adventure sponsored by the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society. How did I live here for over 60 years and not pick up on that?

I just found out about it and them on Sunday when I was reading an article that they participated in a local town’s fall festival with merchandise, artifacts, and even bus tours to sightings sites. (I can hear the tour guide now. “Ladies and Gentlemen, if you look out the right side of the bus, you’ll see a break in the trees. We will depart the bus an’ go through that break about 30 yards, cross the crick, turn right, go 32 paces from the fallen hemlock tree to the spot where Ole Zeke heard Bigfoot a’moaning. You taller folk with long legs might want to stop at 28 paces. An’ don’t interrupt the UFO folks on the trail. They gots a sightin’ site one crick over.”)

It seems that just in the last 8 years there have been over 50 Pennsylvania sightings reported to just this one group, one pretty much in my backyard. So now when I say that my daughter’s dog is a yointer, I could be right!

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