1. PiC and I had a mini rant about Walmart the other day, on the heels of the blowup about their Ohio store’s doing a food drive for their own employees, when we saw a Walmart commercial advertising their “opportunities”. The spokespeople for Walmart would have you believe that the fact that the company culture supports “associates” and takes care of them during the holidays doesn’t highlight the fact that a company could actually “take care of” their employees by paying them living wages and that’s where their responsibilities lay.
2. For a good part of my childhood, my parents were small business owners who took very little salary for themselves, but paid their employees both as decent salaries as they could afford and Christmas bonuses. Admittedly this wasn’t the best financial decision they could have made for our family in the short term, but if health problems hadn’t prevented them from continuing to run the business, we would have slowly built up enough savings to make it worth it in the long run. In the meantime, we knew our employees were able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. And as crap as it made my 20s, and as much as I would have made some minor changes to how things were run if I had a more active hand in business decisions (yeah because I was all of 9 years old. totally plausible), I’m comfortable with knowing our employees didn’t have to struggle just to feed and clothe their families, they just had to do a good job while they were with us.
3. Abby’s ruminations on J.Money and his thoughts on Tom Corley and Linda Tirado’s Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense remind me that people who have always had enough to eat, money for a rainy day, and a support network find it much harder to understand the decisions that poor people make, that seem to obviously be bad choices, but in reality, many of them aren’t really choices at all. I’ve been there, and remember the things that burned in my gut much like shame when I had to make those “stupid decisions” because I didn’t have the cash to make the smart one.
Note: I never smoked, drank or did drugs to get by but damn if I didn’t understand the desire, at times. I never gave up because I had my parents to support, while I wouldn’t call it hope, I never acknowledged that not fighting was an option. Still, when I was affected by THEIR bad decisions, that really sucked too.
A. You don’t have float money. You have exactly “enough” to get by from day to day which means if there’s a sale at the grocery store on pasta, you don’t have the extra $5-10 to buy enough to last you until the next sale cycle. So you buy off sale cycle, you only buy enough for today and tomorrow or even just right now. You resort to super cheap, filling, but super unhealthy fast foods, compromising your health. I used to buy a 99 cent corndog for lunch/dinner on days that I didn’t have food to bring from home and I had to run from school to work. It was the cheapest thing I could get, and I guarantee that was not a healthy choice. But I loved corndogs and it was a dollar for a few minutes of “happy” and food on any given 14-hour day. Or you can’t fill your car up with enough gas to last the week, you can put in $5 for now, and milk that until you hit E and then have to pay whatever price-gauge is at the next station. Also you buy cheap stuff because you can’t afford the higher quality stuff. So it breaks or falls apart, and you have to buy it again. And again. And again.
B. You don’t have time. You can work enough to pay the bills but then you don’t have time (or money) to go to school so you can stop working a dead end job without any hope of advancement or decent working conditions. Or you can work less, and struggle to pay all the bills in any given month. So you pay what you can, week to week, day to day. Bills slip, and it only takes one late fee to really screw up what you thought you were going to be able to clear that month.
C. *Observed: You don’t have hope. So you make stupid decisions like buying crap you don’t need, because your luck is crap anyway. After all, you scrimped, saved, and did without and where’s that gotten you? Nowhere. So you also think that luck has more to do with your life and what happens than what you do (I saw this develop in more than one family member, my incredibly strong, adaptive, and hardworking mom included.)
Confession: I had hope for several years, then I gave that up and just relied on gritting it out.
D. You live in the short term. Today’s work, tomorrow’s bills: rent, utilities, food, gas. Saving for a rainy day doesn’t exist when every day seems like one, saving for retirement sure doesn’t exist. You have to be willing AND physically able to find ways to squeeze every last penny out of every last opportunity: overtime, credit card rewards (without ever paying interest or late fees), loyalty programs. This takes time, which you don’t have, and attention which you don’t have.
That’s definitely only scratching the surface.
I made it out of there by working my ass off, taking every scrap of overtime available ever, and by good luck and good fortune. I was fortunate enough to be employed by the people I worked for: whether they were good people or not was irrelevant, the fact that I was able to make it work so that I could claw my way out of debt and to build up savings was a blessing.
I was fortunate enough to gain the respect of good people who would vouch for me when I needed it.
I was fortunate enough to become friends with people who had retired from super high income, high powered careers who were willing to advise me and help me make the hard professional decisions as a neophyte to the business world. My parents were decidedly blue collar, working class folks who didn’t know enough about today’s world to help. They could only listen and try to help guide.
I was fortunate enough to have just enough brainpower to plan a career path, at least somewhat vaguely, and not just focus on the immediate horizon.
I was fortunate enough to have discovered Fatwallet’s Grocery and Finance Forums in the early years. They taught me to save every scrap, every penny, that I possibly could, while trying to generate a little extra creative income AND to think about the future.
I was fortunate enough to always have been able to pay the internet bill: the source of my inspiration, ideas, and money blogs that taught me things that FW hadn’t. For all the crap that the internet represents, it was an amazing resource.
While we all have culpability in the choices we make, it’s far too simplistic for people to say: being poor is your choice.
And this is why SingleMa’s post on giving always resonates with me. People may not have given me money, my path may not have been smooth, but at every step of the way, while I struggled and fought for what I needed, I was given a helping hand by people who had zero obligation to do so, whether they knew they were helping me or not.
I’m not normally much of a Halloween person but this year I had high hopes of dressing up my victim … Doggle, and taking him either trick or treating or to a good friend’s house to play. Instead, we’re sadly in Southern California to lend a dear friend moral support and planning support. Her elderly mother, weighed down by a series of illnesses and then a serious fall breaking her hip, simply couldn’t bounce back and I’m grieved to say we lost her. I don’t care how old you are, losing a beloved parent is never easy.
***
This month has been busy as all get out and I’m rather glad it’s coming to an end, or I would be if that wasn’t rapidly pushing us toward a conclusion I’m not ready for (the end of the year). Which means that we have to make the most of this trip down south for wedding stuff as well as life stuff.
We need to (deep breath):
Visit friend with a new baby,
Visit friend who lost her mother,
Meet the photographer,
See the venue for the first time & figure out if anything else needs doing,
Deliver any wedding stuff that we don’t need here so we’re not transporting a moving van’s worth of frippery the weekend of,
Buy suits for PiC and my dad,
Buy or rent a traditional dress for me,
Attend a wedding,
Attend a family dinner, Oh and WORK.
Talk about your last minute trips!
We decided this would happen only 2 days before and it was a flurry getting ready! (I thought it was wise to start preparing by doing seven loads of laundry…..)
I booked three hotels because it’s a long stinking drive down to SoCal, and if we want to be convenient to certain people without spending 2 hours in traffic either way, it’s a hotel or bust.
Booked 1 hotel for 50% off. Yay for catching billing errors from our last visit and their profuse apologies = savings: ~$100 or less. Includes breakfast or lunch.
Booked 1 hotel with SPG points: 7,000 points + $50 pet fee instead of spending $200.
Booked 1 hotel for cash: $120 + $100 pet fee. Occasionally this fee is waived so we’re hoping for the best.
We’re also renting a car for the week. We’d normally take the Dog Chariot but we need more room for transport of several cases of things and we need to keep the mileage on our personal vehicles low since we get a major discount on the insurance. I booked a week-long rental on Carrentals.com using ebates (3% back): $273.
The funny thing is, if I rented the same car from Tuesday through Sunday, it would have been billed at a MUCH higher per day rate and the total estimate was nearly $600. !!!
In total, this near-week long trip will cost about $800 in travel;
probably another few hundred on wedding clothes that are meant to be rewearable for years after this;
and miscellaneous costs for food.
[insert aggrieved face here] Staying home is so much cheaper.
***
On the bright side, we’ve decided to put about $20K toward principle on the mortgage. We’d squirreled away cash for a re-finance but thanks to some legal mumbo-jumbo with the HOA we can’t at the moment. Might as well put it to work reducing the mortgage, then!
Also, made a dinner at home for friends this weekend. Not counting the cost of garlic or butter, I think we managed to feed four for about $20: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes w/onions & garlic, braised bok choy, and roasted beets. Unfortunately for a cooking-for-guests night, I wasn’t terribly impressed with what I turned out. PiC loved it but I’m convinced he’s far too kind when I cook.
PiC and I have a new tradition of sorts, a weekly dinner with one singlet friend, and a every couple of months dinner with another singlet* friend. Both are friends from years back, Ye Olden Youth Dayes. I don’t know if it’s weird that we never tried to seek out couple friends specifically now that we’re married but it’s just never been a priority. A friend’s a friend, whether single or doubled up. And I like that, paired or not, our friends feel comfortable with us, paired or not.
*Singlet denoting the fact that they may not actually be single, but they hang out with us sans partner for these regular shindigs.
We’ve gone out to explore weird little joints, relaxed with easy take out, and experimented with new recipes. The responsibility or privilege of deciding what to do next has been alternated like a hot potato, back and forth, but I always feel like since we’re feeding three in total, two of whom are a couple, isn’t it more fair if we paid 2 times out of 3 outings?
Sounds logical to me, but the singlets we dine with usually gives me an odd look when I venture forth with this theory. Granted, we rarely have terribly expensive meals, ranging from $5-20 per person depending on whether we’ve cooked, did take out or dined out, but it does still feel a bit unfair from my perspective.
:: Am I being overly aware or would you feel the same way? What if you were the single one? What if you were part of the couple?
There’s been a lot of hullaballoo over the Marissa Mayer decision to stop telecommuting as a standard rule. I thought I was done with talking about it and hearing about it but there was something that still got under my skin.
My reaction? That sucks from a work-life perspective but what’s the business decision behind it?
We don’t know. We aren’t privy to how productive their workers are, we aren’t privy to the balance sheet, we can’t see what she’s aiming to do.
Mayer’s decision is based on what she thinks is right for the business.
Right or wrong, she is the CEO. Her job is to make those decisions.
Personally, as an uninformed outsider, I would extrapolate that the Yahoo employees are actually not as productive as they could be. Yahoo’s been failing as a business for years, and that’s indicative of a failure on several levels: their business model doesn’t work, the employees aren’t excelling, the managers are not doing their jobs to ensure productivity in the office or from telecommuters.
Evidence?
Look at how far behind Yahoo’s lagged in maintenance on their existing products, on developing innovative products, on not eating their putative competition’s dust. Can anyone compare Yahoo and Google without laughing?
What does Yahoo excel at? As their consumer, I’d say nothing.
I still (shockingly) use them because I can’t be arsed to transition everything but they don’t excel at search, at mail, or at news. What’s left? They needed a big kick in the pants, or five, because they’re mediocre, or subpar. That’s not a business I’d invest in.
Bottom Line: If it were working for them, why the hell would she change the policy? If it isn’t working for them, then it’s her responsibility to change it. She was hired to turn a company around. She’d better be doing what it takes.
I can’t stand the claims that she’s a disappointment to feminists…
….that she was the Great Freaking Women’s Hope and she owes the employees a nursery because she gets a private one, or that she’s setting the company back to the stone ages.
She leads a business that employs people. It can employ people only so long as the business is successful, and of course it needs people in order to be successful. Circle of life.
Within that circle, employers provide jobs that pay a wage. “Life essential” benefits like health care, dental, and time off would be nice, even expected from this type of company. Perks like gyms, free food, free transit, subsidized or conveniently located childcare, flexible schedules, etc., are even nicer. They are, however, the mark of a company that has both the money and the willingness to provide them. A competitive company will. One that is struggling to survive will pick and choose. (BI notes, btw, she is willing to provide some of those other perks.)
At the end of the day, it’s a job, not a belief system. They have the right and responsibility to run their business best they can, all employees have the right and responsibility to make the best decision for their lives.
A, As a feminist, I’m tired of the focus on her decision as a woman and as a businesswoman, I’m tired of the insistence that all telecommuters are productive because they’ve been doing it so long.
It shouldn’t matter if she’s a man, woman, teal, or an elephant. It’s not her responsibility to prop up a policy that doesn’t work so that employees are happy. It’s her responsibility to take the long-view, make the business work, make it productive and profitable otherwise there won’t be a company.
B, It’s called WORK from home. It’s being available for conference calls, contributing to solutions, brainstorming creatively, creating new solutions, completing projects.
It’s not: work while with your kids, work and play with the dog, or work when someone’s paying attention and then run errands, or work while helping kids with their homework. Believe me, those conference calls where someone’s helping with homework or soothe a crier can suck.
Having childcare, flexible schedules and telecommuting are all different things. Great or very necessary, depending on your life, but they cannot be conflated.
Being able to set your work aside for two hours in the day to pick up the kids, run errands or take multiple breaks throughout the day w/o affecting your work, productivity or reputation: flexible scheduling.
Being able to take your child to the doctor, play with them, help them with their homework, feed them: childcare.
Being able to work with your laptop on your sofa or in bed or at the dining room table instead of in the office: working from home.
These are all good things. They are, however, NOT the same thing. Mayer’s nursery (childcare) = your ability to work from home? False equivalence. She has childcare while she’s at work but that’s not the same as being home to take care of your kids while you’re working.
Working from home also doesn’t confer ability to do everything you wanted to do at home AND work, nor the ability to split yourself in two. If PiC has the day off when I don’t, I still can’t talk or hang out: I’m working. Yes, it saves you a commute, but the trade off is the ease of face to face conversations that resolve issues in two minutes.
Related: the assumptions people make about working from home drives me (and Andrea) insane.
No, I don’t have time to sit and chat on the phone for an hour.
No, I can’t just come and have a 2 hour lunch.
NO, I can’t make your travel arrangements because I’m good at it so I must enjoy doing that instead of my work during my work day. I have work to do! It’s like I’m in an office.
I worked from someone’s home with his children and guess what happened? I had a kid crawl in my lap every twenty minutes, every single time that child could sneak past her caretaker (surprisingly frequently) insisting on having me “Look! Watch! Come!”, and I couldn’t kick her out. She wouldn’t STAY out anyway. Bet your tuchus I wasn’t answering emails.
This is not uncommon. I’ve worked with many parents trying to work while they were caretaking and they were always distracted; all the colleague-parents who worked from home routinely arranged childcare during the day because they couldn’t do both at the same time.
When Doggle was sick, I spent a week looking after him from home. when I was trying to juggle him and work, my productivity was at 25%. When they were divided, it was 100% him for 6 hours and 100% work for 3 hours.
This isn’t to say laziness isn’t present in the office – of course it is. I’ve had coworkers who didn’t work more than 2 hours a day in the office and 0 outside of it. It took a manager really willing to do her job to put an end to that.
Bottom line: Working from home is great but not when you’re distracted. You are productive when you’re working, not when you’re taking care of your personal life, no matter where you are. A business can’t stay in business if they aren’t effectively managing problems.
C, What corporate CEO isn’t privileged? Heck, non-corporate, non-profit CEOs can be too. She chose to exercise her privilege on a nursery. CEOs also have luxury travel options, massive salaries, they have assistants, secretaries and a dozen other services at their beck and call. The fact that she has a nursery may feel like a slap but why aren’t people bitching about those luxuries that other CEOs have? Is the childcare arrangement of any other CEO discussed and held up as a Call to Action? Working dad CEOs aren’t being called out to provide X because they have Y.
Her responsibility at Yahoo is to run Yahoo as well as she can. Her calls may be good, they may be bad, but the focus on motherhood, working womanhood, to fuel the mommy wars, basically, zeroing in on the fact that she’s a woman is GROSS. To quote Allison.
As a feminist, who believes in equal opportunities, not gender-based special treatment, I’m disgusted with that angle.
There’s been a lot of jaw-setting, teeth-gritting as a coping mechanism of late. November’s become my least favorite month. October catches short shrift for being a close neighbor. So while I’ve been searching for a way back, I’ve been just holding on. Holding still and keeping quiet.
The tougher things have been, the more we’ve been eating out. The spending sort of bothered me but I always knew it was really symptomatic of larger problems. Not the fact of eating out itself, but the listlessness with which I went along with it. I’ve always had a line in the sand when it came to the cooking:eating out ratio, both because I don’t like restaurant food that much, and it’s costly. It was fitting that it felt like there was a small turning point with trying a new recipe for the sake of experimenting, for the sake of pulling together the pantry. Baby steps.
Personal Edits: With a search-and-advice assist from @zenvar on Twitter, I soured up some 2% milk with a tsp of vinegar to replace the Greek yogurt that wasn’t on hand, and measured out a Cajun spices mix instead of the dried thyme and chili powder our spice cupboard never has. Surprisingly, we did have breadcrumbs so we didn’t go without a crust, though it wasn’t the fancy sesame seeds.
Ingredients:
Fresh baby spinach (~ 1 lb), blanched
1 cup quinoa to cook, makes 2 cups
1 cup milk/vinegar replacing yogurt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 tsp. sea salt
1/2 tsp. ground pepper, used black but white was called for
1/2 tsp. Cajun spices, replacing thyme and chili powder
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Grease a baking pan and line with breadcrumbs.
3. Cook quinoa.
4. Prep an ice bath and boil a pot of water for blanching the spinach. Blanch the spinach to a bright green (no more than 8-10 seconds) and transfer to ice bath, then set aside on a paper towel.
5. Saute garlic, shallots and spices in olive oil until translucent; transfer to a medium sized mixing bowl to be combined with remaining ingredients: spinach, quinoa, milk, eggs, sea salt and pepper.
6. Pour into baking pan and bake until golden brown, up to an hour.
I served this with roasted Lime Chicken thighs and roasted onions. Optional: burning your hair stovetop. But that did add some spice to the night.
PiC loved the pie, calls it a quiche, but I’m on the fence. It’s good, but with a sort of critical taster’s opinion, maybe it could have used double the spices and it’s possible the yogurt was more important than just as a dairy component. Next time!
In my earlier years, my triggers were as easily flipped (though eventually some money followed) to overwork, to overcommit, and to make trade-offs that went against the grain dictated by the myopic “Accountants.” Though in my case, it was more frequently a would-be Creative preoccupied with playing god instead of Accountant, instead of seeing a bigger picture and so utterly failing to make the right decisions to steer the company in a positive and productive direction so that our work would be meaningful, reducing our efforts to nothing more than one sad punchline after another.
Luckily, my clarity came after just a few years and my trajectory wasn’t . Of course, I was bearing the burden of more than just my own ego so I had to snap to, pretty quick.
eemusings is watching herIndian friends live life under a marriageability microscope. My parents didn’t force the matchmaking issue but they definitely asked me to “play along” when their friends did. There was more than one old village acquaintance who’d sidle up and propose a marriage alliance, and more than one awkward meeting with a proposed groom. I tried to be a good sport about it for the most part so endured no end of cackling from my parents over the traps their friends would lay to lure me in as I was notoriously busy and shy to boot. Since they never took it seriously, though, I didn’t worry about being pushed into anything I didn’t feel right about. Maybe it would have been less awkward if it were still a completely accepted practice or totally out of date but in the even more awkward phase of generational and cultural gaps, we just shook our heads and all sort of humored each other.
Speaking of gaps, Vanessa’s Money, Bridget and a few other bloggers had some things to say about the recent post by Shawanda grossly generalizing whether women should work in male-dominated workplaces.
One of the major issues I took with the article was the spurious logic and sweeping generalizations, as evidenced by the lumping in of STEM with blue collar jobs as “dirty,” “physically-demanding” and “masculine” as the reasons given for women choosing not to be in male-dominated professions. As if women don’t already face enough sexism in the workplace generally, women in the sciences, leaving out E on purpose here because I’ve seen many friends succeed in E, face a huge uphill battle with basic sexism, so much so that a recent study shows that there is an inherent bias against hiring and promotion of women by both men and women, all else being equal. Some areas of science are equally represented by men and women, but most areas are still male dominated and patriarchal.
For the record, this isn’t my field but I do see the results of that behavior frequently, I follow bloggers who do work in the sciences and have to deal with it, and it’s horrifying that we continue to have to fight for what I’d consider the right to make basic decisions for ourselves. Why are these questions even being debated on a political stage? /digression. My point is: The well worn mental image that women are delicate, women are weak, women would much prefer not to be taxed, let’s protect the poor little women is still out there.
For people, much less women, to be perpetuating any part of this utter gender-based bullshit on behalf of all women is not just insulting, it’s frustrating considering the kind of opposition we already have to fight. Like Alison said, we have people whispering defeatist messages in our ears at a young age, telling young women to worry about looking too smart, worry more about their appearance and not their accomplishments.
Do we need to keep feeding fuel to these same old fights too? It’s exhausting.
We were stranded between consultations for Doggle miles away from home and I hadn’t eaten a meal in several hours except for some fruit so PiC found a nearby food hut to tantalize my stressiness off the ledge. He’d been feeding me bits and bites and figured something tasty would be easier to get me to actually want to eat.
It was a bit costlier than our usual fare, but heck. A tenner more wasn’t going to break the bank and it kept me functional for the rest of a very tough day.
And look, pretty pictures for the blog too! Win-win-win!
A tin bucket of oyster crackers. Two of my favorite things.
It’s possible this makes me a huge doofus but I’m sure other things already put me in that category. I love oyster crackers, and I love tin buckets. *shrug* That’d be the 5 year old country girl in me.
A cup of clam chowder
Seems like we can’t not try the clam chowder wherever we go. And this time, highly touted by the highly excitable lady at the counter. As it turns out, she was hugely excited because she actually thought we were the same customers from the night before. Had to break it to her that we were new customers who were trying out the place for the first time, so she was really happy to see, well, strangers. But nice to meetcha!
The Maine Crab Roll
Confession: Some days my memory span = life span of a gnat. We vacillated long enough between two lobster rolls and a crab roll + a lobster roll that I just forgot what we ordered entirely. So by the time this came, I just thought it was an anemic looking lobster roll. I failed to appreciate the lobstery goodness. Then PiC reminded me it was crab. Ohhh…. uh. Yeah. Good job, me. It was fine for crab but it reminded me why I’m so particular about my crab. Go Maryland Blue Crab!
The Naked Lobster Roll
The Lobster roll was pretty delicious – I’m not usually one for lobster but I skipped the butter and mayo and with just a squeeze of lemon: perfection.
~~ ~~~ ~~
It’s just pricey enough that I wouldn’t go out of my way to find the Shack but it was really good. Their “rolls” – the bread slices that were cut into the middle of and made to be sandwich-like things were incredibly good. They had to be buttered and fried, they were amazingly soft inside and just a bit crisped and crunchy on the outside but not greasy.
Definitely a treat I’d bring visitors over to try.
It’s actually not the money part that terrifies me. Rather, when you hear that, you know that what comes next is going to be a serious treatment or procedure that is going to cause your baby additional pain and no little anxiety and fear.
Doggle had a mini-vacation with friends he absolutely adores and they utterly adore him, therefore spoil the stuffing out of him. And we appreciate that to no end.
Unfortunately, he came home with a hurt back, a reprisal of last year’s limping pain, only worse because this time he’s actually vocalizing pain when he sits down too hard, he’s hunched up most of the time and can’t really bear weight on his rear legs. This from the stoic dog that doesn’t emit a peep when he runs into things, gets stepped on, has had children swinging on him, accidentally smacked his head into cabinets, whacks his head on the kitchen table with a THUD every other day. He’s in real pain. Seeing him shuffle or scuttle, afraid to walk normally, slipping and falling when he least expects it, hearing him trip and fall when he turns too hard is just killing me.
We took him to the vet for an exam. The results were alarming. He had a physical and the interpretation of the x-rays from last year was much more strongly worded. As usual, Doggle didn’t react to the physical exam, but the vet felt the physical confirmed what he felt he saw in the x-rays: a serious disc/vertebral issue. This was definitely not what we were told last year and put this way, I would have proceeded to the suggested more aggressive follow-up route last year, the one the other vet said wouldn’t be necessary if he responded to pain meds, because “a serious back problem” says he is a high risk for recurrence, instead of just a one-time oddity that is life as usual with a relatively senior dog.
While we opted to take a more conservative approach last year and that resolved well enough, the last thing I wanted was for this to recur, and to run the risk of causing serious neurological or neuropathic problems!
I didn’t bring home this dog to start losing him less than two years later!
This is my puppy. He’s my heart now. I can’t bear the thought of … well.
So we’re drugging him for two weeks to alleviate the pain and discomfort. He’s loving that. (No, he’s not. He’s already accidentally chomped my finger while trying to spit them out while I tried to shove the pills back in his maw. We were a bit of a mess. Normally I’m great at pilling him so that he doesn’t taste the nasty ones but I let myself get all distracted and wrung out over the what-ifs & screwed it up spectacularly. So I have a sore ring finger/nail to show for it.)
Meanwhile, I’m asking for a second opinion, and another recommendation for a good place to go in case this is the right thing to do. And checking the treat stash to see which other ones I can feed him while he dissociates his favorite ones with disgusting meds. We (I) may need to mix up some special Mom’s baby food and rice dinners for a few days too while he gets used to being on medication. He’s having enough trouble standing physically speaking, I don’t know if he’s going to be able to mentally muster the motivation to eat.
I really really don’t want him to hurt anymore, I really don’t want this to happen again and I hate that it did this time. This is breaking my heart.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In the end, the money part scares me a bit too. I live in the Bay Area now and not only do I not have any kind of friend, professional or any other kind of animal health care discount that might have slightly defrayed costs in the slightest, pricing is between 25-50% higher than it is down south. – heart attack –
An office visit alone goes from $30 to $50. I go into the vet office and come out $160 poorer, 90 minutes later. Going to a specialist? I’m not joking when I anticipate the office visit alone starting at $100 and treatments starting in the thousands.
Back in my youth, teens and early twenties, I could only afford as much vet care as we needed for my dog pack by working really hard and being creative. (Not that I didn’t just repurpose my own pain meds for Doggle today. This is totally legitimate. He was getting prescribed the same meds I can no longer use and they are exactly the same thing.)
But now, if we’re going the specialist route, we’re paying for it straight up, and this will sting. *deep breath* Wish us luck?
** 11:30 pm: That was fast. The second opinion consultation has already come back. Get us to a specialist now before the damage is irretrievable. Ok.
