Month: December 2014

We started Harry on Selegiline. In dogs, the drug is indicated to treat Cushings disease, but also has shown efficacy in treating symptoms of dementia. Or canine cognitive disorder. Or whine whine whine, it’s 4:30 am, would somebody please get out of bed come downstairs and let me outside. And then a half hour later let me back in?

Could take up to a month for the effect to be observed. How does it work? In the brain, Selegiline inhibits an enzyme that breaks down dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter required for proper communication (“signaling”) between neurons. (Kid’s still got it!). Inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down dopamine means there’s more dopamine left swirling around in Harry’s wetware, which means longer periods of proper neuronal signalling, which means — at least two sleep-deprived adoptive Uprights hope it means! — improved continuity of sleep for Harry At Night. And in turn the Uprights.

Even more so than in the hard sciences, in biology there is theory and there is practice. If you know what I mean. So now, we wait.

No, that’s not the light of the camera flash. The light is coming from inside him — flashes from the incessant electrical storm occurring inside his little canine brain. Emphasis little. What? I’m not kidding. I mean really, think about it, how big a brain does a pampered pooch need to get safely through his day? It’s not like he needs to scrounge in the wild to find his own food, fend off competitors and do the whole survival of the fittest crap. No. We buy his food for him. And then Happy Wife mixes it with something irresistibly tasty, like microwaved beef, or left over gravy from the Swedish meatballs, then she gets on her knees and hand feeds it to him. He doesn’t need to search for a safe place to sleep like other animals. No. We have dog beds on the floor for him to choose from, in different shapes and colors, and if either one doesn’t suit His Finickiness, well, there’s always the $700 arm chair. When he’s done with the food and poops out what’s left we pick it up by hand. After, of course, placing over the hand a plastic grocery bag, one you hope doesn’t have holes in it, plus, when necessary, kicking the little brown-black poohs to dislodge them from the frozen snow. I find that if you do that while wearing a soft-toed boot you can actually bruise a toe those buggers are frozen in so hard sometimes. As often as not we walk him on leash so he doesn’t wander off aimlessly into the woods like a demented old man who up and leaves the house when left unattended. Beyond its support for basic physiological functions, mainly eating and poohing, you wonder why Harry needs a brain at all anymore.

Once I start my new job (soon) Harry will no longer have the benefit of me being his daytime babysitter. So a woman named Desiree is stopping by Friday morning to “interview” us, and presumably Harry as well, to see if she will agree to stop by once or twice daily to attend to his needs. Desiree runs a pet sitting company here in town. We figure human contact once or twice a day oughta do it. That plus the Selegiline, to keep the “sky” in Harry’s little brain storm free, so that by the time Happy Wife and I arrive home from work, and later go to bed, he’s not still snappin’ & cracklin’ up there, if you know what I mean.

My rendition of the Cobb salad I made us last night, complete with homemade buttermilk dressing, pan-fried venison bacon (Andy!), Roma tomatoes, black beans, kernel corn, hard boiled egg, avocado, rotisserie chicken w/BBQ sauce all over romaine lettuce. Wine: Oregon Cabernet.

Or, maybe you would’ve preferred Happy Wife’s rendition: sans beans and corn, hold the BBQ sauce on chicken, add Alaska king crab. Wine: Viogner/Chenin Blanc.

More than fifty victims recipients of our annual newsletter this year, which is hot off the press this morning. For those of you looking in, as you breathlessly await the arrival of your very own copy of the 2014 Nibbles in your snail mail box, a little vignette therefrom to tide you over:

I even red eye corrected this. Well, at least one eye. When I went for two, Photoshop erred and added a black stipple to Happy Wife’s lower lip. This escaped my attention. When I submitted the photo for her review she asked, alarmingly, “Why do I have a melanoma on my lip!”

Oops. Ctrl-Z.

Which just shows to go ya, Photoshop can cause cancer.

Ice fog this morning. But a few more seconds of daylight today! Out of the seasonal trough we come, ready for what feels like a Sisyphean climb to summer solstice.

Listening to Christmas carols on Pandora this morning. “Round Yon Virgin?” There’s an oxymoron for ya. If you ask me anyway. Ask a master of ministerial matters, however, and you’d learn this:

Let’s back up. “Yon” actually has nothing to do with Mary’s youth. Rather it is a shortened form of “yonder,” as in “way over yonder.” “Round” is short for “around.” So the entire lyric is an abbreviated way of saying, “around yonder virgin,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you put it in context. The previous line is “all is calm, all is bright.” Put it all together and you get: “All is calm and bright around the virgin over there.”

If you say so, pal. Not the kind of atmosphere that attended any virgin I ever knew. And I knew at least one, in high school (I took her word for it). The atmosphere in the basement at the after-football-game party was anything but calm and bright once she showed up. More like frenzied and shadowy, what with all the attention she got from would-be suitors queuing up trying to snatch her away from the crowd to get her alone. I took her to the prom one year. I was the boyfriend, for a while, but being she was a year older than me, when she graduated and became a working girl and I was still a school boy that was the end of us. It wasn’t for lack of overtures on my part. I stalked her once. Showed up where she ate lunch during the week and spied her from the other side of the bar. Or I’d park a block away from where she lived and wait for her to come home. Just to see. Eventually, the last time I remember seeing her, I hounded her into coming as my date to a wedding reception. She was a real looker. I recall the raised eyebrows and elbow-jabs of approval from some of the guys at the bar. Drove her home that night and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Pretty sure she’s not a virgin anymore. She met some guy where she worked, agreed to marry him and off to Arizona they went. To raise a family, so I heard years later. If she Googles my name and clicks the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button she’ll land directly on this blog and recognize it was her I was talking about. One gander at Happy Wife and she’ll also discover, after all, I was the luckier one.

This may be what I’ll miss the most:

For the past four plus years I’ve come here, or somewhere close, each morning Monday thru Thursday for a walk with one or more dogs. This is December 17th light. Enough to reassure us that Ol’ Sol hasn’t gone out for good. Not much more than that, though. It’s a blessing of working at home, to be able to step away from work for an hour, get settled in your thoughts while the dogs get some exercise. This time of year and day especially there is rarely anyone else around. And for all the talk of Alaska’s prolific wildlife, other than the occasional moose it’s rare to see even a squirrel scurry up a tree. And when the day is breathless like today it’s deliciously quiet. Just imagine.

It will all change come January when I start a new job. A real brick ‘n mortar with my own office. A desk, a chair, a computer and windows. A view would be nice. The bustle of fellow employees. Face to face meetings in conference rooms. Performance reviews. Donuts. What I’m going to enjoy most is working for an Alaskan employer and with Alaskan clients. No longer will I need to fly periodically to the east coast, or to get up at 4:30 am to be on a call. Will there be a Ficus Tree in my new office you wonder? This I do not know.

The other day our friend was up from Seattle and stayed the night at our house.  Happy Wife tasked me with making dinner, specifically, beef stroganoff. See what I did there, I linked the recipe for you. I’ve made it a number of times. But the other night, instead of beef, I substituted caribou. Can you say yum? Nay, can you say sanguine — just look at the color of that protein:

Sans fat you’d think this would be tough when cooked. No sir. Two hours over low heat simmering in stock, onions, garlic, and a splash (okay two splashes) of cognac — scrumptious. Then ladled over buttered egg noodles. Shut up.

The horse is out of the barn, back in the field!

Happy Wife had her hands full with heavy items to go in the wash when I said to her, “Dear, please remember to set the spin cycle to medium with those things, otherwise you know what.” Mildly annoyed with my thinking she needed to be reminded of this, she came back with a most profound reply: “I can’t remember the last time I forgot to do that, dear.”

After a second or two we both laughed. I was sure what she’d said was a classic example of some well known circularity in formal logic.

Moments later, while making the bed, she got all Donald Rumsfeld on me. “You know,” she expanded, “There are things we recall we remembered, things we recall we’d forgotten, and things we can’t recall if we’ve forgotten.”

I backed out of the bedroom, slowly. Whoa. This is why I married this woman.

Needed the oil changed in the Subaru again. Brad, I think his name was, enlightened me on the pros & cons of using synthetic oil. Wait a second, “synthetic?” Isn’t that synonymous with man made? And if so, we should never fear an oil shortage again, right? We needn’t have to wait tens of millions of years for plants and critters to die, get buried, transform into raw crude, get discovered, produced, refined, and finally put in a can. We just make the stuff de novo — Brilliant!

Methinks I’m missing something here. Probably been away from the oil business too long.

In the end I settled on the synthetic, but wouldn’t you know it, only minutes after the technician took my car into the garage, I was called back to the service counter and informed that the technician had also found my air filter was filthier than a George Carlin standup, and a signal light (blinker) was out on the driver’s side, and so “Mr. Nibbe would you like us to take care of these items today as well?”

Oh sure.

$200+ later…

Wait a second…You’re probably wondering… $200+ for an oil change, an air filter, and a light bulb?

Let me tell you something about this light bulb business on Subaru Outbacks. 2011s anyway. Though I’ve come to understand it afflicts other model years as well.

(Subaru of America automotive engineers: Pay especially close attention!).

To do so let me back up a few months. It was then I discovered a headlight was out on the driver’s side of my Subaru. I went to the auto parts store, bought a new bulb, came home and figured in the time it would take my bread to toast I’d go in the garage and replace the bulb. No-brainer, right?

Bzzzt.

Come to find the plastic housing that needs to be turned (unscrewed) to get at the bulb was not only just barely visible once I’d lifted the hood, there was no way in hell a standard human hand could pass by the battery and all the other crap blocking the access required to replace the bulb. WTF? Ah, wait, I think, maybe from underneath. Nope. In fact I couldn’t even see the headlight assembly looking up while on my back on the garage floor. So WTF? I get out the manual. No help. So now what…Don’t tell me I need to pull the entire integrated headlight assembly out just to replace a damn bulb?

I go back inside the house. My toast has popped up, long ago, and now it’s cold. The butter won’t melt and I hate that. I call my friend, an expert Subaru mechanic, 25+ years. None better in Alaska. “Mark,” I say, “how many middle-aged white dudes does it take to change a headlight bulb on a Subaru Outback?” He laughs, knowingly. I chew my cold toast. Come to learn the answer is one, assuming the one middle-aged white dude knows the trick.

Trick? “Yeah dude, you need to get at it from inside the wheel well.”

“What?!”

“Yup. Turn the steering wheel hard right to get the wheel out of the way. Then remove one of the clips which hold the splash guard in place. Then slowly peel the guard back just enough to get your hand up and in there to unscrew the housing. Then you can get at the bulb. The guard may feel like it’s going to break when you fold it back but it won’t. But just be careful.”

“WTF! To replace a bulb?!”

Well, I still couldn’t believe it. Even though I knew Mark would never lead me astray. “If you can’t do it just bring it over to my house and I’ll do it,” he said.

I went back into the garage and tried again, but not the way Mark told me, not initially anyway. This was a mistake. What I tried first is I slid a screwdriver from the top down through the narrow gap and managed to forcibly unscrew the plastic housing, and then with a flashlight I could just barely make out the bulb in the socket, but when I tried (with the screwdriver) to release the retainer clip it broke. Sh*t. Only then did I abandon that approach and try to peel back the splash guard like Mark told me to do. But it turned out I removed the wrong clip (there are two). Consequently, I’m fishing my hand and arm through the wrong gap feeling for the back of the light bulb in order to pull it out. I did this about five times, sustaining, in the process, many life-threatening scrapes and tears to my skin before saying, “F*ck it.”

I drove to Mark’s house the following day. He showed me the correct splash guard clip to remove, had the new bulb in and everything put back in place in like five minutes. Show off. I treated him to breakfast for his trouble.

Of course, because I’d earlier broken the retainer clip (not sold separately!) we had to kludge a way to keep the bulb in place in its socket. We folded some blue foamy stuff into the cavity of the plastic housing before screwing it back on, figuring that would work to keep the bulb from popping out, and it did work, but at breakfast Mark said, “You know, that cavity can get pretty hot when the light’s been on a while. I wonder if that blue stuff is flammable?”

Uh oh.

Back at his house we went into the garage and held a piece of the blue foamy stuff above a lit match. Poof!

Uh oh.

Mark says, “Well, just run with it a while and check it. If it doesn’t melt or start a fire right away you’re probably good to go.” Then he asks, “By the way, where did you buy the new bulb?”

“Fred Meyer, why?”

“Oh. Those are cheapys. Probably won’t last longer than three months or so. The ones at the dealership are better, but way more expensive too.”

Great. When I got home I called him back and said the car had not started on fire. And oh by the way, we should have wrapped that blue foamy stuff in aluminum foil first. “Brilliant!” he said, “why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

Fast forward to a few days ago…the oil change, and yes please also replace the dirty air filter, and by all means that burned out signal light bulb too! I laugh and share my past experience loudly. Everyone within earshot at the service desk nods sympathetically. Half hour later it’s all done. $200+. “Sorry, Mr. Nibbe, I had to charge you the shop minimum for labor to replace the bulb.” His head droops.

He’s sad. I’m sad. Everyone at the counter is sad.

Then yesterday I’m driving Happy Wife to work in the morning and I notice the volume control for the radio, the one on the steering wheel, doesn’t work. Down volume works, but not up. Hmm. Well, it figures, the car’s out of warranty by months, but no biggy. The volume control, the one on the radio itself, is like literally two inches from my right hand when it’s gripping the steering wheel, and there are masses of people starving in Africa, so…perspective.

AND THEN, after I drop HW at work I notice — wait for it — the passenger side headlight is out.

Uh oh.

Sure, I know the trick now, but I’m busy, too busy to deal with this myself. However, it is bloody dark much of the day this time of year so I really need to get a new bulb, and so I make an appointment at the dealership for this morning. In I go at 9 am. I’m on my way up to the service counter when an exceptionally cheerful man, who I take to be the service manager, says, “Good morning, sir, how is everything going today?” Well, I tell him, just fine, except for my utter contempt for the auto engineers at Subaru of America!

Everyone at the service counter looks up. I slap him on the back, tell him I’m kidding, sort of, and give him the short version of everything that you’ve just read. Plus, I emphasize to him, I was just in a couple days earlier for an oil change and had to have the blinker bulb replaced. Which I paid for dearly. Sympathetic nods all around.

I don’t know for sure, maybe it was the gaiety of my demeanor despite the crushing charge I’d suffered days earlier. Or the service manager was feeling the generous spirit of the season. Or both. But he looked over at the man at the service counter who was checking me in and said, “Write WS4 in the “bill to” column on Mr. Nibbe’s ticket, will you.” He wished me a good day and went about his business.

“WS4?” I asked the man at the counter.

“Means we’ll bill it to the shop, or find another way to pay for it. No charge for you today.”

“This is like Obamacare,” I said, “I get fixed and somebody else pays for it!”

Kidding. I didn’t really say that. But I did give him a very big thank you. And wished him a Merry Christmas. I mean for goodness sake, they didn’t even charge me for the bulb. $0.00 out the door.

And guess what. As I drove away I reflexively went to turn up the volume on the radio with the steering wheel control and… it works again. Frickin’ spooky.

A fine clique of Cheeseheads, no?

I texted my niece (pictured) during the game: “Hey, I think I just saw you guys on TV!”

Oh, the spirit of youth. I might like to be young again. If I could go way back and start all over I’d like to think I’d do something different with my life. But I confess I have no idea what it would be, even assuming I had my druthers. Ask people that question and many will say they know what they’d do. I don’t believe them. It’s not that given another go at life people can’t imagine what they might like to do, or what they might try to become. It’s just that how we end up is every bit as much the result of our stochastic reactions to unforeseen circumstances as it is the cause of our linear intentions.

I can certainly think of a few things I wouldn’t change on the next go around, or certain events I would seek to hasten rather than having to wait for the right circumstances (and my reactions to them) to arrive. For an example, see my prior post.

Xanax. One milligram. You would’ve thought he was in a coma. I know we slept as though we were.

Glorious.

Xanax was so successful we thought to reduce the dose by half, and because of Happy Wife’s alarm that she prescribes a whole quarter milligram for her human patients. As expected one half milligram was about one half as effective as one milligram  (I’m a pharmacologist — I think I know why!). The following morning Harry was up and bleating at 4:30 am. Better than 2:30 am; less desirable than 6:30 am. So we’re thinking we may go back to one milligram.

Yesterday HW & I celebrated the 10th anniversary of our (re-)introduction ten years ago. Duh, right? We’re both far more squishy around 12/04/04 than our wedding day (6/03/06). I was living elsewhere in Anchorage at the time, 12/04/04, just me and Rufus, anxiously waiting to hear which, if any, of the seven graduate schools I’d applied to would invite me for an interview during their recruitment week. I was at work one day finishing up a project when a friend and colleague (Marty) suddenly appeared in my office wondering if I might be interested in dating someone. I wasn’t. I was hopeful I’d be off to school soon; not a good time to begin a new relationship. I was about to wave Marty off when he said, “Do you know someone named Nancy?”

Full stop. I spun around in my chair and locked on him. “Describe her,” I said.

…

Backtrack to 2001. I’d first met a “Nancy” at a wine tasting and was quite taken with her, and, it turned out, she with me. Unbeknownst to her I followed her home after the tasting. Which was, technically speaking, stalking I suppose, but only because I was curious where she lived. Oh, and I should mention that earlier at the tasting a friend of Nancy’s had invited everyone at the table to his house the following week for Thanksgiving dinner. So it was early the following week that I was at work and couldn’t stop thinking about her. I called the number where she worked, asked to speak to a nurse practitioner named Nancy (I didn’t even know her last name), got her on the phone and asked if she was going to the Thanksgiving dinner. She said she was, and so I went too. We got along swimmingly there. I remember that during a moment of excited gesticulation in the living room she (or was it me?) spilled a glass of wine on her blouse. Off it came (unfortunately in the privacy of the bedroom), replaced by a loaner from a friend. Funny, innit, how we remember these details. Anyway, at evening’s end I drove her home. It was winter, cold outside. But I’d never felt warmer. Or more anxious. What would I do when we got to her house? If she invites me in? At the time I was in another “relationship” — scare quotes says it all — and a hapless victim of misguided loyalty. It didn’t happen, thankfully. Or so I thought at the time. We pulled into her driveway, I thanked her for a fun evening, she me, and then she stepped out of my truck and closed the door. I might have shook her hand. Ooh, daring! I didn’t even walk her to her front door. I know, right, what a schmuck. In my defense, though, I knew I’d be helpless to control my impulses were I to find myself, say, caught up in her arms? So I self-arrested. Like I said, misguided loyalty. After that, for the next three years, we never saw or spoke to each other again. Three years.

…

Marty described Nancy to me.

“A nurse practitioner, right? I said. “Yes, I remember now, we met several years ago. What about her?”

“She wants to know if she can call you.” I stared at Marty a second, thinking back to that night in her driveway, the tasting, the grace and beauty of her smile, the glow of her hair, the ease with which we talked to each other.

“She wants to call me? Now? Like tonight? Yeah, sure, of course, have her call me.”

I need to be honest in my recall here. The implied casualness of that, “yeah, sure, okay” completely belied my inner excitement.

That turned out to be the wisest Of Course I have ever uttered in my entire life. For the record I did have to call her. I waited at home for the phone to ring as I studied for my final biochemistry exam, and eventually it did ring, but when I picked up it was Marty, “Did she call you?”

“No.”

“Crap. She’s too scared is all. Just call her, okay?”

“Okay.”

And so I did. And from that night forward we have never been apart.

You may dry your eyes now.

Oh, the travails of old dog companionship. Wasn’t it just a month or so ago, while Lucy was still with us, he was sleeping contentedly through the night? We’re pretty sure it was. Now? Well, somewhere between 2:30 and 3:00 am we hear him downstairs, bleating. It’s usually Happy Wife who gets up and goes down to let him outside. Most often he’ll take a pee and then lay down in the snow in the middle of the yard. And stare, at nothing in particular. Or bark a few times at the northwest corner of the fence. But there’s nothing there. Eventually he gets cold and comes onto the porch and lays on his bed for awhile. After a time he paws at the door and wants back in. Happy Wife will get up from her makeshift bed on the couch and let him in. Once he resettles she can slip back up stairs without him knowing and come back to bed with me. Most nights, not all, he will then rest quietly until about 5:30 or 6:00 am. Then, copy/paste, except it’s me who’s on duty this time, wanting to let HW enjoy a little more sleep.

We tried Benadryl before bedtime. Didn’t seem to help restore his normal sleep cycle. Neither has Amitriptyline, which he’s also on. And Gabapentin for neurological pain. And Rimadyl, an anti-inflammatory.

I Googled “restless dogs at night.” Melatonin may work! Or Xanax! “Have you considered Selegiline?” Why no, I hadn’t. Says it helps some dogs in the throws of cognitive decline — nighttime relentlessness, reversed sleep cycles, barking into space. That kinda thing.

I offer my findings to HW as I prepare her morning latte (w/Eggnog — it’s that time of year!). She agrees we should try Xanax. He responded to it favorably before, she reminds me. Remember, we’d taken him to the vet to have him degassed and he came back home looking and behaving all panicky? Oh, right.

The advice I found included the caution not to scold a dog in cognitive decline. It’s like scolding an Alzheimer’s victim because he doesn’t understand. And equally futile.

Sometimes, usually on the weekends, when we sleep a little later and he’s been let outside (and back in) twice during the night, we’ll come downstairs and find him in “his” chair, zonked:

Whatchya gonna do.