Just Cut around It

IMG_0522If you’ve a sharp eye you’ll notice my watch is on the wrong wrist (wrong for me, that is … if you’re a lefty, this is ops normal).

Yesterday Dr. T, my dermatologist, freeze-burned a spot on my left arm, right on the untanned area where I normally wear a watch. It’s tender and swollen and I’m wearing watches on the other side now, at least for a while. Turns out my right wrist is larger than my left and only a few of my watches have straps long enough to go around it. Fastening straps left-handed is a new trick for this old dog. So far at least I haven’t had to ask Donna for help.

That wasn’t all, the wrist. Dr. T burned several spots on my face as well, mostly around the temples and eyebrows, so I’ll look a sight the rest of the week. She also took a bit of questionable skin from behind my right ear to send out for a biopsy. She’s never wrong about skin cancers and I’m confident there’s a follow-on visit in the cards.

Where I do need Donna’s help is applying polysporin and putting bandages on the spot behind my ear. And wouldn’t you know I have a haircut appointment this morning? I’ll ask Jason, my barber, to cut around that area. And hope he doesn’t slip.

In a previous post I wrote about a neighbor’s newly-adopted dog getting loose and running off, and how bad we felt for the family and the dog. Delighted to report a good Samaritan caught the dog and took it to the county animal shelter. Since the shelter microchips dogs when they’re adopted, they knew just who to call, and dog and family are now reunited. Mister B, our elderly dachshund, has a chip with our info on it, but Lulu and Fritzi do not, so we need to get on that.

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A friend (the same neighbor who just got his dog back) picks up on the received wisdom that license plates in photos must be blurred or otherwise obscured. A folk belief that originated, I think, with reality TV shows like Cash Cab, where visible license plates of vehicles in traffic are always fuzzed out, no doubt on the advice of studio lawyers who warn of potential liability should a plate be traced to an estranged wife by an abusive cop husband, who’ll then track her down and kill her, resulting in a civil suit brought against the studio by the woman’s family. Or something like that.

Law enforcement officers can dox someone from a license plate — you and I can’t do it. If anything is public information, it’s our license plates, visible to any Tom, Dick, or Karen who might be sharing the road with us or standing on a corner as we pass by. We can’t not share the information on our plates. Which information can be Googled to find out what vehicle the plate’s assigned to, plus some basic information about the vehicle itself, but nothing personal about the owner. So why cover license plates in photos?

Because TV studio lawyers do so, I guess. Well, I don’t have to, and don’t plan to start. You don’t either. By the way, the best photo in my friend’s post is the one at bottom right, which has nothing to do with hiding license plates.

Back to dogs. Fritzi was scratching herself and nibbling at spots she could reach with her teeth. She’d been at it for months and it was getting worse. Donna suggested she might have a food allergy. Our old dog, Mister B, eats prescription kibble for his kidneys, and since it’s expensive we feed it to Fritzi and Lulu as well. Last week I stopped giving Fritzi the kibble and switched her to canned food. The scratching diminished quickly — she still does it a little, but it looks like the food was the problem and the itching is going away.

Small problem: all three dogs observe my every move at mealtime, and Fritzi saw right away she was no longer getting what Mister B and Lulu got. She thought she was being punished, which put her off the canned food, which otherwise she’d wolf down. So I ordered a small bag of kibble made for dogs with food allergies, and now she’s happy and eating well again — I just have to be careful she doesn’t notice I’m scooping hers out of a different bag than the one her housemates’ food comes in.

Well, that’s the news from this corner of hell. Stay fresh, cheese bags!

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