Adventures In Babysitting

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 10, 2015] © 2015 
 

Recently, we spent four days in L.A. babysitting our grandchildren – 5, 4, and 14 months – paroling our son and daughter-in-law for a much-needed get-away.  Overall it went well. There were, however, three heart-stopping episodes but fortunately nothing that could not be resolved by either (1) acetone (2) phenobarbital or (3) the realization that the house wasn’t on fire after all.  

Fortunately, we were provided the assistance of a babysitter as Olof and I were clear that we were not up to the task on our own. Each of those kids has more energy than Olof and I have combined. Further, the 14-month-old, like all of his ilk, is positively drunk with happiness at his new mobility and makes a break for the nearest object of peril the second you take your eyes off him. He needed one-on-one.

And so we arrived in L.A. with our dog Winston. Now, you may remember that Winston is actually their dog but he has spent so much time at our house that in January we took official ownership of him. Our son and daughter-in-law adore Winston – he was their wedding gift to each other eight years ago – but like most English bulldogs of his age, Winston has developed increasingly serious and time-consuming medical problems. 

Concurrent to Winston’s health woes, my daughter-in-law and two friends started a YouTube channel for moms with young kids that has been so successful that it has been featured on Good Morning America and the Today show; their thrice-weekly video site has 15 million views a month. They are delighted, of course, but my daughter-in-law’s overstretched life could no longer accommodate urgent veterinary appointments with three tots in tow. 

Now, normally the older kids would have had summer activities for part of the day but these had mostly ended. So we arrived with plenty of projects planned. We made homemade slime (borax, Elmer’s glue), planted herbs in little pots, read tons of stories, watched all manner of endearing theatrical performances, mediated the usual number of “He’s being mean to me!” altercations, tried to explain that in checkers you either have to use the red squares or the black squares but not both, and otherwise enjoyed our time with them. 

At 5 a.m. the second morning we were there, however, there was a sudden loud blast from the smoke alarm in the hallway right outside the kids’ bedrooms. Let me tell you, that will get your adrenaline going. Fortunately, the blast stopped as quickly as it started. There was no smell of smoke, and we recalled that our smoke alarms had occasionally, maliciously, done this as well. It’s like smoke alarms get bored and decide to toy with you.  (It’s not the same noise as the low battery indicator water-faucet-torture beep that smoke alarms make - also maliciously - at night.) But anyway, false alarm – but no coffee needed THAT morning. We were seriously awake. 

The second night we were there, after everyone had gone to bed, I was horrified to find Winston having a seizure. Fortunately, my arsenal of Winston medications included some doggie phenobarbital that my daughter-in-law had bequeathed me. Since Winston has only ever had a seizure at his L.A. home and not ours, he had obviously become sensitized to something at their house during the last two years while he was mostly living at ours. 

Now, Olof and I had to concede that a seizure for either human or canine was not an altogether inappropriate response after a day with three kids five and under. But the kids are incredibly gentle with Winston and there are plenty of places in the house he can escape. My theory? The L.A. folks eat mostly organic and use all green cleaning products. Maybe it’s too much of a shock for Winston’s aged immune system to go from our house where we don’t eat organic and the cleaning products are toxic. Definitely a puzzle. 

On the third day, the two older kids were giving me a mani-pedi while Olof was on toddler-stalker duty. Granddaughter accidentally knocked over the whole bottle of Mommy’s special bright red nail polish on the light colored kitchen floor. When the sitter tried to clean it up, it only succeeded in expanding it onto a nine inch diameter red blob which was impervious to kitchen cleaning products. We Googled “nearest hardware store” and dispatched Olof to acquire acetone and Magic Erasers which fortunately did the trick. Whew! That one was going to be hard to explain to Mommy! And if she asks if I’ve seen her red nail polish, I’m going to plead the fifth.

So: Mom and Dad are back home, we and Winston are back home, everyone survived, and a good, if exhausting, time was had by all. Now Olof and I are thinking of our own four day retreat. We’ve earned it. 

Manicure by four-year-old

 Winston as a gift pup (6 weeks old)

Technodespondence

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 27, 2015] © 2015 

There are infinite numbers of things that can go wrong with your computer. And Microsoft thinks of new ones every day.

I have a personal hate-hate relationship with all things technical which includes computers, software, cell phones, and the entire workforce of Time Warner Cable. I am suffering from serious technodespondence.

I really don’t do anything that weird.  I’m very careful about what emails I open, have good virus protection, rarely sext, don’t do social media or download videos.  So it is truly unfair that I’m dealing with as many techno problems as I am.

 

Even ten years ago, if your computer was working fine on one day and you didn’t mess with it, it would be working fine the next day too.  Not anymore. 

Unsolicited updates (that would be you, Microsoft) and undesired upgrades (Internet Explorer anyone?) are the curse of the modern world. They guarantee that whatever worked before will never work again.

 

For example, all of a sudden these red circles with white exclamation points started appearing on my desktop files.  Not a good sign. Many aggravating hours later, it turned out that I needed to go to McAfee, my virus protection software, and select Disable Icon Overlays in Windows Explorer.  But I never enabled them in the first place!  Turns out to be some stupid McAfee upgrade that I didn’t ask for that alerts you that this file is not backed up. Like, I need to be tortured by my own virus software?

 

On my iPhone, I accidentally upgraded to iOS7. I began to notice that I was missing most of my calls – it often wasn’t ringing even when I was holding the phone in my hands.  My daughter-in-law finally explained that iOS7 had activated “Do not disturb,” as an “upgrade” (hah!  HAH!) that keeps your phone from ringing if you’re in “sleep mode” (which apparently happens after you haven’t used the phone for about seven seconds).  Of course, I didn’t actually activate it because I had never heard of it, wouldn’t know how to activate it and didn’t want it in the first place.  Because it was eating all my calls!  Worse, it kept coming back! A stealth app.  Gaaahhh!

 

On-line “Help”, alas, doesn’t speak English.  (Actually, human help usually doesn’t either.) You have to know what you did to undo it.  (See “icon overlays,” above.)

 

For most new software, there IS no tech support (we’re talking about you, Google), other than “community groups” for which you are depending on the kindness of totally inept strangers. My experience with community groups is: 

(1) nobody answers your question

(2) lots of people answer your question but none of the solutions help

(3) I can’t understand any of the solutions

(4) the solutions will mess up my computer to the point that the original problem will seem insignificant.

 

Change one little thing on your computer and it’s like the butterfly in Australia that flaps its wings and causes tornados in Kansas.  Trying to fix it changes enough things to add monsoons in Asia. 

I have a mug that says “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”  I believe it fundamentally.

Error messages, meanwhile, are a cruel psychological test. The one thing you can be assured of is that whatever it says is NOT the actual problem.

It goes without saying that if Olof crumps before I do, I’m going to have to throw myself on top of his coffin and let them pile dirt on top of me. This is my worst fear, being left alone with my electronics. Every new appliance we get is more terrifying than the last.  In my nightmare Olof-less world, the grandtots mess up the remote and I never watch TV again.  Because who do you get to fix that stuff?  Messed Up Remotes R’ Us?  THIS, unemployed twenty somethings, is the career of the future. 

 

I just can’t keep up.  I don’t WANT to keep up.  I just want everyone to leave my electronics alone.  I don’t want those 22 Microsoft “Updates” to automatically upload (download?) on my machine when I go to turn it off. I know for a fact that there are evil forces contained in them.

 

And I want to opt out of all cloud-related activities.  Sunshine only!  I want messages that go from here to there without stopping on some intermediary planet. 

 

If I were president, I would make it a law that no software can be released that isn’t supported by actual humans who:

 (1) answer within 15 minutes

(2) can speak English understandable by 95% of native English speakers (meaning no one from either India or Alabama)

(3) actually understand the product.

 

If software should be introduced without tech support:

First offense: $1,000
Second offense: eight billion dollars
Third offense:  hanging

I’m serious.

 

 

 

 

 

The Cheapness Olympics

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 20, 2015] © 2015 

At a happy hour recently, we were having a contest about the cheapest person each of us had ever known. I actually entered three candidates. None of them won but they all got honorable mentions.

 

Fortunately, we’ve been surrounded by truly generous people for all of our lives which makes the pikers that much more memorable.

 

My first entry was a couple whom my former husband had known in college. He hadn’t had any contact with them in the 15 years since graduation when he got a call from them saying they were coming out to San Diego for two weeks and hoped to see us while they were here.  My then-husband enthusiastically agreed. A few days later another call: a mix-up about their accommodations had occurred.  Might they, and their toddler daughter, stay with us for the first two nights since their airline tickets were already purchased? OK, we said, but be forewarned that our house is not baby proofed. We had no kids of our own at the time.

 

They duly arrived but daily complications with their other accommodations kept arising. Vague excuses despite our specific queries as to where this housing was. Should be just one more night, they said. After a week, we started to get really suspicious.
 

They managed to be at our house every night for dinner noting that it was greatly preferable for a young child to eat at home rather than a restaurant. It became clear that short of changing the locks (we thought of it), we were not getting rid of them.

 

On their last evening, they arrived at dinner time bearing a gift “to thank us for our hospitality” (i.e. sponging off us for two weeks). It was a $10 cardboard-backed poster which they leaned up against the beautiful Tiffany hurricane lamp on our dining room table which promptly fell over and broke. Oops! No offer to replace it. Let’s stay in touch, they said when they left. We never heard from them again.

 

My second candidate was a woman I knew casually in college on the east coast who I ran into at a local alumni event. Our husbands seemed to hit it off so we ended up socializing with them. Both the woman and her husband had had their educations funded by the income from their trust funds and were each heirs to fortunes that would be familiar to you. But they liked to play “struggling young 20-somethings,” and while we fed them nice meals at our place, dinner at theirs generally consisted of bread pudding (no meat) as the main course with a salad, and for dessert, “frozen yogurt” – one container of Dannon per couple put into the freezer and served with two spoons.

 

You could see how these peoples’ ancestors had gotten rich. This couples’ favorite entertaining gambit was to invite their friends for a “bring your favorite wine and your favorite cheese” party – and then proceeded to put guests’ names on them to shame you into bringing a genuinely good wine and a genuinely pricey cheese. (It was alleged to engender conversation about one’s selections.) Suffice to say, they were able to stock their wine cabinet for months with the unopened bottles.

 

For my 30^th birthday, they showed up at our house with cake and a “gift basket” (minus the basket). The gifts were two avocados from their tree and a book from a local library sale still marked $.25, all wrapped in newspaper, along with the bottle of wine we’d brought to the wine and cheese party. The supermarket cake was tagged “Clearance” to reflect its imminent sell-by date and read “Feliz cumpleaños.”

 

My last candidate was a fellow mom with whom I’d had the misfortune to carpool for a sports practice. She frequently bailed on her carpool days leaving messages on my home answering machine (she had my work number) that she was unable to drive that day because her husband wanted her to meet him for drinks at their club. (Only in La Jolla.) So it probably wasn’t too surprising when she showed up to the end-of-the-season pot luck team party at my house minus anything resembling a pot but carrying a large Costco can of beans. She wanted to make her chili at my house, she said, so it would be “fresh.” (I think chili does better after it’s been in the fridge for a day.) She then proceeded to appropriate my stock pot and ransack my spice cabinet for all the spices she’d need, making a giant mess in my kitchen in the process. Nobody ate it (since other people had brought actual food) so she graciously announced she was leaving it for my family, since of course, she couldn’t actually take it with her without stealing my pot as well.
 

As I said, all honorable mentions. You don’t even want to know the story that won.



 

 



Letting It Go

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published August 13, 2015]  © 2015 

There was definitely a selection factor for the people who attended my 50^th high school reunion in suburban New York a few weeks ago.  We were the ones who weren’t dead.

I confess I was seriously ambivalent about attending this event. But in the end, I was glad I went, despite, as I’ve previously written, the nightmare air travel to get there. Fortunately, there was one shining light in the airline experience: flying from Martha’s Vineyard (where we were visiting friends ahead of time) to Armonk, NY (closest airport to my hometown) in an 8-seater Cape Air plane. When I tried to go through the TSA line at the Martha’s Vineyard airport, I was  informed that I didn’t need to as mine was a “TSA-unsecured flight.” There’s really such a thing?  But then, there’s probably only minimal terrorist activity going on between Martha’s Vineyard and Armonk.

When they announced my flight, the Cape Air agent told me to go out the side door, walk past the playground, and hang out by the chain link fence where someone would come get me and my two fellow passengers.  After hours being tortured at O’Hare en route, this was truly refreshing.

Olof, meanwhile, had decided that he would rather excise his spleen with a rusty cheese knife than go to my reunion (his own, in Walnut Creek, is in September) and decided that it would be an upper instead to tour the battlefields in Gettysburg. Fortunately for me, the huge storm that was about to hit the Northeast held off long enough for my tiny toy plane to fly. While a deluge didn’t particularly impact my reunion, Olof observed that the Gettysburg battlefields probably show better when not under water.

When I arrived at my Armonk motel (my Draconianally-zoned home town doesn’t have any hostelries), friends had already set up a bar as a precursor to our first evening plans, which was to eschew the reunion’s official Friday night event: walking in the graduation ceremonies followed by dinner at the school cafeteria. When I heard that my classmates had voted for this event, I could wonder: were they all on food stamps? Further, I thought this was a rotten thing to do to the new graduates: like, if they work hard their whole lives and don't die of cancer, WE'RE what they have to look forward to?  Third, I avoided that cafeteria like the plague in high school so flying across the country to eat there wasn’t really high on my list. As it was later disclosed, the vote for the graduation/cafeteria event was 12-10, the other 150 classmates having failed to vote one way or the other. 

The big event was the Saturday night “dinner dance” at the local country club whose heyday was in the 1940s. We had a DJ who played “our” music, including the much beloved YMCA which was technically released 13 years after we graduated but without which no oldies high school reunion would be complete.

Despite being a small town, we actually have one really famous classmate, a Pulitzer prize-winning humor columnist and author of some 20 books who has written about our high school frequently. In fact, his latest book has an entire chapter about his yearbook photo in which he describes his hair as resembling a “malnourished weasel.” He and his wife came to the dinner dance with their 15-year-old daughter who bore up bravely but could be seen clicking away on her phone. I would have killed to see the hashtags: #geezerfest  #worstnightofmylife  #sincewhenisthismusic  #Illneverbebadagain #oyveyYMCA?

All of us being 67-68, there was, not surprisingly, a lot of health and diet talk. One of my classmates appeared to have been dropped into a vat of new age elixir: everything was “meant to be,” all choices were OK. You just wanted to smack her. But what was truly lovely was how unfiltered conversations were. Maybe it’s because we’ve finally dropped all the pretenses. Or maybe we’re borderline senile. Regardless, the dialog was all refreshingly honest. Then again, maybe in high school you don’t want conversations to be that honest.

It being a reunion, there were prizes:  most marriages (6); most grandchildren (8), longest marriage (46 years). As with the 40^th, I got the award for coming the farthest although not before a challenge by somebody from Washington state was settled by MapQuest on our iPhones.

Alas not present: the alphabetical creepo who sat next to me in homeroom. I was secretary of the Organ Club (music, not donors) so when club announcements were read, he loved lean in and leer, “Hey, Inga, want to play MY organ?”  I had so many rejoinders ready.  Dang.

 

Ultimately I think the theme song for a 50^th reunion ought to come from a much newer hit, Frozen’s “Let it go.”  I’m happy to say, I think we did.

Arriving in my tiny toy plane

 

 

 

 

Melted Asphalt Insurance

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published July 30, 2015] © 2015 

Our sons have long since been paying for their own cars and insurance but when we got our annual automobile insurance bill this week, I could only wonder if we were still paying for their youthful vehicular indiscretions. 

My husband, Olof, was actually pretty sympathetic about some types of adolescent vehicle mishaps. As a college student, he remembers working as a delivery person for the father of one of his friends and backing the man’s vehicle into stationary objects not once but three times. Finally the friend’s father, Mr. Knickrehm, took Olof aside and explained to him that he needed a better reverse strategy than backing up until he heard breaking glass.

When our older son, Rory, was 17, Olof donated his VW Golf to him, teaching him how to drive its stick shift. For Rory’s inaugural solo drive with the car, we were treating Rory and 15-year-old Henry to dinner at the Mandarin House while we had a dinner party at home. We were not even through the cocktail hour when Rory called. As he attempted to get out of a tight parking place, he backed into a brand new red Lexus putting a pencil eraser-sized hole into its wrap-around fiberglass bumper.

As anyone with a teenage son knows, you do not report these events to your insurance company, or you’ll be paying for that bumper 20 times over in higher insurance rates. Olof and I and Rory went to the man’s house the next day to survey the damage which frankly you needed a magnifying glass to see. But damage is damage, and we paid the owner for the repair. Rory tried to reimburse Olof from his summer job savings but Olof said he wanted to pay Mr. Knickrehm’s generosity forward. First backup incident was free.

A year later, Henry got his driver’s license on his 16^th birthday, and a mere two months later, got nailed for driving 20 miles over the speed limit on West Muirlands Drive by a policeman waiting for just such miscreants as our lead-footed son. Henry was outraged, insisting he was going to court and claiming entrapment. Olof, bemused, said he’d pay the fine if he could videotape the proceedings. Henry thought about that for a minute. “You don’t think that’s going to work,” he astutely observed.

I don’t know if minors can have a lawyer plead them out of speeding offenses but regardless, it wasn’t happening at our house. Olof went with Henry to juvenile traffic court where they were subjected to a long wait and endless videos about the perils of speeding, drugs, etc. “I think this is part of the punishment,” Henry whispered to Olof. Henry got traffic school and a fine which in this case he had to pay. No first time free on moving violations.

Fast forward a few years to the spring of Henry’s freshman year of college. He thinks he smells gas when he takes his car out for a quick errand one day, but it’s mid-term exam time; he’ll take the car in to be looked at next week when exams are over. So the car sits there for another week in the unseasonably warm April weather.

Alas, when Henry next gets in the car and turns the key, the pool of gasoline that had been accumulating under the car explodes. As Olof pointed out to Henry later, he seemed to have forgotten that the root word for ignition is “ignite.” Fortunately Henry didn’t even try to grab his wallet and phone on the seat next to him, just leapt from the car as fast as he could. Within seconds the car was a fireball with flames forty feet in the air, setting off every car alarm in the parking lot. The flames torched the car parked next to his as well, never mind melted the asphalt.

That night, Henry called the house, mentioning to me when I answered that he’d had a “minor engine fire” and needed to speak with Olof. There was a lot of head nodding on Olof’s part during this call. “You’ll need to work Mom into this story over several days,” advised Henry, I learned later. “Otherwise she is going to totally freak.”

Freak would be an understatement. Obviously, the only important thing in this story was that Henry made it out alive. He was fine. Personally, I’m still recovering.

Then, of course, there was the insurance claim. When we added the kids to our policy, who knew to even check whether it covered melted asphalt.  Advice to parents: check melted asphalt coverage! This was obviously a claim that wasn’t going to be settled privately especially when two torched cars and some serious repaving were involved. So every year when we get our automobile insurance bill, I have to wonder:  are we still paying for that parking lot?

 

Insurance photos you hope never to take

 

They Regret Any Inconvenience

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published July 23, 2015] © 2015 

After our flight to Boston was delayed in 30 minute increments for eight hours only to be cancelled, it occurred to us that the reason TSA confiscates guns and knives isn’t just to thwart terrorists but to protect the gate agents. 

I wrote recently about how Olof and I only travel these days if we really want to get some place. The knee room is ever smaller for the 6’3” Olof. The coach seats on long distance flights are brutal for someone like me who had polio as a child then had her spine rearranged several years ago by a drunk driver.

So when I contemplated attending my 50^th high school reunion on the East Coast and visiting friends on Martha’s Vineyard beforehand, Olof and I agreed we would only go First Class in spite of the cost.

Our previous attempt at First Class was a $6,000 Business-First ticket (First Class to East Coast, Business class internationally) to the UK on United for a surgically-recovering Olof. On the day of travel, weather was great, plane was there – but no flight crew. By the time the flight was cancelled, United’s premier coach passengers had already been upgraded to all the First Class seats that day. Olof’s only domestic option (besides waiting two days) was a non-reclining middle coach seat in the last row of the plane next to the bathrooms seated with a woman humming gospel tunes on her iPod. Poor Olof suffered horribly (on multiple levels).

But, we decided, that was just bad luck. Although actually, our flight before this most recent one had been bad luck too. Our United flight to San Diego lost pressurization at 30,000 feet and was diverted for an emergency landing. But that wasn’t even the bad part. 150 seriously traumatized passengers were shunted over to United’s glacial CustomerCare (oxymoron) desk which is the real life embodiment of the Nine Circles of Hell. It’s ten minutes to re-ticket each passenger, partly because of agent ennui but mostly because there are no seats. Every flight flies full, or over-booked. You start to wish the plane had gone down.

On this most recent trip, we arrived in Chicago at 11:30 a.m. on our First Class San Diego to Chicago to Boston to Martha’s Vineyard itinerary only to find that our Boston flight posting a two hour delay due to “maintenance.”  (No weather delays.)  The only First Class seats left were on the last flight of the day leaving at 7:15 p.m. which we booked as backups. At 6 p.m. (see 30 minute increments, above), we’re lined up to board a long-awaited replacement plane. But we don’t board. Oh no!  The new plane now has “maintenance” problems too! (How????? It just landed!!!!) Another two hour delay is posted. So we hustled some 30 gates to a different concourse for the 7:15 flight only to find pandemonium (two different flights trying to board), no gate agent, and finally the news that our confirmed seats had been given away (presumably to upgrade passengers). Only option: stand-by for coach. We’d left our house at 4 a.m. Still in Chicago at 8 p.m.  #hateUnitedwithapassion

Not surprisingly, our original flight with its medley of mechanically-challenged aircraft was cancelled. But no! Now even the stand-by flight was delayed! After more than eight hours at O’Hare, we ultimately flew in coach middle seats 15 rows apart, watching the folks in First Class eat our dinner.

Of course, they’d taken our carry-on away from us since the overhead bins were full. Arriving in Boston after 11 p.m., it took a half hour to wring our bags out of them. Five hours and $265 at the airport Marriott later, we were back at Logan for our rebooked flight to Martha’s Vineyard.  Twenty-eight hours door to door.

So here’s our thoughts about United:   

(1) Is it asking too much that you maintain your frigging airplanes?  Throughout the concourse during the day, we heard endless apologetic announcements regarding “brief” maintenance delays through gate agents’ lying skeevy teeth.  

(2) #worstinvestmentever   Somewhere in United’s fine print should be a disclaimer that a First Class ticket is merely a pricey lottery ticket that may or may not result in First Class travel. If your flight is delayed or cancelled, you’ll fly stand-by in coach - if you even fly at all.  

 (3) Given (2), can we take our First Class United tickets as a charitable deduction? 

 

(4) Explaining to customer service that you bought these pricey tickets for health reasons merely gets you an expression of “So die already.”
 

(5) Trying to sort this out after the fact is another exercise in futility. United’s customer service refund site has no “Bought First Class but flew coach” option. In fact, United is offended that you want a refund. After the UK fiasco and much haggling, United reluctantly parted with $300. (Airline math.) Current trip: unresolved. 

(6) Would it kill you folks to reserve a couple of First Class seats for people who actually paid for them? United starts upgrading its premier coach passengers FIVE DAYS before a flight. Has First Class become strictly an upgrade class unavailable to civilians?

(7) Our advice if you need to fly First Class for health reasons? Stay home.



 

 



**Looking A Gift Dog In The Mouth

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published July 16, 2015] © 2015 

If there’s one problem I’ve never really worried about, it’s my dog’s dental care. That would probably be because I don’t have a dog. Or didn’t anyway. I’ve written about our granddog Winston a number of times before because even though we technically don’t own a dog, Winston, for a variety of reasons, has spent a LOT of his eight years at our house. At this point, we suspect he’s not going back home.

Such are in-bred health problems with English bulldogs that Winston has supported a wonderful La Jolla vet in addition to one in L.A. While Winston was under anesthesia recently to remove a growth in his jaw, our local vet suggested adding a dental cleaning. When Olof heard that Winston would be unconscious for his teeth cleaning, he commented enviously, “Is there any way I could get that too?” Despite incredibly hazardous flying as an Air Force pilot, Olof is not a big fan of sharp instruments in his mouth.

Our vet mentioned when Olof collected Winston that “we” should really be brushing Winston’s teeth at least three times a week. I put “we” in quotes because when Olof reported this to me, I was very clear who “we” were.  “No problem!” I said. “I’ll put it on my list. BTW, if you notice your tooth brush smells a tad kibbley, that’s probably why.”

But this prompted me to research doggie dental care, which I am not disputing is important. Just as with humans, poor dental care can lead to all sorts of health problems.  It’s opened up a whole new world for me, one that I find usually requires a glass of chardonnay. This is especially true when perusing such topics as Picking the right toothpaste for your dog. (It can’t be human toothpaste. BTW, you need doggie toothbrushes too.)

Maybe if we’re going to keep this dog, we should be signing up for ObarkaCare.

Googling How to brush your dog’s teeth gets you lots of understated advice such as Your dog may not go for tooth brushing at first. You think?

Hopefully, the site continues, you can make it a reasonably pleasant experience for both of you. I know I’d have to be on my second glass of wine to consider brushing the dog’s teeth a pleasant experience, and I have no idea what it would take for the dog.

Start slowly, they continue, and quit if the dog gets agitated. If there’s one thing I’m clear on, it’s that I’m not putting my hand into the mouth of an agitated bulldog.

But not to worry: Before long, your dog should start looking forward to the event. I so don’t think that’s happening, considering his general unhappiness with ear reaming and facial fold de-goobering.

Symptoms you should look out for:  (1) bad breath  (2) depression (3) excessive drooling.  (His or mine?)

Your vet may refer you to a veterinary dentist. Ack! No!  We can hardly afford OUR dentist.

If you notice your dog’s adult teeth are crooked, he may be suffering from malocclusion. Don’t even say the “m” word out loud to me! I know all about malocclusion from the orthodonture bills of two kids.

The veterinary dentist won’t give your dog braces, but he has ways to realign the teeth. Sounds like braces to me! (Is there doggie Invisalign?)

Turns out that not a lot of other people want to brush their dog’s teeth either. A friend took her dog to place that does this for $99 (upfront). The dog wouldn’t open his mouth but the place wouldn’t refund her money. I guess the pet’s early obedience training didn’t include the command “open wide please.”

I’m thinking canine dental care could be a problematical pet problem, just as our neighbor found when advised to apply sunscreen to the nose of his cat who had developed skin cancer there. (The video would have gone viral on YouTube.)

“So,” said my husband Olof, as I was recounting my newfound knowledge, “shouldn’t you be flossing his teeth as well?”  I laughed, until I Googled it.  (Tip: NEVER Google information you don’t want to know.) And sure enough, yup, if you really cared about your dog (and you had absolutely no life whatsoever), you should be flossing too.  I did notice a warning sign pop up announcing, Don't floss the teeth of a dog who has a history of biting or growling as you approach his food or other possessions. I think that is extremely good advice. And then they added, To avoid residue buildup in his mouth, use canine popsicles as treats.

Canine popsicles? Does he hold them in his paws? No, I am NOT Googling canine popsicles. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Winston: No, I don't want my teeth brushed