2024 is fast becoming an interesting year. Among its notable events
- The VW ID.4 was mended
- I sold the VW ID.4
- I tried Tesla Full Self Driving
- I bought Bluetti gadgets to replace the APC UPS systems
- I bought a new iPad
- I bought Air Pods Pro 2 to go with it
- I discovered that Missy has an undercoat.
- Rocky presented with what appears to be a tumor in his lung
References
Rocky’s Tumor
Last weekend, December 7th, I gave Rocky a peanut butter tub to lick out. The good fresh ground from Whole Foods. I left the lid on the worktop. Rocky finished the tub and came back for the lid. He chewed up the lid and likely ingested some of it. He is a repeat offender at this.
Normally, he goes out into the garden, eats a belly full of grass, and tosses the lot removing what ever was irritating his stomach and throat. This time he tried it. I didn’t see what came up but he continued to cough and retch that evening. Come bedtime, he slept well but remained colicky Sunday.
Monday moring I booked him in for a sick puppy exam on Tuesday. Monday morning, the his vet’s triage staff read the appointment entry and called me to bring him in. One of the vets examined Rocky who conveniently coughed some for her. She recommended imagery to see what he might have eaten or lodged.
I left Rocky for sedation and imagery. These are taken with the dog in various poses. In the process of taking these, they found the images free of garbage gut swag but they found more dog than should be in the lungs. Rocky’s imagery revealed a tumor.
Initial Oncology Consult
So we booked a referral with the area canine oncologist. He was not particularly up to date on greyhound lore but he did give me a feeling for some of the alternatives. We have several choices at this point.
- Palliative care knowing that he has an active malignancy somewhere.
- Additional imaging to check the rest of Rocky for tumors and palliative care.
- Additional imaging plus biopsies and surgery.
It is rare that a canine malignancy is cured. Many of the treatments are similar to ours. I’m aware of two greyhound cases, one a lymphoma case and one an osteosarcoma case, that with chemotherapy and other care lived about a year after diagnosis. That’s the best you can hope for. In both cases, the dog received chemotherapy that slowed the disease.
The Way Ahead
Rocky has presented with anomalous imagry that requires follow up. The next steps are
More imagery to determine the extent of his disease and to locate the primary tumor if possible. An ultrasound guided biopsy of an accessible lesion follows to identify the tumor base tissue and type. With this information in hand, Rocky’s continuing care can be planned. Depending on the tumor type, chemotherapy or immunotherapy can extend Rocky’s life and keep him comfortable.
As I write this on New Year’s Day, Rocky will cough to relieve lung congestion, one wet sounding cough 2 or 3 times a day. He’s eating normally, eliminating normally, and remains active and engaged.
Greyhound Cancer Statistics
Greyhound history is that, at Rocky’s age, lung tumors are 99% metastatic disease and 1% primary disease. The most common source of metastatic disease by far is osteosarcoma. His lower limbs are unremarkable but there can be a tumor on the femur or in the shoulder where it would not present or in the hips. I think we have to assume osteosarcoma and image for it. This is a discussion to have next week.
I contacted the oncology team for an estimate and tentative booking. Once we have CAT scans made and evaluated we’ll have some idea of the extent and origin of Rocky’s sarcoma.
Rocky’s prognosis is another 6 to 18 months of life depending on how aggressive his disease is and how effective chemotherapy is in holding it back.
Greyhounds are Different
Yes, they really are.
- Red cell pack twice normal
- Tend to have low thyroid T4
- Liver function is a bit lower
- Blood creatine is a bit higher
- IDEXX has separate reference ranges for greyhounds
Couto Veterinary Consultants
Doctor Guilermo Couto has retired from teaching but remains active as a consulting veterinarian. He’s a greyhound expert and remains involved in research and consulting through his practice and the Greyhound Health Initiative. He has provided orthopedic care to pups racing at the West Virginia tracks. He consulted on the osteosarcoma case of a Twitter friend’s hound, Daisy, to Daisy’s benefit.
Greyhound Health Initiative
Because they are different, and have some unique health care considerations Dr. Couto and some others formed Greyhound Health Initiative to sponsor research of greyhound health topics, distribute greyhound health care information to practitioners, and to owners.
Among other things, GHI is researching foot corns which are fairly common in greyhounds and are a bit of an enigma. They’re also sponsored osteosarcoma immunotherapy research with some promising avenues of research ongoing.
ID.4’s Sorry Tale
The ID.4 is also known as “Moby Dick”
In 2023, the ID.4 was involved in a close encounter of the third kind with a Virginia Beach EMS vehicle on its way to a call. The HV isolators fired and the left rear quarter panel and hatch suffered collision damage. It took the local VW shop about 15 months to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. In early July 2024, VW had completed repairs and returned the vehicle.
In September of 2023, I decided to replace the ID.4 and purchased a Tesla Model Y as its replacement. It didn’t take long to fall in love with the Model Y. The car was finished. Everything was there. Over the air updates worked, were happening regularly, and the car gained features.
Among other things, I subscribed to Recurrent Auto EV Sales Referrals Service. They listed the car. One of the subscribing EV specialist resellers contacted me with a fair offer. The ID.4 was gone in about 2 weeks.
Redfin
Our 2023 Tesla Model Y is here to stay. And needed a name. When Model Y first started appearing around town, I was seeing the grey ones and black ones which look remarkably like bullheads when you meet them head on about town. The aerodynamic feature across the lower front resembles a bullhead’s mouth and the dark colors accentuated the look. Bullheads are a black skinned catfish variety common up north in Yankee country. So I decided to look for a fish name of a red fish that would fit on a Greyhound series Virginia vanity plate (6 spaces). All the sporting fish names were taken. After some googling and consulting of oracles, I settled on Redfin, a small fresh water red skinned fish with a bit of attitude — they’re territorial.
It’s Just a Family Car, Right?
A four second family car! Redfin is a Dual Motor AWD long range with a 330 mile range on a nice fall day. A rear hatch. Flip down seats. Room for 2 greyhounds. And it has dog mode. Dog mode secures the window and door controls to prevent accidental opening and egress. It also runs climate control to maintain cabin temperature.
The Model Y is easy for codgers to embark and disembark. And it has all of the modern bells and whistles including front and rear cross traffic warnings, emergency braking, stability control, traction control, one-pedal driving, adaptive cruise control, and lane assist. Tesla calls the combination of these last two Autopilot. Tesla has level 5 autonomy in development. Tesla refers to this feature as Full Self Driving. It’s currently at SAE Level 2 meaning that you have to mind it closely.
Tesla Full Self-Driving
I’ve given it a go in two trials but not the most recent. Full Self Driving appears to lack a sense of caution. It just keeps doing the math delaying stopping until it reaches whatever margin is set in its parameters for it to stop.
When a human driver sees something anomalous, we begin a cautionary slow-down until we understand the nature of the situation ahead and we stop leaving plenty of margin to the hazard. That seems hard for a machine learning system to do. It presses on until it has reached its speed dependent minimum range to begin action. Then it does something. Hard.
The second objection I have is that the navigation is determined to minimize its routing cost functions. Even if it has to take the wide, fast boulevards that break up this town where the bay doesn’t. It is keen on unprotected U-turns and often thinks the objective is on the opposite side of the road from its actual location.
The car has yet to learn my preferred way out of my subdivision. It has failed to learn that I prefer the 2-4 lane secondary roads like Shore Drive over the boulevards. I always take the tamest route that I know.
The big problem with machine learning is that there is no good way to know what it knows or which patterns it is using in a given situation. Tesla adds more examples to the training set and hopes for the best.
Bluetti Power Gadgets
This year, I decided to retire the APC UPS boxes rather than replace their batteries. The question was what to get. After some looking at trade magazines and YouTube videos, I settled on Bluetti Power portable power stations.
What a pretentious name for a portable 12o VAC battery-inverter. Unlike the APC devices, these are offered with clearly stated battery capacity and output power. Knowing load draw, you can size them for a particular runtime. Unlike the APC devices, these can be charged from solar panels compatible with their DC input rating. And Bluetti offers half-price deals on Black Friday and other holiday sale times.
I have yet to buy solar panels and may not. But I did learn that these vary widely in portability, ease of setup, and durability from one brand to another. Bluetti is among several well regarded brands.
Consumer Reports is just starting to test this product capability so there are limited reviews. Keep in mind that most are made in China, most use one of several systems on a chip to be their brains, and battery chemistry and quality can vary widely. So look for a well regarded brand and take advantage of their direct sales. I would not buy these from Amazon merchants as the product offer may have fallen off of a container ship.
This week, Virginia Power was doing retail distribution bus transfers. This break then make switching causes the power to cut for a few cycles. The way the Bluetti devices work, the inverter is always running but the load is on the line. When the line drops, a relay itransfers the load from the line to the inverter. When the power restores, it switches back.
Apparently, the Bluetti management immediately makes the transfer back when the power comes on. If the inverter has not synchronized with the restored line, the transfer to the line is rough enough to make the inverter protection call a fault and trip the machine.
I think the fix could be a simple as waiting a minute or so before transferring from the inverter back to the mains. This wait should allow for the utility to finish its business and the inverter to resynchronize with the incoming mains.
I can imagine that a faulted retail distribution could make the critter most cross. While I was living in Connecticut, a line broke on a rainy winters day. It landed in a puddle and began arcing most impressively as they do on rainy days. The recloser kept trying to clear the fault but the line was in the water. The recloser would reenergize the line. It would fault and trip and reclose several times before locking out the line. This made several of our laboratory computers restart several times. These were customer machines destined for installation in nuclear power plants.
New iPad Air 13 inch
The old iPhad had fallen one too many times without protection. It was an Mini-5 about 4 years old. And the battery wouldn’t hold a charge. And the Lightning connector was warn and fussy to stay connected. So I purchased an iPad Air 13 inch for the larger screen area. I went from light but hard to read to easy to read lethal weapon. The Air 13 is “heavy”, at least it seems heavy. (weight 900 grams in folio case.)
With its Magic KeyStand it weighs in in MacBook Air territory. But being thin and largish it is like carrying around a cafeteria tray!
The image quality is gorgeous. The key stand lets me use it like a laptop but it runs iPadOS rather than MacOS so application choices are restricted to iPad and iPhone titles.
Missy’s Coat
Missy has a thick warm coat for a greyhound. This year she started looking a bit mangey as I had not been brushing her regularly. So I brought her a brush. That helped. A nice natural bristle brush on one side and pin brush on the other. But she still looked mangy. What this, tan belly and red back? Rolling back the hair along the spine, I found a fine tan below the red. That was what she was shedding. It would come up through the red giving her stripes at first, then a mottled look.
I bought another dog tool for under coat thinning that was supposed to rake out the loose hair. It worked, sort of but was probably too coarse for her. She’s going to need a find pitch comb. But I found my old horse leg and face groomers worked well. They reach through the top coat to loosen the undercoat fir.
Car Coat Maintenance
Somebody at Tesla like Red. Each product that is not a CyberTruck is available ina signature red, for Model Y, Dual Coat Red that has some serious smolder.
The Tesla is normally in “Space Dock”, our carport guarded by two camellias that are about to bloom. We are about 4 to 6 weeks from “yellow snow” season when the pollen begins coming down thick as the trees flower in turn. I discovered that I could do a “hoseless wash” of Redfin using a soap formulated not to need flushed off the vehicle.
The technique is to use a wash bucket and a rinse bucket. The wash bucket has water with the measured amount of hoseless soap in it. The rinse bucket has clear water. Using a wash mitt or wash mop, you wash part of the surface, usually a panel. Then wash mitt goes into the rinse water and a second pass is made to take the soapy stuff off.
I have a mop from Microfiber Madness that I use. It saves a lot of bending allowing me to get a good wash in the carport. Once the wash and rinse is complete, I dry Redfin with microfiber towels. One usually does the job.
Then I finish with Adam’s Polishes Detail Spray. This applies a polymer dressing that forms a protective layer resistant to pollen, bug juice, and bird poo. If the car is just dusty, it can be applied without a wash to restore a clean state.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 
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