We had ourselves a lovely holiday, starting with Thanksgiving I over at the in-laws’ with family and friends, good food and good company. A few of our pack were unable to attend due to their work schedules, so after a few hours we picked up the show and took it on the road to our house for Thanksgiving II. The sequel was all about my personal favorite part of the Turkey Day ritual: sammiches. Big, thick, slablike turkey sammiches with mayo and sweet pickles and provolone cheese. And pumpkin pie. But not on the sammiches.

All in all, a highly enjoyable array of holiday brouhahae. Wishing yours was as well.

This particular neologism came about as a result of a dialog with one of the attendees at Thanksgiving I (and Thanksgiving II, for that matter), Curt. Curt is a—well, actually, here’s the heart of the problem. One wants to use the term “vegetarian” to describe his eating habits, but that’s not really the case. He has for many years now and for reasons not entirely clear to me (nor are they really any of my business) forsworn the consumption of the larger and more motile aggregates of organelles that fill the land and the skies, but has no such compunctions when it comes to the denizens of the sea. I have watched Curt tackle a mountain of boiled crawdads, gleefully sucking the brains out of the heads. I have attempted to eat him under the table at sushi restaurants, resulting in a stalemate and an agreement to maintain diplomatic relations.

In short, he is one of those “vegetarian-except-for-fish” guys, a concept as seemingly self-contradictory as being “pro-life-except-for-the-death-penalty”, though not nearly as asinine or potentially destabilizing to society.

Anyway, up to now, “‘vegetarian-except-for-fish’ guy” was about the best term I could come up with for this unique gustatory niche. That is no longer the case.

Ladies and gentlemen, to eschew the tasty bits of the flesh of animals of the land and sky but not the sea, shall henceforth be known as the quality of being bi-epicurious.

There are 22 controlled intersections on the approximately 10 mile route that I drive home from work, 25 on the route I drive to work (don’t ask why I take a different route to work than I do to get home, it’ll just make you dizzy).
So seeing as there are literally millions of variables, starting with the simple: i.e. the light being either red or green (I count amber as “red”) and expanding to the incredibly complex: i.e. the amount of traffic going in the same direction that I am, the amount of traffic going in the perpendicular direction, and, to a certain extent, the time of day that I leave work….

What are the odds that I’ll catch every single one of those damnable traffic lights RED? And, if we assume the odds as being fairly equal that I’d catch every single one of them green, why is it that I seem to catch them all red one hell of a lot more often than I catch every single one of them green?

Since I started keeping track about 18 months ago I have had an entirely green trip exactly once. I have had entirely red trips maybe as often as once a month.
If there’s someone out there with a better head for statistics and probabilities than I, I would welcome an attempt to explain. Just the thought of trying to put together the mathematics of this makes me want to hide in a corner and whimper.

I think I need more tea.

As my darling (and patient) wife said in her previous post, I’ve been  r e a l l y  busy lately. But I thought I’d post a little animation I put together from some photos I shot.

In truth, there is no “Nom Box I”; it just sounded better as a sequel.

Yeah, sorry about that.
It’s been not much more than work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep on my part. As for Andrew, the only reason I know that he’s been eating is that he’s been cooking and if he hadn’t been cooking then *I* wouldn’t be eating so he must be. Other than that he’s been spending a LOT of time in his man cave pointing, highlighting, moving, pointing, highlighting, moving….. Now that the holiday catalogue is done, printed, and sent out he’s building online stores and websites in between arguing hotly with the new mail order software that FP is bringing online.

So a few random neural firings before I go outside to (hopefully) finish the fall garden cleanup.

I’ve run across a couple of patient names in the past couple of weeks that I just love. Both cats. One named “Squonk” and another named “Crash”. See, I’m firmly of the opinion that cats especially need to have names that reflect their personalities. It took us weeks to come up with Scamper and Scrum and we bounced all sorts of names off of them before their true names really showed up. Baird was onomatopoeic. Flit and Pogo were easier, but they’re both so much more extroverted than Scamp and Scrum ever were that their names were much more apparent.
I can put together a picture in my mind of how Crash got his name. Squonk is a little more difficult to picture as a stranger just interacting with him from the outside, but…. Well, the name fits Squonk perfectly. He is just simply a Squonk.
So many times the name comes before the pet — I used to see a pair of (very) fat dachshunds named *shudder* Angelica Joy and Montgomery Fitzwilliam. Granted we had a Johann Sebastian Barch which was a name that my dad had wanted to use on a dog for years. Weirdly, as those of you who knew him will remember, Barch was a remarkably apt and descriptive name for that dog. I’ve never known one who was louder.
Or the pet is named based on an aspect of its life “Precious” or “Lucky”. By the way, in the veterinary community it is well known that pets named “Precious”, “Sugar” and the like are all bloodthirsty land sharks while those named “Lucky” are invariably NOT. I knew a Lucky that, during the time I knew him, had been abandoned on a logging road, hit by a train, had to have a leg amputated (not because of the train accident by the way), and had eaten three poisoned rats. Naming your pet “Lucky” is a great way to invite chaos and destruction into your home — or at least your pet’s life.
Pets are named for celebrities or popular movie characters all the time. That’s a cop out so far as I’m concerned. We saw waves of pets named Nemo, about every third Shih-Tzu I see is STILL named Gizmo. I neutered Steven Segal, I neutered Ken Griffey and most recently I neutered Barack Obama (although his owners are calling him “Rocky” now since Barack Obama is rather a hard name to say in casual conversation with your pet). I’ve got a friend who spayed Paris Hilton. These are invariably interesting pet/name pairings. Steven Segal, for instance, was a standard Poodle and Barack Obama is a Yorkshire Terrier. But the name never really speaks to the person or the personality of the pet. The last Nemo I dealt with was an inveterate little ankle biter, and the grey cat named Gollum that I used to see was the sweetest thing on four legs.
People try to be clever naming their pets. We see an awful lot of dogs named Deohgee (D.O.G.) though I have yet to meet a cat named Ceeaytee. There are a lot of “O.C.” (Orange Cat), a lot of black cats named “Midnight” or “Spook/Spooky”, and I can’t count the number of chocolate Labs we see named “Hershey” or “Cocoa”. A word of advice. If you’re trying to be clever in naming your pet….work harder. The ones that you’re going to come up with first have already been used. Although to give credit where credit is due, I did have a client who named her cats “Charlie” and “(Bad, Bad) Leroy”. You can guess her last name.
The first time I ran across transsexual names for pets was a pair of Doberman Pincher sisters that were in at WSU to be spayed when I was a senior on my anesthesia rotation. They were named “Fred” and “Floyd”. To this day I’m sorry that I didn’t ask why they were named what they were named. I had a guy with a (very) male cat named “Daisy”, and there was one dude who brought in this incredibly obvious tomcat (big jowls, thick skin, beefy shoulders and *very* prominent testicles) named “Dolly”. When I pointed out that “Dolly” was a male he said that (and I quote) he’d “noticed the balls but since I didn’t see a penis I just figured she had to be female!”. He continued to call the cat Dolly even after he realized that Dolly was a boy, but what’s weirder is that the owner continued to refer to the cat as “she” for the rest of his life.
The weirdest ones for me to understand, that is to say, for me to TRY and understand, I’ve not figured this out at ALL, are the people who continue to name subsequent pets the same name. There was a sweet little old lady I used to see who had been through three dogs named “Baby” (the last being a balding and completely hyperactive Keeshond) and a disturbingly weird little old man who was on his fourth “King” by the time I knew him. In both of these cases the subsequent dogs were totally different than the previous ones of that name. The third “King” was a fat, blonde Cocker Spaniel, the fourth was a pushy and poorly mannered black Lab cross.

Anyway it’s stopped raining so I’ll stop ranting about pet names and go out and do something more useful….. Once I get Pogo off of my lap.

That was one of the better Halloweens we’ve had around here to date. To begin with, the newest addition to our Halloween decor, a Shishka Bob Torture Box from Gore Galore, was a big hit. We decked out Fernando with a bloody chef’s apron and hat and set him and Shishka Bob out in their usual place on the front stoop. The video below doesn’t really do the tableau justice, but it gets the general idea across:

Secondly, this was easily the best year we’ve had for Trick-or-Treaters since we moved to this neighborhood in 2001. We must have had 15 or 20 total, of all ages, spread out over a four hour period. Sounds pretty meager, but when you consider that 15 kids is 15 times more than we had last year, it changes one’s perspective a bit. We actually had to refill the candy bowl this year….a real red-letter Halloween. As significant is the fact that every one of them was actually in some sort of costume, versus years past when teenage moochers have come to the door with nothing but a tennis racket as a prop (”I’m a tennis player!”. A tennis player in a raincoat, no less) or the year when half of our traffic was teenage girls whose entire getup consisted of a—*shudder*—pacifier. This year’s crowd was diverse, amiable and polite; one kid even shook my hand and congratulated me on our decorating acumen.

The third thing that made this year a topper was the presence of family and friends. Our usual m.o. for Halloween night is to order pizza and sit around eating junk food and watching horror movies. Since this was exactly what more than a few of our contemporaries were planning on doing at their own homes, we decided to band together and do it as a group. We managed to wade our way through Night of the Creeps, Return of the Living Dead (a classic schlock horror movie, and the origin of the meme of zombies craving brains), Blood: The Last Vampire, and then washed it all down with Shaun of the Dead. All the while gorging ourselves on pizza, candy, chips, coffee, soda and mixed drinks.

The nice thing about sitting down to a terrible movie or two with friends is that you can feel free to talk to each other throughout the film, occasionally dipping into the narrative to comment on some particularly egregious bit of acting or special effects. It’s a form of socialization that only really works when everyone is on the same page as to the overall horrbileness (horribility?) of the flick in question. We were all more or less compatibly aligned last night, conversing animatedly throughout Night of the Creeps and most of Blood: The Last Vampire while remaining companionably attentive through most of Return of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead.

All in all, this was probably what I would consider to be the absolutely ideal Halloween night. While I am perfectly happy to both attend and throw parties, I am not a big costume person. Nor am I the type to want to construct elaborately-themed soirees of mind-bending depth and scope, the way my sister Meg does on Halloween, Christmas, Flag Day, Yom Kippur, etc; I just don’t have the energy. And with the amount of dough I invest in these studio-quality Halloween props (in lieu of expending any creative energy myself), I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of either leaving them unattended or declining to put them out at all. So spending Halloween night in with a few friends and a giant bowl of Kit Kats and Almond Joys is just about as good as it gets. Many thanks to those who came over and helped to kill off some of our candy.

tennis elbow?!
it’s 30 years or more since i’ve touched a tennis racquet and yet the hand specialist says that the ouchie elbow thing that has been tormenting me for weeks is effin’ tennis elbow?!
i don’t make enough money to have a snooty complaint like tennis elbow.

but it doesn’t matter really, that’s what the hand specialist says. actually he says “lateral epicondylitis” which does sound a bit less snooty.
and in the relief of same he’s injected cortisone around the tendon that passes over the lateral epicondyle of my left ulna.

he said yesterday that at first i’d not thank him for the cortisone injection since initially it would increase the pressure and inflammation of that area and y’know….. he was right. once the local anesthetic he poked in with the cortisone wore off my left elbow has been, by far, the most noticeable part of my body. i think you could probably see my bloody left elbow from space. DEEP space.

so i’m to spend the weekend with my arm in a sling wearing slip on shoes, and pants with elastic waistbands since i can’t tie my shoes and i can’t manage buttons or zippers. and you, my friends and family, are the proud perusers (if that’s a word) of the very first UADN post done entirely in hunt and peck with one hand.

it’s amazing what one can do with only one hand. and really, really, really frustrating to find out what i can’t dowithout my left hand.

anyone want an elbow? i’ve got one i can let go cheap.

This year’s Pumpkin Pogrom was, by all appearances, another hit.

Much chili, beer, coffee and junk food were consumed, and by all recordable measures a good time seemed to be had by all.

We had a couple of firsts this year, chief of which being the presence of my venerable Mom and Dad, who seemed rather impressed with the motley assortment of geeks, kooks, waifs and wastrels with whom we associate. Second of the firsts—um—yeah, anyway—was the presence of friend Anne and her boyfriend, who, being from Wales, had never carved a pumpkin for a Jack-O’-Lantern. Tradition in Wales and much of the rest of the surrounding area is to make them out of turnips, which he assured us are a damn sight harder to carve. Did rather well, too.

Anyway, thanks to all who came out to participate and help make the evening memorable. If you were not among those invited this year, please accept my apologies. We had something like twenty people over this year, at the same time that we were hosting my ‘rents for a few days’ stay. As it was, our carpets were heard to be whimpering softly to themselves well into the wee hours of the morning.

I haven’t the faintest when the actual harvest moon occurs, but this is the time of year when I start to get the urge to tally up the garden produce in some odd attempt, I suppose, to assure myself that spring will come again.
I’ve always said so, but I guess it really is true that I personally was meant to hibernate.
So starting from the top down…
Grapes? Check.
Lots of grapes. Lots and lots and lots of grapes. Raisins in the pantry, bags of grapes in the freezer waiting to be made into grape jelly (anyone want some grape jelly? I’ve still got some from last summer….).
Loganberries? Yep.
Stewed loganberries in the freezer. I’m going to make jam with some, Andrew is going to experiment with meat glazes and salad dressings with others. Next year we’ve got plans to have fresh berry salads.
Rhubarb? Oi.
Despite pounds in the freezer I was still harvesting rhubarb in SEPTEMBER for god’s sake. I really do have a mutant garden.
Potatoes? Plenty.
From about five pounds of seed potatoes I harvested about thirty pounds of Cranberry Reds, Yukon Golds, All Blue, Russian Banana fingerlings, and a small, white, round variety that I’ve never been able to classify since they’re still volunteers from the plants that Irv and Mabel grew when they lived here.
Onions? Ditto.
Most of the Walla Wallas ended up as flavoring in the green tomato pickles since they don’t store well and they were getting close to rotting on us. They’re absolutely delightful as such so I’m still going to plant them next spring even though I mostly plant onions with the idea of having storage onions for the winter. Plenty of those, too, although next year I think I might try a different subspecies since the Copras are awfully small. A gallon jug of pickled Cippolinis thank you very much. I’m hopelessly addicted to pickled Cippolinis. A two quart jar of mixed dried Cippolinis and dried leeks. I dried the ones I did because for some reason a lot of them bolted and the centers were too woody for either fresh eating or pickling. The dried onions are delightful in (or on) hamburgers and meat loaf.
Beans?
Pickled beans, frozen beans, dried beans. Black beans that is. Enough Scarlet Runner beans for seeds for next year (the hummingbirds love the flowers) and hopefully next year there’ll be enough beans to harvest for soup.
Two 2 quart bags of frozen currants, black, red, and a few gooseberries. I’m going to try again to make a decent currant jelly. The stuff is gorgeous and I love it, but the last time I tried it I boiled the syrup for too long and it turned into a brownish gunk with the adhesive qualities of whatever it is they use to keep the heat shield tiles on the space shuttles.
Dried tomatoes (they’re gorgeous!), pickled green tomatoes, frozen stewed tomatoes. Next year I might try making tomato chutney, but since we both adore the tomatoes fresh, I may not ever have enough ripe tomatoes to chutney.
I am not sure why, but the raspberries fizzled entirely. I’m working at replacing our red raspberry patch with a black raspberry patch. My parents keep bringing me black raspberry starts from their patch, which they frequently have to keep under control with things like machetes and flame throwers, so I’m hopeful that as these babies mature I’ll start to have raspberries again. Andrew is passionately fond of raspberries.
Lots of herbs. Lots and lots and LOTS of herbs. I don’t ever dry rosemary, the rosemary bush is so convenient to the kitchen. I have plenty of dried sage though, since the sage that one can pick in the winter is a little squashy and of poorer flavor than that which you pick in the summer. I’m currently babying a French tarragon plant with the hopes that it’ll be able to overwinter and be a big, burly French tarragon plant next spring. I got enough lemon verbena to keep me in tea over the winter and the stevia should be sufficient for the winter as well. I’m up to my eyeballs in mint, lemon (or lime) balm, and winter savory and I got my first batch of marjoram off of the golden marjoram plant that I put out last summer. I’m very pleased with the golden marjoram. Also chives. Lots of chives. Dried chives in the pantry, fresh chives out front to be snipped when a chive and parmesan omelet is required (mmm, chive and parmesan omelet….).
The fall peas are doing well, but they’re subject to slugs and they just don’t have the flavor that spring peas do. I may just continue to focus on spring peas.
We’ve eaten our way through the two quarts of pickled spring beets. The fall beets are looking fantastic, especially after the recent rain, and since they’re doing so well I’m going to try again with beet seeds next spring.
The cantaloupes are, of course, finished, but I did run one through the dehydrator so I’ll have a teeny, tiny batch of dried cantaloupe to savor over the winter.
I’m going to have to try pumpkins again next year. I think this year’s plants were too crowded or they didn’t have enough organic matter in the dirt (note to self, the topsoil that is sold commercially is NOT adequate for gardening). There are a few pumpkins for carving and I ended up with enough sugar pumpkins for the annual pumpkin cheesecake, but beyond that the pumpkins kind of fizzled.
And I’m not sure whether or not it counts as ‘harvest’ since it’s not for edible, or at least not human edible, purposes, but we ended up with a LOT of sunflowers. I didn’t harvest the seeds this year because I’ve still got a half gallon yogurt container of seeds left over from LAST year (or the year before, I can’t remember), but we’re having a ton of fun watching the squirrels scale the sunflower stems, chew off the mature seed heads and run off with them. If the leavings are any indication, I may end up with a whole forest of squirrel planted sunflowers next year. Little buggers are leaving them all over both in front and in back. I’m also pleased to report that the squirrels are climbing over the back fence and eating their sunflower heads in the undeveloped lots behind our property. There was a pretty decent crop of sunflowers back there this summer and next summer should be even better.
A good summer, a good harvest. I hope it’s enough to keep me occupied over the winter.

Granted, something I’m not quite sure of having happened to my cucumber vines, I only got about two cucumbers this year so we’re not talking pickled cucumbers, but by god, pickles they are.
I’ve been working over the last few years at modifying and personalizing my aunt Doris’ recipe for green tomato pickles. Possibly because they were one of the foods that my mother craved while pregnant (after Matt was born Dad actually threatened open revolt if Mom brought another bottle of green tomato pickles into the house) I’ve always been rather fond of green tomato pickles. I guess the genes for food preference run deep.
Doris’ recipe is a little plain and, as I found the first time I used it, quite salty and VERY pungent. The first batch I made to Doris’ plan stayed around for years before we plowed our way through them. Since we’ve been in this house, that is, since I’ve yearly had the tomato patch from the Black Lagoon, I’ve had the chance to tweak and modify and this year’s batch is DAMN good.
As part of preparing for Joan & Tony’s visit next week I’ve been spending most of the last three days doing my version of fall house cleaning. Those of you who garden will understand why picking green tomatoes and making pickles counts as cleaning house. For those who don’t garden I will offer as explanation that today my house cleaning chores will also include raking leaves and sweeping the driveway. It’s a perversion, I’ll admit.
Anyway I ended up with about two gallons of hard green tomatoes. As the years go by and my garden matures I’m getting closer and closer to my goal of having my pickles all be home grown. This year I managed the tomatoes, the beans, and the onions. I’ll have to remember to plant more Walla Walla sweet onions next year, I think they’re going to be the best choice for further batches of ANY type of pickle. Next year the garlic patch out front will be big enough to supply my pickling needs, I’ll have another chance to work on growing my own ginger, and I’ll be finally finished with the frozen dill that I bought two years ago so my pickles will have home grown dill too. When I get around to making my own vinegar y’all will know for sure that I’ve officially lost it.
I tend to make my pickle brine based on whim.
This year the tomato pickles ended up with a base of white vinegar sweetened up and cut down with red wine vinegar and just a touch of balsamic. Add about half a cup of pickling salt, about a quarter cup of brown sugar, a whiff of garlic (okay, more than a whiff…. MUCH more than a whiff), a righteous chunk of ginger and if I must say so myself
THOSE ARE PICKLES.
If the fragments of pickled onion that I snorfed down while getting the jars packed before sealing them are any indication, these are going to mature into some truly serious pickles. Please come over to taste!

My blog has been up and down like a yo-yo for about a week now. I was twigged to it when my friend Scot reported being unable to reach Uncle Andrew dot Net. At first it seemed as though something bad had happened to my installation of Apache, so I un- and reinstalled it, which took a while. That’s okay; gave me the chance to upgrade to the newest stable versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP while I was at it. Never hurts to juice up the system with the newest releases. Okay, so sometimes it hurts, and on rare occasions it outright kills. But this was not one of those occasions.

However, after a few hours of installing, configuring and tweaking the brainstem of my Web server—the hours of 12:00am to 3:00am on a weekday, to be more precise—it turned out that the actual problem was my firewall software.

Now, technically, a blog being served out from a perch safely NATed behind a router that is itself a firewall appliance, on a machine that is filtering all incoming traffic through its own (admittedly rudimentary) firewall, should be fairly secure. I say “fairly” because no computer is ever totally secure, just like no sex is ever totally “safe”. But that much preemptive filtration should be well enough to keep the script kiddies from getting much of anywhere with my machine, and the true black hats would hardly be interested in fucking around with some random jackass and his piddly online soapbox. But I run too many services from this box (and therefore too many port-forwards through my firewall) to feel totally comfortable exposing my tender pink interfaces to the outside world without some extra medicine on board. It’s not enough to be all but certain that I’ve got the majority of my sphincters puckered; I want a second opinion, and firewall software can be a good resource for this. Cheaper than hiring a forensic network specialist to sit in my office with me and hold my hand.

Up till recently I was using Checkpoint Software’s Zone Alarm Pro, which—up until recently—I found to be an excellent and full-featured piece of security ‘ware. Problem is, something just started going wrong with it recently. I really don’t know what the problem was, but parts of the network driver add-ons that ZA installs started causing problems, most notably intermittent network shutdowns and—hilariouser still—random Blue Screens of Death. No amount of un/reinstalling, conflict hunting or system simplification would keep my system stable. So I chucked Zone Alarm and have been evaluating a few different packages since. One or more of these packages were more trouble than they were worth, which accounts for some of the other unexpected outages here at UAdN.

I think I’ve found a potential winner, but for the sake of paranoia I will refrain from naming the product, lest it come up later as having some heretofore unreported vulnerability that someone might exploit by Googling the name looking for those who use it. Yes, that’s highly unlikely, I know. But it helps me to sleep at night. Well, that and Benadryl.

If anyone has any recommendations of their own for reasonably-priced network security software for a home mail/Web server, I’d be delighted to hear about it. I’m always willing to tap the pool of knowledge resident in the vast herd of nerds that make up my social web.

With the birth of Renee & John’s new daughter VERY early yesterday morning our total count for October celebrations is at nine. That’s one birthday or anniversary every 3 days, for those that are counting.

Allow me to be the first to say (very deep inhale)
Happy birthday (October 2)
Happy birthday (October 4)
Happy birthday (October 7)
Happy birthday (October 8th) {I had to put in the “th” after the number on this one because otherwise it turns out like this }
Happy birthday (October 9)
Happy birthday (October 10)
Happy birthday (October 14)
Happy anniversary (October 17)
Happy birthday (October 20).

gasp gasp gasp.

Happy birthday y’all. Gonna take a lot of breath to blow out all those candles.

Whilst exchanging emails with a couple of friends, I came up with an observation I just had to share.

Just about everyone is cognizant of the “tramp stamp“, that thankfully-slightly-less-ubiquitous-than-previously lower back tattoo of the young, drunk and judgement-impaired.

Wouldn’t a “Biohazard” symbol be the ultimate tramp stamp?

[I wrote this while waiting for my flight to arrive during a recent business trip. I fully intended to publish this from the airport as well, but Boingo Wireless's equipment does not seem to like my Macbook's packet radio card, so I had to wait until I got home to do so.]

Stuck as I am in the Chicago O’Hare International Airport for a few hours, I thought I’d take a passel of moments to regale avid readers of Uncle Andrew dot Net with the tales, trials and travails of my trip to scenic Pontiac, Illinois for our catalog press check.

Our Winter 2009/Spring 2010 catalog is being printed by RR Donnelley, a rather large conglomerate of various printing facilities seeded throughout this great land of ours. This is our first project with them, and by and large everything has gone quite smoothly. As is usually the case with large, expensive or crucial printing projects (this happens to be all three), we have elected to send a representative—me—to the site of the printing to oversee the process.

The facility RRD is printing our catalog at is in Pontiac, about 120 miles south of Chicago. It’s easy to forget that much of Illinois is highly agrarian until you are driving through it. Take a look at a satellite view of the area and you’ll see what I mean about “agrarian”; practically the entire state looks like a patchwork quilt of farm plots. Along much of I-55, densely packed fields of corn appear to stretch to the horizon on either side of the road. Amplifying the effect is the flatness, the unrelenting, mind-croggling flatness. My brother-in-law once stated that Central Illinois is the only place he’d ever been where you could get road hypnosis simply looking out the living room window. At one point, a series of girdered towers supporting strands of multi-hundred-kilowatt power lines marched across the highway and into the distance, like an advancing skirmish line of War Of The Worlds shock troops. They gradually vanished into the light haze of atmospheric distortion….or possibly over the curvature of the Earth. All in all, once you’ve left the manmade megaliths of Chicago proper, driving through Illinois is basically a traverse through a seemingly limitless expanse of miles and miles of miles and miles.

I found myself thinking that perhaps the state could avail itself of some of the federal stimulus money and buy itself a Z axis.

Pontiac is little more than a wide place in the road, a farm town and railway whistle-stop that just happens to be ideally located for plonking down a rather impressive sheetfed web-offset printing facility. Land prices are doubtless extremely reasonable, and I imagine that the Town Fathers were willing to offer just about any concession—up to and including virgin sacrifice—to secure that kind of industry. From the looks of it, choices in employment in Greater Metropolitan Pontiac are restricted to farming or working at the Wal-Mart (of course there’s a Wal-Mart). The RR Donnelley facility must employ at least sixty or seventy-five people, at a more than appreciable average wage for that community.

(On the subject of the Scuzzy W, something that I noticed since my last trip to Central Illinois many years ago: the Wal-Mart to Hardee’s ratio has drastically altered over time. It used to be that you couldn’t find a Wal-Mart in a community without also encountering at least a brace of Hardee’ses [Hardi?] as well. At the time, Margaret and I concluded that the two enterprises coexisted in a predator/prey relationship, the spry and wily Hardi forming packs to track and consume the larger, slower Wal-Marts. Or perhaps the Hardi served a function more closely akin to that of a remora, affixing themselves to the host in order to make the most of its leavings—presumably soiled Pampers and discarded RV tires, which would go a long way towards explaining the quality of the food served therein. Whatever the real answer, there was not a Hardee’s to be found in Pontiac, despite the all-too-evident presence of the prey/host organism [Wal-Mart is by far the tallest thing in town; you can practically see it over the horizon. Then again, you can practically see folks' mailboxes over the horizon too. In summary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the place is FLAT]. What this indicates about the delicate retail ecosystem of the Midwest is not for me to say.)

Aside from the relative dearth of employment opportunities, the town of Pontiac is one of those storybook-cute farm towns you see all over the United States, anywhere where folks can convince things to grow that other folks can be convinced to buy. Long shady tree-lined lanes, peak-roof houses, small cozy churches, friendly local diners (the main one in Pontiac is called “Baby Bull’s”; great place for a steak, unsurprisingly). And not a decent cup of coffee to be had for love or money. Really, this is just about the last place on earth to be entirely Starbucks-free, much less any local independent gourmet coffee shops. You want that kind of highfalutin’ city slicker shit, gotta go to Bloomington.

I’m being snarky here, but it’s not like I don’t understand that this is the way folks in Pontiac and countless other small American communitites would seem to like it. And that’s great: not everywhere on the planet wants or needs espresso stands, comic-book shops, computer and electronic parts stores and a good spot for Unagi or a Caterpillar Roll. But I do. In fact, I don’t think it’s out of the question to identify these things as a requirement, a staple of survival as vital—for me—as shelter or fire. More than a few days’ abstinence from any two of these things and I’m likely to go into withdrawal. And for those in Pontiac who want a touch of the exotic, the aforementioned Bloomington is only about thirty miles away, and they have at least three of the crucial amenities I listed above. Haven’t tried any sushi there, but I’d be willing to give it a stab. Might stay away from the fugu, though.

Anyway, despite the fifth or sixth worst night of sleep I’ve had in my life (just don’t sleep well in hotels, particularly the day before something important), the press check went extremely well, and I topped off my visit with a quick picnic lunch in a small local park. Folks were out walking their dogs in the crisp but perfectly lovely October sunshine, others were playing with their children or slowly paddling down the lazy Chautauqua River that runs through the community. All in all a positively idyllic scene. At least until the guy in the meshback cap and bracers started bellowing to someone out on the river about health care and the economy, at which point I wadded up my sandwich wrapper and got the fuck out of Dodge—sorry, Pontiac.

Since I didn’t know how long the press check was going to take—I’ve had them last better than two days at times—I scheduled myself for a flight back to Seattle on Tuesday (the day after rather than the day of the press check), with an overnight stay in Chicago, which I’ve never visited except for the airport. Chicago is a surprisingly easy town to get around in by car. I hear it’s also a great town for transit, but since I didn’t feel like paying a cab driver eight hundred dollars to take me to Pontiac, I already had a rental car in my possession, so I decided to keep using it. Heading out for a little dinner, I decided to take the opportunity to sample the famous Giordano’s Stuffed Crust Pizza. I had experienced the stuff sort of second-hand when a friend and Chicago native had some shipped here for a pizza party (we also sent some to my nephew and his wife after the birth of their kid, figuring they had enough cards and balloons to last them for a good long while), but I wanted to try it as it was meant to be eaten—fresh off the vine, so to speak. I found a location in the Irving Park area and struck out in a quest for pie.

Chicago seems to have a lot of just the kind of roads I like, namely “back-”. I never take a trip on one highway when I can take six surface streets instead, and getting around the greater Des Plaines/Chicago area on the local roads was a real adventure, particularly since the Chicago DOT seems to repave their highways and byways once every hundred years whether they need it or not. In addition to tooth-loosening potholes, the trip to Giordano’s featured everything from charming tree-lined boulevards to what would pass for slums in the minds of a lot of spoiled whiteys such as myself, but were probably just mid-to-lower-working-class apartments. I found the restaurant with a couple of false starts, parked on the street and went inside to some of the best pizza I have ever eaten (though my heart—and my gut—will always belong to Peppinos): cheesy, gooey, with a wonderful flavorful crushed-tomato sauce and an amazing, almost pastry-like crust. Outstanding.

All in all a great dining experience, which really helped to ameliorate the fact that, upon leaving the restaurant, I discovered that my rental car had been sideswiped by a Chicago Transit Authority bus while I was eating. Harold, the bus driver, was forced into my car by another motorist who attempted to merge into his lane. Rather than stay where he was and bounce her into oncoming traffic, he pulled to the right, clipping the front of my car in the process. I know all this because Harold, bless his heart, waited in his bus for over an hour for me to get back to my car so he could explain the circumstances. He and I had a nice chat while we waited for the police to arrive. Even now I find myself positively charmed by Harold’s earnestness, his honesty and his unflappable demeanor in the face of what must have been a really long, really boring wait for little expected return. Assuming that the CTA covers the damage to my vehicle without complaint, I will be writing them a glowing note regarding his job performance.

After I and my wounded Hyundai got back to the hotel, I found out from the concierge that there was a Giordano’s around the corner, about a thousand yards from where I was staying. How do you say “D’oh!” in a Chicago accent?

Anyway, the next day I returned my slightly-worse-for-wear rental car and headed off to the airport, where I remain to this very minute. I made sure to give myself plenty of time in case Budget wanted to subject me to enhanced interrogation techniques regarding the accident, but they seemed pretty satisfied with a copy of the police report. That gave me  p l e n t y  of time to take in the fleshpots of O’Hare Airport, which, truth be told, are in fact fairly fleshy. I was able to grab a decent cup of coffee to go with my Chicago-Style Philly (?) from Giordano’s, and sit around on some of the more comfy airport benches I’ve ever encountered whilst gnawing on my nosh and assembling this entry. Some day soon I expect to board my flight and bid fond adieu to the Midwest, returning home to my sweetie, my cats and my Tempur-Pedic mattress.

Tap, tap, tap….there’s no place like home….

Very, VERY soon after I got my DVM I realized that my professional life was going to be inextricably entwined with my personal life.
I wasn’t but three or four days past graduation when a neighbor came knocking at the door of our trailer in the wheat field next door to the Whitman County landfill outside of Pullman. Their cat, he said, had gotten into it with a coyote (looking back on this I can tell you for sure it wasn’t a coyote that their cat had fought with, but that is beyond the point) and had an abscess. The farmer that owned the property on which our trailer sat had told him that I was now a veterinarian and could I come and help? At that point I was so new in my profession that my DVM still squeaked when I turned around too quickly, I was unemployed, worried about my future, and bored out of my skull sitting in our trailer in the middle of a wheat field. OF COURSE I would come and help their cat.
There wasn’t a lot I ended up being able to do. The neighbor held the cat down while I opened the abscess, expressed out the goo, and flushed it as best I could with hydrogen peroxide (and why the cat didn’t immediately eat his owner in an attempt to get away is still beyond me, but that, too, is beyond the point). I told the neighbor that the cat really needed antibiotics, but since I didn’t yet have an official license I couldn’t prescribe anything. Despite my protests he insisted on handing me a $20 for my help.
Having cut my teeth on James Herriot, I was certain that my veterinary career was off to a roaring start.
I got a job, we moved, and I started learning that the realities of modern veterinary medicine are NOT like what is detailed in James Herriot. One of the most major differences being that there are, in most communities, after hours emergency veterinary hospitals so those people whose pets had medical problems when I wasn’t in the office had no real reason to call and wake me at godawful hours of the morning.
Granted that the definition of godawful changes based on the person and the day in question, but in my case the next experience I had with having my professional life interfere with my personal life was the idiot that called me at 0630 on a Sunday. It was a sometime client of the hospital that I worked for, I had seen her dog once. She had found my home phone number in the phone book and had called me because her dog had been vomiting all night. When I, somewhat testily, told her that she should call the local ER, she told me that she’d already talked to them and that she didn’t like what they had told her (again, the voice of experience now tells me that they told her that she’d have to have the dog examined before they could help him at all and that she didn’t want to pay for an exam, but like I said before, it’s all beyond the point). Having been yanked out of sleep at 0630 on a weekend and having had the instinctive reaction that everyone has at getting a telephone call at an unreasonable hour on a weekend, i.e. that the telephone was ringing to inform me of something drastic having happened to a family member, I was a little less than pleasant when I told the silly twit that I couldn’t help her, that I (big fat lie) didn’t even have a key to the hospital and I couldn’t go and see her dog. I slammed the phone down and called the telephone company to have my number changed and de-listed.
As an aside…. I have maintained a de-listed telephone number since that day. When I moved from Olympia a lot of my former clients were looking for me and since I hadn’t told my then ex-employer where I was going to be going they weren’t able to relay any information to people who called to get appointments specifically with me. Matt, whose initials of course, match mine, lived in Olympia as well and did have a listed telephone number at that point. He told me later that he had received more than a few phone calls from people who had seen the M. Hammond in the phone book and called him to see whether or not he was me. Loyal brother that he is he didn’t tell any of them that he was my brother and told them all to piss off.
We moved to Burien and ended (shudder) in a neighborhood where we did NOT fit. Large numbers of dogs in the neighborhood, large numbers of whom wandered the neighborhood all day. Next door neighbor who thought it was a good idea to scoop the dog crap out of his yard and dump it in a corner of ours (”But Aaron never minded it when I did it when HE lived there!”). Next door neighbor whose two large lab type dogs roamed all day whose daughter crowed to her mother in my hearing “Mom! Buddy got into a fight with another dog and I played that I was the veterinarian and put a band aid on his cut!”. I decided early on in our time living there that NO ONE in the neighborhood would know what I did for a living.
I’m not sure how the neighbors learned what I did although since I did work close and at the only local emergency hospital I’m sure that someone saw me or my car at work and at home and then put the pieces together. The one time that ended up being a nuisance was, in hindsight, almost laughable.
A few months after we had moved in I was at work and a large and aggressive dog managed to pop his muzzle off and nail me in the shoulder and upper arm. I ended up at the local ER where they cleaned the wounds, gave me a tetanus shot, and filled me full of antibiotics and pain killers. By the time I finally got home I felt, and this is not exaggeration, like death warmed over. Thanks to the tetanus shot my un-bitten left arm was swollen and throbbing, I was bruised and swollen from clavicle to elbow and oozing serum and iodine antiseptic solution from my right arm, and the combination of antibiotics and pain killers had made me so dizzy I could hardly stand. I was lying in bed watching the ceiling spin and hoping that I’d just throw up and get it over with when someone came banging frantically at the front door. Andrew got up to answer the door and found a gaggle of neighborhood urchins with a kitten. The kids said that the kitten had been treated with dog flea control product the previous afternoon and had been having seizures ever since. Their parents had told them that a veterinarian lived here and couldn’t I come out and save their kitty? Andrew was beautiful. I heard the front door slam and Andrew rumbling then he came back inside and they left. He’d told them, he said, that I was sick and that I was a VETERINARIAN not a veterinary HOSPITAL, that I had no capacity to help their kitten at home even if I wasn’t sick, and if their kitten was so sick that they were coming to bother me that they should just save some time and have their parents take it down to the local emergency hospital. Whatever impression he made on them at the time it seemed to stick. Outside of having constant problems with barking and shitting dogs, we never had anyone from the neighborhood disturb us again.
In the neighborhood where we currently live I would doubt that there are more than three or four people who know what I do. A benefit, certainly, I have colleagues whose neighbors have presumed in every conceivable way on their professional capacity.
Family and friends, of course, ALL know what I do. And this brings us to the point of today’s missive. In 15 years of practice I have ONCE been bothered by having family or friends impose on my professional capacity. It was a friend of a friend type situation where my home phone number was given to someone I’d never heard of and I was called at home by a perfect stranger to discuss breeding poodles. After I pitched my snit at the dude on the end of the phone I called the perpetrators and pitched my snit at them. For family and friends I will always be available for veterinary advice. For casual acquaintances I will NOT. I treat my parents’ dog, my brother’s cats (both in person and over the phone). I’ve offered advice for in-laws and cousins, I’ve aided in referrals for friends. So y’all really don’t have to worry about asking. If you’re one of the few who knows my home phone number or my personal e-mail address you’re in. Be assured that I will give you my honest opinion, and the best options available to you under the circumstances. It’s incredibly liberating to be able to offer my opinions without first sugar coating them in professional-talk. And don’t worry, if you annoy me by asking I’ll be sure to let you know. Just don’t call me at 0630 on a Sunday.

Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, July 1, 2009.

A retrospective case study from The Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University titled:

The Effect of National Football League Games on Small Animal Emergency Room Caseload.

Really.

Four veterinarians all with board certification in multiple specialties. Huge numbers of hours spent reviewing case files, doing statistical analyses, writing, reviewing, and submitting their article to the leading veterinary journal in the country and it’s about effin’ FOOTBALL? Not even football in general, but the 2007 season for the New England Patriots (now granted, the Patriots apparently play at a stadium that is close to the Tufts University veterinary school, but still….) They even mentioned that the football season in question was “particularly exciting for the New England Patriots, as the New England Patriots completed the regular season undefeated, which is a rare event.”

Someone thought that putting the money forth to do this study was worthwhile. The authors apparently thought that the time it would take them to do this study was worthwhile.
And since their major conclusion was, and I quote,
“Findings of this study indicate that popular professional sporting events, particularly in geographic regions with a dedicated fan base, may affect the caseload of a veterinary emergency room and that staffing alterations may be warranted.”
it makes me wonder if the funding for the study was from the NFL.

The article does cite a study done in Great Britain about admissions to pediatric emergency rooms. Apparently on weekends that new Harry Potter books have been released there has been a significant decrease in admissions because all the kids are home reading Harry Potter instead of outdoors “participating in more potentially reckless activities.” Also the authors did cite a study done about the effect of the full moon on admissions to veterinary emergency rooms (full moons increase veterinary ER visits which we in the community have been noting for a LONG time). So I did get some useful information out of this article, but still…..

Yeesh. I’m glad I’m not required to actually read EVERY study that’s published in JAVMA.

My Dad sent me this link today, and I think I might have peed myself a little:

See, I thought my mother in law was the Costco queen.
Joan does regular Costco runs to the warehouse closest to her and will fill a cart to overflowing which generally fills the back of her mini van. When we were in Hawaii in June and Joan was preparing for the onslaught of all five of her children, four in-laws, two kids, three rats, and a dog all under one roof, the Costco haul was two and a half carts, the back of the mini van, and some of the back seat. It was a pretty serious Costco run.

I was making our own monthly warehouse shopping run this afternoon. Saturday isn’t my favorite time to go to Costco, but that was the way it turned out this time and so I had to face the crowds. The Southcenter Costco has, of course, a proportionately large Costco sized parking lot and I always try to park near the back because it’s easier to find a place to park and I don’t have to deal with the nonsense of people cruising the aisles looking for the spot closest to the door. I’d rather walk, rain or shine, than deal with the idiots who are willing to wait for upwards of 10 minutes at a time while someone else fills up their trunk just to avoid having to walk a few more steps. I take it as a sign that I’m living my life right when I can manage to get my shopping done and checked out well before the yahoos that waited to park closer to the door manage to do so.
Parking philosophy aside, this afternoon I parked well back in the back as I usually do. Since this particular Costco is right up against the Tukwilla section of the Green River trail there are frequently people parked back there who aren’t Costco customers. Campers and RVs aren’t uncommon. When I got back to my car with my haul, at some future point I’ll probably wax philosophic about purchasingingredients versus purchasing food, I did notice the oddity of a bus in the parking lot. A big bus. Like a charter sized bus. Unusual place to want to bring a bus, I thought, but since I wasn’t driving it, what the hey. I guess bus drivers have the right to sit and watch the river go by on their lunch break just like everyone else.
Except….
Except, the bus had all of its cargo hatches open.
And once I got closer to it I noticed that the cargo holds were mostly full of…. Costco purchases. Just then the second wave of people with laden carts came down the parking lot and started emptying their carts into the bus.
A charter sized bus, with a big Boeing logo on the back as it turns out, with 12-15 people of Asian heritage and absolutely BULGING with Costco merch.

Now THAT is a Costco run.

In the midst of the unholy shit-storm I’ve been facing at work for the last three months or so, I decided to drop my Internet Service Provider, Zhonka Broadband. Once a fine, fast and friendly team of wireheads offering competitive, high-quality service, they seem to have dropped off the map completely. I can’t get anyone to answer an email, no one ever picks up their phone, and their voice mailbox—terminally full and unable to accept messages—no longer even features their company name. I get the feeling that, as a business, they are just barely holding their shit together, spiraling in towards an inevitable crash of downed name servers and a padlocked NOC full of equipment set for auction. I don’t know that, because I don’t know anything at this point. However, having smelled smoke, I have no intention of waiting until I feel that burning sensation.

So after much shopping around, I went with a residential DSL line from Qwest. Their proprietary caching equipment means that I get nearly a megabit of upload speed where another ISP could only offer 256k. (Someday I hope they’ll upgrade the equipment out here and I’ll be able to bump up to 7 or 20 mbps. And yes, yes, I know I could get “blazing fast Internet” were I to go with Comcast, but I would never be able to run all the services I want out of my house with their throttled, port-blocked Tinker Toy Internet service. I also kind of hate them.)

And just to make my life a lot more complicated, I decided that in addition to running my own Web server, I would now also run my own mail server and, in order to “simplify” (!) my control over both Web and mail servers, my own name server. Needless to say, this particular branch of the decision tree was a) grievously more complicated than I had anticipated and b) hella grievously more complicated than I had anticipated. It was only after having moved over to my new DSL circuit, reconfigured my routers, set up my DNS zone file and configured my mail server settings that I realized—well, was given to realize by a friend much more experienced than myself—something very very important: I was not going to be able to send anyone mail because I was not properly set up for Reverse DNS. Every time my mail server sent out a  message, the recipient’s mail server would politely ask Qwest’s global DNS servers who I was. And instead of replying “why, that’s mail.uncle-andrew.net”, Qwest would say, “oh, that’s anonymous douchebag Qwest customer number blah blah blah.qwest.net”. At which point the recipient’s mail server would yell “PSYCHE!” and drop the connection.

It is at this point that I would like to really talk up Qwest’s DSL Technical Support Department. They are open 24/7, and are just a toll-free call and a moderate number of asinine voice-prompts away. Within about three minutes of calling I was on the phone with a very helpful technician who, once she got it through her head that I really was running a mail server out of my home and not just using the wrong terminology to describe my problem (and oh, can you even imagine how many times these poor folks must have to wade through a sea of misused technical jargon and overheard buzzwords to figure out what the ignoramus on the other end of the phone really wants to do?), she promptly modified Qwest’s top-level DNS zone files to include entries for my mail and Web servers. They did this for me, a baseline residential DSL customer with nothing better to do with his time than complicate his life and theirs. Frankly, I’m extremely impressed.

I’m still working out some of the bugs, but things seem to be pretty stable at this point. Another week without any problems and I’ll be sending my former ISP a “Dear Zhon” letter. So now I can sit back, relax, and get back to neglecting my reading public in favor of my crushing workload. Stay tuned!

But I’ve really got to put this to a vote.

According to scientific designation, baby mongoose are called pups.

I vote no, however. Really, baby mongoose should be called mongoslings.

Those of you who are pet owners, pay attention.

TAKE CARE OF YOUR PETS’ TEETH!

I am less than 24 hours out from having an impacted and quite possibly infected wisdom tooth extracted and I have to say that my mouth hurts less now than it has in the last three weeks. That doesn’t have anything to do with the amount or type of pain medication I’ve been taking. The oral surgeon gave me Vicodin (hydrocodone and tylenol) for after surgery and I’d been taking Percocet (oxydocone and tylenol) before surgery. Both relatively high dose narcotic pain medications of approximately equal strength mixed with an almost completely useless compound that isn’t really an anti-inflammatory. I’d also been snorking down ibuprofen in as large a dose as I could take at a time.

What, you ask, does all this babble about pain medications have to do with your pets’ teeth? Well, I’ll tell you.

Dental disease of varying degrees is the most common health issue I see in my patients. This can range from teeth that are only a little grungy to teeth that make me gag (literally, I’ve had patients whose mouths make me gag and for me that’s a neat trick). The good pet owners listen to me about how important dental health care is for their pets. The most common excuse I get from the irritating (that’s the nicest thing I can say about them) pet owners is “Well (s)he’s still eating so I don’t think the teeth are bothering her/him. We’ll wait to do anything about it until (s)he stops eating.” or “It’s just a dog/cat, don’t their teeth fall out when they get old anyway?”
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong wrongity wrong.

I am at a point in my career where I have enough personal experience with my own pets and literally thousands of patients that I can point to specific examples as leverage to convince people that they really need to provide the care that I’m suggesting for their pets instead of the care that (pick one) Dr. Google, their breeder, their groomer, their nephew’s cousin who used to work for a vet (as a shit shoveler), their farrier’s friend who knows a lot about animals, etc. etc. etc. (and yes, for the record, I have had clients who offered each of these examples of people who are “experienced with dogs and cats”) suggests.

Now I have personal experience myself with whether or not bad teeth are bothersome. They are, they hurt, and having them taken care of makes a big difference in your quality of life.
So take care of your pets’ teeth. If your critter will allow you to brush them, DO IT. If your critter won’t let you brush their teeth, pay attention to your veterinarian when you’re told that something needs to be done. A reasonable appetite doesn’t necessarily mean that your pet’s mouth doesn’t hurt.

Now y’all will pardon me while I go take more Vicodin and snork down something soft and squashy before I go to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons with my cat.