12/28/2006

Yet Another Couple Of Gifts From The Gods

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 6:53 pm

I was driving back home from a trip down to the farm today when I came across the most awesome sight. The sun was just finishing setting over the Puget Sound; the bottom fourth of the sky (from horizon to apogee) was the color of tarnished copper above the shimmering cerulean of the water, very pretty. But the whole thing was topped with a thick band of the most insane fuscia I have ever seen in the sky in my life. I was almost struck dumb with the beauty of it.

That was Gift Number Two today. Gift Number One was tuning into the Tom Hartman Show this morning and hearing about this Web site. We are truly blessed. 😀

12/26/2006

Some Really Rockin’ Soup

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 12:56 pm

I said when I posted the recipe for my summer pickles that I am not much of a creative cook on my own. I do best when I follow or (occasionally) improvise on other people’s recipes.

I ordered Andrew some Crimson Fire cheese from Ferdinand’s Dairy at WSU. I also ordered us a wheel of their dill garlic cheese since I’d never tried it and it sounded too good. The package came the other day and packed with it was a recipe for potato soup made with Cougar Gold cheese (a barnburner of a white cheddar). I thought the recipe sounded interesting so I put it up on the fridge with every intent to give it a try when I got my hands on some Cougar Gold.

But Sunday the 9th (okay, this is a few weeks after the fact, gimme a break, I work long hours) I was looking for something to cook for dinner and I figured, what the hey, the dill garlic cheese would be an equally good option for this soup so I started improvising. And improvising. And improvising.

The product was a FANTASTIC soup that lasted exactly two nights (unlike my usual insane attempts at soup that last anywhere from weeks to, as is the case with my last batch of split pea part of which still resides in our chest feezer, months) and wasn’t anywhere close to the original recipe. I’m so proud of it I wanted to share.

Sunday’s Remarkable Potato Soup

Saute one large chopped onion in 1/2 cup butter (a cholesterol purist could try 2 tblsp olive oil, I suppose).
When the onion is soft add 1/2 cup flour and stir constantly for 3-5 minutes or until the flour is browned.
Add 3 cups of chicken stock, stirring/whisking until smooth.

This is where I really started deviating from the printed recipe. Mostly because I wanted to make more soup than just the four servings that the recipe called for, but also because it sounded good.

To the stock, butter, flour and onion add three cups of white wine (I used a fabulous Covey Run Reisling) and 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of mustard powder.
Bung in lots of potatoes cut into about 1 inch cubes. For the record I used approximately 4 cups (i.e. all of them that were left) of red baby potatoes.
Salt (minimal), fresh black pepper (plenty), basil (a generous handful), and tarragon (?), marjoram (?), thyme (?)…………. Hang on a mo’ while I go look.

It was oregano.

Let simmer until the potatoes are cooked then stir in about 1 cup of milk and 1 (small) package of frozen corn.

While the potatoes are cooking and the frozen corn is unfreezing, frizzle up about half a package of bacon cut into small pieces. Pour off the bacon fat (or add it if you please, but the soup holds up fine on its own and remember you did start with 1/2 cup butter… says my inner cholesterol purist) and throw the bacon pieces in. Some nice dense smoked salmon might be good instead of the bacon at this juncture. Allow to simmer on VERY low heat for about 10 minutes.

Now this is where the recipe called for adding the cheese. I’d tasted the soup and decided that it was precisely right without cheese so I didn’t. The next time I might because I still think it’d be good, but there wasn’t any real need for it. You’re supposed to add in about 1/2 to 1 cup of cheese, stir until the cheese is completely melted and then serve with celery leaves on top.

We had no fresh celery and I’m none so fond of the leaves anyway so I didn’t. I served mine with yummy dense multigrain toast.
Andrew did melt some of the dill/garlic cheese into his soup on Monday night, but I kept mine virgin. It was one of my better efforts.

This is a very thick chowder like soup with almost a gravy consistency. Andrew noted that it would also be good over noodles but I’m thinking noodles and potatoes would be a lot of starch…….maybe over a hunk of cow. I’ll have to think on that

12/24/2006

Oh….Oh My….Sorry About That

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 11:13 pm

I just checked out my referrer logs before hopping into bed, and I had to put this one up before turning in.

At 9:19pm Pacific Time, someone got to my recent post about the Furreal Friends Butterscotch Pony from a search on Yahoo!

The phrase they entered into the search engine?

“i am looking for instructions for butterscotch the furreal pony”

I’m picturing a homicidally frustrated last-minute Santa, sitting on the floor of his living room, feverishly scouring the Web in search of an assembly guide for the present lying in pieces around him.

Oh, Man, I am so sorry you wasted your time perusing my blog. Hope you found what you were looking for.

To the folks who stopped by this evening to eat pizza and play Alhambra, thanks for coming over; we had a blast. To everyone on this Christmas Eve, a wish for happiness, prosperity, and Peace on Earth.

12/22/2006

Godless Secular Humanists And The Goblet Of Fi—Er, War On Christmas

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 10:02 am

As most of you are probably already aware, I listen to a lot of Talk Radio. I sit here in my office/NOC/hamster ball working on projects for my employer, and since I do not have to pay much attention to the phone, I take up my spare mind cycles by listening to NPR, KIRO and KPTK. One of my favorite hosts is Dave Ross, who combines a common-sense approach with a strong streak of mellow good humor. He’s on Monday through Friday, nine to noon.

I’ve noticed a weird trend this year among his callers. About twenty percent of the people who end up on the air begin or end their call with the phrase, “Merry Christmas”. Only they don’t say it like a salutation. There’s this bizarre emphasis to it: “Hey Dave, thanks for taking my call, and Merry Christmas!“. The tone these callers use to enunciate the phrase is strangely strident, kind of snide and aggressive.

It took a couple of instances before I figured out what was going on: these people have appointed themselves the unofficial Guardians of Christmas. No “Happy Holidays” for these people, nosireebob-cat-tail. The holiday is Christmas, and by God (naturally), they’re going to say Merry Christmas, no matter what no liberals or Muslims or faggots have to say about it. Take that, Mister Liberal Media Talk Show Host!

The ironic part of it is that, in taking this particular, smug-yet-angry, defensive-yet-aggressive stance, they are unwittingly deconstructing the premise of the very phrase they claim to be protecting. Never has “Merry Christmas” sounded so much like “Fuck You”.

So much for “Peace on Earth, good will toward men“. 🙄

12/20/2006

A Gift From The Gods

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 11:21 am

Oh sure, lots of people are aware of Prometheus, the Titan hero of Greek legend who stole fire from the gods and gave it to Man. Nice guy. Good heart. (And liver, if legend is to be believed.) You may also be aware of his brother Epimetheus, with whom Prometheus crafted the clay figures that were to become the human race. But, were you aware of the similarly benevolent actions of their younger brother, Proyoutheus?

Proyoutheus was hardly the overachiever his big brothers turned out to be. A tad of the hefty side, a little lazy, but a heart of gold. He was always a little jealous of his more-proactive older brothers. He saw the good works that Prometheus was up to on behalf of the poor mortals scuttling roachlike along the baseboards of Creation, and he wanted to contribute something to the effort. Unfortunately, Proyoutheus, in addition to being a bit stout and somewhat indolent, was also something of a coward. He was a passive, live-and-let-live kind of Titan; having seen what Zeus did to his sibling as punishment for his own philanthropy, Proyoutheus was sure he didn’t want to find out what the King of the Gods might have in store for him if he were to have the temerity to steal, say, electricity, or the science of antibiotics, or protocols for asynchronous packet transfer.

So, he decided to set his sights a little lower. He broke into a low-security facility on one of the less carefully monitored continents that was used to house some of the more minor—but nonetheless miraculous—celestial resources. He managed to secrete a small miracle on his person and smuggle it out of the warehouse, and he made it available to Man, auspiciously enough, right around Christmas.

The minor miracle that Proyoutheus gave to Man?

Candy Cane Roca.

12/17/2006

No Toto, We Didn’t Make It To Kansas

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 2:28 pm

Not for lack of trying, though. Some of you out-of-state types may have heard through your local news outlets about the Killer Windstorm the Puget sound area experienced late Thursday/early Friday. Over a million people in the greater Puget Sound area lost power, ourselves included. This would explain the disappearance of your friendly neighborhood Uncle Andrew dot Net from the blogosphere (we really need a better term for the extended community of Web logs. Just about anything beginning with “blog” is right out: blogscape, blogopolis, blogobahn….nothing really works. Gotta mull that one over some more.)

We lost power about one-thirty Friday morning. I had been lying in bed dozing on and off, listening to titanic gusts buffet the house and watching the arc-white flashes of transformers going down in the distance. The flashes grew closer and closer, until finally I head the distinctive, gritty “BZOWT!” of high-voltage electricity going somewhere it ought not from somewhere just outside, and knew that our own power had gone down.

Everyone has their task to perform when the power goes out. Margaret had already covered our snake cage with a sleeping bag to help preserve the heat, and I was running around turning off the myriad battery-backups that power our computers and other devices, all of which were bleating plaintively about the sudden lack of electrical nourishment. Shawn, who had basically just gotten to sleep (he keeps weird hours) came up from the basement to let us know that the burglar alarm was complaining as well. We got the alarm settled and went upstairs to the living room to watch the storm out our picture window.

It was there, upon opening the blinds, that I noticed our mountain ash tree, reclining in a manner that seemed much chummier with the house than was usual.

mountain-ash-1.jpg

Shawn and I went out to investigate, and so that he could move his car across the street to the parking lot of the dentist’s office, in case the cedar and the ash had some kind of suicide pact. In near-total darkness, with pieces of the neighbor’s roof occasionally whipping past us, we noted that the hardly-in-the-prime-of-its-life ash had cracked at its base, rather than being pulled up at the roots.

mountain-ash-3.jpg

mountain-ash-2.jpg

By some miracle, the forty-plus-foot-tall tree had fallen completely clear of the house, failing to seriously disturb even the lavender beds. And to make matters even better, the tree is not on our property, but in fact is on the causeway leading to the large lot behind our house, recently purchased by a developer to turn into three single-family dwellings. So not only is the fallen tree not a problem, it is also not our problem.

Margaret and I sat around our rapidly-cooling house for most of Friday, trading off having our endothermic pythons stuffed down our shirts to keep them warm, reading books and serving as electric blankets for our spoiled, fur-covered cats. About halfway through the day I remembered that I could turn up the gas hot water heater to nearly 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and after that we had cups of tepid coffee and tea to—well, not warm, exactly—lightly defrost our spirits. Shawn brought home some delightful marinated lamb from work that we grilled on the barbecue outside, and turned in early.

Allow me to proffer an observation at this point: if getting to sleep in a raging windstorm is difficult, getting to sleep in the power outage following a raging windstorm, with a pillowcase full of nocturnally-active ball pythons under the covers with you, is also difficult.

The next morning Margaret’s clinic had had its power restored, so she took the snakes to work with her, while I stayed home attempting to prepare for another night without electricity. This consisted largely of making sure that our serious perishables were surviving in a cooler out on the porch and that nothing else was leaking/melting/slowly waking from its ancient sleep in the nether corners of the freezer. I also went and did a more thorough lookabout of the house and property. Really, we did amazingly well. Nothing of a disconcerting size or weight fell on our house, our fence stayed up, the pole for the bird feeder didn’t bend….hell, we didn’t even lose any shingles that I could see.

Power was restored about 5:00pm Saturday, and we luxuriated in our new-found warmth and freedom by re-booting the Web server and microwaving some leftovers. Oh, and making a big-ass pot of real coffee.

As roughing it goes, we were pretty damn lucky. When the hardest part of your harrowing story of survival involves keeping snakes in your shirt and having to mix chlorine into your slowly-cooling hot tub with a kayak paddle, heart-stirring drama it is not.

Which is exactly how I like my crises.

I hope my fellow Puget Sounders are holding up well. If you’re reading this, post a reply and let us know how you’re doing.

12/14/2006

Ooooookaaaaaay….

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 4:03 pm

This just in from the “Wuh-HUT The Fuck” Department….

Someone dialing in from Kennewick, Washington reached my site via a search entered on the iWon search engine. The phrase entered into the search field?

“whopper pooping reindeer”

Good luck, Man; hope you find whatever it was you were looking for…. 😯

12/13/2006

Give Me Health Care Or Give Me (Premature) Death

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 12:36 pm

My buddy Laura sent me this article yesterday, along with her thoughts about it. Pretty interesting; I had no idea it was so easy for doctors in some states to (semi-)legally approve dozens—or hundreds—of prescriptions a day based on the most cursory sort of online “interaction” with the patient. Pretty scary.

Laura’s chief observation was a good one, one that I imagine many of you might share. Namely, how stupid do you have to be to think filling out a brief online questionnaire is sufficient basis upon which some anonymous medical “professional” decides to issue you prescription medication? Isn’t the mere fact that the guy featured in the article was enough of an idiot to put anything he got from a spammer’s Web site in his mouth just an indication that Mother Gaia was trying to snip this particular thread out of the fabric of the biosphere? The answer is, of course: yeah, sure, probably. I mean, sheesh.

But the article brought up some larger issues for me, that dovetailed neatly with my thoughts on a recent treatise by well-known science fiction author Newt Gingrich. I had the pleasure of hearing him wax polemic on one of his favorite fictional themes in a commentary on the December 6th edition of Marketplace called “Health Care Needs 300-Million-Payer System”. All his most far-flung and far-fetched visions were invoked: the Magical Healing Power Of Free Enterprise, How Personal Responsibility Will Save America, and of course his long-standing chart-topper, Government Can’t Do Anything Right. (I just love hearing how inefficient and wasteful the federal government is from someone who spent every femtosecond of his time in office trying to hinder, hamstring and/or outright dismantle it. Every femtosecond, that is, except the ones he spent banging House aides. Okay, okay, just that one. So far as we know.)

Yes, fine, I happen to favor the C*O*N*C*E*P*T of free enterprise, of the power of the marketplace, allathatgoodshit. In its pure form, capitalism would seem to be an ideal model for maximizing prosperity amongst all the hard-working, good folk out there. On the other hand, the basic premise of Communism sounds pretty sensible as well, until you release it in the wild.

Among other real-world complications, the basic framework of these ideas were formed at a time in history when tools of mass communication and information dissemination—not to mention disinformation dissemination—were still in their infancy. Free-market aficionados like Adam Smith had yet to see the awesome power of a mature advertising industry insinuate its shiny, self-esteem-sapping, hot-chick-purporting-to-attracting fingers under the rim of the collective subconscious of the public, and pry that sucker up, exposing the tender, vulnerable insides.

Let’s be honest: is there really anybody out there, short of the most die-hard Social Darwinist, who believes that a consumer like Mister Spammy McXanax from the article should be given freer, less-government-supervised access to prescription medication?

I am reminded of another experience I had with a free-market type, at (of all things) a gingerbread-house-decorating party a few years back. The topic of Social Security privatization—oh, excuse me, that’s “creation of an Ownership Society”—came up. I was voicing the opinion that the average American had neither the time nor the knowledge to make all of their own decisions regarding the investment of the funds in the Social Security Trust, particularly when faced with the inevitable and virulent advertising pitches and public relations campaigns initiated by companies dying to get their hands on the billions in potential commissions at stake.

At that point, a wiry fellow with a truly hideous smirk on his face ambled over, patted me condescendingly on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, right, don’t worry, the government is gonna take care of all your money for you, no need to have to think about it.”

I stared over my shoulder at him until he pulled his hand back and scuttled away. I wasn’t actually trying to stare him down; I was trying to come up with a witty, slightly more civilized way of saying, “that’s the dumbest goddamn thing I’ve heard today, and I don’t think you’re actually stupid enough to believe it.” Here’s a quick and easy way to test the validity of the premise behind his snotty comment, in the comfort of your own home: if you think that private enterprise is more capable of competently (and ethically) handling your money than the feds, just replace the word “government” in his little diatribe with the name of your favorite financial megacorporation. Feeling safer?

Some of you—heck, maybe a lot of you—okay, maybe just Gavin—are saying, “oh, you bet I feel safer! Give me control over my own money, and if I end up getting hosed it’ll be my own fault. But at least I will have had the opportunity to manage my own destiny, myself.” That may work for many of us. Certainly the dude who talked down to me at the party was a clever chap, a technology worker if I’m not mistaken, probably carrying a couple of college degrees and a lively compensation package. I imagine that he could, in fact, manage his investment portfolio better (that is to say, with a higher rate of return) than the government could. Intelligent, motivated individuals will tend to react more quickly to market conditions than will a giant entity like—well, like anything, really, investment houses included.

But that’s not the point of Social Security. Intelligent, motivated individuals with extra cash have always been capable of investing their disposable income to their preference and their advantage. It is not the function of a social safety net to make sure that everyone supported by it has the opportunity to buy a superyacht. It is there to establish a minimum standard of living for everyone, up to and including the savvy Microserf with a burgeoning portfolio, down to and including an overworked salesman confused and gullible enough to buy brain-chemistry-altering drugs online.

To me, health care is even more critical a resource than retirement income. In fact, I would say that health care for the citizenry is a governmental function of a priority on par with that of national defense. The very fabric of society is informed by the question of the level of health care Americans—all Americans—receive.

Simply put, this issue is too essential to the stability and prosperity of the country as a whole to be put in the hands of the for-profit private sector. There is an essentially infinite number of techniques which unscrupulous individuals and companies can develop to separate people from their money, and nothing breeds innovation like imperative. If a sudden, massive influx of cash-like medical insurance vouchers were to suffuse the American populace, an almost instantaneous fine-screen mesh would coalesce to filter the cash back out.

Jumping back to the plight of Spammy McXanax: having ready access to free health care—including prescriptions—through his family doctor may not have stopped this guy from taking too much Xanax and nearly offing himself. However, it seems pretty clear to me that such facilities would have gone a long way towards discouraging such an unfortunate event. Particularly given the fact that, had he faced the choice of free scripts from his doctor or 400-dollar scripts from an online pharmacy, he would have almost certainly chosen the former over the latter. See, you don’t even need to pass a law making it illegal to sell drugs online for this to work; just make going to your doctor the obvious financial as well as ethical and not-batshit-crazy-al choice. The mail-order Cialis businesses would continue to exist to fill the market for folks with the scratch who don’t want to fill in their doctor on their weenie problems, just as the high-end medical clinics and specialty centers would continue to exist to feed the need of those with the income to afford them. Not that there would be anything necessary missing from the free facilities. Call me a red-blooded, flag-loving patriot if you must, but I believe that America has the money, the skills and the compassion to make high-quality free health care available to all its citizens. Hell, I bet we could even throw the illegal aliens on there without breaking the bank. Still be cheaper than preemptive war in the Middle East.

I’m not by any means saying that the federal government is as honest, as streamlined, and as efficient as it might be (though I hardly think it’s the hive of incompetence that many anti-government types purport it to be, particularly in comparison to the private sector). Politicians are as fallible as any other human being, and the potential for nepotism, graft and dishonesty is a serious concern. That’s why we as consumers of government services need to be be vigilant, and through the media, public awareness and our franchise act to minimize the benefits and maximize the risks to our elected officials of going astray. Surely the American electoral process is as viable a method for influencing the actions of government as consumer spending is for influencing the actions of industry. (Please note that the phrase I used was “as viable as consumer spending”; the inherent viability of our electoral process as it stands today is another question entirely. I just think it’s easily as transparent, effective and accessible a form of influence as consumer spending at this point in time.)

Instead of voting with our dollar as Mr. Gingrich suggests, we could vote with—well, gee, our vote.

Additionally, putting the control and dispensation of health care services in the hands of the government would actually streamline the oversight process. Think about it: right now, government regulators monitor and enforce laws on the health-care insurance industry, lest it take advantage of the consumer. In turn, the People keep an eye on the government, lest its officers succumb to the temptations of bribery and influence-peddling on the part of the organizations it is charged with regulating.

If the government were directly in charge of health care, it would eliminate the need for an entire redundant layer of oversight.

If you won’t think of the children, think of the savings! 😉

12/7/2006

Bmmph….*snort*….Bwaaa, hahahahaha….

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 11:59 am

Okay, this is just too funny:

Mahalo Nui Loa to Mike for sending this my way.

Contains simulated sex (no nudity), so it’s likely not safe for work. But it is frickin’ hilarious. 😀

12/5/2006

The All-Natural, 100% Oganic, Free-Range Cat Trap

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 9:49 am

Caught this motion-capture on our driveway camera the other morning:

driveway_2006-12-03_04-05-36.jpg

I waited to post this until I had confirmed my suspicions with my vet. Margaret agrees with me: this is a coyote, not a dog. Walking around our house at 4 in the morning. How cool is that?

After seeing this picture, Margaret mentioned that she had seen a flier posted somewhere along her walking route telling people to keep their pets indoors because the poster’s cat had been eaten by something. I guess now we know by what.

Well, if we can’t keep the damn cats from coming onto our property by trapping them (two weeks of baiting that frigging trap and all I got was that one cat and a bunch of happy, tuna-fed raccoons who knew enough to reach through the bars on the side to avoid getting caught), maybe our furry friend here can help to slim down the roster of perpetrators. It’s not the best or kindest way to keep our yard free of felines, but like our two-stage bird feeder, I can justify it by saying that wild animals gotta eat, too, and they might as well draw their tuck from the rich and fecund buffet offered by stupid and irresponsible pet owners.

Hell, I’m tempted to leave our side gate open at night to make his job easier. 😀

12/4/2006

Yet another life experience I did NOT need.

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 1:23 pm

I promise this will be the last one of these for a while. I said when I first started posting that I’d try not to write exclusively about work, but the things that happen at work are frequently so bizarre that during the winter I don’t often have anything more interesting to talk about. They really should warn prospective veterinary students that their careers aren’t going to be entirely about medicine.
I’ll try to have a non-work related post the next time.

Around the middle of last week a guy comes in to our emergency service with his Doberman. He claims that he is a retired veterinary pathologist (no way to find out if this is true) and that the Doberman is, weirdly, French. Okay, a little eccentric, but apparently harmless.
Then the bizarre shit sets in.
He’s bringing the dog in, who, BTW, is paralyzed and has a chronic urinary tract infection because of a neurologic disease common to Dobermans, because she has pleural effusion (fluid in her chest). She has pleural effusion because his neighbor’s kids have implanted a microphone in her trachea that is giving her pleural effusion.
Um……

Yeah.

Paul, the on duty DVM at the time, managed to talk him out of having the dog x-rayed since there was no evidence of ANY cardiopulmonary disease. Sent the dog home with additional antibiotics and instructions to have the dog seen by his regular veterinarian in the morning.

Fast forward two days.
Guy comes back in on Friday. 45 minutes late for his appointment and pitches a snit when he’s told he’ll have to reschedule. Sits down in the lobby and refuses to leave until he is seen.
We should have called the cops and had him removed at the time, but we’re soft hearted and that sort of thing kind of takes you by surprise so we weren’t thinking clearly. And the appointment doctor, Laurie, agreed to fit him into a bare spot in her schedule.
So Laurie went in to see him and came back to the ICU where I was overseeing patients and doing surgery a few minutes later. Picture me sitting at my desk and Laurie, face red, eyes bugged out and spinning in different directions coming in from her appointment with the guy.
The dog is still paralyzed and has a bladder infection but now, according to the owner, she has two microphones implanted in her trachea. On receives and one transmits so now the dog is talking. She said “Ho Ho Ho!” in the exam room. And Laurie should be aware that parts of their conversation might be overheard. Also the dog still has pleural effusion and now she also has chronic active hepatitis. She has the hepatitis because the microphones are either made of silicone or of arsenic. Or she might have chronic active hepatitis because the neighbor kids are giving her scopolamine (a common anti-nausea drug), or they’re giving her strichnine. Or they’re giving her ipecac. But she has chronic active hepatitis. And pleural effusion.

At that point the world was spinning around inside MY head and I did the only thing I could think of to do which was to call my brother. It is a great comfort to have a brother in the medical field.
Called Matt. Left a message on his cell phone to have him call me back.

Laurie, bless her patience, got some blood from the dog to check for hepatitis. Sent the blood to the lab, sent the guy home with a balanced electrolyte fluid supplement (at his request) that he could give at home to treat the hepatitis. Playing into his delusions might not have been the best thing to do, but following the principle of “first do no harm” at least the fluid injections wouldn’t hurt and they might actually help the dog’s bladder infection.

Dude left, dog left, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Matt called me later and told me that not contradicting the guy outright was a good idea lest he really get berserk on us, and the next time (if there was one) he showed up we should have him removed if he refused to leave. He also suggested we call Adult Protective Services to have someone go and check up on the guy. Suggestions noted, advice gratefully taken.
Laurie wasn’t on over the weekend, but I was. I warned the ICU doctor, Joel, that he’d have to talk to the guy about the labwork.

Saturday afternoon. I came down from my office after lunch and our (relatively small) parking lot is full. FULL of aid units, sheriff’s department cars, an ambulance and at least two city of Burien cop cars. Now it isn’t unusual for some fairly impressive crackups to happen on our road. It’s a busy arterial with businesses on either side so we frequently get treated to this sort of display when someone gets t-boned pulling in or out of one of the parking lots. I wandered over to the window and asked Joel, who was sitting at the desk, if someone had had another accident.
No, he said, the doberman guy was back.
Doberman guy drove his truck into our parking lot and over the kerb stopping just short of hitting the front of the building. He came into the lobby ranting and incoherent about how the dog still had pleural effusion and chronic active hepatitis. Also the fluids that we had given him (despite being still within their protective wrap we discovered later) were contaminated with scopolamine. Doberman guy was raving about pleural effusion to our receptionist, a tough broad named Meghan, when he wet himself. Meghan asked him to leave, he refused. Joel asked him to leave while Meghan was calling the cops and he refused. Cops showed up and called the paramedics. Paramedics promptly carted the guy off to the Ha Ha House leaving us in posession of his truck, and, god help us, his dog.
We had the truck impounded if, for no other reason, it was parked in our handicapped parking space. The dog, unfortunately, is in our care unless Joel really did manage to get ahold of the guy’s lawyer, or brother within the last 24 hours to get her OUT of our care.

It’s a sad situation all around.
I feel for the guy that the world is that threatening a place for him. And it’s obvious that he is unable to care for himself properly, let alone his dog. There is no doubt that being somewhere safe, clean, warm, and LOCKED is better for him than it would have been for him to get back in his truck and go back to wherever he was living.
And I really am sorry that his truck had to be impounded, but we couldn’t be responsible for it to say nothing of the fact that it was parked in our only handicapped slot (and on the sidewalk, and almost in the building).
The dog is in a sorry state. If she belonged to anyone else I’d be calling up Animal Control Pam to have them cited for cruelty. As it is, we’re obligated to care for her until one of the guy’s representatives takes over care or we have 10 days without documented contact with the owner at which time the dog is considered abandoned and Animal Control can give us permission to euthanize.

But what makes me the most insane about the whole thing…… One of our support staff, a very immature woman only a few years younger than I, was ranting most of Saturday night about how mean we had been and how would we feel if it was our grandfather that had been treated that way?
I really hope Joel has a come-to-Jesus talk with her. Or just plain fires her butt. That sort of thing we do NOT need.

12/1/2006

The Godfather As Santa Claus

Uncle AndrewUncle Andrew
Filed under: @ 3:44 pm

Mahalo Nui Loa to Laura for passing this along:

FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony

Read the copy under the description, the part that starts with “Adults take note“. Kudos to Entertainment Earth for both the sense of humor and the finely-honed sense of preemptive strategy.  😀


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