Random Thoughts

Monday Morning Smile

2010-05-24T06:41:00.000-05:00

It's a Snowball day.

WTF?

2010-05-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

Well, at least he has his own handcuffs...
I'd give a lot to be able to read that officer's mind right now.
Gotta love the practical white athletic socks, though.

VORTEX 2 should be pleased

2010-05-21T07:16:00.000-05:00

The kickass crew of VORTEX 2 (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2) should have had a productive couple of weeks, with at least 50 tornadoes touching down in Oklahoma alone, and enough advance warnings to let them get into position.

I felt for them last year; after five weeks of chasing, they finally intercepted ONE tornado.

Then, maybe a week after they closed up shop, there was a massive outbreak across two states.

No shortage of activity this year, and that's gotta be one hell of a road show: 80 scientists/crew and 35 vehicles and specialized instruments, all headed to wherever the action looks like it's going to fire up. Still never a sure thing, as their blog makes clear, but it sounds as though they got some good data that can be applied toward their ultimate purpose of gaining a better understanding of how tornadoes form and finding ways to increase the warning time for those in a storm's path.

And, in a semi-related bit of irony, one of the Oklahoma farms where portions of the movie Twister were shot was hit by a tornado during the May 10 outbreak.

Oh, the irony...

2010-05-19T13:33:00.000-05:00

Octomom unveiling pet birth control banner

The woman who, along with Kate whateverhernameis, has discovered how to turn children into cash cows, has now hit up PETA in lieu of getting a real job, and is apparently oblivious to the irony of urging birth control for species that are *supposed* to have litters.

Not that I don't support spaying & neutering pets. I do. But PETA is made up of a bunch of freaking morons who are more interested in freakshow publicity stunts than any real efforts to promote animal welfare, such as...say...pet adoption.

Eight whole animals adopted out in all of 2009; the rest of the more than 2,300 ownerless dogs and cats taken in at PETA's Norfolk facility were euthanized (except for the 31 that were 'transferred'). Now THERE'S a group dedicated to animal welfare.

In fact, now that I think about it, PETA and Suleman are pretty much a natural match.

30 years ago

2010-05-19T11:36:00.000-05:00

OK, so yesterday's post dealt with my lifelong fascination with tornadoes (an interest that I may well get a chance to further indulge later today).

Today, it's volcanoes, specifically Mount St Helens. I was 11 in 1980, and up to that point, I'd always thought of volcanoes as things that were found on distant Pacific islands, spouting lava into the air. The realization that they existed within the continental US utterly fascinated me, and throughout that spring, I watched the news reports of the increasing activity: the earthquakes, the steam venting, the growing bulge on the north side, wondering what was going to happen, and when.

I don't think anybody was ready for what happened. The earthquake that collapsed the north side of the mountain turned what would have already been a massive eruption into a catastrophic lateral blast. The images still take my breath away.

The sheer scale of it is almost impossible to comprehend. The lateral blast, moving at speeds up to 300 mph, obliterated everything in its path up to 17 miles from the peak and covered 230 square miles. The ash cloud reached to 80,000 feet, and circled the globe in 15 days. It was my first exposure to pyroclastic flows and lahars, two volcanic phenomena that continue to fascinate me with their sheer destructive potential. I'd always figured you could run from lava, but a superheated cloud of ash and debris moving at up to 450 mph, or a soup of melted snowcap/glacier water, mud, ash and debris sweeping along at 60 mph? No way you're getting away from that if you're anywhere near.

57 people died, and it was their stories that fascinated me the most. The eruption was not unexpected. A danger zone had been set up around the mountain, which was why the death toll was not even greater; many of the deaths were outside the zone, due to the unexpected lateral force of the blast, and all were on the northern side of the mountain. Campers, loggers, volunteer volcano watchers, geologists, and one stubborn old-timer who simply refused to leave his home of fifty years. For many, death was likely instantaneous, but the stories told by survivors make it clear how harrowing the final minutes of the others might have been.

Some of them undoubtedly knew the danger, like geologist David Johnston or photographer Reid Blackburn, and chose to be there anyway. Johnston's last words were an alert to the observatory in Vancouver; Blackburn continued to shoot footage until he was overcome by the ash. Others undoubtedly thought they were at a safe distance - and likely would have been, if the eruption had not been channeled by the landslide. Still others were likely in the grip of the can't-happen-to-me mindset that is the peculiar gift and curse of the human race. Only 36 of the bodies have ever been found.

The mountain remains active, with the last minor eruption in early 2008.

Springtime in Oklahoma

2010-05-18T18:38:00.000-05:00

Last week, after 41 years of living in Oklahoma, I finally saw my first tornado. Not for lack of trying, mind you. One of my earliest memories is of being in a storm cellar in a neighbor's garage with my grandmother and all the other women and children, and being pissed as all hell because I wasn't being let up into the garage, where the men were standing around watching the storm.

Of course, I didn't have my damn camera with me on May 10 (May is official Tornado month in Oklahoma, when all the lunatic storm chasers go hang out in Moore and wait for the next one to blow through. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Moore's population is made up solely of meteorologists and stormchasers, because nobody else wants to deal with the tornadoes that can't seem to resist the place).

But I digress. On this particular Monday, I was nowhere near Moore, being on my way to Karate class in Mustang, and had just hung up from talking to my mother, who was most concerned for my safety and made me promise to be careful. I suppose it's fortunate that I hung up when I did, because the next words out of my mouth were "HOLY SHIT! THERE'S ONE NOW!!", which I suspect might have triggered one of her heart episodes, had she heard it. My periodic reckless impulses come solely from the paternal genes.

Since I didn't have my damn camera, the photos that you see here were taken by people who obviously *did*:

Cute little thing...might've been an F1, though I don't think it ever got the chance to touch down; the storms that day were moving 60-70 mph, & that little rope never had a chance. We pulled in behind it to make sure it hadn't damaged anything, then chased it until it faded.

The ones that hit further north and east were a lot meaner. An F-4 tore across I-40 and trashed several service stations, including this Love's:

Amazingly enough, none of the nearly 20 people inside were killed (they packed into the walk-in cooler & the bathrooms), though two people did die in the storms that produced an estimated 24 tornadoes across the state in one day.

And then there was the hail. Hail is another fact of life in Oklahoma, and just about every spring, you can count on seeing scenes like this:

Pea-sized up to quarter sized is pretty standard stuff, but Mother Nature was evidently in a nasty mood last week:

Yes, that is ONE hailstone, and it was far from the only one of that size. Cars and roofs across the metro area took one helluva beating, and people with swimming pools took some cool videos:

And according to the weather reports, more fun is in store for tomorrow. Got the camera charged and ready.

Monday Morning Smile

2010-05-17T06:39:00.000-05:00

I know a lot of homeowners go crazy trying to keep squirrels out of their feeders, but I think these guys have the right idea...make them EARN every nut!

A really, really good day...

2010-05-16T08:26:00.000-05:00

After a couple of weeks (months?) of major stress, I had a supremely stressbusting day yesterday, starting out with the Women On Target day at the Tri-City Gun Club, where the hubby and I are members.

First off, major props to TCGC for having an absolutely kickass facility. There is absolutely no question where the membership dues are going, because they are constantly working on improvements and upgrades. We already have covered ranges going from plinking and pistol all the way out to 200 meters, a shotgun range where construction is underway for full skeet and trap shooting, covered pavilion, newly constructed classroom buildings, real bathrooms and an archery range. And as members, my husband & I can come out any day the range we want is open (which is most days), from sunrise to sunset, and bring any number of guests with us.

As for Women On Target...I was a little leery at first. I've been shooting since I was eight, and few things irritate me more than some good ol' boy patronizing the 'little girl' by telling her how guns work, but I was pleasantly surprised. The TCGC guys were, by and large, really good about showing us the different firearms, and when I told them that I had experience shooting, they stepped back and let me do my thing.

I got to shoot everything from .22 to .357 & .45, in revolver, semiauto and rifle, as well as the AR-15, which is essentially the semi-auto version of the M-16 used by our military. Me likey (and I put eight shots into about a three inch cluster at 25 yards (yes, the distances were short, but the classes are aimed at introducing women to firearms...I *did* outshoot my husband with his M1 Garand a couple of weeks ago, including 2 bullseyes at 75 yards), but getting one would require buying still another type of ammunition.

The sheer variety was the selling point for me, as I'd never gotten to fire that many different types of guns in one place, and it helped me decide that it's time to switch from my Rossi .44 special revolver that I've carried for over 15 years to a semiauto .45. I also fell in love with a .22 target rifle that the Russians use to train their Olympic teams. Accurate? OMFG!!! Can I afford it? Hell, no.

I do have the Mosin Nagant that the hubby bought me when I first expressed an interest in precision shooting, and I think that once I get used to the extra kick from the bolt action, we're going to get along fine. Even met a police officer for a local Emergency Response Team who is being trained as a sniper and who agreed to pass along some pointers.

Having my husband out there as a Range Safety Officer was definitely a plus, too. From some questions I've gotten from friends, I gather that some guys get threatened if their wives/girlfriends start getting competent with firearms. Not my sweetie. When a veteran female police officer (who used to be a crime scene investigator & has a collection of handguns that would make your jaw drop) announced that she'd take me as a partner any day, he was grinning from ear to ear (again, we were shooting at really short range, so I took most of the compliments from the men with a grain of salt...they were there to encourage us, after all...but that one felt good).

I did get invited out to the monthly International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) shoots at the range by at least two of the guys, so I guess I did reasonably well. Still plenty of room for improvement, though.

It made for a very long day, and even though they fed us lunch, we were seriously hungry by 4pm, so we wandered into Chili's, where the hubby got a kickass steak, I had a steakhouse sandwich with LOTS of horseradish (yum) & topped it off with a splurge on their molten chocolate cake dessert.

Then home, where I soaked out my soreness in my whirlpool tub (worth EVERY penny we spent on that baby), then settled back in bed with the hubby to share tequila, limes and salt and watch Stardust, which is, IMHO, the best fantasy/romance since the Princess Bride.

Damn good day.

World's Coolest Dude

2010-04-24T19:01:00.003-05:00

The title has officially been claimed by this guy:

Not only did he ride the damn thing after it knocked him off his board, but once it took off, he kept surfing!

Monday Morning Smile

2010-04-12T06:22:00.002-05:00

Because sometimes you just need to start the week with a dose of cute...

Leningrad Cowboys

2010-04-11T11:37:00.004-05:00

'Eclectic' doesn't even begin to describe the Leningrad Cowboys. They cover everything from Irish folk to classic rock. Sometimes they hit, sometimes they miss, but the results are rarely less than interesting. The concerts where they are backed by the Red Army Choir are especially good.

And turning ZZ Top into a polka is damn near genius. Check out the old guy getting down at about 1:50.

Major Tom Revived

2010-04-10T08:31:00.004-05:00

I'm usually not much for covers of my favorite songs, but when I heard this one on a car commercial a few weeks ago, I was willing to give it props just for reminding me of one of my favorite 80's One Hit Wonders (the original was done by Peter Schilling).

After downloading both versions from iTunes, I have to admit that I like the cover by the Shiny Toy Guns better. They've given it a much stronger Electronic Pop feel without really altering the tune, and it still has one of the most haunting choruses I've ever heard. And the look! It's like being back at the Flock of Seagulls concert when I was 13!

Not sure what the rationale for using it to sell a car was, but still a cool tune.

Monday Morning Smile

2010-02-01T08:11:00.002-06:00

My husband stumbled over this bit of silliness over the weekend:

Abbott & Costello meet World of Warcraft? Gotta love it.

Frosted World

2010-01-31T16:31:00.008-06:00

The second big snowfall of the year here in Oklahoma, this one preceded by the more common ice storm that slapped a 1/2 inch lacquer over everything in sight before dumping 4-6 inches of the pretty, powdery stuff. The results were highly photogenic:

Apollo has definitely decided that snow is fun:

And ice-covered twigs are even more fun:

Don't try this at home. No...really. Don't.

2010-01-16T12:05:00.007-06:00

Was helping my husband pack for a trip to visit his parents yesterday. Had to dig out a pair of 9-volt batteries for a metal detector that he was taking back to his dad.

You know 9 volts? Rectangular, both terminals on one end? Put a piece of steel wool over both terminals & you get a cool spark show that can double as an emergency fire starter:

And yes...you can find anything on YouTube, but I digress. Any metal will carry the current. Aluminum foil. Copper wire. Coins.

By the way, did you know that the diameter of a quarter is large enough to bridge the gap between the two terminals. Not one of the things you think about normally, is it? Yeah, I didn't, either.

Which is why I dropped a battery in my pocket one day a few years ago. Not even thinking about it. Just someplace to put it while I was doing the smoke detector battery replacement patrol. Never occurred to me to think about what else might be in my pocket. Not like I was toting steel wool or anything, so I forgot about it for all of five minutes.

I'm washing my hands when I suddenly become aware of a feeling of warmth over my right hip. Before I can even think "WTF?", it goes from warm to holyshitHOT!!! and I dive into that pocket, coming up with the forgotten battery and a handful of change, including one overheated quarter that I immediately drop while swearing creatively and hopping around in a pattern that would have called down rain had I been outside.

Seriously, though...what are the odds that coin and battery would align just *so* in my pocket?

Fortunately the effect with the coin isn't as pyrotechnic as with the steel wool, or maybe it's just slower, because I managed to get away without any major burns or holes singed in my jeans (or me). And fortunately, my husband wasn't around to see the whole episode, because if his laughter hadn't killed him, I would have.

Monday Morning Smile

2010-01-11T06:28:00.002-06:00

Oops by *Culpeo-Fox on deviant ART

Another talented artist on DeviantArt who can bring a smile to my face.

Check them out!

Death by Caffeine

2010-01-09T17:02:00.004-06:00

Back when I was a vet student working in an emergency clinic, somebody brought in a labrador that had eaten an entire bottle of No-Doz pills. The poor pup was flying high and seizuring all over the place; he was on the phenobarbitol train for most of the next 24 hours until he came back down.

My own experiences with caffeine overload are limited to one finals week when I consumed two triple-strength, extra large instant coffees in a 15 minute period while cramming for an immunology final. Thirty minutes after consumption, every nerve ending in my body suddenly snapped into vibrating alignment, and two days later, I was able to blink again (Got a B on the final).

Had I just had access to the Energy Fiend website way back then, I would have known that I was nowhere near my limits & just kept going through the rest of my finals.

According to their Death By Caffeine calculator, it would have taken over 180 cups of instant coffee to do me in.

Other possible ends include:

218 cans of Amp
212 shots of espresso
109 pieces of Perky Jerky
72 cups of Starbucks Grande Cafe Americano
348 cups of brewed tea
68 bottles of Monster Hitman Sniper (Somewhere out there, there are people who get paid to think these names up...why can't I find a job like that?)
or
16,000 Hershey's Kisses (Hey, if you're gonna go...)

And, yes...163 No-Doz

Frozen in time

2010-01-08T17:39:00.006-06:00

Snow is almost gone (still freakin' cold, though, and promising to stay that way through the weekend). While I was leaving this morning, I looked down and spotted a well preserved pawprint in the snow from one of Apollo's forays outside.

While it's not likely to be mistaken for a yeti track by anyone, I was mildly impressed when I put my hand beside it for scale (but only mildly: having had the foot that made the track on top of my own, I can testify to the size and weight).

Given the way that he plowed through the stuff once he got going, I'm surprised that he left any clear tracks (tossing the duck did wonders for getting past that initial hesitancy, though I wish I'd been able to find my laser pointer; I used to be able to turn my Rottweiler, Molly, into a snowplow with that little gadget).

Happy puppy!

Random lunacy from The Onion

2010-01-06T19:08:00.002-06:00

...very NSFW

Book Review: Your Heart Belongs To Me

2010-01-05T20:51:00.003-06:00

Dean Koontz is one of those authors that I can always count on for, at the very least, a decent read. Well drawn characters, smooth-flowing dialogue, suspense that builds throughout the book and plot twists that can leave you gaping in midair like Wile E. Coyote. When all the elements gel together, you get masterpieces like Strangers, Intensity, & One Door Away From Heaven, that can literally change the way you look at the world. When they don't quite mesh, you get something like Your Heart Belongs To Me.

Well written, but at the same time, missing...something. Koontz does his usual superb job of building an atmosphere of suspense, blending supernatural and mundane elements until the reader is wondering along with the protagonist which is which.

But the when the twist, the lever point, of the story arrives, while it's not something that I could say I saw coming, it has the feel of something hurriedly tacked on to finish the tale, and leaves quite a few questions raised throughout the book unanswered. While many of his books touch on ethical and moral issues, the message that this one is trying to convey gets muddled in the race to the finish.

I'll probably give it one more read-through, to see if I missed anything, because some of the omissions seem uncharacteristically sloppy for a writer who is usually meticulous about tying up loose ends (unless he's got a sequel in mind, which in the case of the Chris Snow books has meant years of waiting...and waiting...and still waiting, dammit, give Odd a break and get back to Moonlight Cove already!).

For classic Koontz, see the books mentioned above. If you're looking for something more recent, either The Husband or The Good Guy are better ways to spend your time and money.

Pausing for a geek moment...

2010-01-02T10:40:00.004-06:00

I can't honestly say that I've ever developed a taste for anime, but I do have very fond memories of hauling ass home in my elementary school days to watch Star Blazers. That & Scooby Doo were my favorites (and yes, my tastes have remained that eclectic).

I can't quite bring myself to pony up the $270 for the three seasons on DVD, but I had to do a little happy dance when I saw this:

Mind you, it's not scheduled for release in Japan until December 2010, & it's pretty well guaranteed that it won't be seen in Oklahoma until the DVD is out. Ah, well...I can always watch old episodes on YouTube while I'm waiting.

New Year, New Post

2010-01-01T10:19:00.003-06:00

A friend of mine posted a lovely quote on Facebook this morning. She's a librarian, so she's always a good source of quoted, but this one actually comes from a television show. Not one I've ever watched, but the words struck enough of a chord that I might give it a try.

"There are moments in our lives when we find ourselves at crossroads. Afraid, confused, without a roadmap. The choices we make in those moments can define the rest of our days. Of course when faced with the unknown some of us prefer to turn around and go back. But once in awhile people push on to something better. Something found just beyond the pain of going it alone. And just beyond the bravery and courage it takes to let someone in. Or to give someone a second chance. Something beyond the quiet persistence of a dream. Because it's only when you're tested that you truly discover who you are. And it's only when you're tested that you discover who you can be. The person you want to be does exist. Somewhere on the other side of hard work, and faith, and belief. And beyond the heartache, and fear of what lies ahead." ~ Lucas Scott

Good thoughts to start the new year with.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-12-28T08:02:00.001-06:00

Back to work...ugh.

This calls for some Stitch, methinks.

And I must say, Wynonna does a pretty mean cover of Elvis on this one.

Loss, grief and the holidays

2009-12-26T18:01:00.002-06:00

Got a call from one of the analysts that I supervise this morning. She's a bit absent minded, so I was half expecting her to tell me that she couldn't make it in to work because of the snow, and was prepared to remind her that it was Saturday.

Instead, she was barely coherent, telling me that her mother had just died in Taiwan, where she is from. She hadn't been home for a visit in 10 years, though fortunately, her parents came stateside just last year for her wedding.

She'd already reserved a flight, and was calling to tell me that she likely wouldn't be able to come back until late January, due to needing to deal with family matters there. She had leave time to spare (and even if she didn't, we'd have worked something out...the agency I work for can be a p.i.t.a. at times, but they're really good about giving you leeway to deal with family crises, as long as you don't take advantage of the generosity).

She kept apologizing for the fact that she'd be missing so much work (she's one of those who would be there until 10pm - without asking for comp time - if I didn't make her go home), and I kept telling her not to worry about that, just go and take care of her family and herself.

In a way, I know how she feels. The scars from losing Dad are still raw at times. But at the same time, I know that no one experiences loss in exactly the same way as anyone else. I was able to hold my father's hand as he drew his last breath, and knew that it was going to happen. Her mother died half a world away and unexpectedly and on the day after Christmas. That's all got to add to the pain, and I can only imagine how much worse it might have been if she hadn't seen her parents last year, if phone calls and e-mails had been the only contact between them for the last decade.

Now she has to deal with international air travel after that jackass tried to blow up a plane yesterday, and with this part of the country still trying to dig out of the 'Blizzard of 09'. Fortunately, no new weather is due, which should have allowed the airport to clear the runways.

Living with that kind of loss is hard, particularly when the anniversaries roll around and the memories are triggered, but to have that grief forever tied to a holiday of joy and family? I can't conceive of dealing with that, and hope I never have to.

You Can Find Anything On YouTube...

2009-12-25T13:38:00.002-06:00

...including the original video clip that goes with one of my all time favorite Christmas tunes...and for those of you who don't know, I do a kickass Alvin imitation ;-)

A white Christmas at last

2009-12-25T12:35:00.010-06:00

Snow...real snow, as opposed to the mix of sleet and ice that we get once or twice each winter...is rare in this part of Oklahoma. I still have fond memories of the winter before my brother was born, when we had knee deep snow (I was ten) and a long enough cold snap that the pond behind the house froze hard enough to sled out onto.

That was thirty years ago, & we haven't had anything remotely like it since, but I'll take what we got yesterday. OKC reported 14 inches of snow (nicely shattering the old record of 2.5 inches for the date).

Nothing close to that in Norman; I'm guessing maybe 6 inches, but the winds created some very nice drifts.

Apollo, our English Mastiff (who turned two on December 23rd) , hadn't seen quite this much snow before.

He definitely wasn't sure about it last night

But the old man finally shamed him into it. Bad hips & a shaved butt weren't about to keep Zeus out of his favorite weather, even if he didn't stay out long.

Apollo was a lot less reluctant this morning

He even helped me back up when I slipped & fell on my butt. Going to take his favorite toy out a bit later & try for some action shots.

Our planned Christmas trip to my in-laws got shifted to next weekend (I have every confidence in my husband's driving...it's the other idiots on the road that worry me. Oklahoma drivers cannot do snow...or ice...or rain...or any sudden change in road conditions, as far as I can tell), so I've got a roast in the crockpot, hot water for tea & cocoa and everything else we need to spend the weekend snowed in.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

A Canine Christmas

2009-12-23T06:32:00.002-06:00

Some good dog training and creative editing making for an amusing video :)

How I Spent My Winter Vacation: Part 2

2009-12-22T13:36:00.017-06:00

The OKC Zoo is offering free admission on Mondays through February, and since the weather was lovely (in the 60's, but expecting snow & ice by Thursday...welcome to Oklahoma), I dragged the hubby and the camera out to take advantage:

The cooler temps had a lot of the animals up and moving...think this is the most I've seen of the giant anteater since he arrived

The meerkats were out and about, and yes, I had my husband making odd noises to get them to all look over like that. Why make a fool of myself when I can subcontract?

Two swift foxes catching a nap

and a mountain lion being lazy

North American river otter

Lowland gorilla. Shooting through the heavy plexiglass can be a pain, between reflections and smears, but if you're patient and lucky, you can capture some good shots

The chimps were in a hammy mood

but this little doll stole the show

Mom wanted to leave...

...they'd almost make it away

and she'd break away and come tearing back for another performance. Went on two or three times before we finally left (I could have happily stayed another hour or three, but we were meeting Mom for dinner)

I'm hoping MLK day will be nice. January in Oklahoma is a crapshoot: could be 70, could have two inches of ice on everything. Definitely want to make it out there for another Monday or two.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-12-21T08:12:00.003-06:00

A blast from Christmas Past...the only Christmas song from the 80's that I still love hearing.

And the synchronized lights are cool, too.

Have a great week and a Merry Christmas!

How I spent my winter vacation: Part 1

2009-12-19T09:40:00.009-06:00

No big travel plans, except to the in-laws' for a couple of days at Christmas, so just staying home and relaxing, hoping my little brother's Marauder's Map comes in by Monday, when we're going to Mom's for our early 'Christmas Eve' (I'll pause right here to say that both sets of parents have been an utter blessing when it comes to sharing holidays).

And yes, my brother is over 30 & I'm over 40, but he's a big-time Harry Potter fan & I hate giving practical Christmas gifts. Got him the Beedle The Bard collector's edition from Amazon last year for teh big win.

Anyway, so we're home on a budget, and have agreed to get a few things done around the house that needed doing in between playing WoW and/or Dragon Age, writing, reading & general holiday laziness (eggnog makes a great coffee creamer, btw...if you like eggnog...and coffee).

Zeus was top of the list. Our old Great Pyrenees' has always hated being brushed, and lately, his hips have gotten so bad that neither of us have had the heart to use our usual method of one of us all but sitting on him while the other brushes what they can reach.

It has recently become a necessity, however, since he's no longer always able to get up when his bowels move (or, the strain of trying to get up leads to the movement, which I suspect is the more likely scenario). Once he's up, he does pretty well and lumbers around the back yard barking happily at squirrels, but the fur around his tail and hind legs had gotten pretty messy.

So we sedated the hell out of him and spent nearly two hours brushing him out, shaving his backside, trimming his nails, etc.

End result:

One fluffy, brushed out & slightly stoned puppy (who still needs a bath)...

...and one really, REALLY big pile o' hair.

When we're brushing him regularly, it's routine to have enough fur combings to construct a lhasa, or at the very least a maltese. For a while, my husband was squirreling them away to knit a sweater (yes, he can knit *and* spin his own yarn, card wool, etc), but when I kept finding Wal-Mart bags stuffed with white fur in every nook and cranny of the house, I put my foot down.

And we probably could have gotten half as much again if we'd have kept on brushing, but the sedation was wearing off, and we'd accomplished our primary objective, which was cleaning up his backside & shaving off the fur there so that things don't get stuck so easily.

We had plenty of company at our task; the five cats were milling around, watching with great interest, but Sebastian didn't seem too impressed when I asked him to pose with the pile for scale:

In retrospect, I probably should have just buried him in it & tried for a LOLCats-worthy shot. He has a marvelous "F*** you" expression as a result of having been the chew toy for every puppy that's come into the house for the last fifteen years.

I'm hoping that what we did will keep the old boy more comfortable, but I still suspect that it won't be more than a year before we'll be facing the hard decision.

Not just yet, though.

Don't call me ma'am?

2009-12-17T06:13:00.003-06:00

Evidently, Barbara Boxer, Senator from California doesn't like to be called "ma'am":

I worked for a woman like that once. She would have an absolute meltdown if *anyone* called her ma'am, even if it was the kid in the checkout line at Wal-Mart who couldn't possibly be expected to know about her damn PhD. Not sure where she was from originally, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't from around here.

Didn't get it then, don't get it now. I'm a doctor. Worked through 7 years of college, not to mention the focused efforts in high school. And let's not leave out my Master's degree. I can't remember *ever* asking someone to call me 'Doctor' (I do recall asking my mother to stop after the first month or so after I got my license...getting introduced as "My daughter, the doctor" was getting embarassing), and I can't imagine getting offended at someone for addressing me with a generically courteous title like ma'am (all right...I winced the first time some high school kid in the Taco Bell drive-thru used it on me). Hell, I use it all the time. "Ma'am" and "Sir" have been drilled into me since childhood, just like they have been with just about everyone else in this part of the country. It's known as manners.

What exactly are people expected to do in casual encounters? Ask everyone how they would prefer to be addressed? And you thought the checkout lines at Wally World were slow now...

Are these women just so insecure in what they have achieved that they have to have it constantly reaffirmed, or are they so arrogant that they want to shove their status down everyone's throats?

Boxer made an ass of herself, not only for interrupting a proceeding with such a petty grievance, but also for displaying her utter ignorance of or disdain for proper military protocol, which considers "Sir" and "Ma'am" appropriate forms of address when speaking to persons in positions of authority.

In a world where 'bitch' and 'ho' are routinely used in music, television & movies when speaking to/of women, what does it say when someone considers ma'am to be disrespectful?

Dragon Age: Preliminary Review

2009-12-15T19:24:00.003-06:00

Note: Minor Spoilers May Be Encountered Within

All right, I’ve had Dragon Age: Origins for about a week and a half now, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m addicted. I’m a Baldur’s Gate devotee (and modder-in-the-rough), tried Neverwinter Nights (not bad, but not worth a second playthrough) and just skipped NWN2 completely, based on the reactions of my fellow gamers at Petals and Thorns.

I’m also a World of Warcraft addict, but I don’t really consider it an RPG. There are RP realms available, and I suspect that it would be entertaining, but I type too damn slow to keep up with a real-time RP. WoW is a great place to kill shit, hang out with friends and spend time with my husband (the $30 a month for our subscriptions wouldn’t even cover dinner and a movie for one night…as entertainment goes, it’s one of the more cost effective options out there).

But I do enjoy roleplaying, and the CRPG selection has been pretty anemic (from a fantasy fan’s standpoint) since BG2. The NPC’s, dialogues, relationships and romances pretty much set the standard for me. When I heard that BioWare had a new fantasy RPG in the works, and that David Gaider was involved, I knew that the product would be worth waiting for, but the game has far surpassed my expectations and set the bar to an entirely new level that I doubt will be surpassed any time soon (how long was it from BG2 to DA? *sigh*).

The developers have moved completely away from the D&D based rules of the BG & NWN games, developing a system of character generation and combat that is DA’s own. It was a stroke of genius to release the character creation module as a free download a month or so before the release of the game, though it’s a wee bit too complex for my own preferences. Ear height? Neck thickness? I move the slider back and forth and squint, trying to see the difference, but in most cases I just left it on default. Eye color, hair color & style, mouth & nose shape and tattoos are really all I spent much time on, though that may change on subsequent run-throughs. The truly awesome thing, though, is that after creating the physical likeness of your character, you get to see it not just as a paper doll on your stats screen but as a dynamic, moving animation of the quality that used to be reserved for cutscene movies (and the cutscene movies are, in turn, of near cinematic quality).

The developers went for a more realistic appearance than WoW’s cartoonish style, so the characters sometimes have a stiffer look to them, but overall, it’s impressive as hell, particularly the facial expressions and the combat animations.

With only three races (human, elf & dwarf), and three base classes (warrior, rogue & mage), at first glance, it would seem that character creation would be quite limited, but with two starting origins for each race and a wide range of abilities to choose from within each class (including specializations that can be accessed at higher levels), you really get a chance to customize.

The downside is the risk of spreading your talent points too widely. I didn’t go for the coercion ability on my rogue, only to discover that you *do* need it in many exchanges, if you want all possible options open to you (such as not being told to bugger off). I also don’t know that I like not having a separate healing class. While the concept that magic is something that can be channeled into a number of differing paths, including healing, is a notion that I like, unless you create a mage and put the majority of your initial points into healing abilities, you’ll be needing a lot of healing poultices until you get to the mages and pick up Wynne (yes, you can put Morrigan’s points into healing, but she’s so much more fun with Fireball…).

The game interface took a bit of getting used to, but like the character creator, the basics are actually quite simple, with the option of greater complexity. I’m still exploring the options under Tactics & thanking God for defaults. As in BG & NWN, the spacebar is a blessing in combat, allowing you to pause and set actions for as many as four different characters…which is good, because that is an area that I’ve never excelled at; I still prefer to select the whole party and have them club one poor bastard like a baby seal, but that doesn’t work so well when he’s got eight buddies trying to return the favor.

But the true quality check of a CRPG lies in the RP, and BioWare once again excels, with a compelling game storyline and a great cast of NPC’s. They’ve also created, in my opinion, the best romanceable character yet in Alistair, the Grey Warden and Templar who is the game’s first joinable NPC. Cute, sweet and honorable, with just a wide enough streak of smartass to keep him entertaining to talk to, he blows Anomen out of the water (I found Valen too broody & never played SW:KotOR, so I can’t speak for Carth). I’m enjoying the interactions with him, and while I suspect the romance is doomed (Dal rogue), it ought to be an interesting trip.

The other NPC’s are also well drawn, and in the tradition of BG & NWN, it is the banters between them that are frequently the highlight of the game. One big improvement is that the banters take place without accompanying text to scroll through and without pausing the action. While this means that you may miss parts of the occasional exchange, it feels a lot more realistic to have Morrigan and Alistair making snarky comments at each other while you’re wandering around looking for a merchant.

Another plus is a viewable approval rating, so that you can see how impressed (or unimpressed, or ready to drag you into the sack) a particular NPC is with you. This changes depending on your actions and dialogues, of course, and can be further improved by the use of gifts that you loot or buy from merchants. Haven’t pissed off anyone enough for them to leave yet, but Morrigan is definitely hard for this character to keep happy, as fond as I am of the snarky bitch (I had a soft spot for Viconia, too).

And the dog…*love* the dog, love the ‘banters’ between he and the other NPC’s (the ones with Morrigan are my favorite so far), love the stuff he fetches from time to time.

The ability to easily switch out party members, once they’ve agreed to join, is handy and beats the hell out of endless trips back to the Copper Coronet. The campsite feature is also a nice touch, offering the opportunity to interact with every NPC who has joined up, as well as its own merchant (but no storage space, damn it…and that limit of 70 spaces in inventory is damned inconvenient on occasion…think I’m gonna shell out the seven buck for the Soldier’s Keep expansion, which will get me a trunk or two to keep the good stuff in until we can use it.).

The game is billed as dark fantasy, and it definitely lives up to that. It doesn’t flinch away from tough choices during the quests, such as killing a demon-possessed child or trusting a mage that you know to be an assassin to use forbidden blood magic that requires the sacrifice of another life – in this case the child’s mother, who offers herself. It ain’t for kids or those who can’t live without their HEA’s, but if you’re looking for gripping storytelling, you’re in the right place.

The only real downside that I’ve found so far (apart from the patch not working on my computer…I install it, hit the ‘Start’ button and nothing happens…still waiting on a response from customer support, but I’m betting it’s got something to do with Vista) is one that I inevitably have with CRPG’s: not enough dialogue options. There have been several exchanges where I’m left protesting, “But…but, I could have said/done x or y, too!” I really don’t envy writers for these games, and my own attempts at modding have given me even greater appreciation for the challenge of creating sufficiently varied responses in dialogues, and that’s without having to deal with budgetary and deadline restrictions involved in a project of this magnitude.

Overall, hell of a game, and one that I’m looking forward to playing to completion and starting again with a new character. And probably again after that. I’ll likely be providing updated commentary as I go through this game and find more stuff that I like and dislike.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-12-14T05:49:00.003-06:00

New silliness from Muppets Studio, featuring my three favorite characters.

Have a great week!

sigh

2009-12-13T16:13:00.004-06:00

It's looking less and less like the practice purchase is going to be going through. I could probably qualify for the loan, & I have a kickass business plan pulled together, if I do say so myself. I don't have any doubt that we could make it work.

However, ye olde bank requires that the prospective borrower be able to put at least 20% of the desired sum to be lent down in cash.

That would be $50,000. At least.

Hate to break it to them, but THAT'S WHY I NEED THE DAMN LOAN!!!

*eyeroll* I understand the theory of it, but it's still frustrating.

We've got a hell of a lot of equity in the house...almost paid off, in fact, which is why I'm reluctant to take out a second mortgage or anything that I'd have to pay in addition to the business loan. There is the remote possibility of simply using the house as collateral that we'll be checking on next week.

Everybody keeps telling me "Check out small business grants!"

I have...those that I've found are for a few thousand bucks to upgrade or greenify. Haven't seen any for as much as $10k, & definitely not fifty grand floating around up for grabs. I suspect I'd have to be female, minority, handicapped and in possession of good blackmail pics to qualify for that sum.

*shrugs* I'm feeling fairly pragmatic at the moment. The insanity at the office is dying down, and we're actually getting back to the work that I *like* to do, so I'm not feeling as homicidal as I was a couple of weeks ago. If I can figure out a way to come up with the money, I'll jump at it. If not, I'll just keep on keeping on. As government jobs go, it ain't bad (most of the time), and it keeps the bills paid.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-12-07T07:29:00.002-06:00

A novel bit of interior design in a men's restroom in a hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Have a great week!

And done!

2009-12-06T08:56:00.002-06:00

Sat down yesterday and ground out the business proposal, and that sucker is finally done!

Now the panic starts to set in, as I realize that, should it actually get approved, I'll be jumping from my current job with no safety net whatsoever. No savings stashed back as a cushion. It's an existing and active practice, but this means that it's GOT to turn a profit from the word go...which is precisely what I intend, mind you, but the thought is still more than a little sphincter tightening.

Which is why I plan to immerse myself in a day of shameless WoW-ing and gorging on leftover Chinese food & hot chocolate laced with Bailey's (not at the same time, mind you).

I write alone

2009-12-03T19:59:00.002-06:00

Typing that, I could hear the lyrics from that tune in Rustler's Rhapsody trying to superimpose themselves (yes, I love that movie...Tom Berenger, Marilu Henner, GW Bailey, Andy Griffith and the line, "Draw your gun, prairie fairy!"...what's not to love?). And the root. Mustn't forget the root.

But I digress.

I've always been a fairly solitary creature by nature, and that's never more true than when I'm writing. Not that I don't like collaborations. Love them, love PbP's, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts, sit down at the keyboard and write time, I do best by myself.

I don't even like people to watch me write, even when they can't possibly see what I'm writing, a fact that alternately perplexes and entertains my husband to no end. I can grit my teeth and stand it for a little while, but eventually my shoulders start tightening up, my eyes spin in their sockets and my head starts twirling around spewing pea soup. If that doesn't work, I just slap him and tell him to go away.

So the last week of writing that grant was, I'm quite certain, what my own private version of hell is going to be like. I'm locked in a room with five other people, one of whom is constitutionally incapable of engaging in any thought process without a running verbal commentary, another of whom kept dozing off and waking up with suggestions that she must have dreamed up, and my boss, who has the ego-inflating but frustrating conviction that all he has to do is come up with an idea and I'll figure out how to make it work (I made the mistake of doing just that a few too many times, and now I'm trying to come up with a convincing way of feigning incompetence). The other two weren't too bad, but they were there, and all I wanted to do was be locked alone in my office where I could just get the damn thing done and bring it back for them to revise.

It didn't help that at approximately 1pm on Monday, a cute little glitch on the laptop ate everything that I'd done in the previous four hours. Everything. I actually got complements on the calm way I reacted to the situation (though if I'd known that stripping naked and running through the halls shrieking and flinging office supplies hither and yon was considered an acceptable and expected response, I might have indulged). Our IT guru managed to salvage just enough to make me believe that God didn't really hate me, and I dug back in, plugged the earphones into the iPod and tried to forget where I was and remember what I had written before (it never comes out as good the second time around. Never, dammit.).

But it's done, and with a bit of luck, I'll never have to do it again. I'm happily writing alone while my husband tries to take down Onyxia.

But when he gets done, he'll watch me...just to drive me nuts.

NaGraWriMo???

2009-12-02T17:31:00.002-06:00

Any half formed notions that I might (or might not) have been entertaining regarding participating in the 2009 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November died a swift death in mid-October, when my boss informed me that I had been assigned to work on a grant application that was due on December 1.

Not just any grant, either. This sucker could bring in up to $10 million over a 2 year period (our current annual budget for the entire agency is $20 million). No pressure or anything.

Mind you, I've never worked on any grant before, much less one of this size, but I figured no problem, surely someone else has, right?

Wrong.

Everyone else was just as clueless as I was. So, we hired a professional grant writer!! Sounded like a fantastic idea to me, but apparently, I had a very misconceived notion of just what it is that a grant writer does.

You see, I thought that they actually *wrote* the damn grant, or at least provided direction on what to write. Ours just hung around looking chipper and tossing out occasional suggestions. As far as I could tell, she never went to the website to look up any information, or even download the grant directions for herself. She just kinda sat there like a spider waiting for us to pitch flies down her throat.

The grant itself was a masterpiece of idiocy. $10 million dollars directed to large cities and counties for the purpose of addressing physical activity and nutrition, and you couldn't *do* a damn thing with the money. No major construction. No building sidewalks, very limited allowances for equipment. It all was supposed to be spent on 'policy development'. I've got news for the CDC: using $10 million dollars for policy development at the county and municipal level is a whole lot like using a sledgehammer to go after a housefly. You're gonna make one hell of a mess in the attempt, and you're probably not going to hit what you were aiming at in the first place.

We have seventeen incorporated municipalities in our jurisdiction, and policy changes affecting things like nutrition would likely take the form of tax breaks on healthy foods & higher taxes on junk food. Can you guess how likely that's going to be in the current economy? Add to that the fact that our biggest city is already trying to pass a sales tax funded municipal improvement initiative, and our chances of taking that route went to near zero.

And just to add to the confusion, some of the examples that the grant provided as what we could be doing were exactly what the text of the grant said that we *couldn't* do. And then we had to have plans in place for a leadership team, and an evaluation plan, and a budget.

And, of course, there were the people that we had to convince that the grant was not the answer to their prayers regarding their own pet projects. It took a ridiculously long time to do this, despite the fact that the wording in the grant made it quite clear. They kept trying to twist it, contort it, squeeeeeeze it any way they could until someone finally told them that enough was enough (the fifth try finally took).

Panic mounted through November, culminating in 6 hours at the office on the day after Thanksgiving, a 15 hour marathon session on November 30 and a frantic finale on December 1.

Deadline? 4pm CST. The time on the electronic confirmation of our submission? 3:58pm.

Competition is likely to be intense, so I don't know if we'll get it, but even if we didn't, we laid the groundwork for some effective community partnerships that can be leveraged even without grant money. And we got one hell of a crash course in grant writing. I suspect that anything that we try from here on out will be a piece of cake.

Not that I'm planning on doing it again...but I wasn't planning on doing this one, either.

As a matter of fact, I need to go work on my business proposal. I definitely hear private practice calling my name.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-11-30T06:43:00.003-06:00

Just discovered the Muppet Channel on YouTube, courtesy of their take on Bohemian Rhapsody. Life is good.

Enjoy!

Just for fun

2009-11-29T15:21:00.007-06:00

Yet another world event in WoW, this one centered around a Thanksgiving theme, and one of the achievements was to turn rogues of every race into turkeys using a turkey shooter.

Got a bit tedious after the first couple of days when I couldn't go ten feet without getting fowled, but once I discovered that I could stealth and attack in that form, Death Turkey was born.

I discovered that I could also get turkified while mounted, so I collected a bunch of screenshots on my favorites from my 50+ mounts:

My personal favorite: the turkey on the hog. Going to enlist a friend to turkify my husband in the sidecar for a screenshot next.

Looking Things Over

2009-11-28T15:45:00.005-06:00

Back when I first got out of veterinary school, I helped a colleague write up a business proposal for what became the housecall practice that I worked at for three years.

I have no memory of what the damn thing looked like or what it said.

Of course, now we have the wonders of the internet, letting me look up somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,00,000 samples of business proposals, each of which looks different.

*sigh*

And to make things worse, from looking at the financial statements the current owner provided me, I'm suspecting that she is even more clueless about running a business than I was then.

Got some questions in to her that will hopefully clarify some of the confusion. The tax returns show a solid profit margin; nothing jaw-dropping, but steady, and I think I can increase it over time. There's some weird shit that is not well explained, though...like $11k in 'professional fees' in 2009. And roughly $8k a year listed only as 'Other'. Maybe it's just me, but that's a rather large lump to be categorized like that.

And holy crap, the staff wages. She tells me that she's got 2.5 FTE, but her annual outlay for wages is only around $30k, which tells me that she has either GOT to be one of the two full-timers or she's skirting the minimum wage regs (currently $7.25/hour...you do the math).

I really do think we can make it work, though. It may wind up being just me and the hubby for a while (wouldn't fire anyone who was there when I came, but with pay like that, turnover has to be high, something that she alluded to during our tour, so just wouldn't replace anyone who left).

The thing that keeps drawing me to this practice is the small, homey look that it has. It was Herriot and the idealized vision of the small town vet that started me dreaming as a kid, and I think that kind of intimate atmosphere is a big enough change from the big, high-tech, multi-vet practices out there that it will attract and keep its own clientelle (and I'd have the advantage of already having an established client base).

It still scares the hell out of me, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to.

One month of plotting?

2009-11-27T18:52:00.002-06:00

For a panster writer, that could make for an interesting change of pace.

The Plot Whisperer blog is hosting the Second Annual International Plot Writing Month through December, and after taking a look at last year's activities, I think I might give it a try.

RL has caused both of the WIPs to bog down, but I'm reluctant to completely abandon them while I work on the mod.

And did I mention that I'm thinking about jumping ship on my safe, secure, nerve-wracking government job to buy my own veterinary practice?

In case you're wondering, yes, I'm freaking nuts.

If Stephanie Meyer can do it....

2009-11-26T08:16:00.003-06:00

I overheard a co-worker toss that flippant phrase off in passing last week while she was pontificating on how anybody could write a book these days. I didn't argue with her...I try to avoid black holes whenever I can, and the vacuum of vapidity around this particular individual has been known to suck in small office supplies and passing birds.

It did get me thinking, however. I haven't read the Twilight series, have no particular urge to, haven't seen the movies (was going to suck it up in the name of female bonding on a ladies' movie night last week, but had to go check out the veterinary practice I'm currently considering buying), but I've heard a great deal concerning the quality (or lack thereof) of the writing in the books. She seems to have become the poster child for the "Anybody can get published" crowd these days.

But you know what? As much as those twits want to believe it, it's not true. Say what you will about Meyer's writing ability, but she has created a story that has connected with an incredible number of people, many of whom are in a demographic that is not known for reading.

And actually getting published is just the last step. First and foremost, a person has to have the drive and dedication to actually write. To sit down day after day and achieve a word count, fight past writer's block and distractions, deal with the day job, the kids and the spouse that don't really understand why you are writing in the first place, and keep writing until that WIP is complete.

You have to have the guts to put it in front of people and ask for brutally honest opinions, and I'm not talking about mutual admiration societies where everybody sits around and gushes about how wonderful everyone else is. I'm talking about a group of people who take their craft seriously and respect others who do the same, who will read your manuscript and tell you, "This is good, but this, this and this need work, and this just needs to go." That kind of honesty is gold.

Then, of course, you have to be willing to take the advice that you're given. To accept that the idea that sounded so good in your head needs major retooling and head back to the keyboard. And do it again. And again. And then know when to stop doing it, because you could spend forever tweaking just to avoid the next step.

You send it out into the big bad world of editors and agents. You wait for replies that don't come, you take the rejections and keep submitting. At this point, it becomes a combination of luck and talent, of the right manuscript connecting with the right set of eyes at the right time...and that time may be a long time in coming.

Can anybody do it? In theory, I suppose, but the number of individuals who actually do it gets smaller at each progressive step. And the ones who do get published have accomplished something noteworthy, whether you care for their writing or not.

To those who say that anybody can do it, I have just one reply.

Prove it.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-11-23T06:18:00.004-06:00

Just have to love the Brits. "You are being shagged by a rare parrot!" wouldn't sound the same in any other dialect. Plus, the little guy just looks so darn happy!

Daring to dream

2009-11-22T10:56:00.003-06:00

In the current economy, it's quite possibly clinically insane to be thinking of dropping a secure government job with benefits, retirement, days off & all the other bells and whistles, to go into business for myself.

And yet, here I am, giving it thought. More than thought, really. Friday's tour went well; the place actually looks better than the pictures from the ad. It could definitely use a bit of cosmetic work, but it's obviously been taken care of. The structure is old; Kenny's going to be asking about any existing agreements with Terminix or other insect control. The crawl space underneath means that laying the ductwork for central heat & air won't be an insurmountable task.

Quite frankly, I'm half in love with it already. It's got the tiny, homey feel that I always imagined back when being a veterinarian was all I dreamed about. And we're talking from 5th grade on, reading James Herriot, jumping at any chance I could to watch real live veterinarians doing their work.

My first three years after graduation added the reality to the dream: the day-to-day drudgery of running a practice, the clients who yell at you, the clients who stiff you, the clients who yell at you *and* stiff you, the long hours with few to no days off. That wasn't why I left, though.

I left because, after three years of helping a friend get a practice off the ground, I was still working for a flat $1000 a month, with no health insurance. I could have searched for a position at another practice, but it felt disloyal to me, somehow, so when the research spot was offered to me, I took it, and never looked back, moving from there to public health.

There's always been a part of me that wondered how I could have walked away from those dreams after having worked so hard (and put myself ass deep in debt to boot) to achieve them. I justified it by the security of the positions that I had, the regular hours, the good benefits, the regular paycheck. The easy way out, I guess.

And now? Maybe I'm just fed up with the bureaucracy, pouring my soul into a project that is shelved because it's not politically expedient, working my ass off to make someone else look good and get handed more work as a reward. Maybe it's taking a look around and realizing that I don't *want* my boss' job, don't want to move further up the food chain until all I do is manage people who manage other people who in turn manage the people who do the real work.

And I miss working with my husband. I hate coming home tired and grumpy and barely having the energy to hold a conversation. We've always made a good team together, and it helps to keep his depression a bit further at bay...and there's also no one better at working with animals or people. The idea of an old-fashioned husband-wife veterinary practice is incredibly appealing.

So yeah, if the finances come together, I'll be taking the plunge and returning to private practice for the first time in twelve years. Six days a week. No vacation time at least for the first year. Payroll and inventory and DEA and insurance and all the day to day mechanics.

And puppy breath, kitten fur, the challenge of figuring out why an animal is sick and fixing it, the trust in the eyes of a kid who brings you a baby squirrel in a shoebox and digs $1.50 in change from his pocket. Getting checks made out simply to 'Doc'.

Yeah, I think I could handle that.

Time for a change?

2009-11-19T18:18:00.009-06:00

After over twelve years away from private practice, I'm giving serious thought to returning...and to owning my own practice, no less.

I found the practice below up for sale in the area where I grew up. I've driven past it as long as I can remember.
It's not much, and it's never going to be one of those mega practices, but that was never what I wanted. I've always suspected that if I had started out in a small practice in a small town where a certain percentage of my clients always paid with eggs and produce, I'd never have left. The place is definitely a fixer-upper, but it's got the small feel that I like, with plenty of land to inspire dreams of expansion on my own terms.

I'm already thinking an attractive white picket yard in front where clients can walk their dogs (the street in front is a busy one), and an expanded boarding facility in the back...plenty of room for an exercise yard.

Waiting rooms could definitely use a coat of paint & some new flooring (and the possibility of adding central air is going to be a big consideration...this is Oklahoma we're talking about).

This one brings back memories. I spent most of high school & summers in college in rooms like this, scraping dog crap out of cages...but you know what? I looked at flipping burgers as a *big* step down. It's all in your perspective, I guess.

Nice, no-frills OR. Again, could use a bit of cosmetic work, but I do like the Craftsman toolbox for keeping stuff organized (and yes, those are used for that purpose in many practices).

And one of the great peeves of my professional ethic, the marketing section. There are specifically formulated medical diets that I would carry, but I honestly don't know that I'd be pushing Iams, Science Diet or any of the other prestige brands when every pet I've ever owned has been raised quite successfully on Purina. I'm actually having visions of doing away with all the shelves and replacing the wall with a cozy enclosed fireplace...

And, of course, there's the added bonus that I'd be working with my husband, something that I've definitely missed the past few years.

Got an appointment to check it out tomorrow night, so we'll see how it goes!

Reproductive Rights?

2009-11-16T17:41:00.003-06:00

So, exactly what kind of a piece of shit do you have to be to sell your 5 year old daughter for sex?

At the risk of making perhaps the most non-politically correct statement of the decade, why is it that people have to pass a test to drive a car, but any idiot with gonads can be given complete control over the life of another human being for 18 years?

Reproductive rights? That’s bullshit. There should be no higher right in our society than that of a child to live in safety and without fear, and if that means that some broodmare who shouldn’t be trusted with a potted plant can’t fulfill her maternal urges, I’m not going to be shedding tears. A child is not the property of a parent. It is a living, feeling, growing, unbelievably malleable mind and soul that is forever shaped by the environment it matures in.

I’m not going to advocate requiring a license to parent (though if all parents were put through the same vetting as prospective adoptive parents, the birth rates would likely go way down, along with child abuse rates), but once someone has proven themselves a danger to a child in their care, how many more children do they get to endanger in the name of ‘reproductive rights’?

The landmark case of ‘Unborn Baby B’ in NYC in 1988 paved the way for a new policy enacted in 2008 that allows the authorities to remove newborns from their parents’ homes in all but an extraordinary instance if the parents previously had children taken from their custody and their case is still open.

Even for twenty years ago, it still boggles my mind that there was even any question on what should be done. Seven children taken from the mother due to abuse and neglect? And they wanted to make number 8 a ‘test case’, reasoning that, "now with only one child to care for, she will be able to apply all the knowledge she has repeatedly digested from the numerous programs she has attended and thus be a good mother"???

Excuse me while I puke.

Attorney/writer Andrew Vachss won that one, but it still took twenty years and God only knows how many more children hurt & dead before NYC had the balls to take the logical next step that has the civil libertarians screaming (civil liberties only apply if you’re old enough to vote, apparently, though there is finally a political lobby devoted to child protection, Protect.org).

Too late for too many, but maybe not for the next one.

The little things in life

2009-11-15T14:13:00.004-06:00

I've been fascinated by dollhouses and miniatures for as long as I can remember. Didn't really care about having dolls in them; it's the detail in the tiny furnishings and decorations, the ability to create a scene of amazing reality with elements that can fit in the palm of your hand...or, as shown above, on the tip of your finger. I stumbled over this artist's work on Deviant yesterday & got sucked into her gallery. Truly incredible detail.

I've got a dollhouse that I started several years ago. Little two story job that I was going to turn into a general store with living quarters on the upper level. It got put on hold, since miniatures and cats don't mix, but with the back room clear again, I'm giving serious thought to pulling it back out and trying to finish it.

*fairchildart on deviant ART

Might also have a go at crafting my own miniatures from polymer clay. Because what I really need is another hobby, right?

Ain't no such thing as a hobby horse

2009-11-14T16:56:00.003-06:00

One of the few typical 'girl' traits of my childhood was the yearning for a horse. I collected stuffed horses, the Breyer horses, horse books (Marguerite Henry, anyone?), horse statues, drew horses, dreamed horses, begged my parents incessantly for a horse and rode whenever I could (not often enough).

Then I grew up and became a veterinarian who worked on horses.

Don't get me wrong, I still like them, still like being around them, still like riding them. I just have no desire whatsoever to actually own one now. Part of it is the medical perspective. To a vet, horses aren't animals; they're a ticking time bomb attached to four hooves and a digestive tract. Sooner or later, any horse is all but guaranteed to either founder or colic, and if you're lucky, it'll be a mild case (and if you're unlucky, they'll colic, then founder...or vice versa). The mild cases aren't too costly to treat, but when things get serious, the cash register starts rolling, even for a vet.

Part of it is the memory of being back in practice, dodging flying hooves with the full knowledge that we didn't have health insurance. Horses are big, and they can put you in a world of hurt even when they're not being brainless. When a sixteen hand gelding steps on your foot, you know it. When that same sixteen hand gelding starts kicking like a line of Rockettes, you're looking at broken bones if you move the wrong way. And let's not forget the friend who had a big chunk of her face literally ripped off by her own mare.

If you are paying attention when you're dealing with them, the dangers are pretty minimal. But horses are work. Lots of work. Mucking out stalls, shoeing, worming, grooming, making sure they drink in the winter so they don't impact. Mind you, it doesn't have to be that difficult. With good pasture & good quality hay, they don't need fancy feeds (their digestive tracts are designed for grazing), and they don't have to be stabled in most weather, as long as they have someplace to shelter from wind and cold. Still, it takes time to take care of them, & my time just seems to get more and more scarce. The idea of coming home from work to change clothes and head back out to wherever I had it stabled just doesn't appeal to me these days.

I do still like horses, though. Some of my fondest memories from my time in private practice involve the horse work. Like Sergeant Slammer. Big, burly quarter horse stud who was the terror of every stableboy on the farm where he was standing. The guys couldn't get close to him, but when he cut his leg, my partner and I didn't even need a sedative. She did the cleanup and bandaging while I just let him put his chin on my shoulder and whicker at me. I'd never seen a horse flirt before, but I'll swear to this day that he was batting his eyes.

My sister in law has two; she's been showing & riding since she was a kid, and a friend has the most adorable 7 month old gelding that she got for a song from breeders who didn't want a sorrel (they've been crying for a couple of months now, ever since he darkened to an undeniable and permanant black with white blaze). So I can enjoy them vicariously for a few more years until we find a house with some land. Maybe then the old yearnings will come back.

Redirecting

2009-11-09T06:03:00.006-06:00

Going to have to set the WIPs aside for now, I think. I've found an experienced modder who is willing to do the coding that's been freezing me up on the Valen mod for BG2. Being freed up to focus solely on the writing & not having to figure out how I'm going to get what I've written to trigger in-game should speed the process considerably, and I'm going to try to push to get the damn thing done.

I've developed quite the love-hate relationship with this project. I can't count the number of times I've thought about walking away, handing the whole thing off to someone else or just plain abandoning it. And yet, I keep coming back. There's a stubborn part of me that refuses to quit, and there's also a definite rush when you see a character that you coded saying dialogue that you wrote at the time you wanted them to do it (big distinction there). It's like getting a SAS code to run right, only more fun. A *lot* more fun.

Ironically, I was never that crazy about the world's favorite tiefling to begin with. The romance in Neverwinter Nights didn't impress me all that much (the game as a whole didn't do much for me), but when I got the brilliant notion that I didn't have enough to do and needed to learn Infinity Engine modding, the idea of bringing him into the Baldur's Gate 2 game world seemed like a natural fit (it was also a bit lazy, as it saved me the trouble of coming up with an original character). It was a gift to the PTF's over at Petals & Thorns, and they have been a great group of beta-testers (which has saved me from having to play the game over and over for bug-checks).

But I've actually grown fond of him over the years that I've spent trying to listen for his voice and find a female type or three to pair him up with. Not PTF fond, but 'got yer back, buddy' fond. I think the mod has a good storyline, & I want to stick around to tell it. *And* I don't want to just drop the mod & have it picked up by some squeeing fangirl who will braid ribbons into the poor bastard's hair and tie a bow on his tail. A little silliness is fine, but a tiefling has his dignity (though my version does have a rather wicked sense of humor that emerges on occasion).

So I'm going to suck it up and push some of the other stuff aside until it's done. Not the PbP or the co-writing projects...those are serious sanity savers, but White Knight & Bloodsworn will be in limbo for a while.

Unless I just need a change of pace, Word Whore that I am...

Monday Morning Smile

2009-11-09T06:01:00.001-06:00

Trunk monkey...everybody needs one.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-11-02T04:51:00.002-06:00

It's a Tom Lehrer kind of day. Enjoy!

Dragonbreath Chili

2009-11-01T12:46:00.003-06:00

I was raised on chili made with Williams' seasoning mix & loaded with tomatoes and beans. I'll probably always have a soft spot for it, but being married to a chili snob (beans are occasionally permissible, but tomatoes *never*) has broadened my horizons.

My fondness for winging it in the kitchen has had its effect, too, and the challenge of making homemade chili that has both flavor *and* heat is one that I enjoy. I've never cared for foods that sear off the roof of your mouth, but offer nothing in the way of taste.

Enter "Aunt Ida's Dragonbreath Chili", named for one of my favorite WoW recipes that leaves your toon belching flames intermittently after eating it. First made it a few years back, but this Halloween was the first time I tried to pay at least a bit of attention to how I was doing it.

2 pounds of beef, cubed
2 pounds of ground beef, browned
1 large white onion
6 large cloves of garlic (have I mentioned before how much I like garlic?)
chili powder
cumin
paprika
chipotle powder
cayenne pepper
jalepeno peppers
habanero peppers
salt

I like the crock pot for this one, but you need a big one for the full recipe.

Toss the cubed beef into the crockpot with the diced onion & pressed (or minced) garlic, cover with water & turn the crockpot onto high. Add 3 tbsp chili powder & 1 tsp each cumin & paprika & let it cook for 3-4 hours, until the beef is cooked through.

Turn the crockpot to low & add the ground beef. Adjust the flavor with the chili powder, paprika, cumin & salt to taste (chili powder can be added by the tablespoonful, the others by the teaspoon); let the chili cook for 30 minutes or so after each adjustment. The important thing is to have a good flavor *before* you start playing with the heat. I actually separated about half of the batch out to heat up for a Halloween party.

Chop the jalepenos & habaneros very fine. Now start playing with heat & flavor, adding the chopped peppers by the tablespoonful & the chipotle & cayenne by the teaspoonful. Again, allow time to simmer after each adjustment, & you may need to add chili powder/paprika/cumin, as well. I couldn't get this batch as hot as I wanted because I couldn't find fresh habaneros, so I substituted serranos. I could have used one of the bottled sauces, but I knew there would be plenty of those at the party, & it just feels like cheating. Too much jalepeno & you get a bitter taste along with the heat.

Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. Too hot for most of the party, except to mix with the milder stuff, but not really hot enough for the asbestos-mouthed among us (though they liked the flavor). Had about half left over at the end of the evening, which I brought home, dumped back into the big crockpot with the rest, added black beans & more water and let it cook overnight. Plenty hot enough for general consumption.

I did try Ghost Pepper sauce at the party, & it definitely lives up to its billing. If it's not the world's hottest, I don't know that I want to meet the winner. Has a very interesting delayed effect: you're munching along, enjoying the flavor when it starts heating up. You take a drink of your water/soda/whatever & that *really* kicks it off. Fortunately, I only put 6 drops in my bowl.

Why?

2009-10-29T17:59:00.004-05:00

I'm pretty bored with this "moral ambiguity" crap. Life's too short. And some things are black and white. Raping a child is black and white. - Andrew Vachss

What does it take to be able to watch while a fifteen year old girl is raped for nearly two hours...and do nothing?

No phone? Doubtful in this day and age, particularly in a pack of teenagers.

Mob mentality? Depressing, but the most likely explanation. Still doesn't make it any easier to comprehend. And to me, it's a cheap excuse.

You choose what to do, and what not to do. Going along to get along only gets you so far. Just kids? Bullshit. Kids that age and younger choose to go against their upbringing, against the tide of peer pressure, against what is just plain wrong every day. Calling such behavior inevitable is a slap in the face of those who have proved that it's not.

And the most frustrating thing is, there is *nothing* that can likely be done to the ones that stood by and watched. Not even an aiding and abetting charge. The little bastards should have their names and faces plastered in the paper, and assuming that any of them are college bound, it should be included along with their applications. Universities deserve to know what kind of refuse they are getting.

A kid of mine did that, I'd be sorely tempted to drown them and start over.

Jim Hines, author of The Stepsister Scheme & The Mermaid's Madness, is also a rape counselor and has posted a thought provoking article on the nebulous nature of the boundary between 'us' and 'them'.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-10-26T06:49:00.002-05:00

Vintage clip from TheCafeRetro. Hard to beat for sheer unadulterated silliness.

sigh

2009-10-24T11:58:00.005-05:00

So, the prez has declared swine flu a national emergency.

Ummm...why?

Yes, it is potentially serious. Yes, children are more at risk than they are with the seasonal flu.

But a national emergency?

While there is no good way to estimate the number of people who have gotten sick, the number who have died (around 1000 in the US) to date is likely pretty accurate.

In an average season, flu kills around 30,000, either directly or indirectly. If H1N1 keeps going at its present rate, it will kill far fewer than that by next spring.

That doesn't mean that people shouldn't take the potential for severe disease seriously. Doesn't mean people shouldn't get vaccinated, especially children and pregnant women.

But it's not a national emergency.

If "bureaucratic roadblocks" are preventing sick people from getting immediate treatment for serious illness now, then they are presumably there at other times, as well. If that is the case, then I have a few suggestions as to where the people so bent on healthcare reform might want to focus their efforts.

Right now, half the population is demanding that they be tested for "swine flu" if they get sick, and the other half thinks their kids will sprout a third eye on their forehead if they get the H1N1 vaccine.

You really want to help us, Mr. President? Get all the celebrities and talking heads that you can pull together and blanket the media with some basic education that doesn't seem to be getting through:

1. H1N1 flu is, in the vast majority of cases, just like seasonal flu. If you are having mild flulike symptoms, stay home and take care of it just like you would any other time. You don't have to be tested. Honest. You can just say that you have swine flu if it makes you feel better about getting sick, because you probably do.

2. If you are sick, don't go to work. Keep sick kids home from school. You/they might not be seriously ill, but the person that you/they infect could be.

3. Risk factors for severe illness include: asthma/lung disease, pregnancy, chronic lung disease, heart disease, diabetes and any condition that suppresses the immune system, such as treatment for cancer or autoimmune disease. Anyone with these conditions who develops flulike symptoms should see a doctor immediately.

4. The H1N1 vaccine is made in exactly the same way that the seasonal influenza vaccine has been made for decades. The only reason that it's not part of this year's seasonal vaccine is that it emerged after production had already begun. It wasn't "rushed into production", and clinical tests to date have shown NO severe adverse effects. If you can take the seasonal flu vaccine (some people with severe egg allergies can't), you can take the H1N1 vaccine.

5. The H1N1 vaccine and the seasonal flu vaccine are two separate vaccines. The seasonal flu shot will not keep you from getting infected with H1N1, & vice versa.

6. The intranasal influenza vaccine, whether seasonal or H1N1, is safe to receive, and a great alternative to those with a needle phobia. I've taken it myself, not because of a needle phobia but because we can't give the stuff away & I was doing my part to conserve injectible stock. It tickled a little, & didn't hurt at all. Yes, it looks like a syringe, but I promise there is NO needle attached, & they don't have to stick it way up your nose or anything. If you've used a nose spray, you will know exactly what it feels like.

If we can get those basic facts through to people, things should proceed smoothly.

More questions? Check out the CDC's website.

Winging it in the kitchen

2009-10-18T13:30:00.004-05:00

So between writing & WoWing, I didn't make it to the store yesterday, so come dinnertime, it was either order pizza or figure out what to do with what we had. Not an unusual situation, since a trip to the store ranks only slightly above dropping a cinder block on my foot. Unless it's books or odd gadgets, I hate shopping.

All right, into the pantry. Pasta. I can work with pasta. What else? Black olives? The hubby likes those, & through some sort of strange osmosis, I've started liking them over the years, too. He still hates feta cheese, which means that I can steal his half of the pizza knowing that he won't touch mine.

Pasta, black olives...garlic? Hell, yes. I may run out of everything else without blinking, but I keep the garlic stocked.

OK...fridge. Butter, sliced muenster cheese & the last of the alfredo sauce from last weekend's birthday gorging. No milk, but have some white wine.

Chicken breasts in the freezer. OK, I have a vague idea of what I'm going to do now.

Thaw the chicken & toss it into the cast iron skillet with 1 stick of butter & garlic (how much? Hell, I don't know. I used fresh garlic...maybe 1/4 of a pod, put through the press. Have I mentioned that I like garlic?) and brown it nicely. The garlic got a little past brown...think I'll hold it back until later next time. Pull out the chicken, deglaze the pan with 1 cup of white wine & pour the whole shebang into a saucepan.

Heat up the alfredo in the microwave & pour it in, then attack it with a wisk, adding the cheese slice by slice, then add the sliced black olives after everything is melted, then a couple of dashes of cayenne pepper for a bit of kick & salt (and I cheated & thickened it a bit with cornstarch)

Cook up some bow tie pasta, top it with the sauce & sliced chicken breasts.

Overall, not bad. Next time, I'll just sprinkle the olives over the top after it's cooked, or at least let it simmer a bit before adjusting the salt. It was a bit too salty, but I thinned it with some evaporated milk (still trying to motivate myself storeward) for lunch leftovers & it turned out decent.

Typical panster cooking. Once I get a taste that I really like, I start paying attention to how much of what.

The Reading List

2009-10-18T09:05:00.002-05:00

Ye gods, it's amazing what fifty bucks can buy. I now have eight more Vachss books in hardback (yes, they're former library books...ask me if I care), which means I have the whole Burke series. Snuck a peek at the dust jacket blurb for Another Life (the last one) & it's going to be tough reining myself in to read the rest of the series before diving in. Call it my punishment for not keeping up better along the way. Just finished Hard Candy (#4) & picking up Blossom. Going to be a lengthy trip, but well worth the time. And he has a new novel, Haiku, coming out in November that I plan to snag.

Two Skipp/Spector books, The Cleanup & The Light At The End are here, waiting for The Scream & Dead Lines to arrive. And this time, the books don't get loaned out to anybody, damn it. Those boys are so good - they defined splatterpunk horror in the late 80's/early 90's with characters and stories that reached out and grabbed you - and so underrated that I kept loaning the books out to friends & never seeing the damn things again. Think this will be my fourth copy of The Scream & Dead Lines, my second of Light. I'm seriously jonesing for another runthrough of The Scream, one of my all time favorite reads.

And The Mermaid's Madness was released earlier this month. Hastings didn't have it when I checked Friday, so I'll be heading to Borders in a bit. You can read Chapter 1 on Jim Hines' website for a sneak peek. I got hooked on The Stepsister Scheme earlier this year & was delighted to find out that it had been picked up as a series (book 3, Red Hood's Revenge, just went to the publisher).

Why yes, my reading tastes are eclectic...why do you ask? They all have one thing in common, though: memorable, vividly drawn characters. Burke, Michelle, Max, Jacob Hammer, John Paul Rowan, Talia & Snow. Give me a book with a solid cast & I'm yours, particularly if you can show the relationships & emotions between them convincingly. I like ensemble stuff...books about people that care about each other, regardless of genre, & that's what I keep striving for in my own writing.

That's what life's about, after all, isn't it?

Things you really don't want to see...

2009-10-15T17:28:00.003-05:00

I couldn't say from personal experience, but I'm going to guess that my experimental giant helium balloon floating into the Great Beyond with my 6 year old apparently on board would be pretty high on the list.

Fortunately, the kid was found to have been hiding in the attic the whole time, which means that the incident was nothing more than an exercise in creative problem solving for Colorado Emergency Management (I'd love to hear transcripts of the assorted phone/radio conversations).

On the other hand, his brother said that he saw him get into the balloon before it took off. Anyone besides me smelling a trip to the woodshed in someone's future?

And on the other hand (yes, I can count...I'm borrowing my husband's), if you have a bigass balloon that is capable of lifting your six year old, is it really a good idea to leave it unsupervised, & loosely tied with the damn door open while the kids are playing around it?

I'm suspecting that the whole thing may have been a prank that got way out of hand; I just hope the parents weren't involved.

Mythbusters take on H1N1!

2009-10-13T21:24:00.003-05:00

I love Adam & Jamie (and really want their jobs), and there are plenty of H1N1 myths floating around out there.

Go get 'em, guys!

Monday Morning Smile

2009-10-12T07:16:00.002-05:00

Serenade of Love by =TaniDaReal on deviant ART

Perhaps there is such a thing as being too popular, eh?

Have a great week!

Suha Derbent

2009-10-11T09:12:00.003-05:00

One of my DeviantArt finds, Derbent, who goes by catman-suha on DA, is an incredibly talented wildlife photographer. His action shots of big cats in the wild (check out the Siberian tiger) are truly awe inspiring.

And yes, I really, REALLY want his camera setup.

WTF??

2009-10-10T09:37:00.003-05:00

Diving Equipment Recalled by Halcyon Manufacturing Due to Drowning Hazard

The hazard? "The over pressure valves (OPVs) in the diving equipment could fail allowing the buoyancy compensator devices (BCDs) and the diver lift inflatable devices to leak, posing a drowning hazard to divers."

Maybe I'm just callous, but that sounds to me like a good way to clean out the gene pool. If you don't know enough to get the hell out of your BC if it's deflating & drop your weight belt if you're still going down, you probably shouldn't be diving.

Arrogant ignorance

2009-10-06T19:44:00.004-05:00

Or ignorant arrogance...take your pick. I can deal with the two conditions separately, but put them together and my teeth start grinding.

Orac brought my attention today to an antivaccine idiot who hasn't even bothered to educate herself in basic physiology, much less basic immunology before making statements that almost literally fried my synapses.

She evidently got her hands on the package inserts for the influenza vaccines and looked up the MSDS and started hyperventilating at the horrors she found there.

I held up pretty well when she went on about the potentially toxic effects of neomycin, gentamycin & polymyxin B, none of which are present in high enough levels in the finished product to be a risk for anything but an allergic reaction in someone who is very sensitive (which is why they are listed in the first place).

I definitely smelled something burning when I hit the following sentence, however:

"Potassium chloride (30), calcium chloride (31), and sodium chloride (32) are also listed as ingredients for CSL. All three are considered mutagenic for mammalian somatic cells."

I shit you not. We should be running in terror because there is table salt in our flu vaccine!!!

I couldn't help myself. I know it was a waste of time, but I had to post a response that, because it requires blog author approval, will likely never see the light of day on her blog (and I even tried to be at least polite about it...or as polite as I could be with my common sense shrieking "Are you freaking kidding me???" as I typed):

"Sodium chloride is salt. Table salt. Potassium chloride & calcium chloride are electrolytes found in IV fluids, sports drinks and common fruits and vegetables in quantities far, FAR exceeding any minute amounts that might be found in any vaccine.

"Neomycin, polymyxin & gentamicin warnings are included because those who are hypersensitive to these antibiotics can react to the trace amounts that remain after they are used in the manufacturing process to prevent bacterial growth. A child would get a much higher dose in a topical application of Neosporin on a scraped knee than in a vaccine.

"Everything that you listed in your article depends upon QUANTITY for the adverse effects that you ascribe to them, quantity that simply is not present in vaccines.

"The only exceptions to this are those things that can trigger allergic reactions, and it is precisely because hypersensitivity can occur in response to minute quantities that the warnings are given. The reason that the vaccines have not been evaluated for carcinogenic/mutagenic effects or impairment of fertility is that none of these ingredients is present in high enough levels to pose any risk of these effects."

I know...there's a pretty obvious "you freakin' moron" left unspoken at the end of just about every sentence, but there is only so much restraint that can be exercised. This level of ignorance is more than arrogant. It's lazy. It's someone who doesn't bother to actually educate themselves on the whole of what they are talking about, because it's so much easier to just make up facts to fit the truth as they want it to be.

Ninja Gerbils Ahoy!

2009-10-04T09:48:00.003-05:00

Cute, ain't he?

There were forty one of them waiting on my best friend's lawn when I drove up with my husband, purportedly to help them deal with a marital crisis that had been brewing over the past 2 weeks. The fact that it was my birthday probably should have clued me in, but they had set it up nicely with an ongoing series of 'counseling calls' from my friend or her husband to Kenny.

They figured that no matter how clueless I was, I'd start getting suspicious at the cars stacked up in front of the house, so they might as well surprise me with the ninja gerbil army. Short but very old story, stemming from me sneaking my pet gerbils into the college dorm. In the SCA, I painted a sword-wielding gerbil on my shield as a joke, & have been known as The Gerbil ever since. Kat Photoshopped this up from a ninja guinea pig image and taped the resulting army to wire coathanger wickets.

Yeah, they got me. To maintain the deception, Kenny took me out to dinner, just the two of us, beforehand. Joe's Crab Shack, Crabdaddy Bucket, so I ain't complaining. But they also had a potluck dinner with brisket, potato salad, baked beans...the works. And the cake (our oven was busted, so the hubby couldn't make it; he settled for micromanaging the hell out of the design at the bakery, including making sure the icing was real buttercream & not the whipped crap that gets used now...my sweetie loves me!). And the Cheesecake Factory turtle cheesecake that Mom & little brother brought (having them show up was a surprise in a surprise). I'm still full & between the sugar (those chocolate swirls on top of the cheescake aren't fluff...they're heavy duty fudge) & the coffee to cut it with, I'm a bit surprised that I managed to blink before Monday, let alone fall asleep last night. I'm still full.

And did I mention the bigass bottle of Tequila Rose that Lynn gave me?

Everybody there but Mom & little brother were WoW players, but we actually didn't talk too much shop. The boys have rediscovered football, so they were watching OU get their butts kicked by Miami. Had a beautiful set of Kodak moments though: the first when my always polite & proper Mom was trying not to look as though she could hear one of the guys describing a raunchy online gaming video (I didn't even try to look at her, but Kenny said that her expression was priceless) & the second was after she & my brother had left, when he realized that she'd heard him (knowing how conversations tend to meander when the guild gets together, I was expecting something like that; I was just glad they hadn't actually pulled the video in question up on the computer).

Good food, great friends, great birthday.

And I have a ninja gerbil army to decorate my office with.

And leftover cake & cheesecake to eat when I finally get hungry again sometime tomorrow.

Or maybe it won't be that long.

Paradise Found

2009-10-03T15:19:00.004-05:00

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorge Luis Borges

I stumbled over www.abebooks.com a few years ago when I was looking for Alistair MacLean titles for my husband's birthday and discovered a bibliophile's nirvana.

Pick a title. Any title you can remember. Fiction, non-fiction, biography, out-of-print, whatever. Regardless of how old or obscure, chances are good that you'll find it on AbeBooks, whether you're looking for a readable paperback for $1 or a first edition to round out your collection.

An online marketplace that ties together the inventories of thousands of booksellers from around the world, it's both a bargain basement & a dream factory. I can pick up a good used copy of The Hobbit for a buck plus shipping or wonder if I'd really be willing to drop $175,000 on that first edition if I had the money (they have merchant rankings, similar to eBay, so you can get an idea of how reliable a particular seller is).

I get the most fun out of looking up the prices on signed first editions by my favorite authors, but I definitely get the most use out of the other end of the price spectrum. I just picked up the seven books that I needed to complete my Andrew Vachss 'Burke' series, plus another book of his short stories that I'd been wanting. Add to that four books by John Skipp & Craig Spector, two of the best contemporary horror writers around for an even dozen books from seven different vendors for a single payment 0f just over $51, including shipping (Hardbacks averaged $3.75, paperbacks $1, all of them listed in good or better condition).

Next week's gonna be good!

WTF Whoopi??

2009-10-02T09:14:00.005-05:00

If we ever needed proof that Hollywood isn't breathing the same air as the rest of us, the reaction of the A-list to Roman Polanski's arrest provides plenty. I'm disgusted by the repeated assertion that the man's artistic talent somehow absolves him of moral and legal accountability for his actions.

Whoopi Goldberg's comment that "I don't believe it was rape-rape." is probably the most appalling, since it displays both utter ignorance of the facts and a willingness to jump in with an opinion anyway. Her pathetic attempt to 'clarify' herself by saying that she was "only trying to get the facts straight" was even more insulting.

The facts are already straight. Roman Polanski got a 13 year old girl drunk, drugged her and raped and sodomized her. She said no. She said that she wanted to go home. You want to get the facts? Read the transcript, you moron. He wasn't charged with "Unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor"; that was what he PLED GUILTY to, which was a bargain, considering that he was charged with furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, committing lewd & lascivious acts upon a child under 14, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape by use of drugs, perversion and sodomy. When he thought that he might get more than a slap on the wrist, he fled, which is another crime.

And while I'm glad that his victim has put it far enough behind her to be able to say that she forgives him, this isn't about forgiveness. It's about justice, the fact that a criminal doesn't get to decide what his punishment gets to be and the fact that talent does not excuse behavior.

This is the same mindset that was behind the successful efforts of Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and other pinheads to have convicted murderer Jack Abbott paroled on the strength of his writing talent, continuing to defend him even after he murdered another man only six weeks after his parole (Sarandon and Robbins named their baby after him, earning them both a permanant spot on my freaking moron list). The victim, Richard Adans, who was simply a waiter who told Abbott that he could not use the employee restroom in the restaurant where he was dining, was evidently not talented enough to merit consideration by these ivory tower idiots.

And these are the same people who seem to believe that their opinions on political and social issues ought to sway us, the untalented masses. I'd feel safer taking advice from a crackhead.

Whoopi? Your job is to entertain. Leave getting the facts straight to people who are capable of doing it.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-09-28T06:43:00.000-05:00

Hypocrisy, anyone?

2009-09-27T12:44:00.004-05:00

My mother has worked for the United Auto Workers' (UAW) union for thirty plus years as a secretary and a member of the Office & Professional Employees Union (OPEIU). She's been a passionate advocate, not only of her own union, but the UAW & other unions as well. She understands the reason that labor unions were founded and the only real reason they should exist: to protect workers from abuse by employers who are focused solely on the bottom line.

The GM plant shut down nearly two years ago; thanks to union negotiations, laid off employees transferred, continued to receive pay while waiting in a job bank, received severance packages, took early retirement or, in some cases, were paid not to work until they were old enough for retirement.

Not going to get into whether or not it was deserved. Auto workers get paid well, but they earn their money & pay a price. I worked there for a couple of months one summer in college & made a ludicrous amount of money for a college kid, but I'd never do it again. My hands hurt from the repetitive motion for over a month after I left, and I didn't speak to a single long-term employee there that didn't have some kind of a chronic injury as a result of their work.

But now the last of the employees are being placed or retired, the union is shutting down the local, and there were actually some union members who argued against giving my mother and her co-workers a severance package because they had been working for the past two years, while the auto workers got "nothing" (hey, if being paid to stay home until I can retire is nothing, sign me up).

Fortunately, her boss & the majority of others a) believe in walking what they talk and b) understand the level of hypocrisy that would be involved in a union denying its own employees the level of benefits that it demanded for its members. I hope it's mainly the former; I'm growing steadily more cynical when it comes to human nature, but I still believe that the average person is basically decent & will do the right thing for the right reasons.

I can't help but wonder, however, at the nay-sayers. What kind of greed and small minded stupidity does it take to seriously propose such measures, when they would be screaming to the heavens (and to their union reps) if someone tried to do such a thing to them?

Labor unions had their place, but looking at the political juggernauts that some of them have become, I have to think that the current structure has outlived its purpose and become another mechanism in the culture of entitlement, with everyone out to get theirs without giving any thought to the cost to someone else (and yes, my mother would wash my mouth out with soap for saying that).

Andrew Vachss

2009-09-21T20:21:00.003-05:00

Mama put her hands into the sugar bowl, tossing a pinch of the white powder on the tabletop, using her fingers to push it into a long, narrow column.

“Everybody do something,” she told me, drawing her finger through the bottom of the column, drawing a line. “Some people do more things, okay?” Drawing another line, leaving more than half the column between us. “Gambling, funny money, jewels,” she said, each time flicking more sugar off the column. “Guns, stealing…” More flicks of her finger – less sugar on the table. “Protection money, killing…” More sugar vanished. “Drugs,” she said, and the last of the sugar was gone.

I got it. Everybody has to make a living. Everybody draws a line somewhere. The people who do kiddie porn are over the line no matter where you draw it. “I know,” I told her.

“Business is business,” said Mama, quoting her favorite psalm. “Everything has rules. Do the same way all the time. Reliable, okay?”

“Yes,” I said, waiting.

“Even with war…rules,” Mama said. I wasn’t so sure – I’d been in one, but I let her go on.

“These people…” Mama shrugged, her face set and hard.

The soup came. Mama dished some out into my bowl. Gave some to herself. She bowed over the plates like she was saying grace.

Mama looked up. “No rules,” she said.

“No rules,” I agreed.

Andrew Vachss, "Strega"
______________________

It’s been almost twenty-five years since Andrew Vachss published Flood, the first novel in his series following Burke, an ex-con, part time private detective and full time survivor. I picked up the paperback a year or two later and got hooked, and with the publication of the 18th and final book in the series, Another Life, I decided to start back at the beginning and work my way through them all, acquiring the few titles I’ve managed to miss along the way.

Writing is Vachss’ second career. First and foremost, he is an attorney who represents children and youth almost exclusively, with decades of experience in representing abused children, and his books shine a light into some of the darkest corners of human behavior. Everything else that he does: the Burke series, the short stories, the comics and graphic novels (which include a Batman novel & comic, The Ultimate Evil) is designed to draw attention to issues that most of the population would rather not think about and fund a practice where the clients are rarely able to pay.

The stories are told in first person, conveyed through Burke’s eyes in a terse, stream of consciousness narrative that gives the feeling of sitting next to him while he cruises the streets of New York City in his battered tank of a Plymouth. After a lifetime spent in and out of prison, Burke thinks that he’s figured out the way to keep from going back without going straight: don’t steal from honest citizens. He lives by juggling a rotation of con games and mail frauds, along with the occasional investigative job that usually skirts the edge of the law and sometimes crosses over outright.

Besides Burke, the series is anchored by an eclectic cast of characters : Michelle, the beautiful transsexual hooker; Max the Silent, the deafmute Tibetan warrior; the Mole, the lunatic genius who lives in a junkyard and can do anything with electronics and explosives; the Prof (short for both Professor and Prophet), the tiny ex-con who is the closest thing Burke has to a father; Mama, whose age falls somewhere between fifty and ninety (and whose Chinese restaurant inspired my own search for the perfect bowl of hot & sour soup…still looking, dammit), and Pansy, Burke’s Neapolitan mastiff, who makes up in loyalty what she lacks in brains. His unconventional but tightly knit family of choice adds a few other members over the course of the books, and more peripheral characters frequently have recurring roles as well, giving the stories a sense of continuity, even though most can stand alone. New York City itself looms large in most of the books, described in grim detail by someone who has seen its underside up close and personal.

The books explore issues that Vachss has encountered in the course of his career: child abuse of all kinds, snuff films, black market organs, kiddie porn, teen suicide, cults. He pulls no punches, neither flinching from nor wallowing in the details, and has zero sympathy for the perpetrators, who are generally referred to as freaks or maggots. Burke’s life history is revealed bit by bit as the books continue, though never in great detail, hinting at a childhood of abuse, teen years spent in reform school or on the streets, touching briefly on time as a mercenary in Africa, and turning frequently to his many stints in prison. It’s left him with a towering contempt for the system and an instinct for survival, but a hidden core of caring that pits him time and again against those who cross the few lines that even he won’t approach.

He’s far from a white knight, however, and while the endings of the books are frequently satisfying in a very visceral way (Vachss denies that Burke serves as an alter ego, but there has got to be some major catharsis in his way of dealing with freaks), there is no happily ever after to be found here. His luck with women is lousy; there’s a new one for almost every book (the first few books take their titles from the women’s names, in fact), but they’re dead or gone by the final pages. My only real beef with the books is the regularity with which he manages to hook up with gorgeous women, given that he is generally described as not being particularly attractive. Still, there is a rough honesty and a jaded sense of honor to him that has an undeniable appeal (but every damn book?) and makes you wish that one of them would last.

I’ve re-read the first two books so far. Flood introduces the core cast; the title character is a beautiful martial arts expert looking for revenge on the pedophile who murdered her best friend’s daughter. An excellent read (it’s the one that hooked me), but I get the sense that he never expected it to have the level of success that it did. It has the feel of a one-shot; he doesn’t really start weaving the threads that hold the series together until the second book, Strega. This one takes its name from the mafia princess who hires Burke to track down a child porn ring that took polaroids of her nephew being molested and becomes one of the series’ most intriguing recurring characters.

Next up: Blue Belle.

Starting the Christmas list...

2009-09-11T15:30:00.002-05:00

More like what I'd get if I won the lottery, but what the hell. The hubby is actually in contact with the company, discussing testing in our area, which has lots of river bottoms that are prone to flooding. Maybe I'll at least get to ride in one...

Australia: The Drinking Game

2009-09-01T15:22:00.002-05:00

Having had the misfortune of seeing Australia, I have reached the conclusion that the only way that this piece of crap should be viewed is as part of a drinking game, where you take a shot for every cliché and stereotype that the filmmakers cram down our throats in place of actual characters & plot.

As a public service, I’m just going to post my own game here, so that whoever wants to can follow along shot for shot and have the fun of getting blitzed without actually having to watch the damn movie. For those of you who don’t like spoilers, I’d recommend avoiding the movie altogether, since there isn’t a single plot twist that isn’t signaled with all the subtlety of a neon sign.

Here goes ….

*unscrews the economy sized bottle of Cuervo Gold*

One shot for the pidgin intro by the half-blood Aborigine kid. Admittedly, he’s cute (& probably the best thing about the movie, Jackman’s bare chest aside), but he lays it on THICK here.

Another shot for the cheesy opening graphics. They seem to be trying to mimic the maps that were used to connotate travel in the 1940’s flicks, but it misses the nostalgia mark completely.

Oops…here comes Nicole Kidman as the spoiled, upper class Englishwoman, determined to travel to Australia to sell her husband’s cattle station. Big shot for a level of overacting that I haven’t seen since I tried to watch Moulin Rouge (and one more shot for THAT particular memory).

And there’s Hugh Jackman - or his eyes, at least - as the outcast & taciturn drover who hangs out with the Aborigines. One shot for the stereotype and another for that idiotic, face-in-shadow-except-for the-inexplicable-band-of-light-illuminating-his-menacing-eyes thing.

Bar fight!! Double shot!

*damn, but I need some limes*

Obligatory discourse of how her presence endangers the monopoly of the Big Cattle Baron on the pre-war beef market. Shot.

*sighs* I’m 10 minutes in, 9 shots down.

Obligatory awkward meeting between Jackman and Kidman, followed by the obligatory trek across the Outback, and Jackman’s obligatory declaration of his independence. Shot.

*yes, that’s three clichés and only one shot, but I’m going to have to pace myself*

Open ripoff of Quigley Down Under: “How long until we reach Faraway Downs?” “We’ve been on it for the last two days.” Shot.

Her cooing over the kangaroos was annoying enough that I actually laughed when they shot one. Feeling vaguely guilty (and decidedly woozy) I decide to forego the shot for that one.

*I eye the Quigley DVD longingly, but duty calls*

Obligatory misunderstanding over sex where they declare their undying loathing for each other. Shot.

David Wenham (Faramir, wherefore art thou, Faramir?) as a smarmy ranch hand who lacks only a Snidely Whiplash mustache. Evidently she’s never seen Dudley Do-Right, because she trusts the bastard. Shot.

Obligatory mystic prophecy about how the strange white woman will heal the land, and the obligatory meeting between Kidman and the cute urchin, during which he reveals to her that the cattle are being stolen by the Big Cattle Baron. Shot.

Kidman’s husband has been murdered, apparently by an Aborigine elder who happens to be the urchin’s grandfather.

*I stumble to the kitchen in search of the damn limes & bring the dog back with me for some intelligent company*

Clever urchin reveals Snidely to be the one behind the theft of the cattle & the decline of the station. Kidman fires him, & he takes all the other ranch hands with him, leaving her with no one to drive the cattle to market. Shot.

Oh, and he’s also the urchin’s father. Evidently, Australia is kinda like Arkansas with, everyone related to everyone else…but with kangaroos (don’t know who they’re related to…don’t care to speculate…how the hell many shots have I had?).

“Hey! Let’s put on a cattle drive! If only we had someone who knows how to drive cattle…”

Enter the Drover in all his unshaven glory. Shot.

“I learned a long time ago not to fight other people’s wars.” Shot. No, that clunker deserves two.

*Note: If I added a shot every time the word ‘crikey’ was uttered, I’d be unconscious by now*

Obligatory montage of the plucky Kidman learning to drive cattle. Shot.

Tragic drowning of the urchin’s mother as they hide from lawmen who are trying to take him to an orphanage where they try to train the ‘black’ out of half-breed children, leaving him a convenient orphan. Shot.

Kidman butchers ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow” while bonding with the orphaned urchin. Shot.

*Oh, HELL no…I drain half of what’s left of the bottle when she tries for the high note…and misses. The dog just whines and gives me a “What have I done to deserve this?” look. I offer him a shot.*

Drunk, plump and aging accountant, inspired by Kidman’s pluck, sucks it up to round out the cattle driving team. Shot…irony duly noted.

Obligatory scene of Kidman learning to appreciate the beauty of the outback. Shot.

Oh, noes! Snidely & the bad guys stampeded the herd!! Who’da thunk it??? Shot.

The now sober, but still plump and aging accountant is killed in the stampede (looks like he picked the wrong day to quit drinking), but the urchin uses his magic to stop 1500 head of cattle 30 feet from a cliff…and himself. BIG shot to swallow that one. Even the cattle look embarrassed.
With his dying breath, the accountant reveals that Kidman’s dead hubby had been murdered by a glass tipped spear like the ones on display in the ranch house, & not the type used by the tribe that the urchin’s grandfather belongs to. That little slip would’ve gotten someone a headslap from Gibbs.

Kidman and Jackman bond by firelight, aided by a bottle of booze the accountant had stashed, “just in case”, and a foxtrot lesson leads to a kiss, which is interrupted by the urchin before it goes too far. Shot.

We discover that the Drover was once married to an Aboriginal woman who died tragically of TB because the hospitals refused to treat blacks, and that Kidman can’t have children. Each agrees that the other would have made a great parent, evidently because they held the urchin to a single shot of booze at dinner. Two shots.

*The dog is looking at me strangely; I realize that I have been insulting the screen out loud*

Oh, noes! Snidely & the bad guys poisoned the only water hole for days! Whoulda thunk it? Shot.

They are saved by the urchin’s grandfather, who leads them across the waste that no one else would even try crossing & finds water Just In Time. Shot and a flying bitch slap to the screenwriter for the crappy deus ex machina.

Oh goody! They get the cattle into town and onto the army boat before the Big Cattle Baron (played by Bryan Brown, btw), accompanied by the cheers of the townsfolk and the glowers of Snidely and the Big Cattle Baron. Shot.

“Hey! Let’s put on a dance! And make sure the widder woman is there so that I, the Big Cattle Baron, can try to swindle her out of her ranch for a fraction of its worth!”

*Note: Paul Hogan appears to have been the only Australian actor with the good sense to avoid this turkey.*

Kidman tries to talk the Drover into working for her permanently, only to get a reprise of his independence speech. Shot.

At the ball, Kidman prepares to sign the ranch over to the Big Cattle Baron, only to have the Drover appear Just In Time, clean shaven and in a white tux, having evidently just been airdropped in from Casablanca. The ranch is saved!!! I am blitzed!! Shot.

Monsoon season arrives in time for a passionate kiss in the rain. Shot.

Up to the hotel room for a quick shag, during which I assume she continues to call him Drover, as we’ve never been given his name. Half shot, since that’s all that’s left.

Bottle’s empty, but I figure I’m safe, because the movie’s got to be over now, right?

Wrong!!

Back to the ranch, which has been transformed by the rains from the dry, dusty armpit of the universe to a green paradise. Obligatory montage of domestic bliss, with man, woman & urchin frolicking on the tennis court (or is it badminton? Having serious trouble focusing at this point). I go to take another shot & remember the bottle is empty. Remind myself to equip the dog’s collar with a cask of brandy for future forays into the cinematic wilderness.

Weaving into the kitchen, I locate the bottle of Bushmill’s. That’s right, I’m going to sacrifice my beloved Irish coffee to this grand experiment.

Back to the movie, take the shot.

Snidely feeds the Big Cattle Baron to the crocs (I knew they should’ve gotten Hogan) and marries his daughter, gaining control of his whole operation. This is a bit puzzling, since my last clear memory is of the Baron declaring that Snidely would never lay a hand on his estate, but I figure what the hell and take another shot.

Obligatory lover’s quarrel between Kidman & Jackman when she refuses to let the urchin go walkabout with grandpa or Jackman go on a cattle drive. Exit the Drover and another shot down the hatch.

On cue, enter Snidely, now the Smarmy Cattle Baron, who gleefully points out the missing glass tipped spear in a display that seems to have escaped the notice of everyone to this point. Shot for me, patented Gibbs headslap for Kidman. Hurt my hand on the television screen.

Urchin hauled off to a mission for half-breed Aboriginals on an island directly in the path of the Japanese air assault. Kidman follows & tries to keep him from being taken, Snidely oozes sympathy and offers to help out…in exchange for the deed to the ranch. He SO needs a good mustache. I draw one on the screen, then take a shot, singing “Along Came Jones” with more than my usual lack of attention to pitch. The dog flees.

The Japanese attack! Airplanes and bombs everywhere! Flames! Screams! The Arizona sinks! I take another shot!

Sorry…wrong continent, wrong overblown movie. But there were planes and bombs, I swear.

Kidman thinks the urchin is dead, Jackman returns & thinks that Kidman and the urchin are dead, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and while I take another shot, Jackman commandeers a sailboat to go to Mission Island & look for survivors, accompanied by his best friend and former brother-in-law, despite solemn assurances from the army that “no one could have survived”.

Of course, they find him and a bunch of other kids without a scratch on them. Shot. As the Japanese overrun the island to eliminate the threat of aboriginal orphans, Jackman swims the kids back out to the big sailboat, which the Japanese fail to notice thanks to the best friend’s clever ploy of running along the beach and getting his ass shot off for no other reason than that SOMEBODY had to die. Shot.

Big white sails hoisted & they sneak away from the Japanese. Kidman emerges from the wreckage and wanders about looking mournful after discovering that the Snidely’s wife, who was, of course, a nice girl (shot), died while working her shift as a radio operator (shot).

As the army begins to evacuate what’s left of the town and the sailboat cruises toward shore, the urchin produces a harmonica from an unknown orifice (think he got it from the dead accountant) and proceeds to play “Over The Rainbow”, which carries across the water to Kidman. Two shots. One of whiskey, one of insulin.

A joyous reunion is had by all, until the smarmy cattle baron staggers from the smoke, bent on revenge. He grabs a rifle from a passing soldier (evidently the Australian army is made up of pussies, because the guy just runs away) and draws a bead on the urchin.

Kidman screams! Jackman runs! I yell, “No! No! Shoot her! Shoot HER!” as I throw back another shot.

Jackman tackles the urchin just as Snidely fires and both crumple to the ground, along with Snidely, who has been neatly shish kabobbed by grandpa’s spear. Obligatory moment of tension during which the urchin appears to be dead, but isn’t. Shot.

Hugs and tears all around, they head back to the ranch and Kidman lets the urchin go walkabout with gramps (considering the number of times he‘s saved their asses, staying on his good side seems like a good idea). End credits roll to sappy song. I take a farewell shot and pass out. Wake up the next day & watch Quigley Down Under while waiting for the hangover to clear.

Final tally: 51 shots and 2.75 hours of my life that I’m never getting back. Actually, twice that, since I had to watch it again to script this drinking game, but I figure it’s for the greater good.

Remember: I’m a professional & most of these shots were simulated (otherwise I would have mercifully passed out before the kangaroo got shot).

Walking Away

2009-08-28T16:10:00.002-05:00

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Matthew 18:21-22

Always had some trouble with that one. I don’t have any trouble forgiving mistakes, but exactly how many times are you expected to let a ‘friend’ screw you over before drawing the line?

I did a lot of my growing up in the SCA (I was a pretty sheltered middle class kid, so I don’t really count anything up to age 18 as ‘growing up’), and one of the lessons that I learned there – repeatedly – was that there are people out there who will be your best buddy just as long as you have what they need/want.

Those needs vary: money, influence (my best friend & her husband were King & Queen of Ansteorra a few years back, & the butt-snorkeling dweebs came out of the woodwork), favors, or simply someone to feed their ego. The methodology rarely varied, though. As soon as you no longer had what they wanted, or simply refused to give it to them, they dropped you and moved on to the next mark. They’d usually come back, though, as soon as they thought you could be tapped again, acting as though nothing had ever happened.

The hardest ones to deal with, the ones that hurt the most (and still do) were the ones that turned away when I stopped being what they wanted me to be. I’ve never had any problem with being a follower (truth be told, I’m happier in a supporting role; I identify perfectly with Samwise Gamgee in LOTR), but as I matured, I stopped being a blind follower and found out the hard way that that’s all that some people want.

Trust is the key with me, and without trust, there can be no real friendship. I can deal with people that I can’t trust, as long as I know up front that the limitation is there. I can be polite, friendly, cordial, even, but the inner doors stay closed. They’re acquaintances, not friends.

It’s harder – a lot harder – when I give my trust and it’s betrayed. I’ll forgive a lot; I’m far from perfect myself, and my friends have forgiven me for some seriously boneheaded shit over the years. There comes a time, though, when you realize that someone is *not* your friend. Maybe they were once, or maybe the whole thing was an act…the pain doesn’t seem to be any different, and it’s a kind of pain that I have no tolerance for.

It’s at that point that I have to close the door and walk away in the interest of self preservation. It’s not a question of forgiving or not forgiving; it’s knowing that if I stay, I might as well just provide the K-Y, because if I get screwed again, it’s going to be my own damn fault.

I could stay, I guess. Keep the relationship limited and guarded, but I honestly don’t see the reason for it. Neither of us is going to get what we want from the other, so it’s a waste of time all the way around. It’s only gone that far a handful of times in my life, but each time, I’ve made the break complete and never gone back. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not, but it's how I deal with it, & so far, it's kept me sane.

I learned in the SCA what real friends were, as well, and those friends are still with me, even though I haven’t played in years (a lot of us have switched to WoW).

Real friends accept who you are. They’ll tell you when you screw up, and give you the chance to make it right, not bitch behind your back about how badly you screwed up. They let you screw up, and while they may rib you to the moon and back about it (I still hear about some of my livlier alcohol-induced escapades on occasion), they don’t use it to hurt or belittle you, or pull it out of cold storage every once in a while just to remind you that you screwed up and they were generous enough to forgive you. They listen when you tell them that *they* screwed up, and while they may not agree with you, they’ll respect you for being honest enough to tell them.

They don’t expect you to be perfect, and they don’t pretend to be, either. You can talk to them and not worry about them getting their knickers in a knot if what you say doesn’t come out in the most PC manner possible. You can talk with them, or just be quiet, and enjoy each other’s company either way. Those are the friends that you keep, the ones that you don't walk away from, and the ones that won't walk away from you.

Writing as a group activity (and why I can't seem to do it)

2009-08-25T14:58:00.005-05:00

Not talking about the Play-By-Posts (PbP's, also known as writer's crack) or collaborative writing projects. I generally find those to be mentally invigorating and fun as hell (and incredibly distracting from my solo projects, but I'm enjoying myself, so I don't give a damn).

I've tried joining a couple of writing forums, however, and I just don't seem to get it. We're supposed to be - what? - encouraging each other? Talking about our writing? Talking about writing in general?

I'm getting a lot out of Holly Lisle's 'How To Think Sideways' course, in terms of writing techniques, and I admire the hell out of the amount of her time that she gives to aspiring writers (yes, she sells her courses, but she puts out a LOT of good stuff for free, as well), but the forums? Meh.

Part of it is the simple fact that I don't like talking about my writing. I don't even like *writing* about my writing. I can discuss general writing concepts, but getting down to "I'm writing x novel with y & z characters, & a, b & c are happening right now"? Daily plot updates? That always seemed a bit self-indulgent to me, like searching for validation that what you're writing is good enough to continue.

Encouragement? Call me a heartless bitch, but I'm of the opinion that if you need other people to motivate you to write, you should probably be doing something else. You're not going to get pats on the head and chocolate chip cookies when you start sending manuscripts out to editors and agents. Tried submitting a couple of stories to Critters, but I'd get back such a mixed bag of results on the critiques that it was all but useless. I don't mind getting slammed, but when one person is praising it to heaven & another one is damning it to hell, I tend to shrug, consign the whole thing to the WTF drawer & go back to writing.

I think that most of it just lies in the fact that I'm independent, and more than a bit of a loner. In school, I'd get the assignment and be working on it while the teacher was explaining it to the rest of the class, wondering why the hell an explanation was needed. Yeah, I'm smart. Came with the blue eyes, brown hair & the damn hips that attract chocolate like a lodestone draws iron filings.

Being about half a mile ahead of my classmates meant that I generally wound up working alone & got used to doing it. I still prefer working alone. It's easier - and faster - to do things myself than to show someone else or wait for them. Arrogant? Probably, and definitely not a good characteristic in a supervisor (hate that part of my job), but it's the way I am.

I'm not a particularly social animal, either. Group bonding activities invariably leave me edging toward the door, and when some chick spills her entire, angst-ridden life story on her second post in the forum, then says, "Hey, you just live the next town over from me! We ought to meet for lunch!", the edge turns into an all-out sprint.

Generally, I have one or two beta readers that I'll run things by to iron out the WTF moments, but forums & writing groups currently have zero attraction for me. I suppose that as I get closer to having something that I'm planning on submitting for publication, I'm going to have to learn to engage in the social rituals of networking, but for now, I think I'll just revel in my hermitage.

Just a relaxing afternoon at the ER...

2009-08-22T17:52:00.004-05:00

I *was* planning on visiting the hospital today, but it was supposed to be my aunt, who has pneumonia.

Instead, as my mother was on her way to pick me up, she blacked out & ran off the road. Fortunately, she hit nothing but grass, and in true my-mom fashion, after a few minutes (during which NOBODY passing on the highway stopped to see if she was OK...bastards), decided to just drive the rest of the way to my house.

Once she got there, again in true my-mom fashion, THEN she fell apart.

She calls on my cell phone, crying so hard that it takes me three tries to simply make out that she is parked outside. I go flying out, determine that nothing appears to be obviously wrong with her (besides being utterly shaken up & understandably frightened, since nothing like that had ever happened to her before), switch her to the passenger seat & drive her to the local ER.

The words "possible stroke" get you immediate attention in places like that.

Once they got her in there, they discovered that her heart was racing along at 200+ beats per minute (60-100 is normal), which immediately generated the ER equivalent of a NASCAR pit crew around her. 10-lead EKG, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, IV saline...all that was missing was the guy with the air wrench and the new tires.

When "hold your breath and push like you're trying to have a baby" (stimulates the vagus nerve) didn't slow things down, they administered a dose of adenosine that did the trick.

The official diagnosis was supraventricular tachycardia, but as to what caused it...currently anyone's guess. She'd worked in the yard that morning, and had drunk almost no water; it was half a liter of IV fluids & another half of water orally before she started feeling *anything* in her bladder, so I'm guessing that dehydration played a part. EKG & bloodwork indicated that there had been no cardiac damage, and her electrolytes were normal.

She's been barred from driving until she gets cleared by her cardiologist, but in true my-mom fashion, she's already rationalizing that "it probably won't happen again"...so I gave her car keys to my little brother, who lives at home. Between the two of us, we can ride herd on her (I'm not above enlisting her friends to bully her into line, either).

The bifurcation of my thoughts at times like that is pretty normal for me. On the one hand, I can take in the clinical aspects of the situation, think dispassionately, hold rational conversations with the doctors and generally do what needs to be done in the way of phone calls. That part keeps the part of me that wants to grab the nearest lab coat by the lapels and scream "This is my MOTHER, goddamit, so you'd damn well better take care of her!" in a padded room. Had to let her out once during Dad's illness, when they were getting ready to send him home, even though he had deteriorated to the point that he couldn't walk, talk or control bodily functions. Once is usually enough.

The crew at this ER was a good one, though I wanted to cry when I realized that her doctor was wearing braces. Hello, Doogie? Are they admitting them to med school out of sixth grade now? Still, he knew his stuff and didn't talk down to her.

Got her home and resting, and promising to call the cardiologist on Monday and NOT to drive. My adrenaline surge has pretty well subsided, though I'd imagine I'll be getting periodic cold chills at the thought of her blacking out in the middle of a busy interstate.

I know she's getting older, I know that it's inevitable sooner or later, but I also know that I'm never going to be ready for it. Hell, I'm still not ready for Dad to die, and he's been gone for three years.

Best scientific publication EVER!

2009-08-18T10:40:00.004-05:00

Orac over at Respectful Insolence turned up this little gem:

When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection

This is what happens when data geeks get bored!

And yes, I've downloaded it to take to work.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-08-17T09:01:00.003-05:00

I took this picture in Boston a few years ago. Just happened to look over & did a double take. Definitely a new take on fusion cusine!

USS Constellation

2009-08-16T16:33:00.016-05:00

I got a chance to further indulge my fascination with the old sailing ships (and make my husband jealous) when I got sent to Baltimore for a work related conference last year (the job's a PITA, but it's given me some good travel opportunities).

The USS Constitution will always be my favorite, but the USS Constellation was still a treat.

The last all-sail warship built by the US Navy, & the last Civil War era vessel still afloat, she is berthed in Baltimore, Maryland (right outside my hotel window, as luck would have it!), and is the second of three naval ships to bear that name. The first served from 1797-1853, and the third, the aircraft carrier USS Constellation from 1960-2003.

The second Constellation was commissioned in 1855, and originally served to protect American interests in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Caribbean. During the Civil War, she participated in the blockade of Confederate ports and protected Union merchant ships. After the war, she served as a training vessel and served on several special missions, including delivering food to victims of famine in Ireland in 1880.

Her original wheel. She was brought to Baltimore in 1955 for restoration and preservation, but lack of funds complicated efforts, and she deteriorated considerably until a major renovation effort was launched in 1994, and she was re-opened to the public in 1999.

Like the Constitution, I found it almost impossible to capture the sheer scale of her in a single shot.

The gun deck.

Contents of the galley (possibly some of the original contents, from the look of it).

First mate's cabin. Amazing to think of spending weeks
at a time in such a small living space.

But still better than what the crew had to put up with.

The infirmary

A sick or wounded sailor might have trouble staying
in a hammock in rough seas; this cradle style hanging
bunk solved the problem.

They also had an extensive collection of the medical/dental/surgical
equipment that was used to take care of the crew at sea. I've got a bone saw
that looks almost exactly like the one above, btw...I guess there's no need to
change a design that works.

That darn cat!

2009-08-08T13:04:00.003-05:00

Fla. man blames cat paws for child porn downloads

JENSEN BEACH, Fla. – Florida investigators say a man accused of downloading child pornography is blaming his cat.

Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach is charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after detectives found more than 1,000 images on his home computer.

According to a sheriff's report Friday, Griffin told investigators that his cat jumped on the computer keyboard while he was downloading music. He said he had left the room and found "strange things" on his computer when he returned.

Griffin is being held on $250,000 bond in the Martin County jail. It is unclear if he has an attorney.

And here I thought hairballs were bad....

Caveat emptor, my ass...

2009-08-02T16:46:00.004-05:00

The gene pool is in desperate need of some bleach.

Unfortunately, it's probably too late for the moron who not only crimped the brake line from the front to the rear tires but also cut the line between the two rear tires trying to crimp it to keep the brake fluid from leaking out around the crappy rear brakes. Call me stupid, but isn't that the point at which you want to fix the damn brakes in the interest of safety?

No real way to prove that it was that way when we bought it (Kenny took it for an extended test drive and swears that it gave no hints of brake issues), but it's nothing short of criminal, IMHO, for anyone to have sold it in that condition without mentioning it. The guy Kenny got it from apparently bought it from a friend & had been driving it for a while...or he's lying through his teeth.

The hubby is taking it a lot more philosophically than me. I'd quite happily break the legs of whoever it was that did it, & if it took me a few legs to find the right one, I wouldn't really mind. The idea of him driving back from Muskogee with the brakes in the condition they were in goes way beyond pissing me off.

They went hiking where?

2009-08-01T20:13:00.003-05:00

Three American hikers arrested after crossing into Iran from Iraq by mistake.

With all the scenic destinations available in the world, you'd think that it would have crossed somebody's mind that Iraq might not be the best place to go hiking, the term "relatively free of violence" notwithstanding. I really hate that term. Relative compared to exactly what? Downtown Baghdad? New Orleans after Katrina? Hugo, Oklahoma?

And even assuming that "relatively" meant that they were as safe there as they would be on an average US street, could none of them read a damn map? Call me overcautious, but if I were going hiking in an area bordering a nation that is currently imprisoning and executing its own citizens who favor better relations with the West, I do believe I'd make damn good and sure to never come within a country mile of that border.

The state department needs to charge these freaking morons for the time it's going to take to get them released.

Looking for a legend

2009-07-29T08:56:00.003-05:00

The Earhart Project is putting together a 2010 expedition to search Nikumaroro Island (formerly known as Gardner Island) for physical remains that could provide DNA evidence that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were stranded and died there following their 1937 disappearance during their attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

The project has been ongoing for a number of years, and has amassed a fair amount of compelling (if circumstantial) evidence, including:

1. Reports of aircraft wreckage predating WW2 by colonists who first settled the island in 1938.

2. Artifacts salvaged by the colonists, including aircraft wreckage consistent with Earhart's Lockheed L-10 Electra

3. Remains of a woman's shoe consistent in size and style with shoes that Earhart wore.

4. The 1940 discovery of a partial human skeleton, a woman's shoe and a sextant. The remains were taken to Fiji, where a member of the medical school there proclaimed them to be those of a male, "a short, stocky, muscular European, or even a half-caste, or a person of mixed European descent". The bones were lost, but the physician's notes and measurements were preserved; a 1998 analysis by forensic anthropologists concluded that the remains were: (1) More likely female than male, (2) More likely white than Polynesian or other Pacific Islander, & (3) Most likely between 5´5˝ and 5´9˝ in height.

5. A notebook containing transcription of a broadcast heard by a 15 year old girl in St Petersburg, FL, on her father's short wave radio. A woman claiming to be Amelia Earhart was requesting help, attempting to provide coordinates & dealing with a male companion who seemed to be injured. The signal faded in and out, & was lost after about three hours. The girl and her family were never able to convince anyone that she had actually heard Earhart, but she kept the notebook. An analysis by TIGHAR concluded that it was possible that the Florida radio could have recieved transmissions from Gardner Island, and that the distortion that would have been likely was consistent with her description of the signal.

The TIGHAR website is a bit disorganized, and contains a lot of technical jargon, but it's definitely worth a look for anyone interested in the Earhart mystery.

Now I just need to figure out how to come up with the $50k that the group is charging sponsor team members to help fund the expedition.

WTF?

2009-07-28T21:03:00.001-05:00

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

There is a part of me that wants to believe that *nobody* can be this stupid.

And then there's the part of me that deals with the public.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-07-20T08:07:00.003-05:00

Rubber Ducky Dragons by Hbruton over at deviantArt brought a smile to my face this morning; visit her page & check out some other work by this talented individual!

Husband for sale...

2009-07-18T18:45:00.003-05:00

So, the big weekend project is fixing the brakes (front and rear) on the truck that we got to replace the one that wrecked in June.

Front end is up on jacks, rear is on ramps. He gets the front set replaced, tires back on & asks if I can help switch the jacks and ramps so he can take care of the rear set.

OK...no problem.

I get on the bigass hydraulic jack that I'm pretty sure will lift a corner of the house and hoist the front off the jacks, & he slides them out.

"OK, now lower it slow."

Uh-huh. Yeah. 3/4 ton Dodge Ram. "You've got to be kidding me.”

“No, just turn the handle counterclockwise until it releases and let it down easy.”

Okie dokie.

I gingerly turn the handle counterclockwise until I feel resistance. Setting my teeth, I very carefully twist it a little bit further…

You guessed it. The damn thing drops like a rock.

Then the ¾ ton Dodge diesel begins to roll backward down our driveway without anything even remotely resembling brakes.

I launch myself from the front of the driveway, going airborne over my husband; just about the moment it occurred to me that even if I made it into the cab, there are no brakes, the truck comes to a stop in a grinding, screeching wail of metal.

I couldn’t see a damn thing behind it. Oh, God, don’t let it have squashed a Yugo.

My husband speaks up. “It’s all right. That’s why I left the ramps in place.”

The ramps. When the front wheels dropped, the rear wheels rolled off the ramps & back until the front wheels collided with them. That was what all the noise was & why the truck stopped.

A moment – a long moment – of silence while I tried to deal with the half gallon of adrenaline that had just been deposited in my bloodstream

Me: (Sounding slightly strangled.) “You mean…you knew it was going to do that?”

Him: “Well, I knew it might.”

Me: “And you didn’t TELL me?”

Him: “I thought it would be obvious.”

It went downhill from there.

It was some consolation to me that when it started rolling, the doofus tried to stop it by grabbing the front wheel and got his fingers mildly squashed.

And I actually did figure out how to let the jack down easy.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-07-13T07:04:00.002-05:00

A blast from the past this morning: the one & only Julie Brown & The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun.

Roasting In Oklahoma

2009-07-11T12:33:00.003-05:00

After a brief respite last week, summer decided to stage a comeback in the Sooner State. For most of the year, the weather here is unpredictable; you can get snow in April, tornadoes in December & monsoons in June. One thing you can pretty much count on every year, though, is hotter than hell in July and August. I can count on one hand the number of summers I remember when the thermometer didn't make it past 100 degrees for at least a few days.

Triple digits started in June this year; they'll leave for a few days & come back. And it's not just the heat. With man-made lakes all over the state (200, more than any other state, with 2,000 miles of shoreline & 1 million surface acres of water), the humidity is outlandish.

Too hot to do anything but play WoW & write. I go to sleep roasting & wake up at 3am groping for the blankets when my poor abused AC finally catches up. Looks like we'll catch a break next weekend, but until then, I'm staying the hell inside & look at my photos of Yellowstone in June to try to cool off!

The last one is Old Faithful erupting in a blizzard.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-07-06T05:52:00.000-05:00

What can I say? I love the Muppets ;-)

Fort Worth Zoo, Part 2

2009-06-20T08:24:00.006-05:00

More pics from the Ft Worth Zoo, this time from the lowland gorilla exhibit.

The silverback was the only one of the group that was feeling photogenic, but he more than made up for it; I caught the last shot as I was leaving in the afternoon, & he looked like I felt!

Check out Camera Critters for more great animal pictures!

Watery Wednesday

2009-06-16T21:07:00.005-05:00

Soakin' up some rays at the Ft Worth Zoo...
Check out the link above to see more watery pics from around the world!

Monday Morning Smile

2009-06-15T06:03:00.002-05:00

Note: Found this on the internet a while back. Probably wouldn't be smiling if it had happened to me...not for a few years, anyway!

I was due for an appointment with the gynecologist later in the week.

Early one morning, I received a call from the doctor's office to tell me that I had been rescheduled for that morning at 9:30 am.

I had only just packed everyone off to work and school, and it was already around 8:45am. The trip to his office took about 35 minutes, so I didn't have any time to spare.

As most women do, I like to take a little extra effort over hygiene when making such visits, but this time I wasn't going to be able to make the full effort.

So, I rushed upstairs, threw off my pajamas, wet the washcloth that was sitting next to the sink, and gave myself a quick wash in that area to make sure I was at least presentable. I threw the washcloth in the clothes basket, donned some clothes, hopped in the car and raced to my
appointment.

I was in the waiting room for only a few minutes when I was called in. Knowing the procedure, as I'm sure you do, I hopped up on the table, looked over at the other side of the room and pretended that I was in Paris or some other place a million miles away. I was a little surprised when the doctor said, "My, we have made an extra effort this morning, haven't we?" I didn't respond.

After the appointment, I heaved a sigh of relief and went home. The rest of the day was normal ... Some shopping, cleaning, cooking.

After school when my 6 year old daughter was playing, she called out from the bathroom, "Mommy, where's my washcloth?"

I told her to get another one from the cupboard.

She replied, "No, I need the one that was here by the sink, it had all my glitter and sparkles saved inside it."

Never going back to that doctor. Ever.

Fort Worth Zoo, Part 1

2009-06-13T07:53:00.004-05:00

My most recent business conference took me within range of the Fort Worth Zoo. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest zoo in Texas. Not one to waste an opportunity, I took an afternoon off of the conference & headed off with camera in hand, so the next few weeks will feature a mini-tour.

First up: flamingos!

The keepers were cleaning out the pool when I was there, which explains the big concrete shell.

The characteristic color of flamingoes is the result of beta carotene from shrimp and algae in their diet. Without this, their plumage fades toward white. Zoos frequently provide an artificial supplement in the diet to maintain color. Bright plumage is a sign of a well-fed flamingo, which makes them a more attractive prospect as a mate.

The reason for the one-legged sleeping stance is not fully known, but they all seem to have mastered the technique. It has been suggested that they have the ability to let only half of their body go to sleep, switching legs when one side is rested.

The mud piles are flamingo nests. I didn't see any eggs, but the ruffled feathers suggested that territory was being staked out.

For more animal pictures from around the world, visit Camera Critters!

WTF???

2009-06-12T23:13:00.003-05:00

Don't get me wrong: I am fascinated by great white sharks (I'd love to see one from within a shark cage), & think they should be protected.

But...starting an awareness campaign in Oklahoma City??

Check your maps, dude. You can't get much farther from the ocean. Not to mention the fact that the posters I've seen feature a pic of Jessica Alba next to one of a great white (evidently, some have been placed illegally, prompting a police investigation for vandalism & a disclaimer from Alba.). Not exactly what I'd call a clear message. Save the great white or Jessica Alba in Jaws V??

The average motorist cruising towards home on I-35 has about as much chance of making the desired connection on seeing these posters as they would of winning the lottery.

There's a thin line between inspiration and stupidity.

Watery Wednesday

2009-06-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

Some impressively-sized koi at the Ft Worth Zoo

Click on the link above to join in the Watery Wednesday fun!

Three Years

2009-06-09T06:56:00.003-05:00

When does the grieving process stop...or does it ever? After three years, I still find myself going a little bit crazy as this day approaches. Nothing like the full blown meltdown that I had three months after he died, but the grief feels as fresh now as it did then, and for a little while, I once again hate the world, and anyone in it who has never had to watch a parent or child die and tried to comfort the other survivors while they were coming apart inside, unseen.

It will pass...and it will come again...and maybe the worst of the emotion will dull with more time.

But I'll always love you, Daddy...and I'll always miss you.

Monday Morning Smile

2009-06-08T06:34:00.003-05:00

Gonna need this one this week, I think.

Messing With People 101:

Today's Flower

2009-06-07T12:44:00.003-05:00

This week's offering is another survivor of my yard, the Sterling Silver rose. When freshly opened, the petals are a very delicate shade of lavender.

Click on the link above to see beautiful flowers from around the world!

David Eddings, 1931-2009

2009-06-06T17:46:00.004-05:00

David Eddings died on June 2 of this year, at the age of 78. I was astonished, when I looked it up a few years back, at how old he was. It's damn near impossible to find a photograph of the man, besides various incarnations of the one above.

He was to my generation what JK Rowlings has been to this one: he got kids reading. His books were accessible to young adults, but lost none of their charm when re-read during adulthood. For kids like me, who were already voracious readers, he drew us into the world of epic fantasy.

His comment? "I am here to teach a generation or two how to read. After they've finished with me and I don't challenge them any more, they can move on to somebody important like Homer or Milton."

I never did get to Homer or Milton, but Eddings and Anne McCaffrey got me through adolescence, and it was Eddings, more than any other author, who honed my own vague but persistent urges to write into something sharper and more imperative, demanding an outlet and picking a direction.

His strength was in his characters: Garion, C'nedra, Belgarath, Polgara, Silk and the others came to life under his pen (he reportedly wrote everything in longhand), and I know them all so well that they feel like old friends. The books had inconsistencies in plot over time (one gets the feeling that he never expected to go beyond The Belgariad), but the characters remained vivid, true and always entertaining.

I still re-read the Belgariad/Malloreon & Elenium/Tamuli series every year or so (I've read the covers off of more than one copy). I was less fond of his later works; The Redemption of Althalus was a decent stand-alone novel, but The Dreamers series never did capture my attention.

I can't complain, though. He's left me with 18 books that I can dive into at will whenever I feel the need for a bit of 'comfort reading', and he's given me my all time favorite quote regarding his craft:

"When writing is going well, it's like reaching up and pulling down fire from heaven. It's better than any dope you can buy. When it's not going well, it's a lot like giving birth to a baby elephant."

As someone who's been at both extremes & everywhere in between, it's a sentiment that I can echo heartily.

Thanks for everything, Dave, & rest in peace with Leigh.

Sitting back and enjoying the show...

2009-06-01T14:00:00.005-05:00

I could offer commentary, but Orac's already done all the work in a superb slicing and dicing of the queen of pseudoscience, Oprah Winfrey (Suzanne Sommers & Jenny McCarthy get tossed in the grinder, too).

The ingenuousness of the woman's claims that she does not endorse the views of the people who appear on her show is appalling in its utter abdication of responsibility in the name of ratings.

Poor Orac...I'm willing to bet that his eyes were bleeding while he was typing...

ETA: And this little gem from The Onion is priceless...and amazingly on target.

Monday morning smile

2009-06-01T07:07:00.002-05:00

One pod of not-too-serious orcas, one VERY desperate penguin and one rubber raft of onlookers makes for one very memorable moment.

Enjoy!

Random Thoughts

Monday Morning Smile

WTF?

VORTEX 2 should be pleased

Oh, the irony...

30 years ago

Springtime in Oklahoma

Monday Morning Smile

A really, really good day...

World's Coolest Dude

Monday Morning Smile

Leningrad Cowboys

Major Tom Revived

Monday Morning Smile

Frosted World

Don't try this at home. No...really. Don't.

Monday Morning Smile

Death by Caffeine

Frozen in time

Random lunacy from The Onion

Book Review: Your Heart Belongs To Me

Pausing for a geek moment...

New Year, New Post

Monday Morning Smile

Loss, grief and the holidays

You Can Find Anything On YouTube...

A white Christmas at last

A Canine Christmas

How I Spent My Winter Vacation: Part 2

Monday Morning Smile

How I spent my winter vacation: Part 1

Don't call me ma'am?

Dragon Age: Preliminary Review

Monday Morning Smile

*sigh*

Monday Morning Smile

And done!

I write alone

NaGraWriMo???

Monday Morning Smile

Just for fun

Looking Things Over

One month of plotting?

If Stephanie Meyer can do it....

Monday Morning Smile

Daring to dream

Time for a change?

Reproductive Rights?

The little things in life

Ain't no such thing as a hobby horse

Redirecting

Monday Morning Smile

Monday Morning Smile

Dragonbreath Chili

Why?

Monday Morning Smile

*sigh*

Winging it in the kitchen

The Reading List

Things you *really* don't want to see...

Mythbusters take on H1N1!

Monday Morning Smile

Suha Derbent

WTF??

Arrogant ignorance

Ninja Gerbils Ahoy!

Paradise Found

WTF Whoopi??

Monday Morning Smile

Hypocrisy, anyone?

Andrew Vachss

Starting the Christmas list...

Australia: The Drinking Game

Walking Away

Writing as a group activity (and why I can't seem to do it)

Just a relaxing afternoon at the ER...

Best scientific publication EVER!

Monday Morning Smile

USS Constellation

That darn cat!

sigh

sigh

Things you really don't want to see...

They went hiking where?