Rants

Categories Politics, Rants

I just got shamed into this.

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I try to avoid politics on here other than the occasional link and eye roll.  I was raised that politics and all other attached thoughts and functions are best kept private.  If you wish to discuss them with someone its a private conversation, best kept between you and the other person.  Over the years I’ve added to that my opinion of most major sports, folks just get to worked up over it, and its just not worth it.  Other than the reposting of information about the Memphis Animal Shelter, and gripes about the TSA, I’ve done pretty well at that.

So when I saw the following pieces of news I cringed inside.  Made a note about which companies I was now going to be avoiding as much as I possibly could.  And attempted to go on my way.

Till this morning, when I read a new post by Heather over at Raised by Wolves.  And I sat here with tears running down my face.

So here goes my attempt at it.

Subway has decided that Michael Vick is their Sportsman of the Year.  Nike has signed him on as a spokesperson.  When I mentioned both to my husband (who watches pro football avidly) he, rather frustratedly, exclaimed “but he didn’t even have that good of a year!!” But it doesn’t matter, the companies in question know that the media follows Vick around, because he’s guarenteed a crowd everywhere he goes, a loud and obnoxious crowd, but a crowd, which means they’ll get all kinds of free publicity.

I know alot of folks say “he served his time, let him be” or “he apologized, what more do you want” and “but everyone deserves a 2nd chance!” but really?  He never served a day for animal cruelty.  The authorities decided to work out a plea deal, they dropped all the charges pertaining to animal cruelty, and he served time for rackateering.  They had enough evidence they most likely wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing a jury, and he’s certinally admited since that he was involved.  He’s apologized to his fans for “being involved” but there’s been no apology to the dogs who’s lives he took, or the others who survived but are scarred for life.  I’ve not seen (and neither have others who’ve watched more closely than I) one comment or step that actually seems to show remorse for what he did.  He’s sorry he got caught, but well, you know, that was how he was raised.  That makes it all better, right?

When I found out that Vick had been whining because now his kids wouldn’t get to grow up with a dog all I could think of was “good, now he won’t get to show them how fighting is done, at least at home,” and the comment that a dog might help with his rehabilitation??  Yah, I saw red.  And then one of my co-workers made a happy comment about how the president had called up the Eagles and during the conversation congratulated them for giving Vick a 2nd chance.  They don’t mention his name around me any more.

Back in the aftermath of the president’s call to the Eagles Fugly Horse put up this post.  Go read, and make sure to read the comments, about 1/4 of the way down the page a commenter makes a suggestion involving a rain barrell, and a geeked up meth-head.  I rather liked the idea.

Categories Dog, Politics, Rants

If you know someone in TN

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Or even if you don’t but what I’m about to show you is something you find apalling, please feel free to join in the letter writing campaign mentioned.

There’s this blog I’ve been reading off and on for a while, to the point where I should be adding it to my blogroll (something I’ll be doing as soon as I’m done this post).  I can’t read it too often, cause it tugs the heartstrings, but I make myself go read as often as I can.

Over at YesBiscuit Shirley spends alot of her time documenting shelter dogs and cats in need of help.  She would prefer to show you pictures of the happy healthy dogs awaiting adoption at various places, but has often found herself documenting their abuses instead.  Lately its been one of those times.

Two years ago the Memphis Animal Shelter was raided by the county sheriff for animal abuse.  Animals were being starved and otherwise mistreated.  A new director was then appointed, and webcams placed at strategic places around the building so the public could see how much better things were.

Unfortunetly things aren’t much better.  As far as the webcam watchers can tell the animals aren’t being starved, or beaten any more, at least where a camera can catch them, but they are being miss-handled, badly, and the webcams are proving just how many dogs and cats are NOT shown to the public before they’re killed.  Over 70% of the animals that cross the threshold of MAS are killed.  Many of them dragged to the kill room on their stomachs by a choke pole because they’re to terrified to walk.  There was a case, not long ago, where a person surrendered a momma dog and her puppies.  Barely 3 days after surrender the pups were placed into a trash can and wheeled to the kill room.  When Shirley asked for information on WHY, when puppies are generally the most adoptable dog ever, she was informed that SOME of the puppies had a respitory infection.  SOME, and no obvious attempts to see if they could be gotten better.  Just kill’em.

Animals brought in by Animal Control Officers as strays are held in an area not open to the public.  These animals are held for 3 days as strays, and then, unless they’re lucky enough to be choosen to be made availible for adoption, they are killed.  Webcam watchers have seen dogs brought in by ACOs wearing collars, and then 3 days later, those same dogs, wearing those same collars, are brought back to the kill room.  So essentially, if your dog escapes in the Memphis area, and is caught by an ACO, if a shelter employee is unable to ID your dog from your description or photo, you are unable to check the stray area yourself to see if your dog is there.  And so after 3 days your dog is killed.  Gotta wonder how many people in the Memphis area are missing their pets because MAS was “unable” to ID the animal and killed it.

Shirley started a Chip-In, to raise funds for rescuers who wanted to rescue some of the animals they were seeing on the webcams.  This week she finally got a response to all her letters to the new director of MAS.  The Memphis City Attorney sent her a letter threatening her with legal action, with a law in her home state of SC that states its illeagel to raise funds FOR a charity or business without their permission.  Seeing as how she was raising funds for the removal of animals FROM MAS this law doesn’t apply.

Feel free join in the letter campaign to let them know what the rest of the country thinks of them, but keep it  polite, polite goes alot farther than ranting.

H/T to Raised by Wolves, she says it much better than I do, so go read.

Categories Rants

A couple of suggestions to contractors everywhere

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1: if I ask you for an itemized quote don’t send me a one line contract with a single dollar figure list and a spot to sign here. Especially when I know you sent my insurance guy an actual itemized quote.

2: if you say you’re going to show up this afternoon to look things over and give us a quote, and for some reason are unable to make it, call me and let me know. I’m a generally understanding person, honest. Not bothering to call the next day either to apologize and reschecdule doesn’t help either.

On the otherhand if anyone ever needs chimney work done in the general Syracuse area I can tell you tw companies NOT to pick!

Categories Guns, Rants

How to use a scope….hints, tips, suggestions anyone?

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Ok, so this past weekend while the weather was nice I took the opportunity to haul out the air rifle.  I won’t be posting a picture of my target, lets just say it was pretty bad, and not because I was a good shot.  Part of the problem was the puppy who was NOT happy about being stuck inside while I was out was barking at odd moments making me twitch (not yet 5 months old and he sounds like a german shepherd, can’t wait to hear him as an adult!), but my hands weren’t happy either (g*d d*$%ed weather) which was making the loading process interesting, and I’m pretty sure I was shakier than usual: something has to explain the issues I was having…..  I took 5 shots with the built in fiberoptic sights, first one was less than an inch from the bullseye, not a bad start right?  Yah, except every shot from there on out went further and further away…..sigh.

So I gave up on the fiberoptics and attached the scope to play around with for a bit.  Please note this is NOT a high end scope by any means.  It came with the air rifle and the whole kit cost us just over a $100.  Took another 5 shots before I gave up reloading (gonna have to spend some time doing this when the husband’s home so he can reload for me).  I’m clearly lost when it comes to scopes.  Pretty sure I’m not getting the right angle to look through the thing at first of all because I keep getting the visible circle at odd angles instead of straight ahead, and the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it aren’t the most helpful.

So….anyone reading this have suggestions as to what I might be doing wrong??

Categories Nothing Much, Rants

Rain

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Syracuse is barely .56 of an inch away from breaking the record for the wettest April.  Now I’m far enough out of Syracuse I cant’ say for sure that those figures are an accurate represenatation of what fell at my house this month, but when you add in the fact that my property is very wet to begin with due to its location it might as well be.  AND we’ve got more “strong to severe” thunderstorms moving through later today.

Really, what is it about trying to break records this year?  First snow, now rain…..farmers can’t plant crops because the fields are so soaked, folks with sheep haven’t been able to shear because the sheep haven’t been able to dry out AND temps are due to hit upper 70’s today…..my yard NEEDS mowing, but I sink past my ankles in mud when I walk on it so I can’t.  Arg!!

Categories Cats, Dog, Links, Rants

A warning for all pet owners to please pass along

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I saw this in an article a couple days ago, made sure it wasn’t a med I was using, and went on with my day. I completely missed how the parent company has chosen to handle this.

Short form: the flea and tick medication named Promeris has been determined to cause severe heath issues in a signifigant percentage of cats and dogs. If you are using this medication you should stop and contact your vet for an alternative. Pfizer however has decided to NOT recall the medication already on the market. Instead they’ve simply halted production. They estimate there is enough already on the market to last through September, or basically the entire flea and tick season.

See here for more information including basic information on the symptoms of the afor mentioned health problems.

Thanks to K9 Solutions blog for the link.

Categories Rants

Air traffic controllers and the night shift.

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There’s been a great big hubbub lately about air traffic controllers falling asleep, or otherwise not able to pay attention, while on the job.  I suspected almost immediately what the problem was, and I found confirmation today here.   They work swing shifts.  That means that on a set schedule of days or weeks (and it looks like days here which is the worst) they rotate between a day shift and a night shift.

Look, its bad enough when this is done in an industry where lives aren’t on the line, but there are an awful lot of industries, and air traffic controller just topped my list, where this sort of schedule is done regularly.  Apparently in this case the union is trying to keep it because it allows a 3 day weekend afterwards.  Whoop-de-doo.  So I risk fall asleep on my last shift of the week, potentially allowing hundreds of people to die in a plane crash, just so I can have a 3 day weekend.  Urm, NO.

Very simple solution, eliminate swing shifts.  Period.  Oh, yes make sure theres always more than one person working, just in case, but eliminate swing shifts, or at least make the swing a matter of months rather than days or weeks.  People’s bodies can’t adapt properly to a new shift in a matter of a few hrs or even a few days.  Most people take several days to several weeks to switch over completely.  But once they’re switched they’ll function better.  Better yet, make the night shifts a permanent thing.  There are people who prefer the night shift, or some variation there of, whether a late 2nd shift, or a very early 1st shift, or a true 3rd shift.  Doesn’t matter, thats the shift they prefer.  Would allowing them to take a nap while on lunch be ok too?  Sure, but if you make sure people work the shift full time they’ll be adapted enough that the NEED for naps won’t be as great.  Plus if you work the schedule right you could still have the occasional 3 day weekend. 

Presto, problem solved.  If I can see it, why can’t they??

Categories Apollo, Cats, Dog, Rants

Don’t mess with my pets’ health.

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Ok, this is going to be a long winded rant as I get something off my chest that has been building for a couple weeks now.  I’m going to touch on (but not get into) a controversial topic in pet health, I’ll get into detail later, because its not the real cause of my upset.  For those of you who don’t want to read further, lets just say that my (now) former vet should be very happy I’m not the sueing type!

For those of you who are willing to read further, its a long story…..

Back on 2/28 we took our new puppy into our vets office for his new puppy checkup.  We knew going in that we were probly not going to meet a happy vet as we have chosen a non-standard vaccination schedule for our dog.  Sure enough the vet walked into the office prepared to administer vaccines (which even under the standard schedule shouldn’t have been the case at 10weeks of age), and then had a fit (I’m a vet, you’re not, I went to school…..), insisted we sign a waiver that we knew we were going against her wishes, then tried to tell us that the blood work we wanted (a vaccine titer, it tests for antibodies for the diseases vaccinated against) wouldn’t tell us anything helpfull, that she didn’t want to do one, and that she had no idea where to send it out to have it tested (which frankly OUGHT to be complete BS, any lab that can test for Lime disease can do a vaccine titer, never mind we’re all of an hour from Cornell).  We stood our ground, and insisted that we would have a vaccine titer done between 11 & 12 weeks of age.  She finally agreed.

Fast forward a week and a half, I bring Apollo in to have blood drawn for his titer, and they inform me that its going to cost $212 to have done.  I took a deep breath and agreed to have it done at that price.  I’d neglected to do my research to find out what the going rate was, and since at that point the puppy wasn’t travelling well at ALL I decided it wasn’t worth hauling him home to do so.

I fixed that lack of information as soon as I got home.  Online research showed that Cornell charges less than $40 for the titer in question.  Calls to several other vets offices resulted in an average rate between $50 to $100 depending on the lab used and their base rate for a vet tech’s time.  I was seriously peeved at that point and made the decision that once his titer results came back I would move all 3 animals to a vet closer to where we live now (the former vet was closer to where we were living).  And I did.

Apollo’s first checkup went fine.  The vet questioned my choice of vaccination schedule, but after determining that I was sure that was what I wanted, and that I knew WHY I wanted it, she agreed that they would work with me to manage what I wanted.  They charge $63 for the titer in question.

The first appointment for Trouble and Janie weren’t quite as smooth, or rather Janie’s wasn’t.  Trouble has always been healthy as a horse inspite of being a pudgy kitty, and so her portion of the visit was fine.  However when we got to Janie we discovered that not only was there no record of what medication the former vet had chosen to treat her thyroid with, they hadn’t recorded her thyroid levels in the records either.  Thankfully I knew the numbers that the vet had told me, and I had brought her pill bottle with me to the appointment.  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I wasn’t going to have to deal with that vet any further.

The new vet suggested a different medication for Janie’s thyroid, one thats in a chewable flavored tablet that might be easier for us to get down her (and it is!), took another blood sample from her to make sure that her thyroid had settled properly, and we went home.

The next day (!) the new vet called me with the results of the bloodwork.  Her thyroid had finally settled at normal, but her kidney and liver numbers were still high, better, but high.  News that I greeted with dead silence.  The previous vet had never said ANYTHING about her kidney and liver numbers being off.  AT ALL, but apparently they had put it in her medical records (but they couldn’t be bothered to record her thyroid levels???).  I said as much to the new vet, who promptly had her own moment of silence.  She explained then that high kidney and liver values weren’t unusual when the thyroid had been off for as long as Janie’s had been, and that although they weren’t back down to where they should have been they WERE dropping.  She wanted to test again in another 6 weeks to check on them, but at the moment Janie didn’t seem to be suffereing from any negetive affects from them so she was willing to leave her be.  I agreed and went on with my week.

Unfortunetly a week and a half ago that changed.  My husband called me at work to inform me that Janie was puking up everything, AND had diahrea that looked like flem.  I told him to call the vet, and I took her in that afternoon.   Two Xrays, and more bloodwork later (some of it very expensive bloodwork), and we have a diagnosis of pancreatitus.  Thankfully it seems to be responding to medication, and there’s a very good chance that has her liver and kidney numbers return to normal it will become less and less of an issue.  Sigh.  Poor kitty!! She is NOT happy with the number of pills she has to take, and I don’t blame her.  I’m just peeved.  Though I’m liking the new vet more and more!

Categories Nothing Much, Rants

Ok, everyone using WordPress blog……

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….. Who just changed your blog format so that each of the last five or so posts is an individual block on the main screen (after a picture I have to swipe to get rid of):

Why???? Can I please vote no? Change it back, please? I guess it looks cool, but I find it frusrating to read, and outright difficult to do so on my iPad. I already had to give up on reading another blog after it chnged over to that format cause it annoyed me that much, but all the sudden today five more of you switched over too and I don’t want to stop reading all of you!

Categories Nothing Much, Rants

The downside of burning wood for heat…..(otherwise known as f*&!!$%@ing insurance co’s!!!!)

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Now first I have to state that the upsides of heating the house with wood outweigh the about to be mentioned downside enough that we will continue to heat with wood.

The major downside?  Chimney fires.  Yup.  Fun.  The same Monday we had to clean 21 inches of snow out of the driveway we had a chimney fire.  It was at least partially our fault, we were perhaps not as OCD about keeping the chimney clean as we should have been (I was only vaguely aware that you have to clean the chimney multiple times through out the season, guess I shoulda followed up on that huh?).  But on the evidence presented to us when they opened up the chimney it wasn’t completely our fault, infact the stainless steel pipe shows signs of having had previous fires in it.  Basically it was badly rusted, which stainless doesn’t do till its been heated too hot, which means it had a fire, possibly several, in it previously and was never taken care of.

The good news is that I was paying attention to my surroundings and so there is NO damage to the house itself.  The metal chimney pipe has to be replaced, but the house itself isn’t even crispy. 

You know how in the news people will say they didn’t know the chimney was on fire till they smelled smoke?  Yah…..that smoke is the HOUSE burning.  Long before it gets to THAT point it makes a horrid rushing sound (freight trains anyone?) combined with a LOUD cracking/popping/snapping sound OVER YOUR HEAD in the chimney. 

So on hearing that noise a quick check outside showed me the chimney cap glowing red hot and showering enough sparks to make a sparkler proud.  Went back inside, put OUT the fire in the wood stove, closed damper and door, called 911, and evacuated both cats, puppy and myself to the unattached carport (not nearly far enough should there have been a major fire, but about as far as I could manage the 3 animals by myself in temps of low teens, we’re going to have to figure out a better method for future problems).  At that point I called my husband, got his voicemail (expected, he can’t answer the phone at work) and left a message stating “the chimney’s on fire I need you home” and hung up.  (Poor guy promptly panicked, by the time he was trying to call me back the fire trucks were on scene and I couldn’t hear the phone, he made the 1/2hr drive home in 20 minutes.)

The fire department was delightfully quick in arriving, not more than a couple minutes after I got everyone outside, I was impressed, but by the time they got there the fact that I had put out the main fire was already showing as the chimney cap was no longer glowing and there were hardly any sparks, though the firemen did confirm the presence of embers in the chimney elbow.

We contact two different chimney companies the next day to come out and give us quotes, and they were both out in less than 24hrs to do so.  We contacted the insurance company at the same time we called the chimney guys….it took them over a week to get their inspector out, another 4 days to tell us what they were going to cover, and we’re STILL waiting for the check.

In the mean time we’ve fired up the main furnace to keep the house warm and I’m not happy about it, infact I’m decidedly tempted to send the insurance the bill for the fuel we’re using since the delay has been their fault.  Before the fire (we checked the Sunday before) we’d used barely 1/4 tank of fuel this winter.  I’m not looking forward to checking it again after this is over.

On a related note I have to recommend the First Alert Tundra Fire extinguisher to everyone.  (note, it was cheaper at my local grocery store than listed on Amazon, and I’m not getting paid in anyway for this).  They’re small enough to keep in a cabinet anywhere, powerfull enough to put out a nicely burning wood fire, work on wood, grease, and electrical fires, and are small enough for small hands to use comfortably.  I WILL be buying several more to keep around the house!  We have a couple larger “standard” fire extinguishers around the house, but this was more convenient, and MUCH easier to use than the larger canisters.