New Car

I got a new car yesterday. It's really nice and only had 4 miles on it when I started driving it yesterday. It's a Mazda6 5-door with a V6 engine. The car is red with a black leather interior, and it has a sunroof. Pictures coming soon.

If it's not broken

Whatever happened to the old saying "If it's not broken, don't fix it"? Sometimes I really wonder why men feel the need to keep "improving" stuff that works just fine. Sure, once in a while things are made more efficient, but most of the time it's just another headache to deal with, another step to get things done.

Take, for example, the garage door opener to our house. Keep in mind that we are only planning on living in our house for another 8 months or so until we upgrade to something larger, and we have known this for quite a while. Last summer Chuck wanted to upgrade our garage door opener to the idrive (an opener without chains or something like that). It was going to cost around $250. Our current garage door opener works just fine. Not only would it have cost us some money out of pocket, but then there's the time involved tearing out the old system, installing the new system, figuring out how it works, reprogramming all the garage door openers, and there are no guarantees the thing would even work-Chuck's parents bought the same system for their garage and it wouldn't work, then they bought a replacement and that one stopped working after a month or so. (I convinced him not to buy the idrive until our next house).

Second example: I wanted to play my own music while cleaning the house today instead of listening to the radio. Normally to do this I would have to put my cd into the DVD player and voila...music. The second option was to go through the tivo menu, select Chuck's server, choose the CD, and off I go. For his birthday, Chuck bought a Mac mini to plug into our TV, so we have more storage space for recording shows, music, etc (again, something that really isn't necessary or even all that more efficient). He plugged it in last night, disconnected some things, and now the TV's all messed up-I can't figure out how to play a simple CD on our system, let alone try to play video games during the day. So now I have to listen to the crappy music on the radio.

I don't think I'll ever understand men and their gadgets.

Medical Links

Trojan Chicken - Shows how rapidly microbes can pass between people.

Peep surgery - People with too much time on their hands.

The ants go marching....

I hate ants. I don't know how, but they've found a way into an obscure corner of the kitchen floor. There are no windows or doors they're coming in from, but they seem to like it under the baseboard at the edge of the carpet. We keep the kitchen clean, so there's not much to attract them in that area. Hmm...maybe it's time to invest in a little bug repellent. Grr!

April showers.....

I really didn't want to get up this morning. Working 5pm-1am is nice, but after a while all you want to do is sleep all day so you're up all night. It doesn't help that I was having really good dreams and could hear the rain coming down when I awoke.

Springtime

Spring is my favorite time of year, generally speaking, but there are some things I could really live without that happen in the spring.

The first of these is the mud. Although we have plenty of grass in our back yard, for some reason the dogs always manage to find the muddiest part, get filthy, and bring it all inside for me to clean up. The door to our backyard is a sliding glass door that connects to the kitchen, and so this time of year the kitchen is always very muddy (mental note: next house, the door to the backyard connects to a mud room first).

The second of these is nesting birds. The birds in our neighborhood think that the perfect place to nest is in our bathroom vent. Generally speaking, they're right-it's quiet, safe from predators and rain, and even has a flap to serve as a door. But Chuck and I really don't like it-the birds go to the bathroom in the vent, get bird poop on the side of the house, and chirp when the vent fan turns on. Then comes the problem of removing the nest after they leave. And no matter what we do-put screen on the vent, put a plastic one-way valve with plastic netting over the vent, etc, the birds alway get into it to make their nest.

The third of these is baby bunnies. Over the years I have seen numerous baby bunnies mauled by animals, and regardless of the extent of the wounds, they almost always inevitably end up dying. Wild bunnies do not do well, even if they get the best medical treatment available.

The rabbits and bunnies in our yard have not realized the backyard is a death trap and that my dogs are faster than they look. This morning I looked out the window and behold..there's a juvenile rabbit in Oscar's mouth. I ran outside to assess the damage, and the poor bunny had a severe bite wound to the abdomen, degloving injury to its side, was in shock, but unfortunately still very much alive. As a vet, I always feel there should be something I should be able to do in these situations, but in this rabbit's case, euthanasia would have been the best option. I set the bunny down gently, took the dogs inside and grabbed a pair of shoes (I was going to take it to a local vet clinic for euthanasia), and when I went back outside to retrieve it, I found that birds had already noted the bunny's situation, and had started attacking it before it was dead. I watched the rabbit take its last two breaths (the scene wasn't pretty), and felt absolutely horrible that my dogs put me in this predicament.

Now, I probably know better than most ordinary people that as much as we want to make our pets human substitutes, deep down they are still just predators and have natural instincts. I'm not mad at the dogs for doing what thousands of years of nature says they should do, just upset that I still let it get to me sometimes.