Yes, it’s true. Today I was reminded that I haven’t posted any pictures of Duncan recently.
You remember Duncan, don’t you?
Here he is right after we brought him home, sitting in his toy basket.
He doesn’t quite fit inside it any more.
Duncan is quite camera shy. We get loads of pictures of his butt, which, in my opinion, is not his best feature. The face doesn’t stay still long enough for photo-ops. Apparently, he will never run for Congress.
But the little guy has had quite a good time. He is love, played with, pampered. He has even had a vacation at the shore. Here he is on a rocky beach in Maine. When the rocks are wet, looking for Duncan is very much like playing Where’s Waldo.
Got any Sushi?
Now, let’s see if I can do this. I took some video inspired by Will of Marking Our Territory, alerted me to a fast and easy way to destroy my iPad. So naturally I tried it!
And I uploaded my very first YouTube video.
Shit, I’m a rotten videographer …. but I’m a great dog mom! How many dogs get $300 dog toys?
My husband John believes that the whole reason that the NRA is bat-shit crazy about getting everybody guns is so that bit by bit, everybody will become afraid enough of their own shadows and/or that of their neighbors that they will have no choice but to buy their own gun to protect themselves from everybody else in the US who has one and is likely to come a-callin’. And then, of course, the gun manufacturers would get even more blood money and pay more dues! It’s a win-win for the NRA and the manufacturers! The fact that the country will lose is just collateral damage.
John may be on to something. Because just today I read that there are folks in the NRA who are advocating that non-eagle-eye folks have the right to guns, too. Not only people who need corrective lenses, but folks who cannot see at all. In a less politically correct time we might have called them “Blind Folks.”
Now, now, don’t get all worried. According to Dom Raso, the guy in this video, since blind folks have such good hearing, they don’t need to see what they’re shooting at.
So the logical conclusion is that they will not just randomly start firing their guns around like irresponsible folks. (Not that there are any irresponsible gun owners out there, natch.) That makes me feel much better.
Now I grant you, there is scientific evidence that blind folks can hear better than those with better vision. Still, I’m really not at all comfortable with the idea that one of my neighbors who is vision impaired might have a gun. Well, not if he can put bullets into it and fire it, anyway.
But this discussion led me to a brilliant idea. Now I know how I will protect myself during the apocolypse and/or the rapture and/or when the guvment’s jackbooted thugs come to my house.
When we lived in Switzerland and just across the border in France in the late 1990s and early 2000s, one of the biggest problems was finding healthcare. Now I realize that I worked at the World Health Organization, but the docs there were researchers, primarily, meeting goers-to-ers. They weren’t your every day heal-the-sick kind of doctors.
In addition to not knowing the ropes of a foreign system, there was the language barrier. I mean, frankly, it is difficult to describe illnesses in English — I always feared that I would go in with a sore throat and end up without an important body part. I didn’t realize that that could happen right here in the good old U.S. of A. In fact, that just happened recently when a man went in for a routine procedure and, ummm, had a life changing event. Allegedly.
So in 2002, we moved home to the U.S. where I could communicate and get medical treatment for $197,238.73 per word.
Today, though, I’m rethinking that decision. Maybe we acted in haste. Maybe we should have thought twice or three times. Maybe we should go back.
No, I’m not sick. In fact, with my English-speaking doctors I’m doing quite well.
But there is one thing that I could get in France that I cannot get here: wine.
PARIS – A hospital in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand is to open a wine bar where terminally ill patients will be able to enjoy a “medically-supervised” glass or two with their families.
Vive la France, where the terminally ill can get “medically supervised” alcoholic beverages. I hear the wine is to die for.
UPDATE!!!
If I DO go back to die with wine in my hand/throat/tummy, somebody else needs to pick it out. I have an amazing skill crafted while living inside of or within spitting distance of France.
I can go into any store in France and leave with a bottle of awful wine. It’s a talent. A gift. Not many folks can claim it.
A fellow paralegal I didn’t particularly like gave me a memorable piece of advice over thirty years ago. And I remember it clearly to this day.
“Never get a vanity license plate,” she said, “Because if you rob a bank or are involved in a hit-and-run accident, witnesses will remember it.”
In spite of the fact that I have never actually robbed a bank or run anybody over, I’ve followed that piece of advice. But mostly it’s because I tend to change my mind about stuff. (Like the time I decided that I really didn’t like my choice in between special ordering a new sofa and when it was delivered.) So if I get a vanity plate, I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go to the DMV weekly to change my special plate when I decide that it isn’t quite as clever as I thought at the time. [See: Stupid blog name.]
But I love vanity plates. I missed them when I was overseas. I search the road for them while commuting and on road trips. Sometimes, I laugh at the cleveness. Often I try to figure out what a message might mean. Sometimes I shake my head and try to figure out what insanity might possess someone to saddle themselves with such a stupid plate.
The one I saw tonight though, made all others pale in comparison. It reached an entirely new dimension. Beyond the earth’s stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere. To Infinity and Beyond. Literally.
It said:
EWE NEXT
OK, so that doesn’t seem all that ground-breaking, now does it?
The plate was on a hearse.
About this vintage.*
The hearse itself had seen better days, but it was pretty much like this picture that I found at this website, where they sell hearses, should you be at all interested in procuring one. It was not at all like the fancy schmancy hearses I see regularly leaving this appropriately named local funeral parlor:
Photo from (I kid you not) Moneyandking.com, a Northern Virginia Funeral Parlor
My hearse, I mean the one I’m talking about, had broken down in the left turn lane to get onto a major highway. I drove past as the traffic in my lane flowed by, cursing myself for having my camera/cell phone in my pocket instead of ready for this photo op. [Curses, foiled again.]
That was when I saw the pièce de résistance! The driver stood in front of the hearse (making it far more likely that HE, and not EWE would, in fact, be NEXT). He was dressed in black jeans, black shoes and a black Panama hat. Oh, and a black Blues Brother T-shirt.
FiftyFourandAHalf 