No one else has started this yet? Then I’ll do it.
My dad’s been in the hospital for the last two days with a blood clot in his leg that turned out to have brought it’s best friend an aneurysm along. They did a bypass on the vein on Sunday. I saw him yesterday and he’s still in a lot of pain and his foot was very swollen still. The doctor came by after I left (I have to work today) and according to my sisters, the condition of my dad’s foot has been downgraded to “not optimistic.” They might be amputating today. My dad is also diabetic, so foot problems are serious business.
Curse you, illness, for making me stuck at home last night instead of spending NYE with my bf. We both ended up in bed early and not together, which is a crap way to end the year. Ah well, may 2013 be filled with plenty of nights together to make up for it.
SpazCat, I’m sorry about your dad, but at least they did find the aneurysm before it burst. Keep us updated.
thursday next, I live in Western Redneckia (Colorado), so a certain amount of exploding tomfoolery is expected, but for 5-6 hours? They finally gave it up around 1 a.m.
My poor doggie is still in bed; the stuff she gets for her anxiety makes her groggy the next day. We got her from rescue, adopting her in the middle of July 2009. She was picked up as a stray and never claimed. Given her problems with fireworks, she may have bolted on the Fourth of that year. We thought she was very young, but it turns out she has a puppy personality. She is such a sweet dog and bonded so closely with our other dog that they can’t be separated or they howl (Basset Hounds).
Hey, eager-beaver employee, that thng you felt compelled to instant message me about at 9PM on New Years’ Eve was nothing that needed to be dealt with, er, instantly, or even within the next 24 hours. Contact me during normal office hours, FFS.
Oh and my husband has a sore throat, the baby’s fussing if I don’t hold her most of the day and let her sleep in my bed at night, it’s so cold my skin’s drying out and Stupid Cat scared me half to death last night after he got out and didn’t come back until this morning.
I never go out on NYE because I always manage to be gifted the early shift on NYD. This year was no exception, except for the fact that my husband was invited to a NYE party and, naturally, wanted me to accompany him. So I did.
Two drinks and I was literally on the floor :eek: Really? Really?!?
To top it off, I only got 2-1/2 hours of sleep. It’s a miracle I’m still upright enough to type this. I’d crash, but if I did, I won’t fall asleep at my regular bedtime.
In my experience fear of fireworks is a sign of a more intelligent dog. The brighter of my two is afraid of them and thunder. During storms I have to sit in the basement with him. The sweet, but not smart one, who is shy around other dogs and new humans, doesn’t even lift her head after a big boom. (We got her from some folks that couldn’t housebreak her.)
Congratulations on getting a rescue dog. That’s something my family strongly believes in. We’ve been taking in rejected animals for years and now our children have started doing the same.
Is the scaredy-dog a basset? My family’s had two bassets and both were terrified of thunder. My dad had to go outside and sit with Bernie so he wouldn’t howl all night. Brandy would hide in the closet and shake. They have really sensitive hearing, what with the big ears and all.
The dog we had when I was growing up was a golden retriever. She had little reaction to thunderstorms until Hurricane Fran; she was terrified of any kind of bad weather after that. She never seemed to be afraid of fireworks, though she did like to go outside and bark at them.
My niece is going to be 18 years old in two months. She is in grade 12 and lives at home and is above average intelligence; she has no disabilities whatsoever. So how did she get raised to this point to not be able to do a damned thing for herself or by herself? She has no driver’s license (which, as we’ve discussed on these boards before, is fairly normal for young people now), but among other things, she doesn’t even take public transportation by herself. How can this helpless baby bird be two months away from being a fully legal adult? (In Alberta, 18 is the age of majority for all things, including drinking.)
BigAppleBucky and SpazCat, both dogs are rescue Bassets and are EXTREMELY smart. Not-scaredy dog (Ellie) was hand raised from birth by a human and was a free-to-good-home rescue. Scaredy-dog (Bess) was named after Harry Houdini’s wife, since the first thing she tried to do when we met her was to get out of the gate at the pound. On the day her adoption became final, she figured out that she could open the latch on one of our gates by pulling on the shoestring attached to it. Both dogs are now chipped and the shoestring has been removed! Ellie could care less about fireworks or thunder, but she hates the vacuum cleaner and she panicked and tried to hide under the bed when my husband flew his new toy helicopter in the house.
Mama birds have clutches, though. Three or four at a time, I think, and they do this once or even twice a year. So yeah, you can shove baby birds out of the nest and say “Fly or die” if you have a LOT of offspring and don’t really care if some of them don’t make it. If it takes you 18 years to raise a chick, though, you might get a tad more upset if she gets eaten by the first wolf she comes across.
Since I’m not a parent, I don’t understand how this works - wouldn’t it make more sense to prepare your baby bird for when they are supposed to be living in the real world? And isn’t that time sometime around when they become an adult, give or take a few years?
She’s probably afraid of them - she’s afraid of everything in life, since she’s been given no skills to handle anything.
Yes, it DOES make more sense to teach your baby bird to flap her wings, and let her exercise them, before she leaves the nest. It also makes more sense to let the baby bird make short flights first, returning to the nest, before kicking her out of the nest for good. Well, that’s if you want most every chick to survive. If you’re raising your chicks in clutches, and not investing much time into any one individual chick, though, then what you do is get them to the point where they have a fair chance of survival when you kick them out.
My point is that humans invest a LOT of time and resources in our offspring, and we count on most of them surviving. One of the hardest things that I had to do, as a parent, was let my daughter make choices that I thought were mistakes, but which would not have seriously bad consequences. If I didn’t let her make mistakes, she wouldn’t learn to fly on her own. It’s like vaccinating them. The vaccinations hurt a bit, but nowhere near as badly as getting the diseases would. This is part of the reason why I argue against raising the age of getting a driver’s license to 18. Kids at 16 think that they’re invulnerable, and have poor judgement, but one way for them to develop judgement is for them to learn how to drive.
It’s not enough to just feed and clothe and shelter a kid, and send him/her to school. You have to teach life skills, as well. Cooking, cleaning, basic auto maintenance (or how to get around without a car), financial skills, all that boring adult stuff. And sex ed. The time to teach your child how to use a condom isn’t when s/he is halfway into the bedroom with a boyfriend/girlfriend, it’s when the child isn’t about to have sex in the next few minutes. Because I can guarantee that anything you say when your precious baby is in the throes of passion is going to go in one ear and out the other without stopping to make an impression in between those ears.
When a baby is trying to learn to walk, it will pull itself up by grabbing anything or anyone in reach. It will stand up, let go, wobble for a few seconds, and fall down. Sometimes the baby will cry because it’s frustrated, and very occasionally because it hurt itself. A well meaning but clueless parent might put a baby in a walker, so that the poor kid won’t fall down all the time. But falling down is an essential part of learning to stand up, which is the foundation for walking. If you keep putting that child in a walker, and never let it stand on its own, it will never learn to walk…or to run.
I have a water bed frame to get rid of- solid pine. It is good wood to support the weight of a water bed. I have left it on the verge when we have had industrial bins delivered before (rather than throw it away) so someone could pick it up and use the wood if they wanted. No takers. So today, I bit the bullet and bought an electrical circular saw and cut it into four pieces and placed it in the latest bin. So - guess what? Tonight, after dark, some feral pulls up in a flat tray truck, looks in the bin and takes the water bed base.
Why couldn’t he have taken it before and saved me the cost? (Mind you I do have a new toy )
Ellie could care less about fireworks or thunder, but she hates the vacuum cleaner and she panicked and tried to hide under the bed when my husband flew his new toy helicopter in the house.
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