Vesper musings

Thank goodness NaBloPoMo was not in May. This crazy month is almost over. Sorry for the dearth of posts.

The last-minute babysitter we got to cover this week is impressed with how much fruit our kids eat. Today, Anna ate a banana, apricot, and a peach. Both kids had blueberries, blackberries, and a cookie for dessert tonight. Then Colin snacked on the fresh veggie plate, still on the table, polishing off all the carrots.

Earlier this week we had a crisis when we ran out of fresh fruit. Colin had already polished off the bag of organic raisins, but he found a bag of prunes in the back of the pantry. "What are these?" he asked, and I told him they were dried plums. He tried some, and decided they were "big raisins." He also found a bag of dried figs at ATE THEM ALL before I'd realized it. Only a little worrisome since there is a family story about a great aunt who ate a bunch of figs as a child and died of peritonitis. Colin was fine, and so are his BMs, as you can imagine.

We finally watched "Casino Royale," and yes, Daniel Craig really is all that and a bag of crisps, but in the end it was just another Bond flick to me. I mean, does every woman he sleeps with have to die? I guess so, otherwise he'd have baggage when he tried to bag the girl in the next flick. However, it inspired Anthony to get the Lillet needed to make the Martini Craig/Bond creates in the film - the Vesper. He made it for me tonight, and it is a fine drink...

In a sad note, long-time readers of my blog may remember the standard poodle that I had the priveledge of doing surgery on after he ate 11+ tampons. Quite a memorable smell, I mean story. Anyway, he came to see me about 10 days ago after eating his owner's wallet. J.L. actually looked better than I had seen him look in a long time. He suffered for several weeks over the winter with pancreatitis and looked puny and nauseated for a long time. This time he had a new haircut and looked spunky and spry. I took Xrays of his abdomen and saw a hugely distended stomach. He looked nauseated again after I gave him drugs to try to make him vomit up the leather wallet (he apparently ate it in protest after being left behind on a walk). He barfed up a lot of food but no wallet, nor the $100 bill the owner said was also missing (the plastic credit cards he left alone). Remembering what a difficult recovery he'd had after the last gastrotomy, I got him in to the local specialty hospital to have the wallet removed via endoscopy - a procedure that requires anesthesia but not a large incision. I got a call late in the afternoon from the doctor laughingly saying, thanks a lot for taking up 2.5 hours of my Friday afternoon, but we finally got all the chewed up pieces out. They were keeping him overnight for recovery and observation. Imagine my shock when I heard the following week that he'd developed aspiration pneumonia, 104+ fever, then septic shock and died in respiratory arrest. Poor, poor J.L. and his owner; this was not the end either of them deserved. After having an old dog myself who liked to eat naughty things (Terlingua), I won't soon forget him. Rest in peace, J.L.