I knew the storms we had on Friday night were pretty serious. Being without power and DSL throughout the night and off and on during the day on Saturday, I wasn't aware how bad they really were. I went out on Sunday and started seeing the damage, then I watched the news on Sunday at 6 and it was one very rude awakening.

I don't know how a mesocyclone differs from a tornado, but according to the weather service, mesocyclones are rare in my neck of the woods. It's likely to be the only one I'll ever see in my lifetime and you know what? That's fine by me.

This is the one that traveled through the park I live in shortly after 7 on Friday night:



This is the one that occured during the overnight hours again on friday night:



The following are pictures of the damage that occured in a neighborhood that is 3 or 4 miles away from me.





I knew it was bad enough because we had trees and power wires down, but I had no idea it was as bad as this. The houses with the trees on top of them were on a newschannel 2 video which I am unable to snag and place on my blog.

The National Weather Service had issued a major thunderstorm warning for Thompkins, Cayuga and Chenango Counties until 9pm on Friday night. I live in Oneida County and it was never mentioned. We were hit the first time at 7:05 pm. This just came out of the blue and we spent a few wild minutes unable to see out of our windows because of the rain and hail. The storms lasted all night Friday and on into late Saturday afternoon. Mother Nature at her most awesome.

I do not understand the interest people have in bloodsports. I am cognizant of the fact that the ancient Romans, in their Colosseum, spent entire days enthralled and excited by the blood shed on the sands of the arena below. Chariot races, gladiatorial contests, feeding the Christians to the lions, all in full view of entire families come to spend the day being entertained. Whether a vanquished gladiator lived to fight another day depended entirely on the whim of the emporer, who sometimes merely determined the mood of the crowd before giving the thumbs up or down, as the case may be.

Animals starved for days on end to insure that they would attack whatever human was placed before them in the pit. Slaves trained to fight and die, all for the pleasure of the masses. Noble senators, their wives and select house servants in their preferred areas, prostitutes, shopkeepers, manual laborers, artists, and inkeepers all congregated together for an entire day of excitement provided by blood sport. Hot sun and sour wine made sweeter by the smell of fresh and not so fresh human blood. I wouldn't wish to view such events and yet these people took their children to see this. This was Ancient Rome. This was a society that poisoned their enemies, and a few of their friends, if it was of benefit. This was a society that we no longer live in, nor can truly understand. The brutality of their daily lives seems beyond horrible to us, yet there are those among us who attend and participate in the "sport" of dogfighting.

The genesis of bloodsports is in the Circus Maximus and Colosseum of ancient Rome. Dogs were not used until they were domesticated and bred to type. Specific breeds were developed for bull and bear baiting, hunting, and even for vermin control. They were bred to be lowslung with powerful front legs and jaws. They had to have a protective instinct and a bite to back it up. By the middle ages, bulldogs, pit bulls and different types of terriers were prized by their owners for their abilities in the arena. A good fighting dog brought honor and sometimes wealth to the lucky owner. Before 1835 it was legal to fight dogs in England, and the breeding and training of such dogs was an industry unto itself. It took thousands of years for some humans to accept that fighting their companion animals against other companion animals was abuse. After all this time it should occur to every man, woman and child that dogfighting is animal abuse, but it doesn't.

I think it's horrible. It ranks right up there with child abuse, murder and rape as far as I'm concerned. These are warm blooded loving animals that are abused in a way that will turn them into killing machines for the purpose of making money. It wasn't until the Michael Vick case that I learned how such callous attitudes could still be so prevalent in todays society. Much like the events held in Ancient Rome, todays dogfighting contests are family affairs. Pack a lunch, fill the cooler, grab the beach chairs and spend some time with the kids watching dogfights.
Babies, toddlers, schoolchildren all being taken by their Moms and Dads to the secret place where the dogs are forced to brutalize each other. This is family entertainment. This boggles my mind. This is not hunting for food, this is killing for pleasure, and people take their children to watch. If there were no spectators, there would be no dogfight handlers because there would be no money in it.

When a dogfight arena is raided by the authorities, they are finding discarded baby bottles, dirty diapers, diaper bags, childrens toys, bikes, and chairs designed specifically for the use of small children. All left behind when the parents grab the kids and run because of the raid. They're exposed to it at such a young age that they grow up and repeat the cycle, taking their children, boys and girls to the new secret place where they can view the excitement. Chalk this up to one of those situations where I think to myself that Pogo had the right of it. "I have met the enemy and he is us".

We are experiencing a line of some pretty major thunderstorms in my area. There are wires down almost onto the road just 300 feet away from me. The fire department has stretched yellow caution tape across the road and the power company added orange safety cones but the wires are still hanging about 5 feet off the roadway.

My power went out shortly after 11:30 EST last night, and although it's on right now and I have a DSL connection at the moment there is no guarantee this will last. The weather report calls for more storms throughout the day, and some of them have pretty high winds.

In case of more trouble that will keep me offline I decided to post my music choices early today. If I can, I'll be back, and if I can't, I hope you enjoy listening.





The List

1 Blondie...Call Me, Heart of Glass and Rapture
2 David Bowie...Let's Dance and Rebel Rebel
3 Faces...Maybe I'm Amazed
4 Guns N' Roses...Paradise City and Sweet Child O' Mine
5 Heart...Barracuda and Magic Man
6 Human League...Don't You Want Me
7 INXS...Afterglow and Need You Tonight
8 Joan Jett...Bad Reputation and Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)
9 Kiss...Rock and Roll All Night
10 Motley Crue...Girls, Girls, Girls and Smokin' In The Boys Room
11 Naked Eyes...Promises, Promises
12 Pat Benatar... Heartbreaker and We Belong
13 Paula Abdul...Straight Up
14 Peter Gabriel...Sledgehammer
15 R.E.M....Everybody Hurts and Losing My Religion
16 Red Hot Chili Peppers...Californication and Higher Ground
17 Robert Palmer...Addicted To Love, Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor Doctor) and Simply Irresistible
18 Sheena Easton...Strut and Sugar Walls
19 Steve Winwood...Roll With It and Talking Back To The Night
20 Talking Heads...Burning Down The House
21 The Cars...Drive and Shake It Up
22 The Clash...Rock The Casbah
23 The Police...Don't Stand So Close To Me and Every Breath You Take
24 Twisted Sister...We're Not Gonna Take It and You Can't Stop Rock and Roll
25 U2...Beautiful Day and With or Without You
26 Whitney Houston...I Wanna Dance With Somebody

It's going to be one of those days. I'm needing to post and get offline, but McAffe is scanning my computer which means at the moment I can't even get online. I'm trying to think of something to say, and Hubby wants this and needs to know that, and what about this? I'm not a morning person to start out with and he's pressing his luck, he is, honest. There are days when there's a lot to be said for the single life, this is one of them.

He is balking at parting with old business files. We have all the files extending back to 1992, and all the ledgers from every year since 1987. We purchased a 3 drawer filing cabinet which can't be used for the current year because of his desire to keep every bit of paperwork. I can't see why, we can't find anything. No matter how many times I tell him that paperwork reduction is a necessity, he finds some lame excuse to keep it. We do need to save all paperwork for 3 years back. Tax papers and ledgers showing income and expenses need to be kept for 7 years but we don't need the receipts for that long a time. So, he sits in front of the paper shredder this morning arguing with me about every bit of paper he's putting in to it. I have to keep telling him that he may keep the ledger for the first year he was in business which would be 1987, but that everything prior to 2000 is to go into the shredder. I have the tax papers saved for the 10 year time frame we need to keep them, but everything he is sitting in front of needs to go into the shredder.

He found the bill of sale for a truck he used to have. It's in the "things to shred box". The conversation goes like this:

Hubby; "But this is for the truck."

Me: "Which truck"

Hubby: "The Ford"

Me: "Which Ford?"

Hubby: "The '89"

Me: "Where's the title?"

Hubby: "Took it when we took the truck to the scrap yard"

Me: "Why are we saving a bill of sale for a truck we no longer have and for which we no longer have a title?"

Hubby: "I dunno."

Me: "Shred it!"

I am amused and annoyed at the same time, if that's at all possible. In a way, I'm telling him to dispose of his life. He worked hard for every penny spent, and these bits of paper are the proofs that he accomplished something. I have taken the bills of sale and the title for his 1967 Diamond Reo dump truck, the bill of sale and title for the 1975 Ford tank truck, and the bill of sale and title for his backhoe and trailer. I've found pictures of everything except the dump truck, but we still have that so a picture will be easy enough to take. All these things and some other papers which represent "firsts" are at a friends house being made into a scrapbook. It will be one of the Christmas gifts I give this year to Hubby. There are also all the Thank You notes that he's received from satisfied customers and even the subpoena to go to court for one customer who bought a house with a failing septic system that was told the system was new.

In the meantime he is sitting there shredding and feeling as if his entire life has become bits of mangled paper. I sympathize, I really do, but it's a necessity that we have to face. There is more to our lives than these bits and pieces, and he will understand that eventually. In the meantime I need to make sure he shreds everything in that box, and I need to make sure he understands that just because it's gone doesn't mean that it's forgotten.

This week Miss Lou of Lou's World is grieving the death of her beloved Tigger. Despite our prayers, her kitty was unable to survive whatever was wrong with it. I have been where she is two times in my life because of having made a poor choice in veterinarians, and I know, from personal experience how guilty it makes you feel. I've never decided whether the hardest part of all of it is not knowing what the animal died of, or whether it's knowing that a wrong diagnosis was made. I suppose it doesn't matter because in the end the result is the same. In the end you still have an animal to bury and some tears to shed.

There are two types of veterinarians. Those that practice standard protocol, and those that use accurate diagnosistic procedures. If you take a sick animal to a standard protocol vet, you'll pay for stool sample, urinalysis if possible, and bloodwork. That's over and above the office call and veterinary visit charge. After all these tests are conducted the vet sends you home with an antibiotic, and a follow up appointment. If the animal doesn't improve, you are sent home with a different antibiotic and another follow up appointment. Nothing else ever transpires because the bloodtests were negative. Well, of course they were negative, they only tested for Feline Leukemia Virus and Feline HIV. No X-rays take place to see if there's a blockage of some kind, no testing for diabetes, kidney failure, or Hepatic Liver disease ever took place. The animal companion is simply told that the "tests" were negative. We usually are so happy to hear that we never ask "What tests were conducted?"

If the animal doesn't begin normal eating, some vets will write a prescription for something to aid the appetite. That something is a steroid called Dexamethasone. I call it liquid death. It damages the cat's kidneys. It'll will damage human kidneys if prescribed for prolonged use. It's normally prescribed for Asthma in cats by standard protocol veterinarians. Dexamethasone killed my big boy cat B.C. It was prescribed by a standard protocol vet for asthma, which B.C. didn't have.

B.C. was a neighbors cat, and he may have been seriously abused by his prior companion because he chose not to go home. We didn't want to take him in, but he didn't leave us much choice. He was very laid back about it, but quite insistent that we allow him to live with us. When I chose not to let him in at first, he'd just sit there looking so forlorn that it would make me feel guilty. As soon as we opened the door to go anywhere, there sat B.C. always so happy to see us. It was getting colder and the weather was turning nasty so...B.C. found a home.

First trip to the vet he was found to have worms, and he had a cough. So, we received worm meds and an antibiotic and an appointment a month later to have him neutered. He seemed to recover from the cough until the weekend before the neutering was to take place and he got sick. Two courses of antibiotic with no improvement the vet decided he had asthma, so Dexamethasone was prescribed. He ate, he stopped coughing, he was playful, but something made me feel that all was not right and I wouldn't have him neutered, which made the vet mad. In retrospect, I wish he'd gotten mad at me before he prescribed the Dexamethasone.

Six months later on a Wednesday B.C. couldn't urinate. I called the vet's office for an appointment and was refused. He wouldn't provide service, it was his day off, and I was told to get whoever I could. Now, this had been Hubby's vet when he was farming. Hubby was one of this vets first ever clients, and after 30 years and numerous animals we couldn't get emergency service for a cat that was all ready his patient. In Rome, the Animal Hospital had been sold to a corporation and one of the vets there didn't like the changes for some very good reasons so he had opened his own practice. I called there not expecting much and got told to bring B.C. right in. What a difference.

After examining B.C. he decided that B.C. Needed oxygen so he was placed in an incubator. He asked if he could take an X-ray and if he could keep B.C. overnight for fluids and observation. The X-ray told a tale of a cat that was either kicked when he was a small kitten or possibly had been hit by a car. He had a diaphragmatic hernia that was among the worst the vet had ever seen, it didn't just have a tear, it was detached which meant there was nothing to keep his stomach down where it was supposed to be. It was crowding his heart and lungs. Poor baby was unable to stay oxygenated correctly ever, and the steroid simply masked the symptoms. It also had placed him in acute renal failure.

The proper treatment for diaphragmatic hernia is a daily muscle relaxer which would allow the stomach to relax and not crowd the heart and lungs. Unfortunately that didn't occur until the damage had been done to his kidneys. We got to keep him for 6 more months before his kidneys stopped working entirely and I chose to end his life humanely. The thing that tipped the new vet off as to his actual problem was something that I had pointed out to the prior vet.

B.C. looked like a really big cat until you got to the base of his ribcage. Then he looked as if someone had taken a smaller cat and attached the back half to the front half of a larger cat. It was quite noticable. The other thing that bothered me was he didn't have the ability to raise his tail. Dr. Standard Protocol responded by saying something along the lines of these things are common. I just felt that something was wrong which was why I refused to have him neutered. It's a good thing, because a cat with a diaphragmatic hernia will not survive the anesthesia used in most surgical procedures. It affects the lungs, and he would have been another statistic of an apparently healthy cat dying from a fairly simple procedure.

If it weren't for B.C. I wouldn't have Bashful. She would have been treated the same way with antibiotics and we would have watched her die, because antibiotics don't help diabetes. I love Dr. Mark and I recommend him to everyone in my family and among my friends. He does everything he knows to do, uses all the diagnostic tests at his disposal in an effort to keep us humans and pet companions together for as long as we can stay together. He isn't any more expensive than Dr. Standard Protocol was, and I have the knowledge that everything possible is being done for my baby.