Convenient Animals

Animals are usually convenient devices in novels where the horses & hounds are always in great shape & ready to go.  In reality, they get sick & pick up injuries as often as people.  There's certainly nothing convenient about it & it's expensive both in time & money.

My daughter, Erin, & her husband, Josh, own the property that adjoins ours & their backyard opens into our south field.  They lived with us for most of a year while waiting to buy the house, so our animals often have issues figuring out where they belong.  Between us, we have 5 dogs, 3 cats, a rabbit, 2 goats, & 3 horses.  That's not a lot of animals for a farm, even a lazy gentleman's farm, but we've simplified as we've aged & prices have climbed.

We generally use one veterinary office staffed by four vets.  Two specialize in small animals, the other two in large animals.  We deal with the latter most of the time since they come out to the farm, but we know the small animal vets at the office all too well.  (Most others stand in line, they usually just hand us the meds & bill us later.)

Last Wednesday, Orion, one of the kids' cats, was hunting around our house when he had a tiff with our cat, Raven.  Fur flew & Orion went back home while Raven picked up a nasty bite in his cheek; a puncture that got infected despite our best doctoring & his protests.

Friday, Molly, Erin's 13 year old Australian Shepard mix, needed a tumor removed from her elbow.  Erin took her & Raven in to the vets' office.  She got them home only to find Topaz, her old Thoroughbred, had popped an abscess in his hoof & didn't want to put any weight on it.  It was expected & not unusual, but meant she had to spend an hour soaking his hoof twice a day.

Saturday morning, Erin fed Molly with a pill in peanut butter mixed into the kibble, the only way she'll eat it.  After Molly started to eat, Erin started her own breakfast only to realize Molly had walked away.  Erin went to get her & came back to find Orion eating Molly's breakfast.  Why?  That cat has never eaten dog kibble before, so maybe it was the peanut butter?  There was no pill in Molly's food.  Who ate it?  The pill would be really bad for Orion & the vet said to get it out of him.  The kids tried, but couldn't get him to throw it up, so Josh took Orion to the vets' office.

Erin walked up to the barn since she & my wife, Marg, had a riding lesson.  They met only to find Tango, our young Thoroughbred, shivering in the barn not putting any weight on his near (left) hind leg.  They checked him all over, but could only find a really sore stifle.  He'd probably run around, slipped, & pulled something the night before or early in the morning.  He was so uncomfortable that the vet was called & he promised to stop by about lunch time, so Marg took Pumpkin to the lesson alone while Erin waited for the vet.

In the meantime, Josh got back with a very sick cat.  The vet had a lot of trouble getting him to throw up.  Eventually he did & no pill was found, but the cat was sick the rest of the day - disgustingly sick several times.  Not his fault, but one more thing to deal with.

Marg & Pumpkin got back from their lesson about the vet showed up.  He went over Tango thoroughly & finally decided the same thing the girls had.  It was just muscle soreness, so Tango just needed some stall rest & hand walking until he healed up.  Liberal applications of Bigeloil (It's pronounced 'beagle oil' & is a liniment something similar to Bengay or Icy-Hot, although it is a liquid, not a paste.) should be applied to the leg from the hock up.  Just what they'd decided, but at a premium price for an emergency farm visit.

That evening, Erin was putting the Bigeloil on Tango's leg when she found a huge hematoma inside his upper thigh, almost by the groin.  It was HUGE (half the size of an American football) & had a light pink scratch on it.  She took pictures & sent them to the vet.  The vet was quite upset at missing it, but they all agreed they'd looked there & hadn't seen anything, so it must have swelled up hours later.  They decided to let it go over night & see if it swelled more (which would require the vet to come out to drain it on a Sunday) or see if it went down on its own.  It is going down, but Tango is miserable & likely will be for a week or so.

The girls seemed to spend half of Sunday out in the barn since both Topaz & Tango require about an hour of medical attention twice a day in addition to cleaning their stalls, extra work since our horses are generally turn-outs.  And they still had all the normal barn chores to do.

So two-thirds of our horses can't be ridden & are requiring about four times as much time as normal.  Orion needed extensive clean up, Raven may need another vet visit, & Molly keeps trying to do too much with the stitches in her elbow, so needs to be watched very carefully.  Next month's vet bill will be astronomical.

It's not convenient or abnormal, just time consuming & expensive.  I sometimes wished I lived in a fantasy world...

Best 100 Songs of the Rock Era

"Best Of" lists aren't.  They're impossibly limiting & usually poorly defined, but it's the journey, not the destination, that is worthwhile. They lead to interesting explorations & fun arguments.  They're also a great way to make a book memorable.

In "Broken Prey", the 16th of the Lucas Davenport Prey series by John Sandford, Lucas gets an iPod & a gift card for 100 songs.  He takes this as a challenge to make a list for the "Best 100 Songs of the Rock Era".  Go ahead & look at the list.  Who is missing? Jot down a few.

The list gets mentioned a dozen or more times.  There's no long recitation, just various characters mentioning songs that need to be included, arguments over them or versions, & fun remarks.  My youngest kids (late 20s) had fun arguing the list with me & Sandford is in his mid 70s, so it engages a wide age range.  I certainly paid attention every time the subject came up because of my own tastes.  ("We Will Rock You" instead of "Bohemian Rhapsody"?  Please!) 

The list is terribly flawed, of course.  It's far too broad & yet a few artists are on the list multiple times.  It even has one song on it twice.  Some of the missing ones are practically criminal, but it's still a great device & got me thinking...

Rock has been around since the 50s & is still going strong almost 70 years later.  I can't pick just 1 or 2 top songs per year, especially not in the 60s & 70s.  I'm not sure I could limit my picks to 100 for some years around 1970 much less those decades.  Expanding to cover other genres is just crazy.

Have you written down the missing bands yet?  If not, do it now.

I'm a Stones guy, but leaving out The Beatles entirely is wrong.  There's nothing by Alice Cooper, America, Allman Brothers, Badfinger, The Band, Beach Boys, Bon Jovi, Booker T, Blondie, Blind Faith, Box Tops, Bread, BTO, or Buffalo Springfield?  Sheesh!  I'm sure I missed some & I didn't even get to the Cars.  I'll get carpal tunnel before I make it to The Zombies & I'm sticking to pure rock. 

It's obvious that we can't make even a top 100 rock songs without limiting it a lot more.  What about 1 song each by the top 100 rock bands?

I immediately got sidetracked by Eric Clapton.  He's been inducted into the Music Hall of Fame three times as part of Cream, the Yardbirds, & as a solo artist.  He had some fantastic short stints playing with other super groups like Blind Faith & Dirty Mac, although Wikipedia considers the latter a project. That's OK, even though it means I don't even know what constitutes a band.  I might be able to make a list of Clapton's best 100 songs.

Looking through the Wikipedia entry for musical super groups is an education.  They list each band & the band members with the other bands they've played in.  I haven't heard of a lot of them & every time I look at the list I wind up spending too long listening to YouTube.  My list is growing!

Musicians always seem to be teaming up with others for projects & great one-off songs. David Bowie singing "Under Pressure" with Queen or "All The Young Dudes" with Mott the Hoople are two of my favorites.  He sange "Dancing In The Street" with Mick Jagger, too.  Drat, I can't leave off Martha Reeves & the Vandellas version!  It's practically impossible not to duplicate a few songs.  Years ago, I collected as many versions of "Louie, Louie" as I could find quickly.  I have over 60 & apparently there are hundreds.

What about rock muscials?  "Hair", "Jesus Christ Superstar", "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", "Tommy", & "Another Brick In The Wall".  I could easily make a great 100 top songs list just out of them.

How about one-hit wonders?  I noticed only one of those in Lucas' list - "Rock On" by David Essex.  It definitely belongs on the list, but so does "Bang A Gong" by T. Rex, "Couldn't Get It Right" by the Climax Blues Band, "Play That Funky Music White Boy" by Wild Cherry, "Spirit In The Sky" by Norman Greenbaum, & "Porn Star Dancing" by My Darkest Days.  "Signs" by Five Man Electrical Band, Dokken's "Alone Again", Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" & "Wildflower" by Skylark... Yes, I could make a top one-hit wonder list easily, although we'll argue who belongs on it.  Nazareth is NOT a one-hit wonder no matter what Wikipedia says.  They did "Black Betty" & that's a hit no matter what some stupid list says.

I might cheat with Donovan since I like both "Sunshine Superman" & "Mellow Yellow", but they could also go on a list with other quirky, fun songs like "Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road" by Loudon Wainwright III.  I wonder if I could make a top 100 of them?  "In The Summertime" by Mungo Jerry, "Ding-A-Ling" by Chuck Berry, & "A Brand New Key" by Melanie are great & they're guaranteed to bring a smile to my face every time. 

Some songs are great, but I only want to listen to them once a year.  I don't just mean Christmas carols by rock artists, either.  Thanksgiving demands the original rendition of "Alice's Restaurant" at our house.  (We used to get on the radio by calling in to request it.)  "American Pie" & "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" are great songs, but once a year is plenty.  Is that a list even worth making?

Our Internet connection at home is feeble, so I don't stream Pandora or anything.  Instead, I listen to a about 1000 songs regularly.  It's a limit set by my shop stereo system which consists of one of my early MP3 players played through a cheap amp & speakers that are as old as I am.  What it lacks in quality, it makes up for in volume.  (I can still hear it through ear protectors over the power tools & dust collection system.)  I change a few songs occasionally, but keep about the same list playing randomly on my PCs at home & work as well as on my phone.  It's as close to a 'best of' list as I can get.  The songs are pretty much limited to the rock era, although not just to rock. Bing Crosby, John Prine, Brad Paisley, Charlie Pride, Johnny Cash, Billy Holiday & others are on it.  A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.