Yesterday I guest blogged at In the Pink Texas again, this time about Bible courses in public schools: Thou Shalt Do Thy Homework
by James Brush
Month: April 2007
After 36 hours on a kidney flush IV as a result of eating the recalled Natural Balance Venison & Brown Rice dog food, Daphne and Phoebe’s levels have returned to a normal range.
Joey’s, however, are still very high. Higher than they were originally. We had to take him to a specialist in south Austin, an amazing veterinary internist who treated Morrison’s diabetes, and in whom we have total confidence.
Joey is producing urine as well as monster turds, one of which he left in the lobby for them, and he seems to be feeling well. These are very good signs.
The vets are optimistic about Joey, but he will have to remain hospitalized and on an IV for the next few days. The girls will go back to the vet tomorrow for observation and to have some more fluid injected under their skin. Phoebe got this today and came home looking like a camel, but her hump has since gone down.
It seems the contamination in the pet food – melamine – is once again the culprit in this latest pet food recall. This time, however, it was found in the brown rice, not wheat gluten. And, once again, this is from food imported from China.
Despite the fact that Joey isn’t out of the woods yet, I’m feeling very fortunate. Yesterday, we wondered if we would have any pets by the end of the week.
Tonight, we cooked up a giant batch of homemade food from a recipe for a kidney diet we got from the vet (courtesy of Hill’s Pet Products):
¼ lb ground beef (not lean ground chuck)
2 cups white rice, no salt
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped
3 slices white bread, crumbled
1 tsp calcium carbonate (ground eggshells)
It was the finest meal they’ve ever eaten.
We’re trying to find something for Simon.
I just can’t pour kibble into their bowls right now.
As for Joey, we’ve always said he’s an optimistic dog, and so we will follow the way of the Joe monster and remain optimistic as well. He will – hopefully – come home before the end of the week.
Thanks to those of you who have wished them well. We really appreciate it.
The short version:
Beware of Natural Balance’s venison and brown rice dry dog food and venison and green pea dry cat food.
The long version:
I picked up some dog food for the hounds on Wednesday: Dick Van Patten’s Natural Balance, since it’s all natural and not involved in the pet food recalls. I wasn’t sure what flavor to get since we had considered a few when we first stated them on it a month ago, but we were pretty sure it was venison and brown rice.
But it looked funny – the color was off – when I opened it on Thursday night. I figured we must have actually been feeding them a different flavor, probably duck and potato. Phoebe wouldn’t touch it, but Joey and Daphne ate it.
Thursday night Daphne got up to pee. Nothing unusual there, but so did Joey. That’s odd, but not that odd. It happens.
Friday morning, Phoebe still wouldn’t eat, and Daphne only picked at her food. I came home on Friday night to a house literally flooded with urine. In places it was ¼ inch deep. There are sometimes small accidents when we’re gone a long time, but always on the tile by the front door. This wasn’t an accident; this was something wrong. Plus, the water bowl was bone dry, and they don’t drink when we aren’t home.
I made a vet appointment for the next morning. That night Joey and Daphne kept getting up to go outside. In the morning, No one would eat except Joey who grudgingly ate about half his food, which was the first time since we’ve had him that he didn’t clean his bowl.
They took blood and urine at the vet and told us they’d have results on Monday.
I stopped at Petco on the way home to pick up a different flavor since I had my suspicions about the food. When I got there, every single one of the bags of Natural Balance venison and brown rice was gone. The gal at the counter told me they’d been selling it like crazy since the pet food recalls started.
All day Saturday, Daphne and Joey drank large amounts of water and went outside to pee (and chase squirrels). They both seemed run down and a bit off, but not really too bad. Occasionally Joey would vomit a clear fluid. For dinner, they had the duck and potato. They all cleaned their bowls.
Sunday, after another meal of duck and potato, things seemed mostly back to normal except that there was still way too much of the drink/urinate cycle going on. Sunday night, they each got up to go out twice.
This morning, I took Joey and Daphne to the vet. When I got to work, I Googled “natural balance venison brown rice” and got nothing. Then I tried it with Google’s blogsearch and discovered a bevy of posts from the last 24 hours about problems with Natural Balance’s venison and brown rice formula for dogs as well as one for cats (not the one Simon eats.) Itchmo seems to have been the site to break the story. Nothing in the mainstream media, of course.
Natural Balance’s site had no info. I called Petco and learned that they had been advised to remove it from the shelves for unspecified quality control reasons.
When the blood work came in, the results were consistent with the kidney issues associated with all of the pet food recalls. Daphne and Joey are now on a 24-hour kidney flush IV. They will spend the night at animal emergency so that their treatment can continue. Our awesome vets are confident that they will be okay.
We’re going to have Phoebe go through the treatment just in case, but she did have the good sense (of smell, I suppose) not to eat the food in question.
As of now, here’s what it says on the Natural Balance site:
NOTICE:
We are receiving consumer complaints regarding the Venison & Brown Rice Dry Dog Food, and Venison & Green Pea Dry Cat Foods. We do not know what is wrong with the food at this time, but we have heard that animals are vomiting and experiencing kidney problems. Although the problems seem to be focused on one particular lot, as a precautionary measure, we are pulling all dates of Venison & Brown Rice Dry Dog Food and Venison & Green Pea Dry Cat Food from the shelves.Please discontinue feeding all Venison and Brown Rice Dry Dog Food, and Venison and Green Pea Dry Cat Food.
We are working closely with the FDA.
We will update this website today, as more information comes available.NO OTHER NATURAL BALANCE PRODUCTS ARE AFFECTED.
There seems to be something very wrong with the pet food industry right now. I don’t trust it, and this just sickens me. The thought of losing all my dogs at once…
Assuming they all come through this okay, we’ll probably start feeding them a canine-healthy blend of people food (pizza, cheese, chili dogs, beer).
I think I’m through with packaged pet food.
When the thunder booms, sometimes a big dog needs the smallest chair to feel safe. And surely, there’s a book in there somewhere that explains that thunder monsters don’t go for greyhounds.
[saveagrey]
My classroom has no exterior windows and if I get busy, it’s easy to go a whole day with no idea of what the weather is like outside. This time of year, however, it’s beautiful and so, I’ve taken to going for walks around the building. It’s good to get out for some exercise and even more fun to see what kinds of wildlife I can identify. Today, I brought my camera.
I’ve been especially fascinated by the killdeer around the building. Initially, it was its call that caught my attention, and so I stopped to discover these noisy shorebirds that live nowhere near shore. Apparently their natural habitats are parking lots near fields and golf courses.
When I go for my walks, I always look forward to getting around to the west side of the building where they like to congregate in the drainage ditch, which this one discovered helps make him especially photogenic.
I see mockingbirds all the time, and today, I actually managed to get a picture of this one.
I’d like to try to get one displaying the white flashes on its wings, but that will take a bit of patience.
Finally, I saw this scissor-tailed flycatcher hanging out waiting to be photographed.
I’ve seen these birds all over the place around here, but I never knew what they were until today. The tip-off, of course, was when I saw one catch a fly in midair, his scissor-like tail streaming behind him. Now that I know what he is, I get to add him to my list.
In addition to the three I photographed, I also regularly see barn swallows, turkey vultures, white-winged doves, and some kind of hawk that I haven’t been able to name yet, although, I didn’t see him today.
It’s a funny thing walking around the building. Looking outward, I see birds, wild and free, filling me up with enough of the outdoors to go back in for the rest of the day, and all of it surrounding a building full of juvenile offenders. I wonder what they think about when they see the birds outside, or if they even notice them at all.
Today marks the return on Weekend Cat Blogging here at Coyote Mercury. Don’t worry, my fellow lovers of the pointy-headed hounds, Weekend Hound Blogging will continue, though they’ll have to occasionally sit out a weekend.
Simon is doing great. He likes playing feather toy and he follows us around, but his favorite activity is sitting on my nightstand watching the birds and squirrels in the backyard.
Simon is fitting right in. He never had to go through that I’m-a-new-cat period of hiding under furniture for the first week. In fact, he acts as though he’s always been here and at two weeks, it already feels that way to us.
After adopting him, we realized that we’d gotten him exactly seven months to the day after losing Morrison, and while we still miss the big guy, it’s certainly fun to make a new friend.
Update: Visit Simon’s new friends at the 159th Carnival of the Cats hosted by Bad Kitty Cats.
Continuing my effort to read the books that appear on Lost, I’ve arrived at Stephen King’s Carrie, which makes its appearance in “A Tale of Two Cities,” the season three opener.
Prior to Carrie, the only Stephen King books I’d read were his more recent ones (except for Firestarter, which I read perhaps 100 times in eighth grade) so going back to his first novel was kind of fun.
Carrie White is the girl that gets picked on by all the mean popular girls. She has her first period at age seventeen in the shower after gym class. Her insanely religious mother never told her what this meant, and Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death. The other girls make fun of her. Carrie is bitter, confused and angry. With the onset of her late puberty, she also develops telekinetic powers. One girl tries to make amends. Carrie goes to prom. There’s a practical joke and then Carrie turns her powers against her classmates.
My English classes just finished reading Lord of the Flies (my Lost post on that is here) and the question always comes up: what would happen if it were a bunch of girls? With Lord of the Flies in my head, I couldn’t help but think of Carrie as a kind of female version, with Carrie playing the part of poor doomed Piggy. With that thought in mind, it was hard not to think of Carrie as an examination of the effects of cliquish cruelty on the outsider, the kind of fiction that makes one think of things like Columbine.
Unlike much of King’s more recent work, Carrie is short and brisk. It’s a fast-paced novel that tells the story from a variety of viewpoints including investigatory committee hearings, police reports, letters, books written by survivors, scientific articles, and popular news pieces all interspersed with King’s no-frills narration. It’s one of those books where the form is part of the enjoyment of the text. A good read.
On to Lost. The first five minutes of season three was one of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen on TV. We meet Juliet hosting a book group meeting with no idea who she or any of the members are. She puts in a CD, burns some muffins and deals with book group members who complain about her book choice: Carrie. There’s a rumbling, they all run outside and there in the sky is Oceanic 815 breaking up above them. Suddenly, we realize that Juliet is one of the Others and that they live in nice houses with electricity and plumbing. They have the ability to score at least ten copies of recent editions of Carrie from the outside world. Your head spins.
Juliet says she chose Carrie because it’s her favorite book. What does this reveal about Juliet? Well, now that I’ve read Carrie and gotten to know Juliet a bit better its easy to see that Carrie White and Juliet the Other are both outsiders in their communities. Like Carrie, Juliet plots revenge (I wrote about this in my To Kill a Mockingbird post) against her own people. They are cruel to her (first sentencing her to death and then finally branding her in “Stranger in a Strange Land”) and don’t appear to think of her as one of them.
Like Carrie White, Juliet vacillates between being sweetly concerned with being liked and being an accomplished and merciless asskicker, though without Carrie’s telekinetic powers (I think). We saw this in last Wednesday’s episode (“Left Behind”) in which, Juliet cuffed herself to Kate so that she would have someone to be with after being abadoned by the Others. She appears to want to be with the Oceanic 815 survivors, but her manipulative nature and the fact that she wasn’t straight with Kate suggest to me that she may not be 100% on the side of the survivors. Perhaps, Like Carrie, Juliet is ultimately on her own side and all the while wishing desperately that she could fit in somewhere.
Next week’s episode features more Juliet flashbacks with Sayid, himself an accomplished and merciless asskicker, apparently offering to kill her if she doesn’t tell him everything. Can’t wait.
Other connections via Lostpedia:
- Carrie White, the eponymous heroine, attends Ewen High School. The principal of that school is named Henry Grayle (similar name to Henry Gale).
- In a Carrie TV Movie, the role of villainess Chris Hargensen was played by Emilie de Ravin, who currently portrays Claire.
This is also yet another Lost book that deals with mental/psychic/telekinetic powers.
Having nothing to do with Carrie, but interesting nonetheless, here are some links to three interesting posts about last week’s controversial Nikki & Paolo episode, “Expose” (which I really liked, by the way):
- Check the Fien Print wonders if “Expose” was Lost’s own version of Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead
- South Dakota Dark commends the episode for giving the viewers a break
- The House Next Door has some very good and amusing analysis as well. In fact, check back there every Thursday for good analysis (h/t to Scribes & Scoundrels for directing me there)
Click here to read all of my Lost book posts, or here for the index.
Next up… Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov.
And on this Friday, made especially good by not having school today, the first ten off the ‘pod…
- “Houses in Motion” – Talking Heads – The Name of this Band is Talking Heads
- “Sorrow” – Pink Floyd – A Momentary Lapse of Reason
- “I’m in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop” – Brian Wilson – Smile
- “Five Room Love Story (Live)” – Cowboy Junkies – Waltz Across America
- “Windfall” – Son Volt – Trace
- “Feel So Bad” – Lightnin’ Hopkins – Blues Kingpins
- “Antiquity” – Chicago Underground Trio – Flamethrower
- “I Love Her All the Time” – Sonic Youth – Bad Moon Rising
- “Sing a Simple Song” – The Meters – The Meters
- “Open Country Joy” – Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire
That is an eclectic set to say the least.
The Talking Heads tune at the start comes from my all time favorite live album. It covers the Heads from their post-punk minimalism through the expanded Remain in Light version of the band, which is still one of the most intriguing and thrilling musical adventures I’ve ever listened to. I had The Name of this Band… on tape for years and years. And years. Every time I went to a record store, I checked to see if it was out on CD, but no luck.
Few people I knew had heard it, and by 2004, the tape was getting pretty run down. The one day, lo, I saw it at the record store, not just on CD, but remastered and full of extra tracks from the Remain in Light days. The best parts, of course, are “Born Under Punches,” “Crosseyed and Painless,” and the ominous “Psycho Killer” that opens disc two. This was a band at the height of its powers and sometimes it seems the world is still catching up.
As one might guess from the title of this blog, I like coyotes. Yes, yes, it’s true. I never rooted for the roadrunner, though I like them too.
Though I prefer old coyote stories in the Native American trickster tradition or even the Western tall-tale genre, I like a modern coyote story as well so needless to say, this story caught my eye:
Employees and customers at a downtown Chicago Quiznos sandwich shop were stunned to see a coyote walk through the propped-open front door Tuesday afternoon and lie down in a cooler stocked with fruit juice and soda.
So fruit juice and soda? I figured he’d go straight for the roasted roadrunner on rosemary parmesan (ten times as fast as you can).
Assuming he’s uninjured and healthy, he’ll be released to the wild where he will promptly order an Acme anvil, Acme Quiznos employee disguise suit, and Acme deli meat slicer in order to build a fiendishly complicated Quiznos invasion device.
Back when this blog was only a week old (and hosted on Blogger), I took on one of the big issues of the time: big, ugly billboards.
I was inspired (or should I say provoked?) by a gigantic billboard that was erected near our neighborhood, surely making it one of the biggest erections in recent history. Well, it seems the county has won its legal battle with the apartment complex whose billboard can be seen for miles, as I realized when I first drove on the new toll roads.
I’m pretty sure you can see the thing from space.
At any rate, it sounds like it won’t be up much longer, which is good news for anyone who (like me) sees billboards for the vile eyesores that they are.