Skip to content

Year: 2007

Friday Random Ten

This is a hip – and on one track tragic – little set. Cowboy Junkies’ Waltz Across America appears for the second week in a row. It’s a cool little CD that we picked up when we saw them last year. Margo Timmins even signed it for us.

  1. “Audio Boxing” – Isotope 217 – The Unstable Molecule
  2. “Play Hurt” – The American Analog Set* – Set Free
  3. “The Drowning Man Knows His God” – The Mermen* – A Glorious Lethal Euphoria
  4. “Run” – New Order* – Technique
  5. “Good Friday (Live)” – Cowboy Junkies* – Waltz Across America
  6. “Letter from Home” – DJ Shadow – The Private Press
  7. “I Want an Alien for Christmas” – Fountains of Wayne – Out-of-State Plates
  8. “Tuff Gnarl” – Sonic Youth* – Sister
  9. “Save the Planet” – The Tragically Hip* – Phantom Power
  10. “Teknikal Illprovisation” – Sonic Youth* – Demonlover: Bande Originale du Film

*’s by the ones I’ve seen live

Hounds Today, Hounds Tomorrow

It looks like all three dogs will survive eating the latest recalled pet food – Natural Balance Venison & Brown Rice dry dog food (their Venison & Green Pea dry cat food was also recalled, but Simon wasn’t eating that).

The pups all seem to have recovered from kidney failure thanks to the efforts of the excellent doctors at the regular vet, emergency vet, and specialty vet hospital. Phoebe and Daphne are home with a clean bill of health, and Joey will come home tomorrow. His doctor says he is being a pest and that that is a very good sign.

Hopefully, they’ll feel up to some weekend – or should I say weakened? – hound blogging.

My wife has more on her site.

The details of this little adventure be found here, here, and here.

Check out Itchmo for more on the recalls as they happen.

Thanks again to all of you who have expressed concern and best wishes for the dogs.

Six Wrens All the Richer

This bird has flown along with its six offspring. I checked the box on Monday evening and saw a pile of small wrens looking up at me. When I got home on Tuesday, they had all left. I dumped out the nest and saw no dead ones and there weren’t any struggling in the yard, so I assume they all made it into the air.

I’m sorry I missed the flight lessons, but it’s good enough to know that the world is six wrens better today.

Hopefully, I wasn’t too late in cleaning out the box; I’d love it if they came back for a second round this year.

Be sure to check out I and the Bird #47 at Bell Tower Birding. My Three Bird Lunch post, which has a fairly decent shot of a scissor-tailed flycatcher is included in the carnival. It’s funny that the one time I had my camera at work is the only time I’ve seen one there.

Mercy Mercy Meme (The Listology)

It’s high time I caught up with this little homework assignment George left me last week. It is the biggest meme I’ve ever seen…

FOODOLOGY

Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Olive oil and vinegar

Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. Thundercloud

Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. Right now? Fonda San Miguel

Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. 20%, 21%, whatever it takes

Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick off of?
A. Bread. I would make a model prisoner since bread and water are two of my favorite things

Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. I was required to renounce all gum when I became a teacher

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A. At home: this

At work, this view from our hotel last summer:

Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. Two

BIOLOGY

Q. What’s your best feature?
A. I never directed a feature, only a few shorts.

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. Wisdom teeth and some front teeth when I was a kid

Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. Maybe I have a sixth sense that’s good for something

Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. A few years ago

Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. Forty pounds of toxic dog food

Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. Yes. I’m told I went skiing in Colorado in 1991. There is, however, no proof of this.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. Only if I could do something about it

Q. Is love for real?
A. Yes. Can I get a witness over here?

Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. Heironymous or Wolfgang, I go back and forth

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. Blue

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. By mistake, no. In fact, I swallowed an ibuprofen just this morning

Q. Have you ever saved someone’s life?
A. I’m told I have.

Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. I don’t know.

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. Perhaps out in the country

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. Prostitution isn’t my thing

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. No

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. No, but someday I might never blog again for free

Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. No.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. Hell, I might do that just for the bottle of hot sauce

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. Never

Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. Can I download episodes of Lost and watch them on an iPod?

Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. Yup

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. iPod, memory stick, chapstick, contact lens solution

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. I liked it.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. No

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. Stand

Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. Not anymore

Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. None since I blew out the last pair, stepped on a pop top, and had to cruise on back home…

Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. I run into them all the time at work

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. This

LASTOLOGY

Q: Friend you talked to?
A. One of the other teachers at school

Q: Last person you called?
A. The vet

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning?
A. The vet

Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. Finish my next novel

Q: What’s the last movie you saw?
A. Clue

Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. I try

Now that this towering meme is finished I tag (with humble apologies masking mischievous glee) my wife, Chris, and Danigirl.

Update: Keeping the meme alive – Danigirl and Chris.

Greyhounds Doing Better and on the Way to Greyt

After eating several bowls of a poisonous batch of Natural Balance’s Venison & Brown Rice, I am happy to report that it looks like all three hounds will pull through. Daphne and Phoebe are at home again tonight. They have to go back for one more day of subcutaneous fluids, but they will be fine. Joey will remain hospitalized on an IV until Friday, but he will also be fine, and he’ll get to go home on Friday afternoon. His vet says he’s doing great and expects a full recovery.

Thanks to all of you who sent good wishes, thoughts, prayers and nice words for our hounds. There are much worse things in the world the past few days than some blogger’s sick pups and so we appreciate it all the more.

As to the food… well, we’re beyond angry, but very relieved that this wasn’t fatal for our dogs. Sadly, not every pet owner can say that as you can see if your read the (very long and often depressing) comments section on this post at Itchmo. There is also another post at Itchmo regarding more suspect foods that are not yet under any recall. In fact, Itchmo seems to be more on top of this mess than anyone else.

For all you pet lovers reading this, please consider making your own dog or cat food, at least for the time being. Ours really liked the kidney friendly food we made for them last night.

Update on the Hounds

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.

Not Fit for a Dog

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.