Roberta Baker was a saint. It is incredible to me how little I appreciated that when we were working together. As the song says, “I was a young and callow fellow.” Which sounds nicer than saying I was a jerk, which I pretty much was. My wife tried working with me for a while and […]
Category Archives: A day in the life
Several months ago, Oliver broke his left front leg, both bones, and right above his wrist. With both bones broken, a splint or cast was unlikely to give good results, so we felt he needed orthopedic surgery. The problem was, the lower fragments were so small, there wasn't much to grab onto. The other problem […]
This could be about Father’s Day or my birthday or science or all three. That' s my Dad on the left, and that good-looking, fair-haired boy at Mom's shoulder is me, back in 1962. Somewhere (somewhen?) down the line I skewed a lot more toward Dad. In the second photo, you see him a few […]
I was a little surprised to find my last post about our animal control situation printed in the Daily Dunklin Democrat newspaper as a letter to the editor. I'm not upset, just surprised, as they didn't talk to me about it, and I didn't send it to them. Of course, anything on the internet is […]
You may be aware that there are some upsets and disagreements over the handling of our city’s animal control department. This is a complex issue, and I fear that it is being oversimplified in a polarizing way. When people of good will seem to be at odds, there is usually some failure to communicate. It […]
When I was in high school and college, there was a certain time when it was considered "mandatory" to take a foreign language class. I'm sure that in some schools you could have taken German or Japanese. In Kennett it was French or Spanish. I chose French, having the odd notion that it might be […]
“So, on those microchips, what kind of range do they have?” About three inches. When people don’t really understand what microchip identification is, they can have some unrealistic expectations. Look at this little thing: do you see any room for a power supply? I mean, I’ve heard of the “button battery”, but you’d have to […]
You’ve probably seen the TV ad where the doctor rushes across the ball field trying to make a catch. “You wouldn’t want your doctor doing your job, so why try to do his?” It’s about folks trying to diagnose themselves and treat with over-the-counter remedies. Some do this because they want to save money (and who […]
"Now why is there two sets of directions on this bottle?” What do you mean? “It says on this label, give one pill twice daily, every 12 hours. Now, which is it?” That is a true story. I knew that we had experienced some communication difficulties with this client while he was still in the […]
We can do so many wonderful things with medicine and surgery that we begin to think we can fix anything. If we just do the right thing, make the right choices, do the right tests, perform the right treatments, we can make the patient well again. Well, doing the right thing is certainly better than […]