Maximum carnage in a minimum of time...

Visited with my friends Donna and Rick at Donna's mom's house near Phoenix this past Friday night. Kind of thrown together at the last minute, but that's how my social life usually works. So, after playing an outdoor gig in the morning, I ran home, showered, and headed off to the airport. After about an hour in the air, I touched down, rented a car (and by the way, at Alamo Rent-a-Car, a PT Cruiser is among their "compact" models), and soon I was crawling through traffic on my way to the suburbs south of town.

After I arrived, we hung out at the house a while, looking at real estate websites (they're working on a possible move to the area), giggling at lolcats, and having a glass of wine before striking out for dinner about an hour later. The Mexican restaurant we went to was a favorite of Donna and Elinor for their mole, but the place was pretty crowded so we ended up outdoors on the patio. They had great chips and salsa, and we munched those for a while as we ordered a round of drinks. My blue margarita was excellent, and in the 100-degree heat it went down like fruit punch, even though I'd been making a special effort to drink a lot of water all day. After a short while our entrees arrived, and we chatted about business planning as we worked through them. I had the pollo asado with rice and borracho beans, which was very good. Donna's mole was excellent, and I was kind of wishing I'd ordered the same when the weirdness started setting in.

"Weirdness," in this context, is the best term I can think of to describe the general feeling of, "whoa... what the heck is happening to my head?" After confirming with Rick that yes, I was looking a little pale, I tried waiting it out, hoping like crazy I hadn't lost track of how much I'd been drinking and was about to lose my dinner all over the patio. Just in case, I asked Donna to walk with me to the ladies' room. It was a good thing she agreed, too... because she kept me from doing a face-plant moments later, as I unceremoniously passed out.

But wait... it gets better! So I come to and find myself on the tile in the middle of this restaurant. The manager is offering me a damp towel and telling me not to get up so quickly, and I'm thinking, "oh crap... I can't believe I just did that." But I still wanted to go to the ladies' room, so Donna and the restaurant manager (a very nice lady who said this happened a lot) escorted me over, and I soaked up the air conditioning while I tried to clear my head. A few minutes later a team of paramedics arrived, so we moved back out to the patio where they checked me over. My blood sugar was normal and I was starting to feel a bit more together, so we were thinking of just heading for home when the medics asked me if I was okay to walk out to the car. Upon standing my blood pressure and pulse (which were being monitored) both took a nosedive, so on their recommendation I consented to be taken to the hospital. Within minutes I was sporting an I.V., a heart monitor, a pulse/ox monitor, and was being loaded into an ambulance bound for Mercy General Hospital in Gilbert. Not *exactly* how I'd planned to spend the evening.

I was certain I was headed for a lecture about my reckless alcohol abuse, but after a battery of blood tests, an EKG, and a chest X-ray, the E.R. doctors decided that my meltdown was likely the result of a combination of fatigue, low potassium, and being unused to the heat, which were all amplified by the drink I'd had at the restaurant. They dumped about a liter and a half of saline into me, prescribed potassium and sleep, and then turned me loose to go home at about 1:30am. Rick and Donna (who had been incredibly good sports through this whole stupid adventure) drove me back to Elinor's house, and spent a few minutes peeling innumerable little adhesive foil squares off my skin before heading off to bed. What a night.

Given that waste of an evening it would have been nice to stay a little longer, but I didn't really mind going home Saturday and spending the rest of the weekend taking a break from my usual hectic routine. I think that if there were a moral to this story, it's that I'm not 18 anymore and really need to get serious about taking better care of myself. That's a bummer, but as my office-mate once remarked, getting old is WAY better than the alternative.

In the interest of posting a trip photo, though, I give you this shot of Elinor's little whirlwind of a Boston Terrier, Pogo. This year-old terror is almost always moving, and I was actually surprised to catch him taking a momentary catnap the next day. Here he's hoping that his perfect "down-stay" will earn him another game of tug-of-war...

I has a carrot!

Every once in a while, the supermarket gets these HUGE carrots, and since everyone in my house is on a never-ending diet, we try to eat as many veggies as possible. The dogs just LOVE these, so they get them as treats. This one kept Punky busy for at least ten minutes... crunch crunch crunch.

The little dog with no eyes

Just an update for Punky's well-wishers: She's doing great, and is getting back to the little hellion of a dog she was a few weeks ago. She's had a bit of local swelling (not surprising when you consider all the connective tissue the eye had to be released from), but she hasn't needed any pain meds today and was up for her usual ride to the donut shop this morning, where she shared a plain donut with Dexter. Since she really shouldn't be left alone much at this point, Punky joined Dexter and me for a Father's Day visit to my folks' house. Judging by her snoring on the dog bed in the next room, she's pretty tuckered out... but I'm glad to see her doing so well and in relatively little discomfort.

Those who might be facing similar challenges with a pet of their own (or, anyone who is just curious) must certainly wonder what a dog with no eyes actually *looks* like, so I've included this picture that I snapped with my cameraphone this afternoon. As one might expect, Punky just looks like her eyes are closed all the time. It's taking a little getting-used to, since even blind eyes help give a dog an "expression" that provides a cue about their alertness/mood. Without them, I'm finding myself paying more attention to Punky's ears; combined with the direction she turns her head, I get an idea of what she's listening to or what she's about to do. Meanwhile, her other body language--putting a paw on my knee, rolling over for a tummy rub, or jumping up and putting her head on my arm--is, of course, unmistakable.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there...

Just when I thought it was safe to relax...

Some vacation week *this* was. Finals were last week, and with everything going on--including some unexpected filling-in for a colleague--I didn't get all my classes' term papers graded. So that, along with all the other end-of-quarter grading I normally have to do, spilled over into this week in a major way. I got everything posted by the deadline, but that required a few *really* late nights that I'm just recovering from now.

Speaking of paper-grading, one problem that I can see has gotten markedly worse is the volume of cheating I'm seeing in class assignments. In fact, I don't think it would be exaggerating to say that plagiarism has now reached epidemic levels. I beg people not to do it; I warn them that I wrote professionally for years and I can spot this stuff (and yes, I check), and I schedule additional office hours the week before case studies are due. In spite of all this, I've found more papers with unattributed copied-and-pasted material than I *ever* have in a single term. One particularly lazy student actually pulled stuff right from Wikipedia and pasted it into his first two pages. I don't know if they think their professors are retarded, or whether they just don't care, but either way, but I'm frustrated with the apathy and especially irritated that I have to waste so much of my time being the plagiarism cop. And since it's clear that many/most of these folks have no intention of actually learning from assignments like this, I don't really see the point anymore in putting us all through the exercise. Instead, I'll make a group strategic plan (which can't be ripped off) more intensive, make it worth more toward their course grade, and then give an objective final exam. Yeah, I realize this amounts to giving in, but I'm not sure what else to do and keep my sanity intact.

On other fronts, the show with Roger Neumann went well, and I'll post a recap of that later. Also recently heard a CD that I played on a couple of months ago (I was sitting in for a friend), and a solo I played sucked *SO* bad that I'm going to pretend it never happened and just move on with life. Right now, though, I'm dog-sitting. Punky, my Springer Spaniel who was born blind from an inherited eye malformation, had a second eye develop glaucoma and had surgery to deal with it this afternoon. The condition is very painful--human sufferers compare it to a migraine headache that never goes away--and treatment in dogs depends largely on whether the dog has vision in the affected eye. If so, medication is typically used keep the intraocular pressure down. When the dog doesn't have vision to preserve, treatment is often more aggressive and ranges from surgery to relieve the pressure, to replacement of the interior of the eye with a prosthesis (which gives the dog a more normal appearance), to enucleation (removal) of the entire eye. Since Punky has been through this once before, the decision to remove her remaining eye was an easy one; she's the kind of dog who pile-drives her way through life, and a useless eye just gets in the way of things like catching rats (yes, really) and terrorizing mailmen. It's also a permanent solution to the constant management of cornea ulcers and secondary infections common with blind but active dogs. She's home from her surgery and in a fair bit of discomfort now, but experience has shown that she'll be back to her evil ways in a day or so. It'll also take some getting used to for me since her eyes are now permanently closed, but I'll figure out a new way to "read" her. I'm just glad she'll be out of her pain.

And on that note, I'm off to cook some doggie dinners. Cheers...