A little Less Conversation

Things are not super great in MS. Unfortunately, we went to the vet on Saturday. Madison had a red belly, which had me worried. Turns out she had some sort of allergic reaction and started itching it pretty badly – now it is infected. She is on major antibiotics. She isnt’ acting like a sick dog – but she isn’t an all well puppy. So, I don’t want her spending too much time outside until I burn off the leaves in the back yard. However, every time we have a weekend where I’m not booked solid it rains and I can’t burn them off. Plus, these dogs are dumb. When I leave them outside during the day, they spend half of their day sitting in the leaf piles as though they are “beds”. Yesterday I pulled a huge nasty tick off of Daisy. I don’t want to encourage any more of that than possible. Unfortunately, when they can’t go outside they get into a bunch of trouble in the house. If I didn’t know any better I would think that they hated one another!! There is a lot of biting and rolling around. I definitely have not figured out what to do with them while I’m out of town next week.

Still, it could be worse. Erin and Jeff, she works in my lab, just got a new dog over Christmas. They had a basset hound, Pogo, who was purchased when Jeff was single as a mechanism to attract women (it worked), and Alley, a cat who came from Erin’s single days. They wanted a second dog, so after much looking around they tried to rescue a basset hound. They picked Juno up on the way to Erin’s parents for Christmas. Both dogs spend a fun holiday in Memphis with Erin’s parent’s dogs. All went well until they brought Pogo and Juno home. Pogo stopped eating on December 27th and hasn’t eaten since then. After going through bloodwork at the vet the other day it turns out that Pogo is just depressed. He now has two crazy females living with him, so he is on puppy prozac!!! Really, puppy benadryl isn’t as bad as puppy prozac.

Speaking of out of town – Next week will be a busy week. It turns out I’ll be world traveling. I’m heading to Washington DC on Sunday morning. I’ll spend the first part of the week at the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Meeting. It is essentially a meeting of 10,000 transportation professionals from all areas – government (state, federal, and local), academia, practitioners, and all sorts of others. It is amazing some of the things that get discussed in the sessions in this meeting. The conference deals with my area: pavement materials, as well as highway and airfield design, traffic flow, geometrical design, railway and ship transit, policy, and a million other things that I forget. My favorite is always seeing the sessions regarding things like: Women’s Issues in Transportation, or Signage for the Elderly. There will be people from all over the nation, and it should be a blast, as always. Luckily, my former boss is going to go on his own dollar – he retired last year and it just isn’t TRB without Al there drinking scotch and chewing on a cigar.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon I’ll be heading out to Las Vegas to meet a couple of my coworkers to attend a training seminar on constitutive modeling of soils. If that doesn’t sound like a Vegas type of topic, I don’t know what is!!! Actually, this will be a great training course for the work I’m doing right now and the work I want to move into. So, this will actually be a really good opportunity for me. Plus, it is Vegas baby!!! My one goal: Go to the Venetian. I’ve been to Vegas before for work, and it sort of made me sick. I see so much excess that it sort of makes me sad. It was cool to see the neat stuff, but it goes a step too far. Plus, we have boats here in the ‘Burg, so the gambling isn’t such a big deal to me. Still, Vegas Baby! Where else do you get to go to a mall with a canal and gondoliers in it?