Wednesday, August 13, 2008

more on Sam

Sam is still moving stiffly, but now that the weather has (thankfully!) cooled off, he's a bit more spry. A couple of friends have recommended some pain killers, so I'll need to start looking for them. The challenge will be getting pain killers into Sam.

The heartworm pill is easy, as it looks and (apparently, I haven't tried this personally) tastes like kibble. Getting other meds into Sam has always been a challenge. He's never been one for having pills coaxed down his throat, and when mixed with peanut butter, he simply licks up the peanut butter. (NO fool, my dog.) The only approach that seems to work is to grind up the pill and mix it with applesauce. Given that I am generally only about 25% awake when I give Sam his breakfast, this could pose certain difficulties for me.

Meanwhile - I'm cynical about Edwards and his affair, addicted to late-night Olympics and highly amused by the student who complained to the dean about me. I'm "unreasonable" because I deducted points from her essay because she didn't proof-read. The dean was much amused too, and told her so.

8 comments:

Harriet said...

I can't believe a student would complain about that to a dean. Such a course of action would never, in a million years, have occurred to me.

lemming said...

Harriet - she's not the first - or the second, or...

"This is a history class, that shouldn't matter!"

Jeanne said...

More and more, students complain about points being "deducted" for grammatical and punctuation errors even in an English department class.

My most pompous response is to explain that they have to earn points, that I don't think of everyone as starting with a perfect score.

My CYA response is to hand out increasingly detailed assignment sheets, which the most aggressive complainers don't seem to be able to read and understand.

Drewster said...

I kind of like that idea. "Every paper starts with a zero and you work your way up to 100".

This just makes me snicker. You really don't have to write well for a History class? Where do they come up with this?

Aye yi yi!

Chase Driven said...

I have an old dog. She's to the point where we don't let her jump in and out of the truck. She's willing, but she starts limping afterward too much. The Lovely J has had this dog in her life for 12 years. 12. It will be sad when it's her time to go.

Side note: when it's her time, hopefully measured in years from now, we'll bring a new dog into the family. If all goes as expected, that means my son will spend most of his childhood with a friend who will likely pass in his mid teens.

Man, sometimes its hard to stay grounded in the present.

I've taken to calling out co-workers who use words that don't exist or that are just wrong. Recent examples: "orientated" (to mean "oriented" -- "orientated" is a common IT word sin) and "derogate" (to mean "reduce" instead of its more normal "to annul a law"). So far, no customers have called me to complain.

I also toss resumes with obvious spelling and or grammar errors. Feel free to share that with any student who thinks spelling and grammar only matter some of the time. And I'm far from alone on that.

Wow. This is a long comment. I might as well make it just a little longer but I must warn you: I'm out of things to say.

Matt Brown said...

I think yoo were just being unreasonoble.

One Man and his Dogs said...

Pills into awkward dogs... After trying virtually everything, I generally find crushing the pill and putting it into "meat spread", or "meat paste", (not sure if the same terms are used in the US) usually works. Stronger flavoured the better.

Awkward students...Turning them into the meat spread you then put the pill in?

A very nice blog page :)

One Man and his Dogs said...

I had a dog with arthritis for a number of years. She had good and bad periods. There are various liquid medications which you can give for short periods, followed by an interval, then another course. They certainly seemed to help for quite a while.

A "vet" would know what was currently available.

Also they are fairly easy to put into the dog's food, without it (hopefully) knowing...