For the cold and snowbound

Pictures from a visit to the Farmer's Market (over a year ago.)

 

Spring is coming. Really!

Email to my insurace company

Car insurance.  Home insurance.  The company has a website.  I can view my policy online, pay my bill and email them questions.  They just made me change my password AGAIN and refused to let me change it to one of the passwords I had used six to nine months ago.  So I emailed them:

Oh, for goodness sake, stop listening to your ultra-conservative web security geeks and knock off making us change our password every three months.  How does this make my account any more secure?  Are you telling me that some computer hacker is working away in his lair for months and months to steal my password and he is FOILED because at the end of month three - HA HA!!!   Your policy has forced me to change my password!!  Take THAT evil, computer hacker guy!  All your work for 2 months and 29 days has been wasted!!!  WASTED!!!  And now you have to start all over!!  Mwa ha ha!!!  The good guys win again!!!

And really, I have my insurance coverage with you.  If a hacker mangaged to steal my password and get into my account - what's he going to do?  INCREASE my insurance coverage?!  Pay my bill for me?  Heavens, no!  Not that!  

Your web security folks are supposed to tell you that we should change our password every three months.  It is their job to think about the worst case scenarios and come up with ways to combat them.  But it is your job, oh reasonable and practical-minded customer service executives, to see the whole picture and realize that you can go overboard with your security policy by making it too strict and hugely inconvenient to your customers.  You know that you just force us to start writing down our passwords, don't you?  How safe is that?

Please consider changing your password policy.  Thank you for your time.

 I couldn't find any good pictures to go with this story,

so here is a frog:

 

(And YES, I did use all of those exclamation points in my email.  You got something to say about it?!?!)

Rosemary blooming

Notes on a Colonoscopy

You'll be happy to know I have a very clean colon.  Not even a polyp.   Scientific proof that I am not full of sh*t.

I think I am immune to Demerol* because I was awake and coherent the whole time.  I was watching on the screen and it was awesome!  Like a  twisted Disneyland ride floating through undulating, pink-walled tunnels.  You never knew what was around the next corner! 

(*I might be impervious to narcotics in general.  I took Vicodin once for pain and it did absolutely nothing for me.)

One of my nurses was named Jeff and looked exactly like Chong from the Cheech & Chong films - except Jeff's beard was longer and more scraggly.

At one point in the middle of ... um... the journey, Jeff left the room and another guy came in.  I looked at him and said, "Who invited you?"  He laughed and the doctor said, "You're funny."

The procedure was not painful at all and there was only a teeny-tiny amount of discomfort near the end.

The worst part of the whole thing was that while I was waiting in the recovery area, I suddenly became very nauseous and broke into a cold sweat.  Then I threw up the only thing I had consumed that day - a few sips of water.  They said it was probably the Demerol (not so immune, I guess.)  After that I felt much better.

So the lesson, kids, is that if you are supposed to get a colonoscopy, just go ahead and do it.  It's really not a big deal.  And you can always ask them to load you up on the meds if you are nervous and not interested in watching the ride through Mucosa Wonderland.

Meet Monk

He is such a peaceful soul.

Does not bark.

Did not know any commands but learned "Sit" in less than a day.

At times, does not seem to hear very well.

Beginning to wonder if he has a hearing problem.

Will ask the vet next week.

Easily defeated the gate that was supposed 

to keep him in the kitchen in spite of 

his lame front leg.

(Might have superpowers.)

Also known as Pimp Dawg because 

he has charmed Lily 

into licking his wee-wee for him at least twice a day.

She seeks it out like a hungry calf going for its mothers milk.

Or perhaps it is not because of Monk's seductive ways.

Maybe Lily is just a slut.

She is, after all, 11 years old.

The old girl probably has more than a few stories from her past
that we'll never know.