rainmaker cometh

Jack was uncharacteristically punctual. I gave him 9 hours before I post an entry without a kingfisher picture, he had it up in 2. This is a female belted kingfisher; males are bluer. People still refer to her as he even when we know better. We feed them piscivore diet, which Tiffany got in her hair. She says all that fish oil is good for it. Normally, they eat lots and lots of smaller fish like minnows and they're a pain in the ass to keep. Someone found her in a parking lot, possibly hit by a car or possibly just from crash landing, mistaking the blacktop for water. We're going to flight test her Friday and hopefully she'll be releasable.

She bobs her head a lot so Jack took about 25 pictures in rapid succession and then took a video of the feeding/medicating process.
Who knows where that ends up. Probably on one of the tvs we have scattered about the wildlife center.


Here is a picture of the squirrel. I wouldn't normally post squirrel pictures unless I take them myself but these are BLACK SQUIRRELS. I don't think Facebook altered the urls themselves so much as they kind of went through the site with metaphorical pruning shears and now a bunch of things don't work properly.

There was a paper in med ward that had pictures of various animals and facts about those animals, including the gray fox from this year and a bunch of animal pictures, including some kind of tree frog, and how skunks are good for your garden because they forage for grubs, that didn't end up on the Wildlife Center's facebook page for some reason.

I asked Jack about the oystercatcher and he said he took a bunch of pictures of him but he wasn't satisfied with any of them.

One of the painted turtles died and he was in rigor mortis so we didn't actually need to doppler him to confirm his death, as we do with turtles. Another painted turtle died a few days after a really intense fishing hook removal surgery. Tiffany says it might have been pneumonia, which we didn't notice piled up everything else wrong with the turtle. Yet another painted turtle is tilting in water and may or may not need his eye removed but is otherwise very vivacious. A feist (backformed from feisty), as Abby would put it. Wiktionary tells me it's a real word that isn't really used anymore, used to describe silent but deadly farts and belligerent yip dogs.

This is all pharmacology talk so imagine my hand going over my head like "whoosh."
Yes, turtles and other animals can get addicted to morphine because addiction isn't just an emotional state, it can be physical as well, not just for opiates but for alcohol and tobacco and anti-depressants.
Abby got us sidetracked into a discussion about workaholics and I don't know how.

The goose has a cast on his leg which makes taking him out pretty awkward.

Owl eyes remind Abby of cat eyes.

I think we need some kind of stopper for the bathtub drain because we have to block it by stuffing a glove in there and holding it down with a couple of concrete blocks.

One of the gulls may have pneumonia but he probably got it from poking his face in his water dish.
They're not the brighest bulb on the tree, says Abby, our resident lampbreaker.

Abby says it's a good dreary day to spend at the wildlife center and then to spend in bed reading or watching movies or playing video games. They want to have a movie night because the interns' room upstairs has a bunch of old VHS tapes, so they can watch Fly Away Home or something. Abby says the first movie she saw in theaters was The Lion King. Abby doesn't remember seeing the live action Grinch but was apparently terrified by it. I think the first movie I saw in theaters is Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, which Tiffany was obsessed with.
That's why I love the War Against Silence. He spent part of the review of Stretch Princess' Fun With Humans talking about how he wants one month a year which he can devote to reading and how he hasn't had that time since before high school and Tiffany said that it would be nice to be able to afford that and Tiffany says that the wildlife center is understaffed but most people are there because they want to help animals. I know I am and Abby says nobody takes vacations any more because nobody wants to come back from a vacation just to find their position occupied by someone else. Like me, Abby used to read a lot.
I'm the other way around, though. The summers that I consider my best are ones where I'm going to concerts and museums or taking art classes and not just laying about doing nothing.
Stretch Princess are surprisingly unknown; they were on She's All That and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

It was cool in the hospital corridor but warm in med ward and even warmer and more humid outside so I'm all kinds of achy.

Tiffany got wistful because every time she gets to know the interns and their personal habits and quirks and personalities, they're gone.

Abby says that pineapple at just the right level of ripeness tastes just like coconut. Her boyfriend is allergic to coconut and seafood so if he ever found himself washed up on some island in the south pacific, he's fucked, or maybe he could just try to get off and worst case scenario, he ends up in Fiji or Australia.
If you think about it, if Chuck was in the Indian Ocean instead, he could end up in Burma or Iran and things would go from bad to worse.

It started to pour just as Julianne finished with the outdoor raccoons.

Julianne learned that raccoons do not like celery.

They once practiced suturing on banana peels. We use towels. Some people apparently use mice.

burning question: But what is it about white culture that it only thrives in the continued absence of any other?