as the pup waits for blast-off her front leg is secured with a Fentanyl patch, a narcotic 100 times more potent that morphine.
the vet insisted that we put a plastic cone on her, to make her look more like Laika, and to prevent her from chewing the patch. “if that happens,” the vet said, “then you’ll have a dead dog.”
he must have liked the big goofy stare i gave him, because he followed that up with “and of course people have tried to chew on them too, in which case you’d have a dead person.”
did i miss something or when did meat start looking like DVDs? will the full color booklets explain exactly what the difference is between the photograph for Tyson’s Beef Brisket vs. the one for Tyson’s Pork Loin (is it just the addition of a single tomato) or why the Hormel Italian Style Beef Roast says “au jus?”
help is on the way for iphone users buried by the Snowmaggedon. you don’t need to take your gloves off, or buy those expensive electrostatically-enhanced gloves. just get yourself a fancy schmancy meat stylus aka Korean snack sausage and check the weather with ease. i LOVE the fact you can chew on one end and work with the other.
it’s tuesday so i go to my yoga class a few minutes early, hoping for an illicit chance to stick my mat in the zapper. but hey! the sign that says “for authorized staff use only” is gone, and in its place is this:
it looks kind of fake, the way it’s just sort of stuck on, but i’m sure it will suck the dollar out of your credit card just fine. now that the management has pointed out the need for ultra-sanitation-to-the-max, they want to charge money to achieve it. smacks of some kind of twisted yoga philosophy, not surprisingly. oh sacrilege!
some things never seem to make sense together, unless you put them all inside a funny afternoon called “going to take photos of an organic avocado farm.”
20 some acres on the top of a hill in Camarillo, the farm has mostly avocados but they also grow citrus, cherimoyas, plums and heirloom apples. their dog Astro is on nature’s Avoderm – he mows like 5 avocados a day, but only the really smushed ones. it’s like veggie roadkill.
and then there’s our dog, who ignores the land o plenty around her and goes instead to greet the bees:
after a walk around the farm (including a little spying on the property next door—noticeably weed free thanks to Roundup), a little knife-wielding tussle between Mr. Farmer and Mrs. Farmer, some scientific Brix testing of grapefruit (theirs reached 11, their neighbor’s a paltry 7.5), we arrive at homemade Ume wine:
and fresh macadamia nuts.
apparently if bees have too many macadamia flowers they will become toxic bees and in turn produce toxic honey. good thing there’s some billion avocado flowers to keep them otherwise occupied.
apparently there is less than one percent of the world’s avocado growers doing what they are doing in terms of bio-agriculture. they have ladybugs, snail eating snails, slug sliming slugs, and an “energy pyramid.” they’re trying to figure out how coyotes, gophers and the weird snake-lizard fit into their ecosystem as well.
they also have the skinny about the other farmers at the market – who’s not a farmer, who’s selling someone else’s fruits and veggies, who’s got a fishy certificate. oy.
while the east coast deals with its “Snowmaggedon,” we get (along the 14 freeway near Acton, anyway) a rather on and off storm, big raindrops followed by small patches of sun. it’s like going through the MooGooGaiPan tunnel, only bigger.
start by driving INTO the storm:
stop at your friendly double-double In and Out burger:
