Bald Is Not Necessarily Beautiful

Look at this poor bird! Bald as a cue ball! Ron caught him taking a dip in our pond yesterday. I just have to feel sorry for the poor thing because I'm sure he's being ridiculed by the rest of the birding population. They can be so cruel. Ron said it was perfectly normal and I kept my thoughts to myself. Mainly that he didn't know what he was talking about. But, sure enough, I googled "bald cardinals" (which in itself is hysterical) and some cardinals do go through a post breeding molt. Or it can be caused by mites. If we were trained ornithologists we could put a little band on this bald bird's foot and track him to see if he grows new feathers (the info said he should have a new batch of feathers in about a month). My initial thought was that there had been a nuclear explosion in our backyard and the bald bird was an unfortunate casualty. Was I ever glad to realize I was clearly out of my mind!

You know that gargantuan limb that fell during the storm last week? Well, Ron didn't get around to taking care of it until Saturday. He was sawing a smaller limb and managed to puncture his forearm with the saw. He didn't rake it across it; it came straight down with probably eight hundred pounds of pressure and made a nice little row of offset puncture marks. By Saturday night it was hurting so he called Ask-A-Nurse and she advised him to go to the Emergency Room. I was beside myself with excitement. What better way to spend your Saturday evening than sitting in a room with The Strangest People Ever to Walk the Planet Earth?

There was a young gal who had severed the artery in her arm, or so she said. Even in that extremely perilous state she was able to talk on the phone in a very loud voice for a very long time about how the blood shot up three feet into the air and that it was her hair cutting hand and the doctors were just going to have to figure out how she could use her thumb because she had a new job to go to on Sunday. Or the man whose eye was bleeding because it was a glass eye and it was obviously not working properly. And he wasn't the one that needed to be seen. It was his mother, who kept moaning over and over (I really did feel sorry for her). There was a skinny young girl who was pregnant, with her belly button protruding through her knit top like a carrot. And the mother who had a migraine headache and brought her three kids with her. There was a kid who came in with his head split open, smiling like a doofus the whole time. The guy who came in right before us had some sort of severed thumb action going on and after about half an hour left to go to Menorah. After about three hours we finally saw a doctor, who told Ron to take some ibuprofen and ice it . This valuable piece of medical intervention will probably cost $2,000. I think I'll set up my own emergency room clinic in our basement. Because I can't get enough of The Strangest People Ever to Walk the Plant Earth.