The Dreamwidth Journal of zdashamber

Ask yourself, do I have $6000 sitting around that I can spend tonight on my cat? I'm guessing the answer is "I need pet health insurance, which is only about $20 a month, but which I have to buy before my cat is too old, because more than 10 or 11 years old means there's no one who will insure my cat."

$6000 is the price after your cat catches his leg on something while jumping off it and breaks the leg: it covers taking your cat to the emergency vet in the middle of the night to get him painkillers and antibiotics, and then getting the leg pinned together again later. At least 6K. It's probably more than that, because Flat Hair Girl, who had this experience, did not have that kind of money.

I'll tell the story sometime, and it's sad and you might not want to read it, though the cat lives. But the main point of this post is, veterinary bills have gotten insane, and you might not have known. Maybe things are better if you don't go to Berkeley, home of enormously rich people. But I'm thinking that the cost drivers are systemic. This is my hypothesis: 1. Drugs: crazy expensive due in part to the drug war. Ketamine, frex, is both abusable and a veterinary anaesthetic. 2. Veterinary "guild" attitude: frex, there's only one state school in all of California (pop. 60M) that gives out veterinary degrees, and it's damn hard to get into the veterinary program at Davis; and veterinarians from other countries have insane hoops to jump through to be able to practice in America. 3. Pet Health Insurance. Yeah, this ain't a scene, it's a goddamned arms race: once people started thinking "why can't my cat have chemo?" they needed insurance, and then when a decently large number of people got insurance the vets could start charging $4000 for an amputation, which according to Flat Hair Girl was only $300 20 years ago in Illinois.

You know that feeling, when your hands are so cold that they can't tell what temperature the water you're running over them is, just that it's quite different, kind of peppery? I do. In other news, I'm back in California!

( Kvetching, Celcius vs Fahrenheit, mutations, bright side, Cyberpunk, plotting )

Homer: Come on, Flanders, there's gotta be something you hate. What about mosquito bites?
Ned: Mmm mmm! Sure are fun to scratch! Mmm! Satisfying!
Homer: What about, uhhhhh, fluorescent lights?
Ned: Oooh, they hum like angels! You're never lonely if you've got a fluorescent light!

I want to like fluorescent lights. Really, I mean, there's the living-lightly thing, and there's the not-burning-out-suddenly thing, and there's the freeging-politicians-jamming-'em-in-our-face thing. But they just suck. They create crappy light.

I've mentioned this to my friends some, and they're like "Oh, but those are bulbs you got from Ikea years ago! Things are advancing really fast!" But I've been doing a lot of research about light sources lately for an idea I have on backlit mouldings, and I can tell you that the trouble is: every single way to make light today that doesn't involve "heating something up" (ie, incandescents or fire) involves quantized light. We excite this thing electrically, and then it drops back down an energy level, releasing a packet of photons at a certain wavelength. Fluorescents have a vapor in them that glows at high UV energy, and coatings on the glass that are excited by that energy and then put out visible light droppings. EL, neon, LEDs, directly drop photon packets.

( So let's compare spectrums, shall we? )

See how much I love you? I wrote this story up last week, and I carried the bytes one by one by hand to a place with internet so I could present them to you... This is a story of hang gliding, true as I heard it.

* * *

Hang glider pilots are prohibited from flying at night by FAA regulations. When I first started, I asked if they sometimes ignored this for fun, like they ignored the reg that keeps you below 20,000 feet. No, came the answer, for hang gliding is a long graceful exercise in What goes up Must come down, and you want to be able to see where you're landing.

Also, the thermals die down at night.

This is a story I heard from a pilot a couple years back, and it's got an extremely amusing moral. He started thus: There are three types of people in the world. There are people who don't even notice poison oak... They could cook hotdogs on spits of poison oak and go blithely on. This is about 15% of the populace. There are the normal people, who encounter poison oak and itch and bitch; these are about 65% of the populace. And then, he said, there are the people like me, who are deathly allergic to poison oak, such that even a touch will cause the affected skin to fall clean off.

I was flying at Big Sur, he said. Growing up in Colorado, I saw hundreds of TV commercials for "Big Sur Waterbeds"... Surf crashing and spouting in the face of craggy cliffs. Green wooded hills and valleys. Apparently, in the fabled land of California, this place actually exists. And you can hang glide over it.

Alas, it cannot help but be right next to the Pacific Ocean. ( The pilot's tale )