March is Women's History Month, if you didn't know. I work in a strange profession, one that has changed quite solidly in demographics from its original incarnation to its current status, graduating classes of row after row of- well, men, mostly- now replaced, to an 80% extent, by women. I spend a lot of time talking about veterinary medicine, and I would say about 80% of the time I am talking about it with women (who'd have guessed?) Does the changing demographic matter? Yes and no. I may be ... Read more »
stress
The Long Dark Tea Time of the Brode
This is my life right now: Commute kids to school. Get loan documents. Get more loan documents. Write. Provide more loan documents. I have done this house buying thing once or twice in my life, but it's never been like this. I get it, things are different now. But it feels almost violating, some random 20 something loan intern combing through the minutiae of your life's history, eyeing you with mistrust, as if YOU'RE the one responsible for the current housing mess. While our mortgage history ... Read more »
Discombobulated
dis·com·bob·u·late transitive verb \ˌdis-kəm-ˈbä-b(y)ə-ˌlāt\ : upset, confuse <inventing cool new ways to discombobulate the old order — Kurt Andersen> We are now in our new apartment. Just like that, I flew out to Atlanta one day, I came back to a packed house, and the next day we said goodbye and left a decade behind. I would have had a little more mental space to process this, but then a hurricane hit and I felt too guilty and concerned about other people's devastation to ... Read more »
Wordless Wednesday: Happy Place
When the going gets bad, the prey runs. When it comes to fight or flight, I'm a flier. Unfortunately, there are lots of stressful situations- moving, for example, in a mere three weeks with no particular place in mind as of yet and two large dogs to manage in the process- where flight is potentially a less than optimal response. So in those cases, I hold in my head a file folder of Happy Places to which I can retreat, if only for a moment, if only in my head. A Total Recall, if you will, of my ... Read more »
This stinks
As some of you know, because I haven't shut up about it for the last few weeks, we have our house on the market. It's rough, not only because the market is rough, but because trying to pretend a house full of kids and animals is a pristine model home is an exercise in futility. The furniture has some vestigial bite marks left over from Brody's youth; the grass has some brown spots despite my best efforts; the walls have some stickers I haven't managed to completely remove yet. However, those ... Read more »
How I learned what kind of dog I am
Like many pet lovers, I waste a lot of time asking myself the question, if I were an animal, what would I be? It's really not as easy a question to answer as one might think. The obvious first answer, of course, is to look to which kinds of animals you own. There's certainly a correlation there, as anyone who has spent time looking at a veterinary exam room can attest to. The short, squat bulldog owners. The wiry, nervous bird owners. The little wrinkly elderly with the little wrinkly ... Read more »
