Discoveries

Yesterday was a day of discoveries, starting with when M went to put his daily pills, vitamins, stay-young-forever supplements, and so forth into a plastic, two-week organizer box. He discovered, after having been back from Jamaica for 11 days, that some enterprising baggage handler had apparently relieved him of a bottle of prescription medicine. He doesn't remember how many pills were in the bottle, but guesses there were between 40 and 60. They were generic, not brand-name, so he says that in terms of insurance co-pays (whatever that means), he's not out but a few dollars. But because the medicine is also a Schedule II controlled substance, it has a street value of up to ten bucks a pop--perhaps more. (I'm not sure what "controlled substance" means, either. It probably has something to do with when some airport crook in Jamaica or Miami or Orlando ends up controlling your substance!)

J asked M why he bothered taking the whole bottle with him, since he obviously had what he needed in his pill organizer. He said he wanted to be able to prove to the snarky people who do the take-your-shoes-off-and-bend-over screening that he had a prescription for it. Everything would have been okay if he hadn't decided to put his meds in a checked bag for the trip home, instead of carrying them on the airplane with him, as he did on the way down.

Our second big discovery happened when M and I took our walk after supper. We met up with some neighbors who were walking their dogs and they pointed to a spot nearby and told M to keep me away from it, because there was a baby squirrel there who had fallen out of its nest. (What's up with that? Do they think I eat baby squirrels for fun?) M and I hurried home and got J, and they went back to the spot and found the squirrel, which was alive and didn't appear injured. This was pretty amazing, since the nest is about 20 feet up in an oak tree, on a limb that hangs out over the street. Somehow the little critter landed in a clump of soft grass instead of on the pavement. (J thinks, because of all the broken sticks on the grass, that the nest had been attacked by a hawk or an owl. Which I guess shows that it doesn't matter who or what you are, somebody is always on your case.) M picked him up and put him in a box padded with soft towel rags, and they brought him back to our house.

This discovery has a happy ending. No, M and J wouldn't let us keep the squirrel, but J did find a wildlife rehabilitator named Dorothy, who lives just a few miles away from us. Within about a half-hour we delivered our new patient to Dorothy, who said he seemed to be in good shape. This rescue happened so fast that M didn't think to take any pictures of the little guy. But he found this one online that will give you an idea of what we were dealing with:

Hang in there, baby! You still have many roads to cross!

Discovery number 3 was in the middle of the night, when I heard a loud Bang! and woke up to discover that my night light was out. (M says that because it was around 1:30 a.m. when the Progress Energy transformer blew, it was actually today's discovery and not yesterday's. Picky, picky, picky.) An hour or so later I heard some big trucks rumbling up and down our street, so I had to bark at them a little. Then I heard M telling me that was enough--and then he went down to the other end of the house with a flashlight to make sure the computers were turned off, so they wouldn't drain their back-up batteries. The next thing I knew it was daytime, and M was in the living room turning off my night light. I wasn't even aware when it came back on, though he says it was around four o'clock.

What a day.