Family Matters, Week of 8-13-06
Every week I write about my family. Welcome to it.
Hello again Sports Racers and Racerettes, I'm back with another update on the family. This one will be a bit different this week as a very interesting family happening occurred this week.
Read on...
Breaking The Dog
My mother-in-law got a fantastic gift from a friend of hers: A real, purebred Yorkie. Just born, only six weeks or so old. Beautiful little dog.
I don't even like pets anymore but I can see how cool it would be to have a little Yorkie running around.
I guess it comes as no surprise that Ericka wants one now.
Know what I don't want? My damn cat. She pissed on my clothes again today.
Asshole.
Anyway, this tale begins sometime Wednesday evening. The dog, happy and carefree a mere 24 hours ago, began limping around the carpet.
"Is he limping?" Ericka asks me.
"I don't know."
"He's limping," Ericka says to herself.
"Did he hurt himself?" I say. Aren't these little rhetorical questions fun? It's like listening to yourself talk, but, ya know, in front of others.
"I don't know," Ericka says this time.
We don't have time to investigate as we go through our evening rituals.
Finally the kids are in bed and the dog is laying on the floor.
Ericka is crying.
"There's something wrong with its leg," she says.
"What?"
"I felt something...moving," she says.
"Well, okay, call the vet?"
"I did. They said it would cost..." she begins to break down, "over a thousand dollars if they had to do emergency surgery on it."
Oh hell. I try to bring her back to reality.
"Ericka honey, the choice between a dog and twelve hundred bucks isn't a choice at all."
"We gotta get this fixed Evan."
Luckily she had called the Emergency Vet services, which are traditionally about a billion times more expensive than a regular ole vet.
"What are we going to do if it's really that much?" Ericka says, breaking down. "What are we going to tell my mom?"
"The truth honey. Something happened, we don't know what. Were the kids messing with it?"
"I don't know," she says, crying more, taking blame.
I try to comfort her, but it's not much use. She's shaken up (to say the least). She goes to bed hungry and worried out of her mind. It's not a pretty sight.
In the morning she takes the dog to a local vet who doesn't require appendages for basic veterinarian services.
The dog's leg was indeed broken, by what we may never know. However, the charge of $150 for the cast and a day of observation isn't horribly by any means, considering.
It's only later that we learn that Yorkie's are very succeptible to broken bones and that they shouldn't be around children whose rough play can hurt them.
Well, shit. Tell me now, would you.
So this is Evan, signing off for his misbehaving children and distraught wife.
...
Anybody want a cat?
Etc.
Because I've got a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, I'll condense it for you:
- Annie did a great job cheering (as seen in the picture above). She is cheering for the Claxton Blue Devils and NOT the Claxton Cowboys as I had originally reported. Yes, I know you care.
- Dave Jones has posted an awesome rebuttal to my Church and State post.
- Lastly, this story makes me...well...
Until Monday, stay safe peeps.
Did you ever want to be overrun by bandits
to hand over all of your things and start over new?
1 Comments:
I read Dave Jones response to your post on atheism and wasn't able to find how to post a comment on his blog, so I'll just come back to yours.
It is often a misconception of atheism that those who profess it have no moral grounding for their actions, the theory being that virtue is something that must be ordained from god in order to be of merit. In other words, morality comes from god, so if you don't believe in god, you don't believe in morality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Using this same presumptive circular logic an atheist could say that because there is no god, religion and ethics are a product of man and as such, there need not be a god in order for morality to exist.
Paul Kurtz writes a rather dry but interesting book on the subject entitled Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism in which he outlines ethics as having as its basis a set of culturally universal ideals (fairness, trustworthiness, self-discipline, etc.) As such morality and atheism need not be looked at as mutually exclusive.
I was disappointed by Dave Jones'apology for the actions on the part of the school librarian in the story. I believe his thought was that it's okay for someone to question an atheist's model behavior because they subscribe to no organized religion. When this same librarian encounters theists, does she still not have to ask herself how strictly they adhere to their prescribed moral code in order to accurately assess their degree of virtue or "niceness."
I agree with Dave Jones however that this parent's focus should be not necessarily on dereligionizing her child's school but on instilling virtue in her child as well as teach him how she wants her child to handle himself when he's faced with something he doesn't believe. Sure, it was in poor taste for the teacher to hand out a flyer from a church at school, but I think the mother's reaction was a tad overboard. Frankly it makes me wonder if the woman truly was an atheist or if she was trying to cast out her own humanistic doubts by pointing out a mild transgression on the part of someone who believes differently than she
If people were really secure in their beliefs, they wouldn't feel the need to shove them down the throats of others. Prostheletizing is not a product of piety but rather a desperate attemp to acquire it by those who typically don't.
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