Quality nursing care

My medical training consists of a handful of summer camp lessons in splinting compound fractures and cinching belts above gushing wounds. At the age of 10, I imagined there would be a lot more need for hydrating with cactus water and building lean-tos in life, and less in the way of blunt-force brain trauma. But hey, the thing you do is the thing you are, so I am now a brain trauma recovery specialist.

There's been insurance and impound fuckery to deal with, but my mother was really very lucky and she seems to be nearly normal again for someone who has been wadded up in a car. On the day she was sent home with orders not to read or watch tv or use her brain at all, her boss dropped by with a paper lunch sack filled with orphaned chicks. It turns out that staring at baby chickens is pretty good for concussion recovery, in the way that watching a tank of fish lowers your blood pressure. If the fish are all alive. Which these chickens are, so far.

They’re good models, too.

Incidentally, I have determined that vitamin D does not actually cure heart murmurs, no matter how elaborately your doctor shrugs while prescribing it. Doctors are good at figuring things out while you’re actively dying - or just afterwards - but not so good at catching your heart hammering out a John Bonham drum solo on your morning commute, and they feel like they need to prescribe something, so, really, vitamins are better than lithium or bloodletting.

solution: paint more chickens

In other news, the teenager has taken up blacksmithing. The blacksmith who has been training him is a burly veteran/ex-cop who tells stories about getting flakes of metal embedded in his scrotum and not realizing it until the middle of an MRI, and he sent the boy home with "Giant Meteor 2020" election bumper stickers. He's ok.

Noodle Arms and father 

Except now there are schemes to build a forge in the back yard. The blacksmith's tip for avoiding neighborhood complaints was to put sugar and soy sauce in the fire. So we're going to be making fancy bbq-flavored fence post caps in no time.