Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

As a follow up to my previous posting, our dog, Devon is back to his old happy self.
You wouldn’t know that he had his spleen removed except that his belly is missing some hair. It seems to be growing back. I doubt a human would have recovered from that procedure as well or as quickly.

He went in to the vet one day, stayed there over night for observation, and came home the next day. He never needed a collar to keep him from chewing on the staples they used to close him up. He had the staples removed the a week or so later.

It is amazing to see his personality reimerge.

Our dog, Devon, hasn’t been feeling well lately. He stopped eating, and wouldn’t do much other than just lay in his bed. Lisa took him to the vet, where they did an abdominal x-ray. Something looked amiss. His intestines were compressed by something. The vet suggested an ultrasound to determine the cause of the compression. It turns out, one ultrasound and a biopsy later that he has some benign tumors on his spleen. One of them is 6 cm x 6 cm. Since there didn’t seem to be any cancer associated with the tumors, the vet suggested that a splenectomy would help him with the issue, and that he didn’t really need a spleen to survive. At this point I asked myself: what does the spleen do? The answer, as always, is available at Wikipedia. It turns out, it is possible to survive without a spleen, gallbladder, or appendix. I’m sure some fiendish mind has considered this as another possible form of weight loss.

All of these procedures we have done may sound trivial, but they have been expensive: the xray visit was $450. The Ultrasound visit was $650. The splenectomy visit is set to cost $2000. I just hope that this solves his issues. He is a sweet dog, and we all want to see him back to his old friendly self. Note to self: look in to pet insurance before the pets get sick…

Lisa’s father and I have been going to the Siuslaw near Mapleton for three years now. This year’s trip, I finally landed my first Chinook Salmon. It was about 36 inches long, and somewhere between twenty and thirty pounds.

We caught it while trolling downstream of Mapleton. I count myself lucky in a couple of regards. We had beautiful weather while we were there. A slight chill in the air in the morning, but no rain for the two days we were fishing.

It seemed that fishing was terrible from everyone we talked to. It was midweek, and yet there were lots of boats bobber fishing and trolling. We spent the better part of our first day bobber fishing. Dan caught a “blue back” on his second cast of the day, but we had nothing but “bait stealers” after that. They are some sort of chub that inhabits that part of the river and live in abundance. I guess it is because they are well fed. They manage to strip all the bait off a hook in a couple of minutes, which makes it hard for the bigger fish to get a chance to see it.

After not having a lot of luck for hours bobber fishing, we decided to do some trolling. I was using a “rainbow spinner” that had mostly green on the outside of the spinner blade. You can see the beads in it in the photo of the fish above. Dan was using a “Blue Fox” lure. The fish finder wasn’t showing a lot of fish in the river. We were just about to turn back when I managed to hook into the salmon. It jumped around a bit, and took out a lot of line when it saw the boat, but we managed to land it. I was pretty excited.

The second day, we spent the whole day trolling. We had hours of no action. Finally, Dan had a fish on. Unfortunately he had some mechanical difficulties with his reel, combined with my inability to pilot the boat well. We lost tension on the line, and ended up losing the fish. This was much better than anyone else was doing. This seems to be the story for every trip we make to Florence to fish on the Siuslaw. This year, we decided to go a little later. Usually we fish late September, but this year it was mid October. There didn’t seem to be that many fish in the river. During the September trips, we always saw fish rolling, but this year we didn’t. I wonder how the fish populations in the river are doing.

The third day, we went crabbing in Florence. The pier there has been used for years, as evidenced by the marks the ropes left in the wood.

We found lots of crab, but nothing large enough to keep. We did get to experience the view, though, which was certainly worth it.

Lisa and I had a nice trip to Lincoln City for her birthday last weekend. We stayed at the Starfish Manor, which I would highly recommend. We had a marvelous view of the ocean from our room, as you can see in these images.

The room was just what we were looking for: A quiet place for just the two of us. It had all the things we wanted, and a bit more. The room we were in had a king sized bed, a sofa, dvd/vcr player (which we also used to play audio cds), a couple of nice chairs and a marble topped table, a jetted jacuzzi tub with a view of the ocean, a small “kitchen” area with a refrigerator, sink and microwave, a gas fireplace, a small deck with a bbq and wicker chairs. The bathroom had a two shower heads as well.

As you can see in the image with the two chairs, there is a book sitting on the table. It has “Journal” written on the front. It contained entries from various people that had stayed in our room over the years. Lisa added her own entry, so if you ever stay in room “14″, be sure to look for it.

The weather was pretty good for July, so we didn’t spend a lot of daytime in the room. We ate dinner the first night at the marvelous Andaman Thai Restaurant that had been recommended by my parents. They were quite busy, but the food was excellent, and not terribly expensive. Initially, we had ordered a “Papaya Seafood Salad”, but they were out of Papaya. It was suggested that they could make a variation of Larb with the seafood instead, and we agreed. Unfortunately, it was too hot to eat. I’m normally not shy about spicy food. I like Habaneros, but the Larb with seafood was downright unpleasant. I made the mistake of wiping my nose with the napkin after wiping my mouth, and my septum was burning for a while. The other food was appropriately spiced and quite delicious.

The next day we went to Depoe Bay to walk through the shops and get Morgan some salt water taffy. On the way there, it was low tide, and Lisa was amazed to see Siletz Bay as low as it was.

We ate a passable lunch at Gracie’s Sea Hag, and headed back to Lincoln City.

I had purchased some nice steaks at Zupan’s before we left town. We used the BBQ on the deck and had a nice dinner looking out over the ocean.

We spent a little time at the casino in Lincoln City, and more time at the outlet mall there. Lisa enjoyed herself for her birthday. It was great to get out of town, and have some time together.

It has been said that music is a means of broadening perspective. I believe this to be true. It isn’t always a good thing, though. On the way to school this morning, we were listening to Weird Al’s “Running With Scissors” album, and came across the “Jerry Springer” track. He has listened to it many times before and never asked questions about things in the song he didn’t understand. Today was an exception. He posed the question “What is a she-male?” a block from school.

Morgan is nine. This isn’t the sort of question I would expect to come out of a nine-year-old’s mouth. I encourage him to ask when he doesn’t understand something, and this is a good example. I’ve yet to come up with an answer he will understand, though. I managed to avoid the question temporarily because he was moments from school, but it still deserves an answer. I want him to keep asking questions. Any ideas?