FarmWife Answers, episode four

To start us off today, My mother asks what I can only hope are a series of rhetorical questions.

Why do doctors only work from 9am to 4pm Monday thru Thursday and 9 to 12 on Friday? Why can you only get in to see them after you are well or dead? Why do they charge you $100.00 an hour and spend 10 min. with you? Really, what good is the ER unless you are near death?

It's all because of El Nino. And Global Warming. And the current economic slump.

My doctor is in England now visiting his only grandbaby. I think yours is probably sipping Appletinis on the roof of the clinic & avoiding all contact with patients. That's what you get for hiring John Dorian, Mom.

Zann jumps in with a veterinary question (I am truly a fount of useless knowledge): Why is my dog licking her paw obsessively. There are no wounds that we can find, she bares weight on it perfectly so it doesn't appear to hurt her... so what's up with all this licking on one certain paw?

One site I found suggest allergies may be to blame for Sasha's paw licking. Arthritis is also a possibility. If it's not severe, she may show no other signs. There's also boredom (which I doubt since I know you are good dog parents... some of the best I've ever seen!). Busha & Bucka have a 3 pound 2 ounce poodle named Mitzi. Mitzi licks when she gets nervous or agitated. Maybe Sasha knows she's about to have to share you with your impending arrival & has developed a nervous habit. They make a bitter spray that's supposed to discourage obsessive licking, but I'm not sure how well it works.

Zann also queries: Why do cars pick the most busy and money strapped times to start breaking down?

Again, it's all about El Nino. Unless of course cars have internal radar similar to the kind small children have...you know, the thing that makes the 4 kids who've ignored you for the past hour all begin clamoring for attention the second you pick up the phone to talk to your cousin in Canada.

Kork wants to know: if you hate earthquakes so much, why don't you move to Colorado?

One word: Snow. I think I hate snow almost as much as I hate earth quakes...well, maybe not quite that much, but we do not play well together.

Kork also wants to know why I put the disclaimer on my side bar (the one about porn).

A few months ago I added StatCounter to my side bar. According to my counter I was getting a decent amount of hits everyday, but very few comments. I wanted to know who was coming by, where they were coming from, and how long they were hanging around.

The service comes with a keyword tracker so you can what words are sending folks to your site from search engines. That's where things got interesting. When someone Googles a phrase, the search engine will break it down anyway it can to match the words....so it really doesn't matter if the topic is relevant, if all (or most) of the words are scattered throughout my post.

There were things about cheating wives, wives cheating with best friends, red heads (which linked to a post about Inkling), Oedipus issues, farmers daughters, and a few more colorful (perverted) searches. I could tell by the time spent, they were leaving as soon as they realized what we really do around here, but when I saw that button (on a blog I occasionally lurk about), I knew I wanted it!


Finally, Mrs.X asks: Why does it seem that bad news comes in threes?

This one is taking some time to answer. I keep finding the same thing, "They say bad things happen in threes," but no one seems to know who 'They' are. I've found blog posts, movie reviews (Spider-Man 3 anyone?), sports commentaries, Wiccan beliefs (that what you do is returned to you three fold), the number three as the Divine number of perfection, but no real explanation as to why bad things seem to happen in threes.

But on the flip side of that coin, the proverbial 'They' also say good things come in threes...so maybe you're in line for a clump of good news (I hope).

Until then, blame it all on El Nino (that's what Husband does when he can't find a better scapegoat).