I blame the heat

[mickeym]

I probably should stop watching the evening news. It's not healthy for my blood pressure to go up that much, that quickly. :-/

I'm not a perfect parent. Anyone who's followed this journal for ANY amount of time probably knows that. I make mistakes; sometimes fairly colossal mistakes. But. Why the HELL should any parent (or pet owner, because it applies here, too) ever have to be told/reminded NOT TO LEAVE CHILDREN/PETS IN A PARKED CAR, "even if the windows are down". I just--*flails*. *Really*?

There is a college in Indiana -- Goshen College -- who apparently has decided to stop playing the national anthem before sports events because the lyrics are too violent/violence-encouraging for their pacifist stance.

I have no idea what to even think on that. The Star-Spangled Banner has been good enough for everyone else, but not for some dinky college in Indiana?

I can't breathe and my head hurts, and my eyes won't stop watering, in spite of benadryl.

I'm also really tired of feeling grumpy and negative, and y'all are probably equally tired of me being that way. So, um. Trying to close on a positive note...Um. Oh! Okay:

Matthew and I talked last night, after I'd calmed down some. I'm not sure if we actually settled anything, but he understands (I hope) why I was upset. We'll work on the rest of it.

Comments

[macbyrne.livejournal.com]

I absolutely HATE it when I see people leave their pets in the car; there is no excuse for it. Not 'I'm just running in for a minute', not 'well, I'm parked in the shade' and not 'I left the windows rolled down'. These people INFURIATE me.

On the children side, did you read that article that came out a couple of years ago about parents who had forgotten their infants in their cars? It's abso-fucking-lutely heartbreaking. Apparently the article won the Pulitzer for feature writing in 2010. You read the title and you think to yourself, are you fucking kidding me??? Who could forget their kid in the car??? And then you read the article and you can actually see yourself doing it. It's goddamn scary. I bawled my head off reading the article and I think it scarred me for life, but I know I'll never forget Kinsey in the car. I'll link you if you haven't read it.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

I admit we do leave our dogs in the car, but we've done some fairly extensive testing involving the cars, the ambient temperature, and the temperature it gets in the car in various situations, using a remote thermometer thing. (One where you can put a probe somewhere and it will record the high and low temperatures as well as the current temp.)

So there's relatively specific weather conditions in which we'll do it based on that, and the dogs always have ice water to drink in one of the cup holders, too. (And never for very long without someone checking on them. Frankly, probably 90% of the time they go out and have to sit in the car, within a few minutes someone has come back out to let them out of the car and take them for a walk around the parking lot or something. My dad HATES shopping so he'll leave the dogs just long enough to make sure my mom is in the store and good with a cart or scooter - she has some disabilities so she sometimes needs help there - and then come back out and hang out with them.)

The only other occasion where they're 'left' in the car is sometimes if my dad and I go shopping, like for a gift for my mom, I'll go in to pick it out but then he'll pay for it - so during the hand-off the dogs might be in the car briefly. (Though our local stores where we shop the most are pretty dog friendly outside, so more often than not the leashes just get looped around a handy pole while he comes in and I go out.)

In any event, I do think one of the reasons why there are conditions where we can leave the dogs in the car is that they're extremely well trained about windows, so they're not just cracked, they're down quite a distance - if there's a decent breeze, that makes a huge difference to the temperature in the car. (No reliable breeze, no dogs.)

Also, if you're not sure how long you're going to be, and you're not going with someone else who can go out and check on them, no dogs. Basically, questionable situation = no dogs.

(I recognize most people are not dorky enough to have run tests on their cars to determine internal temperature in various conditions so as to figure out which conditions are dog-safe, however. So I do keep an eye on dogs left in other cars.)

[azephirin.livejournal.com]

They're really, really, really committed pacifists (http://www.goshen.edu/aboutgc/values/). While I'm not sure that omitting the national anthem from sports events is going to stop war everywhere, if that's the worst fault those folks have, I'm OK with it.

[fufaraw]

Yeah, sometimes it all just weighs too much. I'm sorry about the heat and the ick. But I'm glad you guys talked.