Do they expect the Nationals to impact Orioles attendance much?..

[Princess Turandot]

While I-95 makes for a short trip, I wonder if league allegiances would change quickly, plus there are all of those folks west & south of DC who probably did not travel up to B-more for games.

[JohnKleeb]

1. I dont know but when I was leaving work tuesday

a lot of people wearing Nats gear were headed on the train. I will support both teams, but I dont expect either to make the playoffs, I also hope to be proven wrong and hope for a Nats-O's series sometime.

[KitchenWitch]

2. Not sure

Not in the area but I know I wish the Twins were a NL franchise. I hate the DH.

Off topic. The second cat from the left on your sig looks like my Tinkie (I had to bury her this week)

[Princess Turandot]

3. Also off-topic..

the left most cat almost died 3 times last month, due to incompetent vet followup after routine bladder surgery. Did a damn fine job on the surgery, removed a bunch of crystals/stones..just didn't think the fact that the cat wasn't trying to pee on his own at all when they sent him home was a problem...

I'm sorry that you lost your Tinkie.

[KitchenWitch]

4. that is terrible

Is he okay now?

[Princess Turandot]

5. well..

He's better..abt 85% of where he was. His bloodwork has been positive. I just had him in today for a urine draw: he had the sort of crystals (struvites) which a more acidic diet helps. So, his pH and other stuff will be evaluated.

What I don't know is whether he was damaged in any permanent way. The place's negligence left him with an enlarged heart, because he went into heart failure. Plus I'm contesting his bill which became enormous (I live in NY; this was at a vet hospital) because when I rushed him back, they had to bring him back from heart failure before they could do the normal procedures that they should have done after he had bladder surgery. I sent in a complaint, and got a response over the weekend from them that literally sent my BP to 150/110. (I take bp meds, and took a few extra that night.) They talked abt how his discharge instructions told me to be alert for 'unusual urinary behaviors' as if I had botched something. I brought him back to the place at first 14 hours after his discharge and we were sent home, then early the following AM rushed him back because he was in respiratory distress.

They sent him home before he even tried to pee normally. All he was doing was leaking pee wherever he was laying. I wrote a letter to the CEO of the place today, and asked if that was one of the unusual behaviors that I was to be aware of, and if so, why it wasn't considered a reason to not freaking discharge him in the first place. When a cat comes in with a blocked urinary tract, the standard of care is to not send him home until he can FUCKING PEE normally. He never tried to use the litter box while there at all. There are a set of steps to be followed which they simply did not do. He was treated by a 'surgery team' and they were more focused on the surgery itself than the bladder condition, PLUS the senior team person was away that week, and I suspect that no senior person filled in.

This is how he looked the day before they sent him home, incredibly bloated & miserable:





Just 3 1/2 days after he was being properly treated for the bladder problem, he looked like this:




Even with tubes in, he was so much brighter eyed and was trying to run around the room.

A week later, he was ready to go home:


Here's what he looked like last summer:


All I can say is Thank God or the Law or the Great Pumpkin that NYC has stringent gun control laws. I don't know what I might have done when I realized that he did not into heart failure because he had an existing heart condition, but rather that it was caused by his kidney back-up. When I got this letter blowing me off from their QA committee, it was under the name of the Director of Surgery. The fucking thing was not even signed by him. Then just today, I get a copy of the same letter, on nicer paper, now signed by him. I mentioned in my letter to the CEO that I assumed this meant that the Director of Surgery had probably not actually participated in the review. Some idiot in the QA department mailed me the letter before his secretary retyped it on nicer paper for him.

Heck, you might just see me on the front page of the Post one day!

[Yupster]

6. They should have put them

in the same league.

When Walter O'Malley was negotiating with the mayor of NYC for a new stadium, his threat was that if his team moved, the Giants were sure to move too.

That seems counter-intuitive as you might expect that the one team leaving would greatly benefit the remaining team.

There were eight teams in the National League though, and the Dodgers and Giants each got over 25 % of their total home attendance for the season from games when the other New York team visited cross-town.

Therefore, the Dodgers leaving would be a financial disaster for the Giants and vice-versa. One leaving would pretty much guarantee the other leaving too.

If they would have moved the Nat to the American League, I think the Orioles would have benefitted from the overflow crowds when the two teams played each other.