Afternoon, everyone. It does look like an awfully impressive storm on the infrared. We are even getting some rain down here from this one. You don't often see a storm system that stretches from New York to the Gulf of Mexico so I'd say that going to grandma's house north of the Mason-Dixon line is going to be off this weekend.
Ray, that's too bad about the the kittie's Vet. You know you're getting older when people around your age start dying.
Larry, odd how having to do things that don't seem like the right thing at the time seem to work out later. I've had those same kind of experiences.
Phillip, that picture out the window is just what I DON'T want to see here. I can only imagine how deep that lawn furniture will be buried in snow by tomorrow. I hope that the wife is resting comfortably and enjoying the view while she can be a "pansy" and let you do all the work.
Steve, you have a very cute daughter. I think the school my great grandfather went to has been torn down and it's a WalMart now. We don't save a lot history like you do in the UK.
Those of you still eating one of Flo's omelets might want to skip the following if you have a weak stomach. Carey, I was first assigned to the Sheriff's Helicopter Unit in 1982. We flew law enforcement, search and rescue, and air ambulance missions. Our first bird was a Hughes 500, which barely had enough room for the pilot, observer, paramedic, and patient crammed in sideways. Since I was the only paramedic, I'd have to handle all the patient care on the way to the hospital. When we had multiple trauma victims, it was heck getting all the bleeding stopped so I could attend to things like starting IV's. I'd use butterfly's and 4x4's, wrapped with an ace bandage to maintain pressure, on the bigger wounds. The vibration in the helicopter was such that the wounds would often open up again and I'd have to be trying to stop the bleeding again. I saw a bottle of super glue in a store one day that had a brush applicator and thought that was the answer to my problem. You couldn't use the stuff from a tube because you couldn't get the skin together tightly enough without gluing yourself to the patient. With the brush, I could use the butterfly's to hold the wound together and then apply the super glue with the brush and push the skin together from the side until it dried without ever having to touch the super glue. Of course, none of this was approved at the time but I figured they already had a bunch of contamination in the wound and how much worse could super glue make it? Well, patients had less blood loss once I started doing this and I was able to patch up wounds a lot faster and use less pressure and it held in the helicopter. The ER docs were impressed and thought it was a pretty good idea. I suspect one of those rats probably ran with the idea and the use of medical grade super glue grew from there. I should have patented it.
I think some of the battlefield medics probably did think of this before me anyway but I know it didn't get officially approved until the first Gulf War. I didn't spend a lot of time in neurosurgery and didn't realize they were using the AA3 for aneurysm repair but it makes sense. It must make gluing on handrails look easy by comparison.
As of when I retired three years ago, there were about a dozen human approved "super glues" including one (can't remember the name) that would bond to anything wet, including blood, which was always my big problem with regular super glue. I think it costs something like $250 per 5 gram tube so I don't think we'll be seeing it hobby shops soon. Steve, that "instant skin" (called Second Skin here) is really just a very thin transparent bandage, not at all like what Carey and I have been talking about. It really doesn't work well for bleeding wounds but it's excellent as a cover for burns so it's a good thing to have around, especially with kids or guys who pick soldering irons from the wrong end.
Enough with the medical talk. Between Carey, Rex, and me, maybe we'll have to start a Medical and Weather section here.
I'm going to take a few pictures for WPF and I'm doing some touch ups on my backdrop. Still trying to figure out a way to hide a few seams in the darn thing,
