Karma Update . . .
Jan and I were up at 4:30am and out the door by 5. God, that was early. We were supposed to be down in La Marque by 7:00, and though the trip should only take about an hour and 40 minutes, I was allowing two hours.
You never know when a wreck will cause things to grind to a halt, and we didn’t want to miss our drop-off window. But as it was, we only lost about 5 minutes and got there about 6:45, and then had to wait for 15 minutes until they opened at 7.
Animal Alliance is a non-profit organization that only does spaying, neutering, and shots for dogs and cats. And the non-profit part certainly makes a difference. When I called around the Conroe area, I found one vet that wouldn’t even quote me a price unless we came into the office, and another place that wanted about $300. Ouch.
But our son Chris told us about Animal Alliance down in La Marque that spays cats for $55 plus $14 for the legally-required rabies shot. So that’s a total of $69 vs $300. Well worth the 180 mile round trip.
They have a very nice facility with separate entries for dogs and cats. But what’s kind of strange is that the two separate entries open out into the same large counter area.
Inside it’s a very efficient operation. After filling out a short form, Karma and I were called in so she could be examined by the vet. And it turns out she weighs 7.1 pounds and is in really good shape.
Jan and I were back on the road by 7:30 and headed up to the IHOP on the Interstate, for coffee, English muffins, and some nice conversation. By the time we left the place was getting busy, so we just sat in the parking lot, listened to the radio, and napped a little. It was very overcast and a little rainy, so we were comfortable.
About 10:30 we headed up to Webster to have lunch at our favorite King Food. Always great, and enough to bring home leftovers. Then it was over to the Harris County Public Library where we spent the rest of the afternoon reading and Interneting in comfort. While we were there, I was amazed at the speed of the library’s inhouse Wi-Fi. With a 5 ms ping, 28+ Mbps download, and 18+ Mbps upload, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any faster.
Finally about 3:30, we drove back down to La Marque to pick up Miss Karma. And after some brief post-op instructions, we were on our way home. With our trip occurring in the middle of the Houston rush hour, I took some precautions that turned out to really be needed.
As we headed north, Jan was monitoring the traffic using the Sigalert app on my Galaxy Tab 4. And as we got into downtown Houston, we saw a complete traffic stop on I-45 north that quickly built up from a 30 minute delay to a 2 hour delay as detailed on our Garmin GPS’ live traffic info. That would mean that our 1:40 trip was going to take 3 hours and 40 minutes.
But Sigalert showed me that I could exit i-45 and go east on I-10, then north on US 59. Then at I-610 come back west until I could get on the Hardy Toll Road and head north again.
Surprisingly, all this zig-zagging only added about 3 miles to our trip, but cut down the delay to only about 20 minutes over the normal 1:30 trip. Later, on the 10pm news we heard that traffic was completely stopped for 3 hours, not just 2.
We really dodged that bullet.
Thought for the Day:
Life is short. Smile while you still have teeth.
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