chronic illness & robot combat

barklife

greetings from louisville where we are either experiencing a redbud winter (a winter that interrupts spring), or we are seeing a tail end episode of spring of deception (a spring that interrupts winter).

this week’s episode was a bit of a rush job—it was always a bit destined to be because we were waiting for the battlebots tournament to end. however, life also intervened last weekend and this week in the form of a sick otis.

content warning: you should not listen if you become very upset or stressed out by discussions of dogs being sick (otis is fine now, but he wasn’t) or if you’re extremely bored by discussions of battlebots. with the battlebots, there is a mention of who won this season’s tournament so, if you don’t want to know that yet, mute that part.

we discuss otis’s diagnosis of addison’s disease in the first half of the pod, but i made a mistake when we were talking about it. i said that he needed to have his aldactone hormone replaced because of the addison’s, but it is aldosterone. the first time i said aldactone, i was a lot more confident than i was the second time i said it (but i’d already said it once so went with it for consistency), so i looked it up before i wrote this to be sure. aldosterone.

i’ll post the photos of our battlebots brackets on the website this week. josh’s, as he mentions, is a complete mess. mine is, too, but marginally less so.

what we’re reading:

jahnna—much ado about mothing

josh—the bus on thursday

family read aloud—2001: a space odyssey

i also mentioned that i just read the book my students are reading in language arts, and that book is the girl who drank the moon. it’s a great story, and i really enjoyed it, but i think maybe some of the deeper metaphors have been a little lost on my 5th grade students, which is understandable. things i read as a middle schooler but understood much more accurately or deeply as an adult are numerous. that discussion could be a whole episode unto itself.

theme music is bark-a-tron 5000 by bad ronald, used available thanks to the creative commons non-commercial share alike license.