Mr. Mark, one of the gray-furred brothers, has an enlarged heart. It was discovered when he was about 6 months old, and he's been on twice-a-day medication ever since.

He got a trip to the cardiac vet a couple weeks ago. He's starting to develop a murmur again, but he's 8 years into the 3-5 year prognosis. I attribute at least part of this to him getting the pills he needs.

As part of the visit, I got a new prescription for his pills, which I took to my local Kroger.

The vet is now doing an automated thing where the prescription is generated and signed from a computer app. The pharmacy wouldn't just accept the prescription with a printed signature. They needed to check it, so I had to wait a few days for his pills, "We'll call you when they're ready."

Back in May, I bought an answering machine to screen the crank calls. To further disrupt the marketers, I did not put the word "Hello" in the message. I'm pretty sure that many of the front-ends do trivial speech recognition and only transfer a call to the human when it hears "Hello."

Well, it turns out that the automated message from Kroger, letting you know your prescription is ready is one of the devices that only leaves a message if it gets something it thinks is a human.

On Sunday morning, I started to give Mark his medication and remembered I'd used the last of the chopped up pills on Saturday evening. So I reached for the pill bottle to chop up more pills, and didn't find anything.

*THEN* I remembered that I was waiting for a phone call that never came.

Luckily, Kroger Pharmacy is open on Sunday, even on a holiday weekend. Mark's medication was late (as was his treat that the medication comes with), but he got his quarter-pill and all is well.

When I realized that I didn't have Mark's medication, it was still too early to go to Kroger.

I usually take Caz when I go shopping. He likes the car ride and it keeps him from getting into things. When it's hot, I leave the car AC running. This means that the car's pushbutton controls are live. Caz has never driven off without me, but he has turned on the radio and changed the engine efficiency settings.

A few months ago I hacked together a cover for the controls. Caz analyzed this device and demonstrated the design failures.

Since I had an hour before I could leave to get Mark's prescription, I decided to make a better shield. An hour should be plenty of time to come up with a design and find scrap wood for building it.

An hour was actually the right amount of time. Right on schedule, I had a new shield that met all the design requirements: it covered the controls, it was composed solely from junk in my scrap bin, and it was ugly as mortal sin.

But, it worked. At least on the first test. Caz spent almost a half hour in the car and did not dislodge this cover.

So, after we finished our errand, I painted the cover. Now it's only as ugly as a venal sin.