Month: September 2013

"These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve."

Rebuilding Ground Zero.

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2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003
2002
2001
2000

Yeah, I know. It’s been almost 6 months since I wrote here, and the thing is that the longer I go without writing here, the less I want to write here (and when I was pretty much at a level of not wanting to write here to begin with, there wasn’t much lower to go.) I had decided to shut the site down, but I was hit with a wave of “But what if I want to wriiiiiiite theeeeeere” and sadness at the idea of shutting down when I’ve had this site for coming up on 14 years (good god, I really had to stop and do the math on that one.) So I’m giving myself ’til the end of the year to decide whether I want to keep the site going or not, or if it’s time to shut it down. Yeah, I know, you’ll miss it. But shit changes and you can always check in over at Love & Hisses and at Dinosaurs Can’t Eat Pizza and on Facebook (even though I don’t post much on Facebook, but I assume that if I suddenly kick off Fred will post something over there. YOU’D THINK SO, anyway.)

Right after I posted last time, a whole lot of shit went wrong, one thing right after the other, the refrigerator needed fixing and then the cars started acting up (both of them, OF COURSE) and I don’t even remember everything that happened, it just was a lot to deal with, most of it costing money, but in and among all that other shit, Spanky started going downhill, and we had to deal with  trying to make him healthy and then trying to decide when the right time was to take him to the vet for the last time. I always tell people that they’ll know, that you’ll see it in their face, but we waffled so many times for poor Spanky, and then the day he went into the small bathroom off the computer room and just stayed there and didn’t want to come out, we knew. And he was such a good, sweet boy, right to the end. I know he lived a good long life and everything, he was almost 17 years old, but it still sucked of course.  Because he was really and honestly one of the good ones, and we’d had him longer than we’d been married, and even still every now and then I see a toy that I think Spanky would like, or a treat, and I forget for a minute that he’s gone.

I’d like to think that between Elwood’s death in December (from FIP, if you missed it) and Spanky’s death in April, maybe we’ll not have to go through that again any time soon, all the remaining cats are pretty young still (except for Miz Poo, who is 14 and I’m pretty sure she’ll live forever). But Elwood was only 3 and we were not expecting that at all, so who the hell knows?

Of course, Maxi, Newt, Joe Bob, Sugarbutt, and Tommy are all around the same age, so christ almighty. That’s going to be a fun few years when they hit old age.

We recently switched vets because although I really like the vet in Tennessee that we’d been using, it’s a half hour drive and I KNOW half an hour isn’t that bad a drive, but it seems longer sometimes. So I decided we’d try a vet 10 minutes from home, located in a strip mall next to the grocery store. I thought we’d have to try several vets in the area before we found one we’d like, but we really hit gold with this guy. He’s easy to talk to, he knows his shit, and we both really really like him. We’ve been taking one cat a month for their checkup, and it’s worked out really well. Of course, the first cat I took to him was Elwood, so in the first few months of being our new vet, he not only got to diagnose Elwood with FIP, he got to euthanize Elwood AND Spanky. Fun times!

(I should add that we did have a vet even closer to home, and Fred really liked him, but he’s a much older gentleman, and I think he’s pretty much phasing out his practice. If I’m to be blunt, we were afraid that he’d up and die on us.)

The biggest thing going right now (aside from the refrigerator shitting the bed, requiring that we buy a new one last weekend AND THEN the goddamn washer shitting the bed THIS weekend, I’m expecting the dishwasher to go next, but at least we could go a while without a dishwasher, NOT THAT I WANT TO) is that Fred has switched jobs and is now working from home. He’s doing, basically, the same kind of work (he’s a software engineer), but he’s gotten back the 5+ hours a week he was driving back and forth to work, so he’s saving on wear and tear on his car and saving on gas. The down side is that we turned my second foster room into an office for him, so I can only foster one litter at a time. I was chafing at the idea of losing my second foster room, but it took about two days of him working downstairs in the computer room where my computer is for me to be 100% behind him having a separate office for work where he wouldn’t be all up in my shit. And it took one screaming kitten fight during a conference call for him to put the kibosh on the idea of having kittens in his office.

So he’s been working from home for 2 weeks now, and it’s been going well. Most of the time he’s upstairs and I hardly know he’s there until he comes downstairs to get coffee. He’s enjoying the work, and I’m enjoying the fact that he occasionally WANTS to leave the house. Not that we’ve gone anywhere exciting, YET, but he’s a little more relaxed about running up in town to do errands, whereas before he would bitch and moan about leaving the house.

Another good thing about him being home working is that I can leave the house for several hours and not worry about it burning down while I’m gone. I mean, not that I worried THAT much about it, but now I really don’t have to.

So. I don’t know. There’s just not all that much going on with me. New refrigerator: we thought we were getting the one white; we got the black one. I think I like the black better – it’s actually smaller, overall, but has more space inside than the old one did. New washer is coming tomorrow, and I need to do 10,000 loads of laundry. Of COURSE it broke during the first load of the day when my plan was to do a fuckton of laundry and then hang it on the line to dry. And it being a perfect clothes-drying day and all. OF. COURSE. MOTHERFUCKER.

In conclusion, nothing exciting going on with me. I’ll try to write more often. I’m probably going to change the design of the site so that it doesn’t guilt me every time I look at it.

Oh, here’s something: I use Filezilla to upload pictures for Love & Hisses. I host the pictures you see on my own site, then link to the same picture at Flickr, because it’s become pretty obvious that I can’t trust Flickr to not change up their shit every few year. Pictures I linked to in 2005 were showing up as great big blank squares and I had to go back through and fix them, and hi. Do I look like I need more shit added to my list of shit I don’t particularly want to do, but needs to be done?

(I need an intern, is what I’m thinking.)

So I use Filezilla, which is a free FTP program, to upload the pictures. And I start the pictures uploading, and then I wander off to do something else, and I check to be sure the pictures uploaded correctly, and shut down the program. I never really looked at anything in the block of useless text Filezilla likes to throw at me, until the other night. Which is when I saw this:

Really, Filezilla? “Try typing a little faster next time”? How about you try fucking yourself next time, how about that? What the fuck with the fucking ATTITUDE? Who shit in your Corn Flakes? What the fuck? I think Filezilla needs a smack on the ass and to be sent to bed without dinner. Asshole.

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Previously
2012: No entry.
2011: We bought ducks.
2010: For today, feast your eyes upon the sheer gorgeous stripey perfection of the kitty known as Corby McGee.
2009: It’s like we’ve entered another universe completely.
2008: Yes, more chickens.
2007: No entry.
2006: I think that “Proven to be beneficial to livers” should be Fred’s new tagline.
2005: Give me some of that, Barbara Bush, you ignoramus.
2004: No entry.
2003: Because believe it or not, it never once occurred to me that the Walton family was comprised of hillbillies.
2002: Look, I drink a gallon of water a day. I need to know that I can pee when I need to, so stop rolling your eyes at me.
2001: No entry.
2000: Can I tell you how much I loathe Bret Easton Ellis?