Month: June 2005

My poor wittle Teddy-kins… oh wait, did I say that out loud? Anywho, the last few days have been stressful – for the guinea pigs and for me. Everything seemed to be good after the visit to the vet. The next day we had a little difficulty giving the antibiotic to Teddy, but we got the dosage down in two attempts. The first half was with watermelon, and the second with parsley. There was still blood in his urine, but he was no longer squeaking when he peed. A real relief (no pun intended).

But the next morning Lisa couldn’t get him to take any of the meds. He avoided any food with it in, and we had to try again in the evening. No matter how much I tried to hide the Baytril in some lettuce, he sniffed it out and avoided those parts. I was getting very frustrated with him and finally had to give up, deciding to call the vet again the next day. They told me it was also available in liquid form and they could mix it in a concentrate for him that included a banana flavor. Unfortunately, by the time I left work to pick it up, Lisa said that Teddy wasn’t eating at all. That’s a big problem for such a little feller.

So I headed directly home, and we packed him in his traveling shoe box and headed over to the Verona office of the animal hospital. Once again, they were very friendly and one of the technicians even came out and demonstrated how to give him the antibiotics. You basically have to put the syringe into his mouth and force the liquid in so that he has to swallow. I felt bad for him, but it’s for his own good. Last night we separated him and Jessie to give them both some quiet relaxation time – fortunately I had just bought a new cage for them, so we now have two for such occasions. Since the bedroom is the only one with A/C, I decided to stack the cages near the foot of out bed. This gave them both the chance to cool off and rest.

Teddy barely munched on any lettuce last night, and kept squeaking every time he had to pee. In other words, it was super stressful for all of us. This morning before leaving for work, I helped Lisa give him his dose. As usual, I’m way too squeamish to do it myself (yeah, and I’m going to have to do this stuff for kids someday?). I was still very nervous, since he wasn’t eating, but at least he got his meds. On the drive into work, however, Lisa called me to let me know that he was finally eating a carrot. Wow, talk about relief.

Assuming the pain subsides by tonight, and he continues to eat, we probably won’t have to take him back to the vet right away. I’m sure that’ll make him even happier.

The following entry was originally posted only to LiveJournal in order to keep things secret from Lisa. I have added these to my blog with the original timestamp for posterity’s sake.

As a follow-up to my last post, the deed has not been done, but I did get to do the whole asking her father for permission thing. It was far more nerve racking then I would have imagined. I mean, I knew what his answer would be, but it still took a while to get the words out. Talking with my brother-in-law I heard some funny stories about this and am glad I didn’t try to do it after a couple beers.

Next week should definitely include a big announcement. Of course that one will be in grand scale on my website – since she’s more than welcome to read it.

My Linux box has been running not too keenly on the file transfer side of things lately. Well, more than lately. It’s been very irritating. We’re talking mp3s skipping while playing across the network. Certainly Samba should be able to handle streaming 5 meg files in real time, right? Maybe, maybe not. I kept putting off the troubleshooting until the other day, when I finally decided to poke around the server logs. Uh-oh, all sorts of IDE read errors were popping up on the mp3 partition. Turns out it wasn’t Samba that was balking, but the hard drive itself. Yay failure!

Well, not really failure, just a bunch of bad sectors. After a bunch of tests, I could see that it was the same bad sectors, so there was a good chance that the drive wasn’t failing. Now the difficult part was clearing enough room to backup as many of the mp3s as possible to avoid having to re-rip all of my CDs. During that process, I also decided it was time to upgrade my woefully outdated power supply, as that was probably the cause of the problem to begin with. So I headed over to CompUSA and picked up one of those Antec TruePower units. I decided the $90 was worth it to protect all of the money I’ve spent on storage anyway.

What a great call that was. Not only did it eliminate all of the crummy y-splitters I had installed and up the power available for the 5 drives in the server, but I can actually hear myself think with it running. You start to take the background noise of computers for granted. Even though the Dells at work are very quiet, I sit next to a much noiser server as well as the network cabinet. So I was downright shocked at how quiet this unit ran. As a matter of fact, I’m now looking at getting an Ultra X-Connect for my desktop computer to shut that up thanks to the current rebate.

Hopefully, background noise will become a thing of the past. Imagine actually being able to enjoy music and movies on my computer again!

My precious little Teddy wasn’t doing so well Sunday night. I had noticed he wasn’t moving around as much lately, but his appetite was still pretty good so I figured the heat was probably just making him lazy. Then, while just sitting in the middle of the cage, he started to squeak rather loudly. After a couple seconds of that, he raised his haunches and squeaked some more. That’s not good – even beyond the squeaking, guinea pigs don’t really pick up their butts that much when going to the bathroom (I really love that expression when talking about pets, as if the little guy was up on the toilet or something).

Lisa and I were growing rather concerned at this point, so we brought him and Jessie out on the kitchen floor to get some exercise and see what was up. Teddy seemed ok at first, but then he went through the same motions as before. And this time, without the bedding material in the way, I could see the urine was a reddish-brown. There was blood.

This is the first time either of these guys has had anything this serious. And, unlike when I’m sick, I couldn’t just ignore it. GPs have very delicate constitutions and illnesses can become serious rather quickly. So we started looking up numbers and locations for vets to take him the next morning. But coupled with my own rundownedness (we’re going to make that a word for the sake of this sentence), I could barely sleep. When it was finally time to get up, I managed to make a morning apointment for him at a nearby animal hospital and let work know I would be late.

Waiting in the actual waiting room wasn’t a big deal, but standing in the exam room with my little piggie somewhat distraught on a table really got to me. The staff and doctor were great, but I was still a bit of a wreck. The doctor flipped Teddy around to feel for stones and get him to pee on the table for testing which really freaked him out. And by him I mean me. While the tests were run I spent the time comforting Teddy in order to calm myself down. Fortunately it turned out to just be a bacterial infection that is treatable, but they did have to give him a shot to start out the treatment.

A shot! He was just over two pounds! A needle would go right through him!

Fortunately I was not present for the shot, as that was asking far too much. My little piggie could handle that better on his own. Although the squeals definitely got to me. In the end, he’s back in with Jessie (minus a clump of hair he lost with all of the stress) and we’re working on ways to trick him into eating his meds.

It’s funny how you don’t even blink at forking over the credit card to spend more than 5 times as much on treatment for an animal as they cost in the pet store to begin with. But one look at those critters and I get sad at the thought of losing either or both.

Crap, the pressure is on – 29 is perfect age for a big idea. According to the article:

The age represents the optimum combination of education and energy levels required for great ideas to emerge, according to the study.

That means starting this September I’ve gotta hunker down and think real hard. But at least I have a reprieve for genius:

However, the wait is even longer for true genius to show. In the past century the age at which great inventors and Nobel prize winners made their life-changing discoveries increased by six years, with the average now just short of 40.

(thanks to Donncha)

P.S.(If you don’t feel like registering for the article, try out BugMeNot. I finally installed the Firefox extension and it works.)

The following entry was originally posted only to LiveJournal in order to keep things secret from Lisa. I have added these to my blog with the original timestamp for posterity’s sake.

Ok, it’s starting to burn a hole in my pocket. What, you may ask, would be doing that? Well, it’s fairly small, made of white gold, and features a diamond. In case you couldn’t guess, yes, it’s an engagement ring. For those of you who don’t know the progress, Lisa and I have been openly speaking of marriage, and she has certainly made her feelings clear. For me, it’s been all about the logistics – getting the ring, planning the moment, etc. Of course, now I’m in full fledged panic mode.

No, it’s not cold feet. I’m very comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of my life with Lisa. The problem is, I want the moment to be just right for her. And yes, it does matter. And now I’m just going nuts about it, because I want to do it, but I’m not quite ready. And so I am instead carrying around this expensive bit of jewelry, and can’t let her know. Which would be why I’m making the rare appearance on LJ. I have to talk about it, but Lisa actually does read my website from time to time.

The one thing for certain is that I want to do it in Hoboken. It’s where we met, where our life together started, and has just played an essential role for both of us. I was leaning towards doing it right in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the bar formerly known as the Rodeo Ristra, since that is where we met. But now timing is the thing. The part of me that’s itching to get it done with before I explode says to just throw it together this weekend. I’m sure it would be great, but not exactly what I was hoping for. I could always wait until Tuesday and say that I wanted to check out something at the OpenMic – as much as it’s changed it would still be very appropriate for us. Now it turns out that an artist she loved but thought had disappeared will be playing in Hoboken on the 14th. What a perfect evening that could be – but I’m afraid of putting it off too far.

Well, I’d have to say the chances of it being tonight are pretty slim, as I’m just too darned tired to be romantic. If I make it past this weekend without bursting, I’ll probably be able to put a good plan together. Assuming that the ring doesn’t fall out of the hole now burned into my pocket.

Give me an inch and I take a week. I have been zonked of late. Saturday was my day of rest (which actually resulted in some running around that I will explain later). Sunday was the third installment of Lisa’s friends getting married and filling our weekends. Congratulations Anthony and Jen! It was a good time, even if the food was a tad on the dry side. Nevertheless, tons of dancing left us pretty tired, and that was just the start of the weekend. For that night, we drove down to my sisters to prepare for our trip to North Carolina.

Continue reading “Still tired after all these days”