Year: 2005

!@(guineapigs/justshadow.jpg:R popimg: “He’s so tiny”) Let me introduce you to the newest member of our family: Shadow. Well, that’s his name for now. I wanted to call him Neil, after my favorite black-leather-clad author, but Lisa wanted something cuter. Since he started following Jessie around like a shadow (and since he’s black… like a shadow) she thought that would be better. As of now, I’ve conceded since that happens to be the main character in Gaiman’s last book.

However, if any of you have opinions or other suggestions, feel free to comment.

!@(guineapigs/jessieshadow.jpg popimg: “I think Jessie could eat him”) I didn’t want to rush into getting another guinea pig, but Lisa was concerned about the effect of loneliness on Jessie. He’s certainly been showing signs of depression, which was enough reason for concern. Depression in guinea pigs can be a serious problem as they stop eating. So we need to keep him amused, and while contemplating future companionship for him, Lisa fell for this sleek black feller.

Of course, Lisa is paranoid that you all will judge us as horrible monsters for rushing out and replacing Teddy when that was not our intention. Apparently she must think that lots of people read this site and actually form opinions based upon the posts. Fortunately I know that it doesn’t weigh on people’s minds nearly that much. Nevertheless, let it be known that the purchase of Neil/Shadow was in fact for Jessie, not us. And once he accepts him as a cagemate, rather than sniffing him vigorously and trying to hump it, that will be more readily apparent.

!@(guineapigs/meshadow.jpg:L190 popimg: “I present to you, The Shadow”) !@(guineapigs/lisashadow.jpg:R190 popimg: “The black lump next to Lisa’s huge boob is Shadow”)
!@—

Goodbye Teddy. We’ll always love you.

!@(goodbyeteddy.jpg:L300 popimg: “Goodbye Teddy”)
!@—

All the ladies in the audience must be saying, “Hey, you gave your woman a rock, and we ain’t seen it yet. What gives?” And if you’re not, why not? Isn’t that what you girls do?

!@(thering.jpg popimg: “The Ring”)Anywho, since I have to force this stuff on you, here it is. The diamond is courtesy of my mother. That’s the same one my father gave to her well over 40 years ago. As a matter of fact, it’s a bit of a family heirloom. The gemologist estimated that it was cut around 100 to 150 years ago. The setting, however, is new. Although it does resemble the ring Lisa’s mom wore, which makes it a very nice combination of both families.

And now onto the stone.

Unfortunately this time I’m not talking about the diamond. I’m refering to what the doctor feels is truly wrong with Teddy. He quickly learned to avoid the crushed pills of Baytril and, after limited success with the liquid form, he stopped eating. From there the vet had us stop the treatment and prescribed something to help his apetite – which barely worked. The entire time his weight spiraled further downward. In the end, we rushed him to the hospital. This time the vet took the x-rays shown below. There appears to be a stone (or possibly a tumor) somewhere around his bladder.
!@(teddyxray1.jpg:L190 popimg: “Top x-ray of Teddy”) !@(teddyxray2.jpg:R190 popimg: “Side x-ray of Teddy”)

This is not a matter of money. Regardless of whether or not I could afford the $1200 for the necessary surgery, there’s only a small chance he could fully recover. Most likely we would need to force feed him, and give him constant care. And even then, he’s already close to 6 years old, and could probably only make it another year. So we’ve made an appointment for tomorrow to ease his suffering and put him to sleep. It’s not an easy decision, but we made it for his sake. At this point, prolonging his pain would only be selfishly motivated because we don’t want to say goodbye.

For Teddy’s relief, we will do so tomorrow.

Where to start? Many of you already know what’s been going on with Lisa and I, as of late. However, since she occasionally reads this website, I’ve had to hide the details on my super secret livejournal. Now it is time to make the official announcement:

Lisa and I are engaged. Last night I asked her to marry me, and she accepted.

Continue reading “She said yes”

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.

Yes, tonight is in fact THE NIGHT. Holy crap, I’m nervous as hell right now. And this is how it happens to me, I’m perfectly fine until I realize that I’ve got to act calm for the next few hours to not let anything slip up. We’ve got to eat dinner. We’ve got to enjoy the show at the Goldhawk. And now, to add an extra twist, I’m going to take her over to the Open Mic afterward, and try to do this all “on stage.” Okay, that part isn’t exactly set, it does depend a bit on who’s actually there. But that’s my hope. Otherwise it’ll end up out on the street with me getting my knees dirty on the sidewalk.

My nerves are calming a bit, right now. We’ll see whether or not I can avoid throwing up on her at this point. I have a funny feeling that would somewhat ruin the romance of the evening.

Thank god for my oversized camera, at least – my telephoto lens hood has allowed me to hide the ring without worrying about the unsightly bulge in my pocket.

Right now the fear of the future is nothing compared to the fear that I’ll trip trying to get down on one knee, drop the ring down a grate, and/or say her name wrong just before blacking out. If that happends, hopefully someone could at least get it on video for me to laugh at later.

One of my favorite visitors to the Open Mic, Danya River, will be in New York City tomorrow for a lone set out here on the East Coast:

Saturday, June 11th, 2005
The Bitter End
set from 8-8:40pm
147 Bleecker St
NYC NY

(212) 673-7030
Price: $5

If you’re looking for something to do, I highly recommend catching this talented singer while she’s away from her home of Boulder, CO. I’ve got a party during the day, so it’s 50/50 whether or not I’ll be there.

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.