Why My Life Sucks

And so does The Darling Wife.

The only thing useful I’ve done in the last 48 hours is to ‘Topspot’ all the critters.   Well, not all the critters the squirrels out side I didn’t bother with, but I did do all the dogs and cats.

bleh.

Brandy, my Miniature Pincher got out some time two days ago.   Got clipped by a car, resulting in a dash to the emergency vet, where they wanted to do all sorts of things to her.   Roughly $800.00 worth of things.     After my PayPal card went “beep beep beep” on the card machine (i.e. declined), the on duty vet said that really, we could just clean it and close it and have us take her to our normal vet in the morning.   That’s $98 or so.   PayPal could deal with that.

He, of course, said this after the normal amount of family drama, due to me having my mothers Gold Card on me, but her not being there, and several cell phone calls back and forth.

Trip to the vet in the morning happened.   Lady Vet said that the wound looked good, and that her (Brandy, not the vet) heart and lungs sounded OK and she wasn’t walking or acting like she was in distress, so she (Vet, not Brandy) really didn’t think she needed to X-Ray her, unless she (Brandy, not Vet) starts acting different.         Lady Vet put her on antibiotics for 2 weeks and told me that her staples needed to come out in two weeks.     Art Dude, bless his heart, asked “so, do you use a needle nose to do that”?

We go back to the vet in two weeks.

Photos of the staples in question when I get my camera back from Random Dafydd

Things that sucks

1. Last night, for reasons I’m not going into for privacy of others reasons
2. Freon.   Or the lack of it in a central air conditioning system.
3. Either the Bank of Oklahoma or Well’s Fargo.   Maybe both.
4. The City of Tulsa’s abatement inspectors
5. One of my neighbors.   not sure which one.
6. ONG.   Just in general.
7. Postfix on Mac OS X 10.4 PPC
8. Fink on the Mac PPC OS X 10.4 version
9. Ingram Micro,Petra,D & H, and Navarre’s some what odd B2B data systems. Each sucks in their own odd way.
10. Dog Poo
11. The GSL
12. AOL and   ComCast’s white listing system
13. Subscribe Me Professional (yeah, related to above)
14. What ever it is in the air this week that is making me sneeze
15. Forgetting to take my sleep aid
16. Getting a total of 6 hours of sleep over 3 days (yeah, see above)
17. The Cities of Wichita KS and Oklahoma City, OK
18. Internet streaming radio “stations” with ads.   A limited number of ads that you hear over and over and over and over.

Things that don’t suck

1. The Darling Wife
2. Art Dude and Redheaded Girl
3. Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed.
4. Jolt Cola
5. Choc 1919 beer
6. Cats and Kittens
7. Miniature Pinchers
8. German Shepherds

Daisy seems to be doing well. Not throwing up or any other problems, plus has her appetite back.

Now, if I could just get my other family issues solved by a little sub-q water and 4 shots.

Time to have family drama!

Hopefully this one will have a better ending than some of the others.

Remember my brother’s dog? Well, she is sick, with Parvo, which is Not Good. However, she seems to have a mild case, and the vet thinks she will make it.

All of my dogs, (we think) have had shots. Well, we know Jack and Coco has, but were not 100% about Brandy, so I got to do the Clorox shower before the dogs got close to me. Not like I didn’t used to do that damn near daily when I lived in Delaware County (it’s good to ward off poison ivy), so I know the drill. Brandy goes in for her shot in the morning, so I don’t have to make the house smell like a high school swimming pool.

Just got weird. Again, with out violating more than my own privacy, I can’t go into the full details of why, but yeah, it’s weird.

On the geek side of life, I’ve beaten ’smallbox’ into submission, and it’s back to being mainly a Linux box, with booting into Windows if and when needed. Can’t say enough good things about Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu aka Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

I’ve also gotten quite fond of andLinux on the laptop. Really slick design. Runs a modified version the Linux kernel as a service under XP. You get more or less the full KDE experience if you run ‘kicker’ I’ve got mine configured to be a vertical tool bar on the left hand side of the screen, normally in “hidden” mode, so all you see in windows in a small button with an arrow pointing down. Once you click that, you get the normal KDE 3.5 launcher.

In other geek news I’m going to be starting a D&D 4.0 campaign, with the first “full” game coming up this Sunday. Granted it’s ‘Keep on the Shadowfells” to start with, but until the books and SRD comes out that is what we’ve got. The enWord.org’s “Pre-release” book is also a good starting point. The offical WOTC page for it has a 6th pre gen, which gives some idea on how to level up a Warlord, which is new info.

On the personal front, other than “weirdness”, Redheaded Girl and I need to talk about what the word “puppy” means. The white dog in this photo is the “puppy” that they rescued. She had called me to find out if I could keep it for the afternoon while they dealt with a situation out at Art Dude’s property. I said sure. When I got home, well, I went out to look at the “puppy”. Sorry, if you are that size, you are a dog, not a puppy. I’ll grant it might not be full grown, but still, that’s not a puppy. Sweet dog. Gets along just fine with other dogs (or at least with our 3). No clue about cats, but I’m sure we will find out real soon, given the number of cats Redheaded Girl and Art Dude have. Might keep the semi-tamed raccoon and the opossum off her front porch, but most likely not given that the pit bulls next door to her house.

Update: White dog gets along fine with cats. Some of my cat’s don’t deal well with her however.

On the professional front I’ll be back doing work at $WeSellUsedMacs next week. Don’t know how long that will last, but I’m trying to make it a “full time” part time job. I think, I can do a 20-30 hour week now, but we will see.

She’s a Miniature Pinscher…

Together they fight Crime!

Assuming you define crime as being squirrel based.

My dogs. Keeping the US safe from the squirrel threat for all their lives.

This shot just amuse me to no end. To me it looks like a poster for a doggie version of those 1980’s cop buddy movies. Could just be me. I’m quite aware that I’m not a normal person at the best of times.

I have a pair of MinPens, Brandy and CoCo.

Actually I have Brandy and The Darling Wife has CoCo, but that’s a whole other story.

CoCo likes to dart out the front door and run. She does this about once a week. Normally she goes to the end of the block and turns back and will come if you call her.

Some days, well, it’s off to the races. Today, for example. This is not the first time this has happened in the last 30 days either. At least this time it wasn’t just above freezing and I had my shoes on.

Ended up chasing her about half a mile. If you include all the twist, turns, etc. closer to 3/4 of a mile. Almost caught her when a random boy child out in the front yard with two adults males (dad and uncle if I understood right) wanted to “pet the puppy”, and CoCo was slowing down a bit and stood back and did her happy bark at the boy, but I’m not going to do a flying tackle of a dog in front of a child while on concrete. Too scary for the child and not real good on my knees. One of the adult males (uncle, I think) tried to help by offering CoCo beer from his can. In this case, it might have worked, given that she likes beer, but What The Fuck? Beer to a dog? Yeah, I live in Oklahoma.

Finally caught her while she was nose to nose with the first dog she ran into about her size that she could get close to. One successful move silent roll and a overbear attack later and I had got her. Given her defense if fairly high with both her dexterity and size modifier being so high, I was glad to have caught her. Yeah, today normally would be gaming day, why you ask?

So what were the Results:

1. Caught dog.
2. Binged knee.
3. Grass stains on knee of dockers.
4. Crotch seam on dockers opened up.
5. Strawberry milk shake I had for lunch wanting to come up.
6. Finding out that 10mg of Amphetamine Salts taken 45 minutes before a major Adrenalin rush slash aerobic exercise will result in a major crash about two hours later.

Any rate, that was my post lunch, and why I am in bed now, shaking like a leaf.

I’m starting to hate listening to various political types on MSNBC.

1) Oklahoma is not “Midwest” and
2) It’s not “critical” for the Clinton campaign. It’s not critical for any Democrat. It’s going to go for the Republican by up to 20%, regardless of who it is. The last Democrat to carry Oklahoma in a presidential election was LBJ in 196freaking4