In which we’ll miss the little poodlet.
G’ma had to have Chipper, her poodle mix, put down last Wednesday.
He’d gotten despondent and the vet had put him on meds for diabetes; G’ma and my brother took turns sticking him with a needle twice a day. A week later he was vomiting repeatedly and was one morning nearly non-responsive. G’ma had my uncle take him back to the vet.
Infection in the pancreas, possibly, or cancer; followed by not eating or drinking, followed by emergent renal failure. Rather than subject a twelve-year-old dog to possibly pointless exploratory surgery, she opted to have him put him to sleep. He’s buried out at the farm in Dave’s pet cemetary.
Bye bye, Chipper-doodle, you were a wonderful, weird, and sweet little dog.
In which we were out of town for 26 hours and it was HELLA FUN!
Teh BF asked our employer if we could leave at six o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Our employer agreed! So we checked the weather, talked it over, and then gleefully took mmmFiber up on her offer to overnight at her place in Portland for New Year’s Eve.
Of course, I was stuck on the phone until 6:17, but we were pulling out of the BMI parking lot at 6:21. We made the trip in three and a half hours, and arrived at Adie & Adam’s a little after ten. They gave us champagne, we changed, Adie gave me a cute hat, and then we went out. They live right near Alberta street, which has several blocks of cute stores and pubs.
We went to four different bars, stopping at a couple of them a second time on the walk back home. We got drunk and rambunctious and hollered “Happy New Year!” to complete strangers. We discovered “the Alberta”: a cocktail made of lemon, orange, vodka, and lime juice muddled with fresh basil. I made Teh BF buy me a blingy ring from this awesome hustler chick (I thought she was awesome because (a) I was drunk, and (b) she was, like me, wearing fucking Crocks in Portland. In the rain. Like an idiot. Who the hell wears shoes with HOLES IN THEM in Portland?!) that we’d met on the walk from one bar to another. Then he ordered me some awesome black bean nachos because we were drunk and had not had dinner.
We went back to the house and drank more and talked and played with the dogs – they have two terriers, a Schnauzer and a Cairn – and hung out until the wee hours of the morning.
Six hours later we were up again. After coffee we went to the Chapel Pub for bloody marys and brunch. Then we took the light rail downtown and stopped at the Thirsty Lion, mostly to get out of the rain. Then we took the train back to the car, and the car back to the house, where we watched an episode of Red Dwarf.
Then we collected our stuff and Bindu and drove home. Whirlwind 26-hour vacation! Whee! I HAD DO MUCH FUN OMGWTFBBQ.
Back in W2, we pulled into the driveway, marched right down the stairs, and held the couch down until bedtime. I slept like a rock last night.
In which I want the whole Intarwebz to know how good those folks are over at Valley Vision.
Last month, I acknowledged that I really could not see anything clearly any more. I know what traffic signs say because of their shape and color, but I had to admit I really could no longer truly see them, and that on those rare occasions when I do drive I’m probably a heinous menace to everyone else on the road.
I asked a local where I should go; Teh BF – who doesn’t even wear corrective lenses, and was therefore mostly just guessing – said I should “try Valley Vision, over on Main.”
So I went to their website to get their phone number, and discovered that I could not only make an appointment online, but I could also fill out and submit the intake sheet before even setting foot in their offices! And I received an email confirmation! The next morning, they called me to confirm my appointment! Awesome.
When I went to my first appointment, the receptionist greeted me immediately. She explained the fees, and allowed me to walk over and make a payment in advance while I was waiting. My time in the waiting room was barely five minutes, and all the front office service was fast, friendly, and professional.
I went through the various stages of my exam with no waiting; the doctor came in immediately after the assistant was finished with me, and when all that was done I was escorted over to the optician to choose frames for my new glasses and he helped me immediately.
With my old contact lenses in, I was seeing 20/100. That’s, like, half legally blind, people. Totally should not be driving a motor vehicle like that! (It’s amazing how the brain works; it really will fill in an awful lot of missing information by drawing on experience. It’s why people can listen to transistor radios and think what they’re hearing is music: their brains fill in all the missing resonances.) I have mild presbyopia (loss of focusing ability), but not enough to need bifocals – thank God. (This is a really cool article for those of us who have never understood what the hell their optometrists were talking about.)
When I picked up my glasses, they service was again fast and friendly. When I picked up my contacts, I was given an exam by the doctor to make sure they fit and was asked back in two weeks for a follow-up.
Today the doctor checked the fit of my lenses extensively (even used yellow dye to check tear pooling under the lenses), gave me another Snellen chart exam, and determined I actually need another set of stronger lenses. I can pick them up next week and give them back the ones I have now.
Over all, killer service. I am now able to actually see things, and when I get my new new lenses I’ll be able to see EVEN MOAR. (I’ve been wearing gas permeable hard contact lenses for twenty years and never had a doctor have me back for two follow-ups and then give me another set of lenses to make it right. HOW HOT IS THAT?!)
In other VERY EXCITING news, we’re going to see Adie & Adam in Portland for New Year’s Eve. Hopefully I-84 down the Gorge will be clear, and we’ll get there in time to actually go out before the year changes!
In which I tell you what I got for Xmas!
Christmas day was fun. I slept in, which is always awesome. Then I vacuumed the living room, helped G’ma with food preparation, set up the card table and found chairs. Around 1:30 the family showed up.
We ate, opened gifts, and then had dessert. It was a lovely afternoon.
Behold the awesome goods I received:
- a cute hand-crocheted hat
- a wallet
- a Dalek cell phone charm!
- a gift certificate for a cut & color with my stylist
- a towel and some bath soak
- an Amazon gift certificate
- $15 cash
- a bag of food: pasta, brownie mix, candy, and more
- a salad cook book
- a gift bag with pens, oranges and cookies
A pretty awesome haul, methinks! Apparently there will be more when we see the rest of the family; G’ma said my aunt Sue has her gift for me, and my cousins and other aunt & uncle will probably show up at some point for belated gift exchanges. The damn weather kept half the family from coming to Walla Walla, so we still have a big pile of unopened gifts for them under the tree.
Which means we get to have Christmas AGAIN later! Yay!
How’d you all make out? Anybody get anything really wonderful?
Update: Also got a bitchin’ solar system poster from ThinkGeek!
In which I was born into a world that did not contain the word “blogger.”
I’m not going to call myself an early adapter because I’m not. But I have been blogging for about eight years now, and in spite of having lost a shitload of content over the years – server crashes, failed backups, my own stupidity – I find that when I log into my current CMS, it greets me with these statistics: “You have 1,617 posts, 11 pages, 49 drafts, contained within 71 categories and 217 tags. You have 5,688 total comments, 5,255 approved, 433 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.”
Yeah. That’s a lot of content.
I was trolling around on the ‘net today and watched a few minutes of this and thought, “So what. Pictures of kids. Who cares.”
And then I realized what I’d just thought.
I no longer look at images of young skinny things doing whatever it is that they do and identify with it. I no longer think I am one of them.
And then I thought, they can’t remember a world in which people didn’t keep millions of insipid, useless diaries on the web for all to see.
More privacy: none of us know our neighbors. Less privacy: we all hook up and break up and get fired on the Internet in front of the whole world. More privacy: we only post pictures of ourselves that we actually like, so our online-only friends think we’re prettier than we really are. Less privacy: WE POST PICTURES OF OURSELVES ON THE ‘NET.
Weird world, innit? Especially with this Internet thing. I truly do love it.
One day I’ll be a venerated old-school blogger, tolerated by the kids only because I’ve been doing it for so long. Imagine that.
In other news, I hope you’re all getting whatever it is that you need from the holiday: time off, time alone, time with loved ones, a new Wii, both the drumsticks, whatever. Big love.
In which white Christmases are neato, but my feet are cold.
This being-snowed-in crap is starting to get a little old.
They sent us home from work early on Thursday. Friday, I worked from the front room and never even got properly dressed. Saturday night I actually left the house for the first time in 48 hours – went out with Teh BF and my bro for a few hours – but Sunday I was home all day. (G’ma threw a little party Sunday evening though; it was really fun.) Now it’s Monday and I’m working from the front room again, and the phones are dead. I think I’ve taken four calls in 45 minutes.
At least I’m getting some knitting done.
In which twitter got me yesterday afternoon off!
I follow the U-B on twitter, and noticed while at work yesterday afternoon that they’d posted an article about the city wanting people off the streets due to the extreme weather.
So I texted the article link to everyone at work – including management – and within fifteen minutes they’d closed the office and sent everyone home! Those of us with broadband connections were invited to take our VoIP phones with us and finish the work day from our home offices. (Most of our tools are accessible with a web browser, so to work from home all we really need to do is plug in a VoIP phone and open some browser tabs. I’m also running LogMeIn for access to the few things I really need on my work box, like the SSH tunnel to the POP server.)
We all piled out of the office into the snow. Bindu and I jumped into Teh BF’s car and he surfed us to Loney’s, where I bought some veggies and a loaf of bread and picked up stamps for G’ma. The snow at that point was well over a foot deep and still coming down. Kaje dropped us off in front of our house and then left to see if he could get into his own driveway.
I set up my VoIP phone in the front room and logged in. I made a few callbacks and then sat around for awhile before realizing there were no incoming calls. Snooping revealed that there was no one else logged into the queue. I IMed a couple of the supervisors and got no response. Finally, I called the office with my cell… and discovered that we were closed until Friday morning!
So I clocked off and spent the evening playing with my iThing, eating too many cookies, and watching Stardust with the family. (It was a lovely little heartwarming fairy tale, and DeNiro as a pouf was hilarious.) Then I laid in bed with my dog, watching episodes of Firefly (thanks, bro!) on my iThing until about two in the morning.
Then I slept. Apparently I slept weird, because I woke up with my back and neck all fucked up. (Stupid ancient bed with a ditch in the middle! I really need to get myself a futon or something; sleeping in sprung beds is hurting me because I’m so old now.) I did a couple rounds of sun salutations this morning and they helped, but sitting in this old chair in front of the computer isn’t helping. I downed an Advil before lunch – I made veggie fried rice – and it’s helped some, but I think I might take another.
Working from home is hella charming. I’ve really never done it before; when I was in engineering at an ISP in Iowa I couldn’t get bandwidth out at my house so I never really did much from home other than reboot web servers.
There is snow everywhere and the city apparently isn’t very well equipped to deal with the roads under these conditions. I’m enjoying working from home today – in my pajamas! – and might do so again on Monday if we really do get the additional six inches they’re threatening.
It’s snowing right now, for the record.
I chatted with Teh BF earlier and he’s all kinds of behind in his Xmas shopping. So is my G’ma, and so am I. I think most of us thought we’d just run a few quick errands here and there… and then we got this crazy weather and none of us have been anywhere since. If we get hit with another storm tomorrow, I think a lot of people will be getting rain checks on some of their Christmas gifts!
For more Walla Walla Blizzard ’08 pics, check out the Your Walla Walla Flickr pool.
In which it’s winter. And slow at work. And I can walk! (Oh, wait, I already could walk. Yeah. It’s that I can see! Yeah, I can see! It’s a miracle! A five hundred dollar miracle!)
I overheard the moms in the office saying that the schools will be closed tomorrow… due to the weather.
The weather that has been here now for three days. Ahem.
The roads and parking lots are slowly being plowed. There doesn’t appear to be any sand or de-icer down anywhere yet, so everything is still completely treacherous. The busses and cops and ambulances are all running chains.
Right now, it’s 2 degrees out and there’s a winter storm watch in effect.
I never thought I’d have anything really good to say about the city of Fairfield, but I’ll tell you what: when you live there, you don’t wait three days after the sky dumps a foot of snow on the ground to see the damn tractors out!
Work was hideously slow today, so I made this, this, this, and this. During my lunch break our network went down for nearly an hour, so no VoIP calls, no surfing, and no control panel. Fun times.
Yesterday, I picked up my new glasses. I can see really, really well through them. It’s wonderful.
Today, I picked up my new contacts. I can see really, really well through them. It’s wonderful.
Did you know that you can buy contact lens solutions on the cheap if you get them directly from your optician? Well, I didn’t! Not until today, when I purchased a box containing a bottle of conditioning solution, a bottle of cleaner, a contact lens case, and 4 liquid enzyme cleaners – for only $8.49! At the store all of that would cost over $25. I’m astonished! And pleased!
And also pissed off, because it means that in the twenty years I’ve been wearing contacts I’ve paid much, much more than I should have for Boston solutions. Gah.
In which we consider our data-syncing options.
Once upon a time, an iPod could be used as an external USB hard drive; all you had to do was tick a check box in iTunes and from then on you could plug your trusty iPod into any computer and use it as a thumb drive. Great for hauling files and applications around in your pocket.
Now the iPod’s file system type has changed so the iPod no longer mounts as a disk drive. The pod itself has gone from being primarily an MP3 player to being a full-fledged PDA: we find that now that disk drive utility is truly needed, it’s gone.
Enter a host of syncing applications and solutions. The pod itself has great built-in Mail, Calendar, and Contacts applications, but they won’t natively sync to web-based content. There’s no built-in file utility, either, so you can’t put your Office documents on it. You can sync some functions through iTunes to local installations of Outlook, but who uses a single installation of Outlook any more?
The problem on the table is this: how do I sync my content to my iPod Touch?
Let me count the ways:
1. I can’t. I use the Google application (essentially just a bunch of shortcuts to mobile Google content on the web) to view web-based documents, contacts, and calendar items.
This solution is clean, but it sucks for two reasons: you can’t view your Calendar if you’re not at a hotspot, and you don’t get to utilize the iPod Touch’s built-in applications, which are adorably cute.
2. I sync my iPod to iTunes, iTunes to Outlook, and Outlook to Gmail using Plaxo.
Gack. This is the mess I’ll probably settle on, because I already use iTunes and I already have a Plaxo account, but can you say clusterfuck? Any chain with that many links in it is bound to fail miserably at some point.
3. Use Apple’s MobileMe.
MobileMe is a service that allows you to keep your files on a web server, and then access them from any web-connected browser and your iThing.
It has a cute little web interface where you can upload files and images, music and movies. It has a cute little iPod app that lets you view that same content – cached, even, so you can view previously-viewed content – offline. It opens Office docs, PDFs, and other file types. It syncs your Contacts and even your email (although why you’d want that, I have no idea
…aaaaaaand it costs $99 a year. For very little storage space. And it doesn’t do anything that Google and Plaxo don’t do for free.
What I really want is some genius to write a Google sync application that allows two-way synching between my iPod Touch apps and my remote Google services. (I suppose I’d want the same thing for Plaxo, AOL, Yahoo!, etc if I were nicer, but I’m not. I use Gmail.) You can sync (one-way only) your Google calendar through iTunes, but what good is a one-way calendar sync?
Argh. It’s so hard to be in love with a product that won’t do what you need. Except that it’s THE CUTEST DEVICE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!
In which I post again about bentÅ-making, because it’s all I think about lately.
I woke up at four this morning and immediately started thinking about what I’d make for today’s bentÅs. Literally! Four in the damn morning! I laid there in the dark in my blanket-cocoon, and went through all the possible combinations of foods I have in the house. I finally settled on a breakfast theme and went back to sleep.
I got up at nine and started the sticky rice. Then I made a 3-egg omelet (eggs, milk, dill, shredded cheddar). Then I rummaged through the fridge for random veggie elements: carrots, pickles, celery, leaf lettuce…
Down to the freezer in the basement to grab some frozen peas and a few veggie sausage links, back upstairs to turn off the burners under the rice and omelet pans. Slice, shape, arrange. Find some cute candies. Fill the onigiri mold. Cut the omelet into squares. Fry the onigiri, brush them with soy sauce. Throw them in the freezer to cool while I go shower and get dressed.
This is the third morning in a row I got up early to make bentÅs. Yes, that’s plural: I’ve been making them for gibblesnix and Left Coast Girlie, too.
Tuesday, it was maki sushi. Wednesday, it was onigiri and chili. Today it was omelet and sausage links.
Just in case you were thinking about getting a food hobby obsession of your own: the best part of food hobby obsession is feeding the results to unsuspecting people in the office where you work!
I just can’t stop with the food hobby. It’s too fun. It’s also a lot like cooking, which I totally enjoy.
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4 random books from my Library!
