Saturday, December 23, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
This is either late, or almost late...
but happy winter solstice! :) Brett and Brian both think it was the 21st, but *I* thought it was the 22nd this year, and when I look online I keep seeing both dates come up, so who the hell knows. But according to timeanddate.com the 21st was apparently the shorter of the two days, at least in the Seattle area: we had 08:25:14 hours of daylight on 12/21, and 08:25:15 hours of daylight on 12/22.
Anyway, Brian sent our whole brood this poem yesterday, and I thought it was nice:
The Shortest Day
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!
So yeah...welcome, yule! He also mentioned that he thought it was kind of depressing, since it's the shortest day and all, and it's so dark and dreary. But what I said was that I'm always happy about winter solstice; it's summer solstice that I find depressing.
Winter solstice means that you've gotten through the worst of it! Sure we still have a few months of stormy darkness and drab gray skies ahead of us, but the days will just get longer and longer from hear on out, until we're finally stuck baking in the summer sun for almost 16 hours a day. :)
The summer solstice falls right around Brett's birthday, so we usually have a pretty big party around that time, and usually it's a BBQ that goes late into the night. It doesn't get dark until after 9pm on those nights, and I love that we can stay outside for so long without getting cold or feeling like it's too late. But that feeling of happiness always makes me remember that the REASON the day is so long is that summer solstice has either just happened, or is about to happen. Which means the long days are going away again. I dig the ups and downs of seasonal changes though, so it's all good.
Besides, the winter holidays rock my socks off. Making/buying presents is hard work, and I'm definitely feeling frazzled after spending the last three weeks doing almost nothing with my waking hours but shopping and making gifts, but it's almost OVER. And I'll finish up my remaining gifts tomorrow, and then I can start catching up on emails, working on art projects for ME, working out again, and (ugh) taking down all the decorations I spent hours putting up. Before we take down our X-mahweenukah decorations though (which I'll post pics of once I'm less busy), we still have one more holiday party to host (for Brett's family), and then we go to Seaside! :D
If there's one thing I like better than (or maybe equal to) giving gifts, it's RECEIVING them. We've already gotten a few (one of which was this bad ass motherfucker of a grill from my ♥Dad♥), but I expect that we'll get more gifts tomorrow, and then on Christmas day, and then when we meet up with some friends next week, and then we'll celebrate our SIXTH ANNIVERSARY (!!!) on Friday and give each other MORE gifts. Sweeet.
If you're stressed out like I've been and you're looking for a fun breather, or even if you're not stressed out and you just like awesome shit, you should check out one of my favorite Christmas specials of all time. It's super cute. Oh yeah, and...HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!! :D
Anyway, Brian sent our whole brood this poem yesterday, and I thought it was nice:
The Shortest Day
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!
So yeah...welcome, yule! He also mentioned that he thought it was kind of depressing, since it's the shortest day and all, and it's so dark and dreary. But what I said was that I'm always happy about winter solstice; it's summer solstice that I find depressing.
Winter solstice means that you've gotten through the worst of it! Sure we still have a few months of stormy darkness and drab gray skies ahead of us, but the days will just get longer and longer from hear on out, until we're finally stuck baking in the summer sun for almost 16 hours a day. :)
The summer solstice falls right around Brett's birthday, so we usually have a pretty big party around that time, and usually it's a BBQ that goes late into the night. It doesn't get dark until after 9pm on those nights, and I love that we can stay outside for so long without getting cold or feeling like it's too late. But that feeling of happiness always makes me remember that the REASON the day is so long is that summer solstice has either just happened, or is about to happen. Which means the long days are going away again. I dig the ups and downs of seasonal changes though, so it's all good.
Besides, the winter holidays rock my socks off. Making/buying presents is hard work, and I'm definitely feeling frazzled after spending the last three weeks doing almost nothing with my waking hours but shopping and making gifts, but it's almost OVER. And I'll finish up my remaining gifts tomorrow, and then I can start catching up on emails, working on art projects for ME, working out again, and (ugh) taking down all the decorations I spent hours putting up. Before we take down our X-mahweenukah decorations though (which I'll post pics of once I'm less busy), we still have one more holiday party to host (for Brett's family), and then we go to Seaside! :D
If there's one thing I like better than (or maybe equal to) giving gifts, it's RECEIVING them. We've already gotten a few (one of which was this bad ass motherfucker of a grill from my ♥Dad♥), but I expect that we'll get more gifts tomorrow, and then on Christmas day, and then when we meet up with some friends next week, and then we'll celebrate our SIXTH ANNIVERSARY (!!!) on Friday and give each other MORE gifts. Sweeet.
If you're stressed out like I've been and you're looking for a fun breather, or even if you're not stressed out and you just like awesome shit, you should check out one of my favorite Christmas specials of all time. It's super cute. Oh yeah, and...HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!! :D
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Free Music, Updates, and More!
1) iTunes has Sarah McLachlan singing "Silent Night" as one of their free downloads this week; you should check it out if you like that song and/or Sarah, because it's nice. If you don't like that, they also have The Knife doing "Christmas Reindeer," which is also entertaining. I like both songs better than the James Talor "Jingle Bells" song they had last week. That was crap.
2) Because SOMEONE complained about my lack of a "comments" link, I updated my blogger code and added the "(^o^)" link to the bottom of each post. It doesn't publish your comment on my site, but it opens my "contact me" page in a new window/tab, which will email me your comment just like the "contact me" link at the side of the page will.
I don't have an actual comments section posted on my site because I don't want to have to deal with deleting comments from stupid and/or drunk people. Especially if they're from my stupid and/or drunk friends and/or family (then I'd have some 'splaining to do). I've also known a couple of other people who've had comments posted to their blogs that they wished they could delete, but left up anyway, and I don't want to be in that position. I like that when people respond with lame, judgmental, or even (only a couple of times) offensive comments they only go to my email, and then I can delete them in secret. :)
3) I updated my blogger account to blogger beta through google, and I like it a lot better.
4) I updated my flickr account to be synched up with my yahoo account (because they made me), and it's stupid. I don't understand why that was necessary, yahoo. You're lame.
5) I updated my Firefox to 2.0, and it's rad. I had like, 1.07 or something before (sans add ons) and it was weak, so I always used Safari. But I updated my Firefox on friday and added a bunch of add ons and stuff and it's sooo much better; even better than Safari, so I changed it to my default browser and haven't looked back since.
Also, in the descriptions of one of the add ons (many of which were created by people who speak english as a second language), the creator says that it "automagically create search engines for you." That made me happy, and I think it's a brilliant word - I wish more things in life were automagic.
6) And here we are, at the meat of the post: we updated our phone service to comcast digital voice, and I got a nice reminder of how dumb most people are, and how impersonal large companies can be.
They had a telephone sales person call us back in mid NOVEMBER, and I wanted to switch over anyway (to try and save money, since we have tv and internet through them too), so I set up an appointment for 11/28 (to bypass all the thanksgiving hustle & bustle).
11/28 appointment: time slot is 12-4, guy impresses me by showing up reasonably on time (around 1pm), and wiping his boots at the door. Sees that our current modem is set up in a room w/out a phone jack. Asks no more questions about the state of phone jacks/cable jacks in the rest of our house (they're supposed to give you an extra phone-friendly modem free of charge if your current modem isn't close enough to a phone jack to be replaced). Tosses out a line about how their cables are "really frail in the cold" and how he can't dig in all this snow, and leaves about 2 minutes later.
12/08 appointment: time slot is again 12-4, guy frustrates me by showing up at almost 3pm for a job that I've been told will take about 2hrs. Does not wipe his filthy boots at the door, does not close front door (leaves it WIDE OPEN), repeats this activity about a dozen times (seriously) even after watching me get up and close the door behind him a few times.
Guy pokes around in our house for awhile and decides that the best room to hook the new modem up in is the master bedroom. Then finds out our cable line is too weak, so he installs a new cable line (by creating a new hole in the wall, rather than using the hole created by the previous jack, which he leaves untouched, complete with *dangling* cable line, just above the new one). He runs the new line outside and around the side of our house, where it meets up with a new splitter thingy. He's also attached all of our OLD cable lines to this new ugly thing, even though they used to be under a protective little box (painted the same color as our house). So now all these ugly black/silver/copper bits are exposed on the side of our house waiting to rust in the winter rain.
After he's done all of this, he finds that the PHONE line in our master bedroom is too weak, and proceeds to call comcast in a panic (on speaker phone, in front of me) to try to get another technician out to our house because he doesn't know what he's doing. It's after 4pm on a friday; no one will come help him. Someone does give him instructions for how to fix the problem (it went something like, "oh, that's easy! you just twist the wires together until the [blah blah] shorts, and then [blah blah blah]"). My guy's response to this (again, in front of me) was to whine, "But that'll take forever...I'll be here till 8!"
So he stays until almost 5pm, rips out the phone jack in our kitchen for some unknown reason, switches off our cable tv & internet, *partially* switches our phones over from verizon to comcast, and then tells me he has to have someone more experienced come out to finish the job, because he can't do it on his own. I make him turn the f'ing tv/internet back on (when I ask, he's all like (pause through blank stare...then flash of comprehension), "oh yeah! I can do THAT!"), so he gets the cable back on and he sets up an appointment for the next morning from 8-12. Saturday morning. 8am. And though it was pretty small, we had a party lined up Saturday night that we had to clean/run errands for, so the 8-12 window was pretty frustrating. But I took it because (according to him) the phone in our bedroom would work fine, but all other phone jacks in our house were dead.
12/09 appointment: I stayed up until 3am finishing xmas presents for the people coming over the next night, but since the THIRD comcast technician could show up as early as 8am and needed our bedroom, the alarm went off at 7:50, Brett got up for the morning to wait for him, and I crawled into the guest room to sleep for a couple more hours.
11:45am, 12/09: still no technician. Brett picks up the phone to call comcast on our one working phone to ask what the deal is, and discovers that we have messages on our new comcast vm from people who've tried to get ahold of us and not had our phone ring through. After that discovery, he calls comcast and they say we don't even have an appointment scheduled. Brett is told that they'll call our technician from the day before to see what's up, and call us back in a minute.
12:15pm, 12/09: I'm cleaning the bathroom, and Brett's in the shower. I ask him what comcast said, and he says they still haven't called back. I pick up the phone to call them, and find that we have a new message. I instinctively dial our verizon vm but that's okay, because that's where the message is.
It turns out that calls are being routed to either our comcast vm OR verizon vm, depending on where they're calling from. So the message on our verizon vm is from comcast, and the guy says that we DO have an appointment but our technician is running late (thanks for calling us, technician), so he'll be there at 2pm. Which doesn't work, because our party starts at 4pm, and I was going to shower AFTER I was done cleaning - at 2pm. And our master suite is kind of funky: the bedroom & bathroom just kind of meld together; there's no actual door to the bathroom.
So I call comcast back, schedule ANOTHER appointment for Sunday afternoon, and also let them know that we can make outgoing calls on our one, sad little phone jack, but apparently incoming calls go straight to one of two different vms. I'm told that they'll let our technician for Sunday know what's up.
1:30pm, 12/09: Our Saturday technician calls my cellphone (I left my number on our home vm so people could get ahold of us) to say that it looks like he's not going to be able to make it out to our house. Um...good, because I'll be in the shower in about 20 minutes. So I let him know that we already CANCELED our appointment with him, and set up a new one for the next day. He then questions me about our inability to receive incoming calls, and actually SEEMS SKEPTICAL that I might not know what I'm talking about. I'm like, "hello...you just called & got my vm message - it never rang here once!" So he's like, "well, maybe the ringer's off, 'cause if it's plugged into the modem, it should work..." and I'm like, "duh...the ringer's on high, it's plugged into the modem, and the caller id says we haven't had a call since 12/09. OUR CALLS ARE NOT GETTING THROUGH." Then I even suggested to HIM that maybe the fact that some of our calls were still going to our verizon vm meant that our service hadn't been completely switched over, and his response to that was, "well...I don't know...if the phone's plugged into the modem it should work."
Anyway. Moving on...
12/10 appointment: the window is from 12-4 again, and I think technician #4 showed up around 2pm. Wiped his feet. Was friendly and non-accusatory. Saw the mess of wires and cables in our bedroom and acknowledged that it was a mess. Didn't do much to CLEAN UP the mess, but still acknowledged it, and fixed the technical problems in about 20 minutes time. Fixed the phone line so that ALL our jacks worked, and not just one. Discovered that we weren't receiving incoming calls because our service had only partially been transferred over from verizon (!!!), and completed the transfer so we could receive calls. Saw the busted up jack in the kitchen, and fixed that too. Even pointed out that on friday, technician #2 had plugged the modem into a power outlet that goes on/off with our lightswitch (it's usually left on, and was on at the time, but he STILL noticed and STILL let us know), and he plugged it into a different outlet.
As of this morning, things seemed perfect; the phones work great, tv, internet...it looked like guy #4 had finally straightened everything out. And then I got a call from [anonymous media research company], saying that one of our boxes hadn't reported any data for the last few days. She suggested that maybe the power outages we've been having lately (because of all our stormy weather) had caused a problem, but I went into our bedroom to check on it and the power light was on. They receive reports on our television data over the phone, so I mentioned that transferred to digital voice over the weekend and asked if that could've caused a problem.
She said that for some reason their equipment sometimes has trouble communicating over digital lines, and said they'd arrange to have a separate, standard phone line installed (at their expense) for the boxes to use. It was at this point that I happened to look over at the phone jack in our bedroom, and I noticed that the separate wires that usually come out the side of the jack and go to the [anonymous media research company] box were MISSING. I found the end of the wires that attach to the data box itself, and pulled on them until I found the end. Which had been tucked behind my bedside table after having been ripped from the wall (probably by technician #2).
So now the girl from [anonymous media research company] has to come out tomorrow to hook their wires back up, and then we'll have another phone line installed, and then they'll probably have to come back out and hook their boxes up to the NEW phone line, and by then we may even have a new (or new to us) tv, so they'll have to come out AGAIN to bug the new tv.
Rarg. I love being part of the [anonymous media research company] pool, and I love their service people AND their phone support, but I'm *so tired* of having service people at the house. For reals. Wow...this suddenly makes me feel really badly for my sister, who's been having her house remodeled for like, the last year and a half or something. Sheesh.
2) Because SOMEONE complained about my lack of a "comments" link, I updated my blogger code and added the "(^o^)" link to the bottom of each post. It doesn't publish your comment on my site, but it opens my "contact me" page in a new window/tab, which will email me your comment just like the "contact me" link at the side of the page will.
I don't have an actual comments section posted on my site because I don't want to have to deal with deleting comments from stupid and/or drunk people. Especially if they're from my stupid and/or drunk friends and/or family (then I'd have some 'splaining to do). I've also known a couple of other people who've had comments posted to their blogs that they wished they could delete, but left up anyway, and I don't want to be in that position. I like that when people respond with lame, judgmental, or even (only a couple of times) offensive comments they only go to my email, and then I can delete them in secret. :)
3) I updated my blogger account to blogger beta through google, and I like it a lot better.
4) I updated my flickr account to be synched up with my yahoo account (because they made me), and it's stupid. I don't understand why that was necessary, yahoo. You're lame.
5) I updated my Firefox to 2.0, and it's rad. I had like, 1.07 or something before (sans add ons) and it was weak, so I always used Safari. But I updated my Firefox on friday and added a bunch of add ons and stuff and it's sooo much better; even better than Safari, so I changed it to my default browser and haven't looked back since.
Also, in the descriptions of one of the add ons (many of which were created by people who speak english as a second language), the creator says that it "automagically create search engines for you." That made me happy, and I think it's a brilliant word - I wish more things in life were automagic.
6) And here we are, at the meat of the post: we updated our phone service to comcast digital voice, and I got a nice reminder of how dumb most people are, and how impersonal large companies can be.
They had a telephone sales person call us back in mid NOVEMBER, and I wanted to switch over anyway (to try and save money, since we have tv and internet through them too), so I set up an appointment for 11/28 (to bypass all the thanksgiving hustle & bustle).
11/28 appointment: time slot is 12-4, guy impresses me by showing up reasonably on time (around 1pm), and wiping his boots at the door. Sees that our current modem is set up in a room w/out a phone jack. Asks no more questions about the state of phone jacks/cable jacks in the rest of our house (they're supposed to give you an extra phone-friendly modem free of charge if your current modem isn't close enough to a phone jack to be replaced). Tosses out a line about how their cables are "really frail in the cold" and how he can't dig in all this snow, and leaves about 2 minutes later.
12/08 appointment: time slot is again 12-4, guy frustrates me by showing up at almost 3pm for a job that I've been told will take about 2hrs. Does not wipe his filthy boots at the door, does not close front door (leaves it WIDE OPEN), repeats this activity about a dozen times (seriously) even after watching me get up and close the door behind him a few times.
Guy pokes around in our house for awhile and decides that the best room to hook the new modem up in is the master bedroom. Then finds out our cable line is too weak, so he installs a new cable line (by creating a new hole in the wall, rather than using the hole created by the previous jack, which he leaves untouched, complete with *dangling* cable line, just above the new one). He runs the new line outside and around the side of our house, where it meets up with a new splitter thingy. He's also attached all of our OLD cable lines to this new ugly thing, even though they used to be under a protective little box (painted the same color as our house). So now all these ugly black/silver/copper bits are exposed on the side of our house waiting to rust in the winter rain.
After he's done all of this, he finds that the PHONE line in our master bedroom is too weak, and proceeds to call comcast in a panic (on speaker phone, in front of me) to try to get another technician out to our house because he doesn't know what he's doing. It's after 4pm on a friday; no one will come help him. Someone does give him instructions for how to fix the problem (it went something like, "oh, that's easy! you just twist the wires together until the [blah blah] shorts, and then [blah blah blah]"). My guy's response to this (again, in front of me) was to whine, "But that'll take forever...I'll be here till 8!"
So he stays until almost 5pm, rips out the phone jack in our kitchen for some unknown reason, switches off our cable tv & internet, *partially* switches our phones over from verizon to comcast, and then tells me he has to have someone more experienced come out to finish the job, because he can't do it on his own. I make him turn the f'ing tv/internet back on (when I ask, he's all like (pause through blank stare...then flash of comprehension), "oh yeah! I can do THAT!"), so he gets the cable back on and he sets up an appointment for the next morning from 8-12. Saturday morning. 8am. And though it was pretty small, we had a party lined up Saturday night that we had to clean/run errands for, so the 8-12 window was pretty frustrating. But I took it because (according to him) the phone in our bedroom would work fine, but all other phone jacks in our house were dead.
12/09 appointment: I stayed up until 3am finishing xmas presents for the people coming over the next night, but since the THIRD comcast technician could show up as early as 8am and needed our bedroom, the alarm went off at 7:50, Brett got up for the morning to wait for him, and I crawled into the guest room to sleep for a couple more hours.
11:45am, 12/09: still no technician. Brett picks up the phone to call comcast on our one working phone to ask what the deal is, and discovers that we have messages on our new comcast vm from people who've tried to get ahold of us and not had our phone ring through. After that discovery, he calls comcast and they say we don't even have an appointment scheduled. Brett is told that they'll call our technician from the day before to see what's up, and call us back in a minute.
12:15pm, 12/09: I'm cleaning the bathroom, and Brett's in the shower. I ask him what comcast said, and he says they still haven't called back. I pick up the phone to call them, and find that we have a new message. I instinctively dial our verizon vm but that's okay, because that's where the message is.
It turns out that calls are being routed to either our comcast vm OR verizon vm, depending on where they're calling from. So the message on our verizon vm is from comcast, and the guy says that we DO have an appointment but our technician is running late (thanks for calling us, technician), so he'll be there at 2pm. Which doesn't work, because our party starts at 4pm, and I was going to shower AFTER I was done cleaning - at 2pm. And our master suite is kind of funky: the bedroom & bathroom just kind of meld together; there's no actual door to the bathroom.
So I call comcast back, schedule ANOTHER appointment for Sunday afternoon, and also let them know that we can make outgoing calls on our one, sad little phone jack, but apparently incoming calls go straight to one of two different vms. I'm told that they'll let our technician for Sunday know what's up.
1:30pm, 12/09: Our Saturday technician calls my cellphone (I left my number on our home vm so people could get ahold of us) to say that it looks like he's not going to be able to make it out to our house. Um...good, because I'll be in the shower in about 20 minutes. So I let him know that we already CANCELED our appointment with him, and set up a new one for the next day. He then questions me about our inability to receive incoming calls, and actually SEEMS SKEPTICAL that I might not know what I'm talking about. I'm like, "hello...you just called & got my vm message - it never rang here once!" So he's like, "well, maybe the ringer's off, 'cause if it's plugged into the modem, it should work..." and I'm like, "duh...the ringer's on high, it's plugged into the modem, and the caller id says we haven't had a call since 12/09. OUR CALLS ARE NOT GETTING THROUGH." Then I even suggested to HIM that maybe the fact that some of our calls were still going to our verizon vm meant that our service hadn't been completely switched over, and his response to that was, "well...I don't know...if the phone's plugged into the modem it should work."
Anyway. Moving on...
12/10 appointment: the window is from 12-4 again, and I think technician #4 showed up around 2pm. Wiped his feet. Was friendly and non-accusatory. Saw the mess of wires and cables in our bedroom and acknowledged that it was a mess. Didn't do much to CLEAN UP the mess, but still acknowledged it, and fixed the technical problems in about 20 minutes time. Fixed the phone line so that ALL our jacks worked, and not just one. Discovered that we weren't receiving incoming calls because our service had only partially been transferred over from verizon (!!!), and completed the transfer so we could receive calls. Saw the busted up jack in the kitchen, and fixed that too. Even pointed out that on friday, technician #2 had plugged the modem into a power outlet that goes on/off with our lightswitch (it's usually left on, and was on at the time, but he STILL noticed and STILL let us know), and he plugged it into a different outlet.
As of this morning, things seemed perfect; the phones work great, tv, internet...it looked like guy #4 had finally straightened everything out. And then I got a call from [anonymous media research company], saying that one of our boxes hadn't reported any data for the last few days. She suggested that maybe the power outages we've been having lately (because of all our stormy weather) had caused a problem, but I went into our bedroom to check on it and the power light was on. They receive reports on our television data over the phone, so I mentioned that transferred to digital voice over the weekend and asked if that could've caused a problem.
She said that for some reason their equipment sometimes has trouble communicating over digital lines, and said they'd arrange to have a separate, standard phone line installed (at their expense) for the boxes to use. It was at this point that I happened to look over at the phone jack in our bedroom, and I noticed that the separate wires that usually come out the side of the jack and go to the [anonymous media research company] box were MISSING. I found the end of the wires that attach to the data box itself, and pulled on them until I found the end. Which had been tucked behind my bedside table after having been ripped from the wall (probably by technician #2).
So now the girl from [anonymous media research company] has to come out tomorrow to hook their wires back up, and then we'll have another phone line installed, and then they'll probably have to come back out and hook their boxes up to the NEW phone line, and by then we may even have a new (or new to us) tv, so they'll have to come out AGAIN to bug the new tv.
Rarg. I love being part of the [anonymous media research company] pool, and I love their service people AND their phone support, but I'm *so tired* of having service people at the house. For reals. Wow...this suddenly makes me feel really badly for my sister, who's been having her house remodeled for like, the last year and a half or something. Sheesh.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Oh, yeah! One more thing...
I added a little "email post" link to my blogger code, so that if you ever feel compelled to share one of my many BRILLIANTLY written (and profound) posts with your friends, you can send them a link. So get to it, because I'm too friggin awesome to keep to yourself.
B to the H to the K...
We haven't really talked about him much since we still aren't sure how we're going to handle things, but BHK (short for Big Head Kitty; Brett's idea) is what we've named the stray cat we've been taking care of lately.
He's been wandering around the neighborhood for years - even when it's over 100 degrees out or when there's snow on the ground, and about six months ago I noticed him sleeping in a cardboard box we left out on our back porch. We started feeding him off and on about three months ago - reluctantly, but he was so hungry! He's always dirty and he has bug bites, etc, and I can see inside the little box he sleeps in through the sliding glass door in our kitchen, and when I glance over, he's there about 25% of the time.
A couple of weeks ago, when it was 19 degrees out and we had a foot of snow on the ground, I was in the kitchen making lunch and I heard this kind of hoooo hoooo sound coming from the backyard. I've seen plenty of eagles and hawks around here, but I've yet to come face to face with an owl, so I dropped what I was doing and snuck out the back door to take a look.
When I got out there I was horrified to see that it wasn't an owl making that noise, but it was little BHK! He was so cold and wet that he was curled up in a tight little ball, wheezing and whimpering in his box. :( I could see the track marks in the snow where he'd trekked over (leg ruts, instead of footprints because there was so much snow), and I was so sad for him!
Since he probably has cooties and our cats are clean, live only indoors, and don't have experience with strange kitties, I decided to set him up in the garage instead of just blindly taking him into the house. We have a couple of old foam mattress pads (the cheap kind) that we were going to take to the dump anyway, so I folded those into a nice cushy square (they're smashed really thin), put down a cheap heating pat, an old towel, and a cardboard box top (to hold in his body heat), made a cardboard box litter box (with litter and a liner), and set out food and water too.
When I tried to pick him up out of his porch box the first time, he panicked and ran away, which I was actually *kind of* relieved about, because I thought he'd maybe run home (assuming he has a home, however crappy it may be). I didn't see him again all afternoon, but around dinnertime he was back in his box AGAIN. The sun had been down since 4pm, and I don't know how cold it was outside by then, but I'm sure it wasn't exactly toasty.
Since Brett was home this time, he helped me kind of trick BHK into coming out of his box on his own, and then I kind of pounced on him with a towel and wrapped him up in it in case he decided to get scratchy. As soon as I was holding him though he was very good - not scratchy at all; not even squirmy (he probably felt my body heat and calmed down - he was so cold!).
So we put him in the garage and he lived there for about a week and a half, only coming out of his little heated box to eat, get pets, and poop. He actually didn't poop at ALL for the first two days and based on our cats' never-ending crap supply I found this lack of poop a little worrisome, but after about 48hrs he started pooping a couple times a day both in, and AROUND the litter box, so I'm really glad we put him in the garage. I kind of wonder if he wasn't pooping at first because he didn't have any food in him to poop. :(
After most of the snow had melted on the ground, and the night time temps were back in the 40's we decided to open the garage door and see if he was interested in leaving, and he just walked right out. I kind of hoped that if he had an owner, not seeing him for so long would scare them into taking him back inside, but within 24hrs he was back on our porch again.
I've been feeding him once a day ever since (half the amount that our cats get), and we've decided that next weekend we're going to call our local no-kill animal shelter to talk to them about whether or not we should bring him in.
I feel bad for not wanting to keep him, but our two cats are a bonded pair (they were litter mates), they have always been indoor cats, they never have "accidents," they're very healthy, fairly young (I think this guy is probably a senior), they're very needy, and I think Mordechai would be VERY jealous of another boy in the house.
Also, we really can't afford to take as good of care of him as we do Mordechai and Star (with food and anti-parasite meds, they're about $30 each per month, plus toys, treats, grooming supplies, and vet bills once or twice a year), and I'm sure he'll need lots of expensive special care at first too - he needs to be neutered, I bet he'll need his teeth cleaned (and possibly need dental surgery if no one's been taking care of his teeth all these years), he probably needs to be de-wormed, and if he hasn't had proper vaccinations he may even have leukemia or some other horrible disease. :(
I think he deserves a nice warm home, but I also don't want him in our house, and I think it's wrong of us to keep him caged up in the garage - when he was out there we had to *make* ourselves go out to pet him (our garage is on the other side of the house, and it's not a very cozy place to hang out), and even then we only went out there about four or five times a day.
At NOAH, which is where we adopted Mordechai and Star, he would be warm, fed, taken care of medically, AND given love and attention. It's a really great place. And he's a pretty friendly guy - maybe someone kind (who doesn't already have two indoor-only cats) would even adopt him! I feel bad stealing him away from the neighborhood where he's probably always roamed, and dumping him off at a kitty orphanage, but HE DESERVES A HOME, DAMMIT!!! A good one. Even if it is a shelter. That being said, we are going to *call* them first, so maybe they'll say to just leave him where he is because he might belong to someone...who knows. I just want him to have what he needs. :(
He's been wandering around the neighborhood for years - even when it's over 100 degrees out or when there's snow on the ground, and about six months ago I noticed him sleeping in a cardboard box we left out on our back porch. We started feeding him off and on about three months ago - reluctantly, but he was so hungry! He's always dirty and he has bug bites, etc, and I can see inside the little box he sleeps in through the sliding glass door in our kitchen, and when I glance over, he's there about 25% of the time.
A couple of weeks ago, when it was 19 degrees out and we had a foot of snow on the ground, I was in the kitchen making lunch and I heard this kind of hoooo hoooo sound coming from the backyard. I've seen plenty of eagles and hawks around here, but I've yet to come face to face with an owl, so I dropped what I was doing and snuck out the back door to take a look.
When I got out there I was horrified to see that it wasn't an owl making that noise, but it was little BHK! He was so cold and wet that he was curled up in a tight little ball, wheezing and whimpering in his box. :( I could see the track marks in the snow where he'd trekked over (leg ruts, instead of footprints because there was so much snow), and I was so sad for him!
Since he probably has cooties and our cats are clean, live only indoors, and don't have experience with strange kitties, I decided to set him up in the garage instead of just blindly taking him into the house. We have a couple of old foam mattress pads (the cheap kind) that we were going to take to the dump anyway, so I folded those into a nice cushy square (they're smashed really thin), put down a cheap heating pat, an old towel, and a cardboard box top (to hold in his body heat), made a cardboard box litter box (with litter and a liner), and set out food and water too.
When I tried to pick him up out of his porch box the first time, he panicked and ran away, which I was actually *kind of* relieved about, because I thought he'd maybe run home (assuming he has a home, however crappy it may be). I didn't see him again all afternoon, but around dinnertime he was back in his box AGAIN. The sun had been down since 4pm, and I don't know how cold it was outside by then, but I'm sure it wasn't exactly toasty.
Since Brett was home this time, he helped me kind of trick BHK into coming out of his box on his own, and then I kind of pounced on him with a towel and wrapped him up in it in case he decided to get scratchy. As soon as I was holding him though he was very good - not scratchy at all; not even squirmy (he probably felt my body heat and calmed down - he was so cold!).
So we put him in the garage and he lived there for about a week and a half, only coming out of his little heated box to eat, get pets, and poop. He actually didn't poop at ALL for the first two days and based on our cats' never-ending crap supply I found this lack of poop a little worrisome, but after about 48hrs he started pooping a couple times a day both in, and AROUND the litter box, so I'm really glad we put him in the garage. I kind of wonder if he wasn't pooping at first because he didn't have any food in him to poop. :(
After most of the snow had melted on the ground, and the night time temps were back in the 40's we decided to open the garage door and see if he was interested in leaving, and he just walked right out. I kind of hoped that if he had an owner, not seeing him for so long would scare them into taking him back inside, but within 24hrs he was back on our porch again.
I've been feeding him once a day ever since (half the amount that our cats get), and we've decided that next weekend we're going to call our local no-kill animal shelter to talk to them about whether or not we should bring him in.
I feel bad for not wanting to keep him, but our two cats are a bonded pair (they were litter mates), they have always been indoor cats, they never have "accidents," they're very healthy, fairly young (I think this guy is probably a senior), they're very needy, and I think Mordechai would be VERY jealous of another boy in the house.
Also, we really can't afford to take as good of care of him as we do Mordechai and Star (with food and anti-parasite meds, they're about $30 each per month, plus toys, treats, grooming supplies, and vet bills once or twice a year), and I'm sure he'll need lots of expensive special care at first too - he needs to be neutered, I bet he'll need his teeth cleaned (and possibly need dental surgery if no one's been taking care of his teeth all these years), he probably needs to be de-wormed, and if he hasn't had proper vaccinations he may even have leukemia or some other horrible disease. :(
I think he deserves a nice warm home, but I also don't want him in our house, and I think it's wrong of us to keep him caged up in the garage - when he was out there we had to *make* ourselves go out to pet him (our garage is on the other side of the house, and it's not a very cozy place to hang out), and even then we only went out there about four or five times a day.
At NOAH, which is where we adopted Mordechai and Star, he would be warm, fed, taken care of medically, AND given love and attention. It's a really great place. And he's a pretty friendly guy - maybe someone kind (who doesn't already have two indoor-only cats) would even adopt him! I feel bad stealing him away from the neighborhood where he's probably always roamed, and dumping him off at a kitty orphanage, but HE DESERVES A HOME, DAMMIT!!! A good one. Even if it is a shelter. That being said, we are going to *call* them first, so maybe they'll say to just leave him where he is because he might belong to someone...who knows. I just want him to have what he needs. :(
Thursday, December 07, 2006
OMG!!!
I was poking around in google images for pictures of chinchillas because of a picture of a bunny that Corey posted in my flickr picture comments through Alison's profile, and I stumbled upon THIS!!!:
I've censored their contact info, but EW! What jerks.
I've censored their contact info, but EW! What jerks.
My dad sent me this...
and it's pretty cute: http://badaboo.free.fr/merryxmas.swf
I guess when stuff like this starts showing up, it's a sign that I should really wrap up my christmas shopping. In more ways than one. Ha.
♥,
Cat
I guess when stuff like this starts showing up, it's a sign that I should really wrap up my christmas shopping. In more ways than one. Ha.
♥,
Cat
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Huh.
Apparently I don't give a rat's ass about the midwest. Also, any state that *I* visit should turn BLUE, biotch!
create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide
create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide
What's YOUR favorite tanning method?
Mine is to not tan at all. Not in a bed, not in the sun, not with a spray, or a lotion. Not in a box, not with a fox...you get the picture. Do I have a problem with dark skin? No! Of course not - it's beautiful. Do I think that MINE needs to be baked and painted until I'm no longer blindingly white? No. But apparently MSN disagrees. In their article about "looking beautiful all winter," listed right alongside helpful tips like "don't linger in the bath or shower" and "protect those tresses" is "self-tan."
WHY?!?
Dry skin and damaged hair I can understand avoiding, but I do NOT understand why the color of my skin is something I should try to change in order to be more "beautiful." Do YOU like pale skin? Yes? No? I mean, sure, there's washed-out pale, there's sickly pale, there's anemic pale, etc. But I have rosy cheeks. Rosy cheeks, dammit! I'm healthy!
I'll admit, I've tanned before. And I've self-tanned. And though I look pretty good with an actual tan, I also burn if I'm not careful, and because of my complexion and family history I have a high risk for skin cancer. Tan...cancer...tan...cancer...not worth it. The self-tanners I've tried in the past were all super high-end, but I never really felt like they looked close enough to the real thing, and they made my skin feel gross. So over time I grew to accept my skin for what it is: pale. Sometimes referred to as "marshmallow white," sometimes "fish belly white," "peaches and cream," "milky," "ivory," or even "damn girl! you are WHITE!" The list goes on. But I'm okay with it. I even LIKE my pale skin.
WHY?!?
Dry skin and damaged hair I can understand avoiding, but I do NOT understand why the color of my skin is something I should try to change in order to be more "beautiful." Do YOU like pale skin? Yes? No? I mean, sure, there's washed-out pale, there's sickly pale, there's anemic pale, etc. But I have rosy cheeks. Rosy cheeks, dammit! I'm healthy!
I'll admit, I've tanned before. And I've self-tanned. And though I look pretty good with an actual tan, I also burn if I'm not careful, and because of my complexion and family history I have a high risk for skin cancer. Tan...cancer...tan...cancer...not worth it. The self-tanners I've tried in the past were all super high-end, but I never really felt like they looked close enough to the real thing, and they made my skin feel gross. So over time I grew to accept my skin for what it is: pale. Sometimes referred to as "marshmallow white," sometimes "fish belly white," "peaches and cream," "milky," "ivory," or even "damn girl! you are WHITE!" The list goes on. But I'm okay with it. I even LIKE my pale skin.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Emotionally, my site is doing okay.
Chromatically, it's feeling pretty blue.
Please feel free to hate me just a little bit more after reading that; god knows I hate myself more after *writing* it.
GOOD NIGHT! :)
Please feel free to hate me just a little bit more after reading that; god knows I hate myself more after *writing* it.
GOOD NIGHT! :)
Saturday, December 02, 2006
LEE-chee, or LIE-chee? And some other stuff.
So a few months ago I got Fresh's A Spoonful of Sugar from Sephora, and I fell in love with Lychee Sugar - their newest addition to the Sugar line. I actually love it so much that I want a bigger bottle; it doesn't have a lot of staying power which is kind of too bad, but it has such a gentle, subtle smell that I kind of like spraying it all over (unlike Fracas which I usually only spray once). It's because of this new, spray-crazy tendency that it inspires in me that I think I'm going to run out before I get sick of it, which is why I want a full-sized bottle. So anyway, I talked to those fabulous folks over at Fresh and found out that it should be available in 100ml bottles by January. Woo! Which brings me to my current question:
Is it pronounced lee-chee, or lie-chee? I think I've always said lie-chee (and I've said it a lot), but every dictionary pronunciation I've found (well, I only tried a couple) have said lee-chee. But that sounds wrong to me! Ly looks like "lie" to my eyes, not like "lee," and Brett even says that the Chinese characters for the fruit (and China grows most of them) are pronounced lie-chee. What do YOU think, dear friends and readers? Please let me know so I don't sound like an ass when pronouncing the name of my own perfume.
On a completely unrelated note, I finished my Christmas Wish List, so...BUY ME STUFF! Just kidding. But seriously, you know...feel free. If you want to. And you already know my addy. If you're a stranger I love ya, but I'm not telling you where I live.
I think I want to change the colors of this site to blue, you know...for winter. We'll see if that happens.
And lastly...I've added some more wintry-type photos to flickr if you want to see them. Some of them are actually not that bad.
Is it pronounced lee-chee, or lie-chee? I think I've always said lie-chee (and I've said it a lot), but every dictionary pronunciation I've found (well, I only tried a couple) have said lee-chee. But that sounds wrong to me! Ly looks like "lie" to my eyes, not like "lee," and Brett even says that the Chinese characters for the fruit (and China grows most of them) are pronounced lie-chee. What do YOU think, dear friends and readers? Please let me know so I don't sound like an ass when pronouncing the name of my own perfume.
On a completely unrelated note, I finished my Christmas Wish List, so...BUY ME STUFF! Just kidding. But seriously, you know...feel free. If you want to. And you already know my addy. If you're a stranger I love ya, but I'm not telling you where I live.
I think I want to change the colors of this site to blue, you know...for winter. We'll see if that happens.
And lastly...I've added some more wintry-type photos to flickr if you want to see them. Some of them are actually not that bad.
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