Tuesday, December 11, 2007

terribly early in the morning

Carlo’s Echocardiogram Results

First, a picture....

We got up early to drop Carlo off at the vet’s office yesterday to get his ECG.  Then, we held our breath until we got the phone call (it had to be sent to a cardiologist in California to read - the cost was actually quite reasonable, thankfully) late in the afternoon giving us the good news - Carlo’s heart is fine.  Yay!

the wee hours

Buy this new 4 GB iPod Nano… help raise funds for Bunny! (copied from Leigh-Ann’s Blog Pound blog)

Leigh-Ann is selling the 4GB iPod Nano that she won at BlogWorld, as a fundraiser for li’l Bunny and her heart meds.  Also, we don’t need it because I won the iPod Touch (which despite being an Apple product, I actually like it - although I’d like it a whole lot more if it would let me use Rhapsody-to-Go on it...I don’t like having to buy each album I want to listen to) and Leigh-Ann won another iPod, so we each have our little prize, which we needed, psychologically, as a little reward for rescuing the cats from the shelter.  Because, those cats?  They gave every single one of our cats a cold.  They’ve all been sneezy, but several of them have been much worse than that, with an awful runny eye problem, which gives them crusty eyes when they wake up.  Yuk.  Also, they seem to sneeze on us often and with great feeling.  I swear that they aim at us.  I think that deserves a little MP3 player keeping.  However, the one we’re selling is pimped to sell and is groovy looking, if I do say so myself.

This is copied from Leigh-Ann’s blog:

Christmas is just around the corner, and I’d like to sell the second brand-new, 4GB iPod Nano that I won at Blog World.  We could use the cash more than we could use the iPod, especially given that Carlo must have an ECG, Cricket has been sick all week with pancreatitis, and a few of the cats with URIs now also have eye infections.  It seems like we’ve been at the vet almost every day in the past week!

As I said, this iPod Nano is 3rd generation, and 4GB.  It’s never been removed from its storage box.  There was recently a sale at a cool store called iFrogz.com, so we purchased a nice case and decorative control pad decal for this iPod, and it will be included in the sale.  Here’s what your new lovely iPod will look like once you put it in the new case and add the decal:

Isn’t that nice?!  The iPod, without the case, sells for $144.99 at Amazon.com.  The case and decal are worth about $18, so the total retail value here is $162.94 (plus whatever taxes and shipping you’d have to add if you bought it in a retail store or online).  If you buy this Nano from me, I’ll give you the entire package for just $130, and I’ll ship it to you for free. If you’d like to buy this and send it to someone as a gift, I’ll happily wrap it and send it wherever you’d like, too.  If you’re interested, you can jot me an email using the “Contact Me” link at the top of the page, or just send $130 to me using the Wee Paws donation button in the sidebar.  If I can’t sell this in a couple of days I’ll put it on eBay, but then I’d have to pay a lot of fees to list it.  I figured I’d try this first.

So, if you’re interested in buying the groovy iPod NanoNano from Ork, please go to Leigh-Ann’s blog and contact her.  It’s a good deal, and it’ll go to a good cause...us.  :D Thank you for your rapt attention.

P.S.  Just look at that face, don’t you want to help buy some heart medicine for her? I used her serious face, versus a video I could’ve taken of her racing around the house today, playing with a plastic ring from the milk bottle.  She’s also been jumping from my desk to my back, gnawing on my hair.  She’s been super cuddly too, only she’s a bit too full of energy and doesn’t quite know what to do with herself...so she lightly bit the end of my nose.  The meds seem to have finally kicked in the past few days and she’s back to acting like a kitten.  She has so much energy that no one else can keep up with her, so she’s been running everywhere she goes, and playing with the plastic from the bottles by herself.  It’s like solo soccer practice.

Monday, December 10, 2007

the wee hours

Look, it’s me!

Sunday, December 09, 2007

the wee hours

Some questions, a little American Idol talk, some dog food tips and the always enjoyable coprophagia

When you’re getting your paycheck, do you like to know the exact date you’ll be getting it or is okay with you if it’s any time within a seven day period?  Am I the odd duck who likes to know exactly what day the direct deposit or wire will show up?  And, if you don’t care, does that mean that you won the lottery or you got Andruw Jones contract with the Dodgers of $36.2 million over two years.  I think that if I got paid $1,000,000 a month or say, got direct deposit of $500k every two weeks, I’d probably have enough savings that if a couple of payments were later than usual, it wouldn’t matter.  Well, unless my house payment was $500k and due 10 days after the last game of the pay period and all of my savings had been donated to a variety of people & businesses...and I was starting my rainy day savings account again from scratch.  So then, I suppose I’d need to know exactly when that $500k was going to be in my bank account, so the down payment check I wrote for my first house payment (you should see the cool house you can get with a $500k down payment) didn’t bounce, right? 

I haven’t purchased an album since the last P!nk cd that was released last April.  But yesterday, I was feeling wild and reckless, so I bought the Blake Lewis “Audio Day Dream” album directly from my iPod.  If I still cared about music like I did when I was a youngster, buying Mp3s online would be way too easy and tempting.  But, I don’t, so that’s good.  I like music, but I like Rhapsody, which lets me listen to any album or song, but I don’t own anything.  It just saves me having another thing to gather dust. 

So yeah, Blake’s album is pretty catchy, wholly unlike Jordin Sparks’ extremely boring album.  She has a decent voice, but the songs are snoozers.  I was going to say that generally I don’t like the American Idol contestant albums, but I have Kelly Clarkson’s two cds and Kimberley Locke’s cd (zzzz, and religious, so extra zzzzzz - I think it was like half price or something, and had one good catchy song...the one I’d heard before I bought the cd), and I listen to Carrie Underwood’s music all the time.  I also like the Daughtry album.  But Ruben, Clay, Fantasia (though I thought she was fabulous on the show), Bo, Taylor, Katherine (I expected to like it, but thought it was rather average), Elliott, and all of the other top tenners who tried to capitalize on the show...did nothing for me.

Anyway, if you liked Blake on AI, you’ll really like his album.  If you have no idea who he is, click on his fancy schmancy picture up there and listen to some song snippets.  If you like any of what you hear, I promise that you’ll like the whole album.  Plus, it has lotsa songs - kind of like getting a book that has lotsa pages.  You feel like you got a better deal.

Cricket is still feeling kind of lousy - I can tell that she’s in pain.  She has almost all the signs of pancreatitis.  The special fancy prescription food we had to get for her is Eukanuba low-residue food and is filled with crap.  I can’t believe how much they charge for it, when they use meat by-products and corn grits.  So, not only does it cost as much as the really excellent human grade ingredients of foods like Merrick & Fromm, but I can’t let Phoenix lick Cricket’s bowl when she’s done (which Phoenix enjoys very much, even when there’s nothing left in the bowl), because she’s allergic to corn.  These aren’t the exact ingredients on Cricket’s cans, but this answer at Yahoo Answers does a really terrific job of describing the veterinary prescription diets.  I’m only whining about six cans of food though - if Cricket needs to stay on a low-residue diet, we’ll find a new food for her.  The big problem is that when the food isn’t the raw food that she & Phoenix have been doing so well on for the past six months or so, or a food that looks like people food (chunks of meat, chunks of vegetables, visible other ingredients like blueberries, apples, carrots, and peas), like the Merrick & Dick Van Patten (giggle) Eatables, she eats her own poop.  So, we can’t feed her anything that looks like paste or mush or anything that you wouldn’t look at and think, “Hmmm, that looks & smells really good, I wonder how it tastes?”, because we all suffer in various ways from that final result.  Blech.  So, if your dog is eating its own poop, try changing its diet to better food.  Their bodies use up all the nutrients, so there’s nothing tasty left in their poop, so they leave it alone.  None of the other stuff worked for Cricket - not Forbid, not hot sauce, not meat tenderizer, and not gagging, begging, and pleading for her to stop it, stop it right now.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

late at night

On The Second Night of Hanukkah My Pets Gave To Themselves…

Some stomach cramps, a little constipation, a whole lot of whimpering and panting...and what basically amounted to a belly full o’ gas.  Cricket went to the vet today after acting like she was in dire distress.  She has some bad gas.  She got a prescription for Ultram, Sucralfate, and Pepcid.  Our poor baby is being treated with the meds for stress and an ulcer.  To be honest, I think she just wanted to go visit Marge and the girls, plus get hooked up with some pain meds, and to get her way, she was willing to suffer the indignity of an, uh, digital exam, if necessary.  It was.  When we got home, I gave her a pain pill and some Sucralfate, and then waited around for a little bit while they took effect.  I think she had a lovely nap while we braved the Xmas crowds at Target.  And, how did she get this illness that existed purely of air?  We ran out of her fancy schmancy raw food and fed her some Newman’s Own and some Spot’s Stew for a few days.  Her belly rebelled.  She’s such a sensitive girl.  Phoenix was fine.  She wondered what all the fuss was about.  She was embarrassed for poor Cricket.

We decided to treat ourselves to the special Hanukkah buffet at the Santa Fe Station hotel/casino as a reward for being good pet parents.  Blech.  Their brisket tasted like rubber tires (it was so nasty that neither of us could eat more that a tiny bite of each of our big chunks of meat), their potato latkes were some weird combination of potato shreds and cinnamon & nutmeg (?? - I’m not sure of the exact spices, just that it wasn’t what it should’ve been), their matzo ball soup that wasn’t nearly as good as Leigh-Ann’s, and it was just all-around unpleasant.  We rarely go out lately, so it was a big disappointment and a waste of money, although we did get $4 off by having our Stations card with us.  That’s the first lousy meal we’ve had at the Santa Fe since the new buffet opened and it’s sad because we were just wanting some simple Jew-y food items.  You know, all they needed to do was buy a matzo ball soup mix (both Streit & Manischewitz make a fine matzo ball mix), some frozen potato pancakes, and your average brisket.  I don’t cook and I could’ve done a better job.  Heck, Cricket could’ve done a better job.

And for you, because you’ve been so good, here’s another song by The LeeVees!