Thursday, February 26, 2009

terribly early in the morning

More Bunny…

She seems to be getting more and more vision back all the time.  Phew!  The eye doctor confirmed that her eyes are physically fine and that she did have some vision at times when we were in his office yesterday.  It was a very good visit.  He donated his time, his staff was amazing with Bunny, and we discovered that, for the most part, she’s doing very very well.  Unfortunately, we still don’t know what happened to her.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

lunch time

Idiot of the Day - Police Dept. and/or DA of Clearfield, PA

15-year-old Clearfield girl faces porn charges The Associated Press Posted: 02/20/2009 CLEARFIELD, Pa.—A 15-year-old girl from central Pennsylvania faces child pornography charges after police say she sent nude pictures of herself over the Internet. Clearfield County District Attorney William Shaw says the girl has been charged as a juvenile with possessing, distributing and creating child pornography. The girl is living with her mother. Authorities say the girl sent the pictures after communicating in June 2007 with a 27-year-old man over the MySpace networking Web site. The practice has been called “sexting” for the prevalence of teens to transmit images via a cell phone. Shaw says the man has also been charged with unlawful sexual activity. State police found the images on the man’s computer.

Child pornography charges???  A 15 year old taking and sending naked pictures of themselves isn’t making or distributing child pornography.  Why on earth would they waste time and money charging a kid with such a horrible crime (she’ll have to register as a sex offender if she’s found guilty, I would imagine), when all she’s really guilty of is being a stupid 15 year old.  The guy, on the other hand, if he knew that she was 15, should be charged with something.  But, if they’re going to charge every teenager, who has taken and sent a naked picture of themselves to someone else online, with child pornography, they’re going to suddenly have an awful lot of new “sex offenders” on their hands.  The girl should be grounded, lose her allowance for a month, sit in a corner with a dunce cap on for a day, or lose her computer privileges for a month, not be charged with something that would be a felony if she was 18.  Although, if she was 18, they wouldn’t be able to charge her at all, because adults can send naked pictures of themselves to other adults without it being considered a crime.

And this is what I end up reading, after wanting only to know why Hanover is the “snack capital of the world”.  I know that Snyder’s of Hanover (the pretzel people) is obviously in Hanover, but I don’t think a pretzel company is enough to make up a “snack capital”.  Okay, after some extended “research”, I discovered that Hanover also has another pretzel company and two potato chip companies, and some other stuff.  I guess that’s a lot of snacks for such a small town.  Nevertheless, police in nearby Clearfield are idiots.

Monday, February 23, 2009

late morning

A Very Bad, No Good, Terrible Weekend

When you hope that your cat only herniated a disk, and are wrong, it makes for a crappy weekend.  We’re not sure what happened - did Bunny fall?  Did she have a seizure?  Did she have a stroke?  Does she have a concussion? (cross your fingers for “concussion”, as it’s the best of the bunch, at least for the future)  All we know is that she hurt her hip, and we don’t know if she fell and hurt her hip and hit her head, or had a stroke and then fell and hurt her hip, or really anything except her hip hurt, which is why we took her to the vet in the first place.  She was going to spend the night getting treated for a herniated disk (oh, everyone has to be like Mom - first Cricket, then Bunny), and they had to keep an eye on her because steroids are contraindicated for her heart condition.  When the vet called later that evening, she told us that Bunny was blind.  Well, Bunny wasn’t blind before Friday evening, so something is affecting her vision, but we don’t know what.  Her eyes react to light, so her eyes are seeing, but her brain isn’t.  Ugh.

The good news, if there’s anything good in this scenario is that Bunny is able to get around the house not too badly.  We don’t know if it’s because she has a little bit of vision (peripheral?) or if it’s because cats leave their scent on everything by rubbing up against things/people constantly.  You know how sometimes it’s kind of annoying?  Try to think of it as less annoying now, because we’re thinking that’s how Bunny is getting around.  She’s marked the whole house with her scent glands (it sounds kind of gross, but we can’t smell them…as far as I know, and if I can’t smell something, it generally doesn’t have a smell) and it’s basically mapped the house for her.  She’s still able to jump over the baby gates, go up & down the stairs, walk around the computer stand in the bedroom that we occasionally kick because the metal legs stick out into the path at the end of the bed.  Several times, I was sure I’d broken a toe kicking that damned thing.  It doesn’t even hold a computer, it has a Pachinko machine on it - a groovy one from a Pachinko parlor in Japan.  But anyway, we kick the legs of the stand, and Bunny doesn’t.  I put her on the bed, and just like she always did, she ran off by running over the blankets, jumped onto the headboard (which is an oddly shaped tree limb), and then down onto the ramp that sits at the end of the bed.  From the ramp, she jumped to the floor.  She navigated all of that without a misstep.  It’s pretty amazing to watch.

The bad stuff - she jumped onto the kitchen counter and knocked a glass bottle of vitamins onto the floor, shattering it.  Lesson learned, no more breakables on the counters.  You’d think that she just wouldn’t jump onto things that are that high up, but Bunny has always been our most fearless daredevil.  She’s the only cat that has jumped on top of the kitchen cabinets, walked the length of them, and then jumped onto the top of the fridge.  While we’re grateful that the other cats stay off the cabinets, we would’ve preferred that the family daredevil not be the one who lost her sight.  We have cats who do nothing but nap all day, when they’re not eating.  They wouldn’t have even noticed if they lost their sight.  Bunny has also been very very vocal since coming home.  We’re not sure if she’s talking to us to make sure we’re still in the room with her, chatting because she’s confused about the sight loss, or doing what I’d be doing…complaining loudly about going blind overnight.

While having Bunny lose her sight at the grand old age of 2 (next month) sucks, what sucks more is that there’s a chance that the reason she lost her sight is related to her heart condition (Restrictive Cardiomyopathy) - if she had a stroke because of a blood clot, chances are good that there would be more clots in her future.  Bunny is an adorable cat and we don’t want to lose her.  She had a follow-up ECG a few weeks ago (she was diagnosed with her heart condition a little over a year ago), and nothing had changed, so we figured that we were in the clear, that her condition hadn’t worsened at all, so we had a lot of years left with her.  Don’t tell the other cats, because I love them too, but Bunny is my favorite.  I sleep with Bing, and Bunny refuses to sleep with me or even let me hold her for too long, but there’s just a special something about her.  The cat that likes to play with your answering machine by walking on it and playing messages is going to either be annoying or adorable.  Bunny is adorable.  She’s been so healthy since she was diagnosed with her heart condition (she was in heart failure when we took her in - we thought she had a cold), and she’s more active than any other cat, which is good for a cat that you want to stay healthy and in good shape.  Anyway, we’d really really really like it if her blindness is caused by a concussion and that she’ll slowly get her sight back, and be fine, as long as she doesn’t fall on her head again.  However, apparently concussions are rare in cats.  But, not impossible.  We know all of the post-concussion symptoms from watching and reading about hockey, and if she had one, we would just make her quit her NHL career now, before she had any more concussions.  Then, she could live a long & healthy life.  The vets don’t think it was a concussion, but they don’t know what it is either, so I’m happy to think it’s a concussion and hope that by next week, she’ll be back to normal.  Oh, and the herniated disk that we thought she had…is fine right now.  She doesn’t seem to be in any pain and she’s stopped limping.

We’re exhausted.  We barely got any sleep on Friday night due to worrying about Bunny, and waiting for the vet’s office to open on Saturday morning.  We took her in as soon as we could in the morning.  We had locked her in the bathroom with Missy Mae, our bathroom cat (seriously, that’s where she’s happy - she sleeps behind the toilet and mothers tiny foster babies when we have them), because we knew that Missy Mae is our least active cat, so there wouldn’t be any danger to Bunny in the bathroom.  It was just her, Missy Mae, three or four cat beds, a bowl of toys, a bowl of water, and a litter box.  When we got up, the bathroom was the most amazing litter/water mess we had EVER seen.  The floor was just covered in gross clumps of wet litter, the water dish was full of litter, Bunny was covered in dried litter (it was like she had a coating of cement on her paws, legs, and tail) and we were really really confused.  However, after we found out that she was blind, we figured out what happened.  The pain meds wore off (we practically have a pet pharmacy here) and then she woke up confused and started to wander around frantically, spilling litter and water, over and over again.  She’s just now finally gotten most of it off of her.  Her tail still has a few litter spots on it, but she either cleaned herself up at the vet’s office on Saturday night or someone cleaned her up.  Whoops, tangent.  I just wanted to say…we’re tired and now we’re going to bed.  Cross your fingers that Bunny doesn’t find any more breakables.

Bunny in December

Bunny at 9 weeks

Tiny Bunny & Carlo (her tongue is sticking out, which is why she looks a bit odd - if you click on the picture, you can see the larger version with more detail)

Saturday, February 21, 2009

terribly early in the morning

A Shocking Encounter At The Mailbox

On the way home from spending the last “dimes” we had (using gift cards and quarters at Target, and a ten dollar bill that one of Leigh-Ann’s friends from Canada had left over from a trip to the US, to get a $5.55 pizza from Little Caesar’s), we stopped off at the mailbox (we used to go on the way out, but without a window on the car, we can’t leave anything inside the car, so we pick up the mail on the way home) and as we were getting ready to drive away from the mailbox, a woman from the house across the street comes running at our car, running in front of the car.  We thought she just wanted to get to the mailbox, but we couldn’t figure out why she would run in front of the car, instead of behind it.  That puzzling question answered in the next paragraph.

When we “lost” (that’s a nice euphemism for it) our white Equinox, we ended up buying a used red Aztek.  Except for our car having pinstripes on the side, it looks just like the red Aztek owned by the people who live next to the mailbox.  So, the woman was actually running across the street to try to stop the car to talk to “us”, only it wasn’t us she wanted to talk to, it was the owners of the other Aztek.  Okay, this is kind of shocking and pretty sickening.  The reason she wanted to talk to the owners of the Aztek was because their 12 year old daughter and a friend (or friends?) went on the roof of their house, pulled down their pants, and told the sister of the woman talking to us, to “kiss her white ass”.  Omigawd.  I guess I probably don’t have to tell you that the family across the street from the mailbox is the only black family in our neighborhood.  Seriously, what kind of parents raise kids who will climb on their roof just to be racist jerks?  Stunning!  Creepy.  Apparently they also have a son who fills the house with his friends every day.  Gee, why is it no surprise that we find rocks and broken bottles in the street next to the mailbox all the time?  Ugh.

We also discovered (it was a very enlightening conversation) that the house that we originally wanted to buy, but changed our minds because we found out that the grocery store was going to be built behind it, constantly has their pool furniture stolen from the yard.  Their back yard wall is fairly low (we have a street behind our wall and the drop is about 20 feet, thankfully), so it’s easily climbable by kids who wander around the parking lot behind the houses on the street where we almost lived.  The association won’t let them build their walls any higher either, which is amazingly ridiculous.  All that’s back there is a parking lot, so it’s not like the walls have to look pretty.  I’ll bet if someone on the association board lived on that street, they’d immediately be able to put up higher walls.  In fact, I’ll bet they’d even make all of us pay for it.  Ugh, associations.  We had frost kill one of our plants and we got a notice to immediately replace it.  Uh, HELLO!, it’s the middle of winter and it’s likely to freeze again - you don’t replace dead plants in December or January!

terribly early in the morning

You and me both, Johnny Damon

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week froze the assets of Stanford International Bank, Stanford Capital Management and Stanford Group Co. “I can’t pay bills right now,” Damon was quoted as saying by foxsports.com. “That started on Tuesday. I had to pay a trainer for working out during the offseason. I told him, ‘Just hold on for a little bit and hopefully all this stuff gets resolved.’”

Okay, but seriously, is there any “fund” out there that isn’t ripping people off?  Geez.  Had I known that it was so easy to steal from rich people, I would’ve done it years ago.  Okay, no I wouldn’t have, but imagine how much money out there was stolen?  Couldn’t those people have just invested it properly and then paid people back?  Oh wait, that’s how a non-criminal would think, therefore that person wouldn’t be stealing from people in the first place, huh?  Crud, I’m honest.  That sucks.