Monday, December 24, 2007

terribly early in the morning

Some Xmas Videos - Happy Holidays to My Friends, Near & Far (mostly far, really far)

Not meant to be depressing - I was going more for the Las Vegas & Elvis flavor.  I already miss Leigh-Ann, since we’re together pretty much 24/7.  Nonetheless, I’m happy she’s having a white Christmas with her family, for the first time in 13 years.  That’s way too long to miss the holidays at home.  Hopefully, next year we’ll have it all figured out so that she can be here for Xmas Eve and we can both be there for Christmas Day.  And, I wouldn’t mind a Leafs’ game to add to it...and some snow, but not too much snow...or too much cold.

One more.  I’ve been awake for an hour or so waiting until it was time to give Cricket her meds.  I don’t want to let her get off schedule because the meds are helping her pain tremendously.  No panting since yesterday after she, uh, took care of some business that she was in too much pain to take care of before.  I’m guessing the position is very painful for her.  However, the combination of Tramadol, Robaxin, & Prednisone is keeping her comfortable.  She’s sleeping, she still has an appetite, and she isn’t making me want to cry when I listen to her pant and whimper.  Best of all, she isn’t following me everywhere I go in the bedroom, which was also making her pain worse due to all of the activity.  I tried sitting on the floor with her and petting her to calm her through the pain, but it didn’t work.  She wanted to be glued to me...but she was still in extreme pain.  However, add another fan of better living through chemistry to the household.  She’s much closer to being the happy Cricket we know and love.  So, I’m off to give her a lovely Hawaiian bread doughball (mmm, nothing but the best for my baby - plus, I can occasionally sneak a pillless doughball) with some lovely Tramadol & Prednisone.  And, I’ll see you at 8am for the Robaxin doughball.

A fun one!

I appreciate all of your good thoughts for us (in previous entries and emails), and we’re hoping for a better and healthier 2008, for us and for our furry beings.  This year has sucked in a whole lot of ways, but we’re both grateful for the amazing friendships we’ve found online.  You’ve all enriched our lives, and we wished you lived closer.  I’m hoping to at least be able to track down Laurie & Dana (our Ontario pals) and their boys (Dana has THREE boys!!!, as of last Friday - she wins for best Xmas present ever) for next year’s Canadian Xmas (or fall, fall is good) vacation.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

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.

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.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

early morning

What I’ve Learned from/About My iPod Touch (won at the CLIQ booth at BlogWorld) - Part I

The inside of my left ear is apparently malformed (I’d always been so proud of my cute little ears - my best feature, I thought), as the earbuds that come with iPods brutally push (er, read: lightly touch) against the cartilage and it hurts.  A LOT!  I knew that the ear canal in my left ear wasn’t as straight as the one in my right ear because I can’t get foam earplugs to stay in my left ear properly.  They don’t expand nicely to block out the noise of you people who live in a daytime world, while I slumber.  The silicone putty works just dandy though, just in case you were worried unnecessarily about my deformed ear canal issues.  I did not know that I had a weird inner ear left ear design.  Intelligent design, my behind!  Anyway, I had to buy new earphones and I was shocked, SHOCKED!, to learn that they can cost as much as $500.  Can you imagine?  Leigh-Ann helped me do lots of research on earbuds/earphones from a variety of companies, from fancy Shure and Sennheiser to JVC, Bose, Etymotic, Philips, Koss, JBuds, V-MODA, and then my head exploded, so I didn’t need earphones anymore.  Actually, I found these Coby Super Bass earbuds and they had pretty terrific reviews for the price.  I figured that $5 earbuds with good reviews were an excellent place to start.  I should be getting them tomorrow.  If they’re good, I’ll buy another pair in case something unforeseen happens to them.  We have cats.  I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Monday, November 19, 2007

early evening

Check out the new Kindle (and floating hand) at Amazon (the blog selection is sports-centric!)

And the biggest blog category in the Kindle store?  Sports. By over 100%.  Sports and Amalah.  Go Amy!  Very impressive.  Okay, not that she’s a whole category, but it’s just cool that there’s a mommyblogger in the Kindle list of blogs on the launch day.  I think that speaks volumes for mommyblogs.