Truffles update

€1 ≈ $0.83
£1 ≈ $0.55
207 lbs on Saturday (goal 180)

Truffles is feeling better. Slowly, since last Friday, he’s gradually started eating and returning to normal (howling in the middle of the day or night, wanting to go outside, harrassing Cookies, etc.). We’ve locked up Lady Bluebelle the past 3 nights in the utility room (with food, water and litter of course!) to help reduce the stress. It seems to have worked. Also, we stopped giving him his medicine, because by Friday night’s dosing he was back into Holy Terror mode. When I talked with the vet on Friday, he said that the cocktail base was a strawberry-flavored amoxicillin, and the flagvil (or whatever), the anti-nausea drug, was orange. Not exactly two tastes cats naturally crave.

We’ve been letting Truffles out in the backyard to explore and relax. Cheri called this morning and said he was spraying the roses. I guess he’s feeling better. So now, in a couple of weeks, we’ll get him in for his rabies and Revolution doses.

Dropped almost a grand at Home Despot (but we did have a 10% coupon). Mostly we got stuff for the guest bath remodelling (Cheri’s project), but we also bought crown moulding for the entire house (sans master bedroom, which will occur when we remodel the bathroom/vanity/closet area). We got this neat mitre box from QVC – it has an angle template which you use in and on the corners, then you transfer the template to the mitre box – voila, instant perfect angle for cutting the coving!

I’m officially toast in my NCAA pool. I’m 41 out of 43. However, I can get some respectibility if Connecticut wins – they’re my F2 loser.

A butterfly just flew by. The monarchs are making their way up from Mexico. I love watching them fly by. Although they seem to be mostly yellow; when I was a kid, I thought they were more orange.

Today is a book larnin’ day. I’m reading Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days from SAMS. The first few chapters are basic intro stuff – and since I do C already, it’s sort of boring. I could read the 5-volume ABCs of OS/390 System Programming, but I think I would fall asleep.

I’ve gotta work out this afternoon.

Tomorrow I’m going to Walnut Creek with the semi-retired boss to visit a FLEX-ES customer, to find out how their experience has been. The one concern is how much time we’ll have to put into management. I personally think it won’t be much after the initial migration and setting up of stuff – just maintaining the backups.

ETA: Dr. Schmidt called again on Friday to check up on him. He’s the best. He also recommended stopping medicinal treatments if Truffles started putting up too much of a fight. Which he did.

One of the few times…

cleaning up kitty poo in front of the litter box is a good sign.

Sufice to say (without going into details) that Truffles did a #2 overnight. That’s a good sign. He was alert but still tired this morning.

Oh, yeah, thanks Pitt. I can officially give up on my pool now. (I’ve still got my F2, Connecticut, but I’m toast.)

A hectic few days…

€1 ≈ $0.82
£1 ≈ $0.55

Wednesday I had to take Truffles to the vet. (He’s the white one in the pic.) He’d barfed big time on Saturday. Not an unusual circumstance with him, though. But after 3 days, we began to get worried, as he began to exhibit all the classic symptoms of a very sick cat. Including not being able to keep down water (although that was probably more from drinking too much at once).

We had planned to bring him in this week anyway for rabies shots, etc., but those were discarded. He’s usually a holy terror at the vet – his files have always been marked with “danger”. But this time he was pretty docile. Oh, he let you know he wasn’t pleased.

I left him at the vet. Of course, the last time this happened, we learned that it was time for Babushka (the middle one in the pic; Cookies is on the right) to go to that great kitty bed in the sky, so you can imagine Cheri was a wreck. And I wasn’t too thrilled as well. They were going to sedate him (ha!) and run diagnostics and tests.

I got the call from Dr. Schmidt at Atlantic St. Vet Hospital. (Plug – these guys and gals are the best. If you’re in Roseville, take your pet there. They’re also a 24 hour emergency service.) There was nothing obvious in the x-rays, blood screening, or ultrasound. The diagnosis was some kind of gastrointestinitis. Dr. Schmidt mixed up a cocktail using a children’s amoxicillin as a base, with another antibiotic, anti-nausea, and Pepcid. (No, really.) I got to pick him up and take him home.

He was pretty out of it that evening – but he was showing some signs of life. He spent the night sleeping on Cheri’s office chair. He was more normal yesterday – Cheri was able to give him the medicine alone. He even ate a little bit of wet food, and in the evening I gave him some cut-up chicken that we’d cooked up the day before. He’s slept all night on one of his cardboard scratchers, so I’m sure he’s still feeling a bit out of it. (And Dr. Schmidt called yesterday AM to see how he was doing, and let me know that his urine, although concentrated since he was dehydrated, was normal.)

Good news at work. We’re getting a FLEX-ES system, which is a IBM-authorised emulator for z/Architecture! I’m gonna add <fill in blank with many items> administrator to my various hats. I’ve recently added a Visual C++ programmer hat, although right now the program is mostly C, as I ported it from a z/OS C program, and I get to port it back as C++ to z/OS. Oh yeah, the obligatory Windows sucks comment must be made here, but I’ll admit that the Visual Studio development environment isn’t all that bad. I gotta get back to work on that today. The worst part of the porting has not been the basic logic (which worked right out of the box, so to speak) but figuring out how to get input parameters into the program. I added command line support (since there was no command line, so to speak, in the batch z/OS environment), and now I gotta parse an XML file. (Hey, anyone know the MFC for processing an XML file? Remember, I’m in C++, plus I don’t know jack about OO programming, although I’m going to start on the SAMS Teach Yourself C++ In 21 Days book.

Oops, time to start getting ready…

Monday, Monday…

£1 ≈ 1.85
€1 ≈ 1.24

Interesting day. Did a little Visual C++, did a little DASD management, did a little analysis on converting an application from BDAM to VSAM KSDS, did a little research on buying a FLEX-ES system.

Semagic is messing up – I’m going to have to manually update the pics/mood.

I spent a lot of time catching up on e-mail today at home. Now I’m updating my LJ, then it’s time to go watch Las Vegas – my regular dose of craptactular TV.

Gawd, I suck.

I lost my Final 1 and one of my F4 today. UK and MS St. And I’m probably going to lose Pitt, because they’ve been playing like total crap. But, from what I remember in my pool, with Stanford, Gonzaga and Maryland gone, it’s gonna be interesting. Just about everyone has lost at least 1 F4, most lost 2, some lost 3, and one’s toast.

On the good side, Arsenal have tied the record for no defeats since the start of the season.

Hacked the lawn back today. Cut back a ton of thatch. Even though I was using a gas-powered mower, my legs got a definite workout. I gotta get back exercising.

Gave Lady Bluebelle a vet-recommended bath today. She took it pretty well. And she’s definitely fluffier.

Hey, who won from last week’s TS:HF? I missed the beginning of both broadcasts, and the folks at discovery.com haven’t updated the web site yet.

Also – does anyone in the D/FW area need a network admin-type or ISP-admin type? My buddy just got RIF’d from GEEK.

Hey, I’m still here!

€1.23 ≈ $1
£1.89 ≈ $1

I’m in Roseville, CA, working for 6 months+ now. There have been a few recent things that I’ll post about eventually.

Sad news – in October, we had to put down our cat Babushka. She was about 17. She had an intestinal blockage and cancer.

But on March 13th, we adopted a new kitty from the SPCA – Lady Bluebelle. She’s grey, and will probably be long-haired (she’s about 10 months old and at that gangly adolescent stage). The other cats are still getting used to her. She’s like Babushka in temperment and actions.

We bought a house in November, moved in in January. It’s really nice.

We did our vacation after all, Brussels and London, right after Thanksgiving. I did have one last trip to Germany, and did day trips to Basel (where my dad was born – got photos of the former Frauenspital) and Luxembourg (country and city).

Damn, I miss Europe.

I’m wearing contacts now, most of the time.

Maybe I’ll start posting regularly soon….