Category: Diary (Page 17 of 38)

Thank goodness Kami has a short memory, because for the few minutes each day I have to pin her down while Lisa squirts a syringe of pink disgusto fluid into her mouth, I’m sure she hates us.

The first couple of times Kami didn’t seem to mind so much, but now she’s become wise to the sound of the bottle being shaken up and also she seems to know when to make herself scarce.

Luckily she’s never too far away from the kibble bowl to which she returns regularly. At this point I grab her, hind legs in one hand and forelegs in the other, then sit on a chair so that Lisa can grab her cheeks and force her mouth open. If I don’t hang on, Kami will lash out and lacerate any nearby flesh with her claws, so a firm grip is essential.

Kami has learned how to not swallow and let it dribble out the sides of her mouth. Her beautiful white furry breast is now spikey and pink.

The other members of our team were deploying our application into the production system today (Yes – on a Sunday) and several nasty bugs decided to expose themselves. It’s frustrating because it was my fault, mostly. More testing would have uncovered these at an earlier stage, but with these guys everything is always so last-minute, interspersed with periods of inactivity. So, it didn’t get the testing it should have. And there are other reasons for unnecessarily complicated and interrelated legacy code (that we didn’t write) which aren’t important except that they make our job harder than it needs to be.

Anyway, we were in the middle of a telephone conversation with the rest of the team when Toni-from-across-the-road knocked on the door, clutching her cell phone, babbling incoherently, obviously in need of assistance. She couldn’t understand where her house mate, Linda, was, yet I had heard from an earlier conversation Lisa had with her that Linda was in Philadelphia for a week and had in fact been away for several days already.

I ducked back into the house and told Lisa it was an emergency and that I had to go across the road and help Toni.

Toni was wandering in circles in her living room, calling people on her cellphone, repeating the same things over and over:

“I must have fallen off the ladder.”
“Are my pupils dilated?”
“Where’s Linda?”

If ever I needed to see a real example of someone having been “knocked into the middle of next week”, well, now I had one.

She was also bleeding all over the floor from a gash in her foot. I got her to lie on the floor with her leg on a chair and dumped some ice in a dish-towel and put it under the back of her head where an egg-size lump was forming.

At that point, one of the people she had been trying to get hold of on the phone turned up. I’d never met him before, but he seemed pretty level-headed and together we got Toni’s insurance card out, called her doctor, got advice about where to take her, and he bundled her into his pickup and drove off, with me assuring Toni that’d I’d look after the cats if she didn’t get back until late.

I found out later that the guy was Linda’s brother-in-law, who lives nearby.

I went back to work on fixing the nasty bugs in our program.

*

Toni returned to the house late in the afternoon, dosed up on some fairly strong painkillers – vicodin I think – and is resting up. We’ve promised not to tell Linda anything if she calls, so that she can continue to enjoy her trip away without worrying.

Peter Gabriel is touring the States, but the closest date for us will be in Phoenix, Arizona. Seeing as we’ve considered taking a sight-seeing trip to the next State for a while, we decided to arrange a trip to coincide with the concert.

Today I went online and bought tickets for the 12 December Peter Gabriel concert in Phoenix, and Lisa found somewhere to stay nearby for a couple of nights. It’s 6 hours from Vegas to Phoenix, through some nice scenery – We’re looking forward to it.

The last couple of times we’ve been in the garden pruning the trees (a long, careful process) we’ve noticed Kami running around and squatting with no noticeable output. This suggests a problem with her waterworks, so after a couple of days of this we decided to cart her off to the vet for an examination.

The good Doctor Gorman verified a tenderness in the bladder area, but Kami refuses to “pee in a cup” so we have to leave her there until she’s willing to offer up a sample.

*

Later – the vet calls us to confirm the presence of bacteria (and blood) in Kami’s urine, so Lisa was right, there’s definitely a problem. We pick Kami up and collect some nasty vile pink stuff to be taken orally, twice a day after meals. Seeing as Kami eats all the time, this might be difficult to pin down.

There is a cat in this picture. Kami is well-camoflaged on the quilt.

Regarding yesterday’s meeting:

The meeting title was “Project Assignment Discussion” which could have been good news, so we really had very little warning, except for the fact we’ve been kind of expecting it for months. For the last month or so we’ve basically been twiddling our thumbs.

It was quite quick and relatively painless, if a little transparent and not very creative. As soon as Bill, our unit leader, told us that this was not a meeting to talk about some new work that needed doing, but rather, to inform us that our job positions were being eliminated, Jim sent us each an email with a “Job Elimination Memo” attached. He must have had them ready, poised in his outbox.

So this morning, we delayed our travel plans by a couple of hours and phoned Marty, the Acme redeployment guy, to make sure he understood our situation and what kind of positions we were interested in. He sounded chirpy enough, but the Christmas holiday season is not the best time to be looking to get hold of people in the company.

We also made a phone call to our old boss, Bob, and let him know what the deal was. Couldn’t hurt, he’s always looked out for us.

There’s a slim chance they’ll be a job for one of us at Acme. We have until January 17 to find one.

Lisa found out from the Sales Office over our back fence that Greystone Homes have been selling the houses in the housing-development-over-the-road to schedule, which means soon the construction will be moving back into our development as they fill out the last gaps with new houses. One of these gaps is the Sales Office car park, which is located diagonally over our back fence.

We expect construction to begin in December? For a move-in date of April 2003? Something like that. It’s been fun have the openess of the sky in that direction.  Hopefully it’ll only be a few weeks of rotary saws going non-stop in January or something.

Glorious weather today. I don’t know off-hand if it is officially Autumn but it feels like it. We’ve left the living room windows open, but turned off the fans because it’s fairly windy. 77 degrees at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Ahhh, beautiful.

*

4:44pm – spoke too soon about the great weather. Half an hour ago the wind picked up, we had a 3-second power cut, and now the trees outside are being thrown around like anything in sudden string gusts. The Palo Verde, much tended and re-staked, is leaning over at a rather sad angle, but at least it’s still in the ground. Over the back fence it looks as though one of the trees is out of the count – it’s split down the middle. Still very windy out there, and it looks like rain headed this way.

*

It rained. Is it Winter already?

The weather has been fantastic for the last week. We’ve been getting up and opening all the windows and setting the fans going to circulate cool morning air throughout the house. The air conditioning doesn’t kick in until just after midday, and sometimes later. I think we’re almost at the point where we turn off the airconditioning and maintain the internal climate passively.

There’s no doubt that the reflective tint film on the windows has helped a lot. It doesn’t eliminate the need to draw the kitchen blinds when the sun makes it over into the West, but it does reduce the heat transmitted into the house. Takes the edge off it, or something.

We’ve felt the most difference by having the secondary thermostat in a different location. It’s enabled us to maintain separate zones with independent temperatures to a much greater degree than before (pardon the pun).

Lisa trimmed some trees yesterday, and put down some plant food for the shrubs at the front of the house. It definitely feels like Summer is over.

Which for us means looking forward to being outside more, and enjoying evenings sitting on the back porch, and stuff like that

…and is much adored. More here.

Also, Karma fits in the case just perfectly:

of lasers, that is. I’ve had Rush songs buzzing around in my head for two days now.

I’m a capable kind of guy. I can use tools, erect pegboards, fix garden lights, stake trees, and hang curtains. Appliances I have trouble with. (I was going to say, “… appliances leave me cold” but as you will see, that would be inappropriate.)

I still don’t know how to use the washing machine. (It’s so wrong. The dials have three “off” positions! It’s positively mutant.)

It being Friday 13th and all, something bad was bound to happen and it did. I left the freezer door in the garage ajar yesterday. What this means is that for 24 hours the freezer tried in vain to cool down its contents, and in the process, heated up the garage and possibly damaged the appliance. It got really hot on its exterior surface.

I remember getting some sliced bread out of the freezer around lunchtime, and I guess the door didn’t close properly.

This evening, Lisa went to get some bacon out and found a small disaster area. Bagels and fruit juice, no worries, but lamb roasts and ground meat? Scallops and shrimps? Argh.

The freezer had done a valiant job, and most things, while obviously less than perfectly frozen, seemed ok. We changed our dinner plans and had scallops instead.

We’ll work on eating through the contents of the freezer before we re-stock it, thus if anyone is going to get sick it’ll be us.