The McWetlog

So we picked up our new car last week: a 2004 Subaru Forester with about 71,000 km on it.

We had decided to buy a new car some time ago. Not only was our 1998 Mazda Protégé, with 211,000 km on the odometer, growing rust, Quebec’s new law mandating snow tires comes into effect this winter — no sense buying new tires for an aging car.

We’ve been doing our homework for a while; our original thought was a small wagon — we decided that we needed cargo space — and our working theory was a new Toyota Matrix or Pontiac Vibe. In the end, however, we decided to buy used again. We wanted a Forester all along, I think, but it was too expensive new. This one presented itself, and we leapt at it. A Forester is less fuel efficient than a Matrix, but most of our driving is highway driving, and we drive less than 20,000 km a year, which is nothing for country folk: I carpool and Jennifer walks to work.

It seems to be in pretty good shape — better, in fact, than the Mazda was when we bought it five years ago. I’m hoping to get seven years’ use out of it. And for something marketed first as an SUV and now as a “crossover,” it drives like the jacked-up compact car it essentially is — which is to say, surprisingly nicely.

I also like the fact that “Subaru” is the Japanese name for the Pleiades. Dig the astronomy reference.

As I mentioned two years ago, we get a lot of animals visiting us, and the bird feeder, which Jennifer has reinstated, still doesn’t hurt. So far this spring, we’ve seen a lot of birds, including grackles, woodpeckers and chickadees; and there’s also a groundhog who seems to have made a home between two front porches in our building.

I’ve created a Flickr photoset to document our visitors. For the most part, these photos were taken through our living room window, with my 55-200mm lens, and with pretty good results, considering.

When people find out we have both cats and snakes, they ask whether the two kinds of animals get along. If the snakes ever got out — and I haven’t had an escape in almost six years — the cats would almost certainly make quick work of them. But through the glass, it’s a little different.

Kittens are extremely interested in snakes, and will examine them at close range. Goober, when young, sat on a lot of cage lids, which required us to upgrade them to something stronger (he broke the 50-gallon tank lid, which is now held together with fishing line; fortunately, the box turtle it now houses is not much of an escape risk). And snakes that have never once bitten a human being, such as Trouser (our male anerythristic Corn Snake) and the Baird’s Rat Snake, were striking at him as he watched. After a while, though, he grew out of it; adult cats (at least the ones we’ve had) aren’t as interested.

But now it’s Doofus’s turn to harass and bother the snakes, who are now freaking out at him …

So, the Doofus was de-nutted on Wednesday. Didn’t seem to slow him down any: by the time I saw him that evening, he was just as psycho as he normally is, if a bit wobblier. He’s still a playing, bouncing machine. I guess just being a kitten has more of an impact than whether or not he owns a pair of testicularities.

What do you do when both cats want to be picked up and held?

This is going to be problematic when Doofus gets as big as Goober. Which he will.

At home today, thanks to heavy snow. An SQ officer stopped by this morning: Atkinson’s, the bar across the lane from us, was broken into held up last night. Since the ATV theft from Bean’s a couple of years ago, the restaurant next door has been broken into a couple of times, and Bean’s was robbed again over the Christmas holidays (snowmobiles that time). Homes don’t get broken into in the middle of the night because they’re usually, um, occupied, and during the day our neighbours watch out for one another, so I’m not terribly worried. Also, we don’t have cigarettes, significant quantities of alcohol, or ATVs. It’s still a little disconcerting to be living right next door to what is apparently the high-crime area of Shawville.

(Updated March 6 to reflect the fact that it wasn’t a break-in, it was an armed robbery; also added the thing about the snowmobile theft.)

I’m behind on posting photos. This is nothing new. In fact, the following photos have been waiting for me to get my act together and post them to my Flickr account:

• Photos from CPR #2816’s visit to Smiths Falls, Ontario in June 2004
• Photos from the Shawville Fair last September
• Photos from the wedding of Jennifer’s brother last December

I leave it to you to figure out which one will get me killed if I don’t hurry up.

For Caturday, a couple of items about the new kitten, which — in case you haven’t heard — we’ve named “Doofus.” (“Spazz” was already taken by the female blue-striped garter snake.)

• He’s more than doubled his weight since his arrival.
• He attacks shadows on the wall. I’m tempted to take a picture of him in mid-air and LOLcat it thusly: “Ranger cat fights da shadowz.”
• We wake up with strange and unexplained scratches. Devious cat is not to be trusted.
• He set off a minor panic earlier this week when he peed on the guest bed. We’re crossing our fingers that it was a case of overexcited loss of bladder control.
• He goes in to get fixed on March 19. Given the foregoing, that cannot happen soon enough. Snip snip, settle down.

Working part-time hasn’t helped much in terms of feeling tired, but that’s given the circumstances lately. Work is, of course, busy, and sometimes I think I’m doing a five-day job in a three-day span. The commutes are still long, especially when it snows, which is happening on a weekly basis nowadays. But my downtime is pretty busy, too. Normally I’m blogging, but not this past week.

First came the Chinese New Year dinner party last Friday, for which I was underprepared: I spent most of the party chopping raw shrimp and other ingredients, but it turned out well enough, and the guests were well and happily fed.

At the same time, it was reported that the Pontiac MRC — the county government — had proposed a uniform animal-control by-law for all 18 municipalities, including Shawville. I had to lay hands on a draft of the by-law, read it, freak out about it, figure out what to do about it, and draft a reply. I spent last Monday writing a letter to the mayor of Shawville, which Jennifer dropped off at the town hall on Tuesday. It’s four pages long. It has footnotes. I’ll post it at some point.

So even though I’m working part-time and I haven’t posted an entry to The Map Room for a week and a half, I’m pretty pooped. Never a chance to catch up on my rest, always something else that needs doing.

What Jennifer didn’t mention in her post about our new washer and dryer — indeed, what she really couldn’t mention until the situation was resolved — was that one of the delivery guys helped himself to her iPod during their job. Don’t worry: we got it back, and I believe that charges are going to be laid.

Figuring out what had happened was trivial. Between the time that Jennifer last used it (when we were preparing the basement for the machines’ arrival) and the time we noticed it missing, the delivery guys were the only other people in the house. They were the only plausible suspects: both it and they were in the kitchen. And yet I had a hard time believing it was possible: someone couldn’t be that dumb to swipe something. It’s not like something like that going missing wouldn’t be noticed.

Apparently, someone was that dumb.

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I love to travel, but I don’t travel well. Stress and strange and uncomfortable beds increase my pain levels and, in turn, reduce my energy levels. I’m constantly tired. I forget to say please and thank you and all the other social niceties. I don’t move around very well. I don’t run around and do things as I should. It’s worse when I travel by road, which is annoying because I love road trips. All that time spent in the car and, if it’s a multiday trip, all those nights either in a tent or on hotel beds. The longer the trip, the worse it gets. Planes shorten the transit, so I may have to opt for plane travel rather than road travel. Either way, I’m sure to come down with at least a cold, usually the flu virus, and occasionally a norovirus. A vacation becomes something to survive, rather than something to enjoy.

Back at work tomorrow.

In many ways, 2007 was a trying year. The first quarter was spent dealing with cat problems and other issues, and I seem to have had some health and stress issues during the second quarter. But the second half of the year was spent back in the real workforce: stressful indeed, but a much more positive sort of stress.

Punching a clock and collecting a steady paycheque have been great for the finances, but my blogging and other projects have suffered. A lot of things planned for the past year simply haven’t happened yet, and my website income has been declining, month by month. (Even so, my website/freelance income was in line with my expectations for the year.)

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So far, the cats seem to be getting along quite well; Goober’s acceptance of the new kitten is actually better than expected, and certainly better than we’ve seen with other cats. The kitten did manage to give his right eyelid a scratch, which necessitated a trip to the vet last week. There we learned that Goober was now in excess of nine kilograms (20 lbs) — a couple of kilos more than we thought he was. Hopefully, the presence of the new kitten — who incidentally is a playing machine who likes nothing better than to pounce on me in the middle of the night — will help him work off a bit of the excess flab.

And no, we still haven’t settled on a name. We have some candidates, but nothing’s stuck yet.

You knew that, once Maya died, we wouldn’t be a one-cat household forever. Jennifer doesn’t work that way. So say hello to our new arrival: a two-month old male kitten. We’re not sure what to call him yet; I’m open to suggestions. He’s courtesy one of Jennifer’s co-workers, who had a litter on hand. Extremely playful and looks to be well-socialized, if a little shy and jumpy so far (which is to be expected). Goober’s responding to the intrusion better than the average cat would. (He’s never looked so huge in comparison, at more than six times the kitten’s weight.)

Apparently I’ve been doing a good job at work: they’ve extended me until the end of the year. This is very good for my bank balance — I’ll finally be out of debt some time in early November. But it’s been less good for my blogging, which will have to be on life support for a little while longer. The job has been busy enough that I don’t have much energy left at the end of the day to look after my web sites as much as I would like.

But the decision to stay is a no-brainer, at least in the short term: I make more than five times as much at the real job than I do from my web activities. In the long term, though, there are two paths ahead of me: either I will resume my web projects once this contract is over, or I will enter the world of permanent, full-time work. The former option leaves the door open to future, short-term contract work; the latter option would likely entail shuttering many of my projects, or reducing them to occasional pastimes rather than regular work. I have a choice ahead of me, one that is by no means easy.

My eyes have always been odd. I was born cross-eyed enough that I was blind in my right eye, and wore an eyepatch in my preschool and kindergarten years. Corrective surgery, to straighten out that right eye, followed in the fifth grade, and I’ve been wearing glasses, on and off, ever since. To clarify, my eyes aren’t actually bad (I’ve passed a vision test without my glasses, and I go without wearing them as often as not), just odd. My right eye is slightly farsighted; my left eye is slightly nearsighted. This means that I’ll watch television across the room with my right eye dominant, and read with my left eye dominant. Binocular vision is sort of a see-saw thing with me. Glasses correct this, but I’ve been overdue to replace mine for some time — 13 years is a little long for the same pair, isn’t it?

More about my birth defects and other physical abnormalities in a future episode.

Meanwhile, it will surprise no one to know my results from a Myers-Briggs test done at work: I’m an INTJ. I certainly called it beforehand.

Shawville is only an hour outside Ottawa — close enough, in other words, for me to be able to apply for government jobs. The catch is whether I’m willing to put up with such a lengthy commute. Others do, of course, but I’ve always liked living close to where I work.

Local jobs, such few as there are, really aren’t for someone with my talents or with my health issues — it’s hard to pump gas if you can’t stand on your feet for more than an hour, for example.

So my decision to work at earning income from my web sites — the self-employment route — was more or less by default. I’d already quit the one suitable local job, and my applications for various positions in Ottawa always went nowhere. (My guess is, my extremely nervous demeanour during the interview put them off.) So, after a while, I gave up looking and started focusing on this stuff, here. I’m not getting rich from my web projects, but it’s been increasing, year by year.

But tomorrow, after a drought of three and a half years, I finally start punching a clock again: I start an eight-week temp contract — an editing/proofreading job with Health Canada.

Fortuitously, my neighbour’s commute runs right past the building in which I will be working, so I will be carpooling in with her: this makes the commute much easier to bear, insofar as my health and ecological footprint are concerned.

Blogging gets moved to evenings and weekends: it’ll be interesting to see if I can manage the double workload. If I can’t, well, it’s only a couple of months away from my projects, and I’ll be able to return to them soon enough. In other words, it’s no longer an either-or proposition: I don’t have to choose between my writing and a steady paycheque.

I worked for the government long enough not to be afraid of it. When people argued that the government was being malicious or corrupt, I countered that, in my experience, incompetence was the more likely explanation. It turns out there’s an adage (or two) for that. Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Or Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” (Yes, it sounds familiar.) Via Daring Fireball.

Born to my brother and his wife at 1:43 AM MDT yesterday morning, via C-section, and weighing 3.65 kg, their first daughter (and my first niece), Cecily Irene Crowe. She was more than a week overdue, a big baby, and with a shockingly full head of hair.

A flurry of family activity in Calgary in the wake of Cecily’s birth — today, says Geoff, is the dog-and-pony show — too bad I can’t be there for it. My mother is apparently over the moon.

Don’t look now, but I think I’m finally feeling a bit better. Over the cold, at any rate, and possibly over the flare, too. I’m also feeling a little more energetic.

Annual checkup on Wednesday accentuated the positive too: blood pressure back to normal, weight down nine pounds since last year.

So, good news all around. (He said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.)

I volunteer for the Pontiac Archives, which mostly involves me opening and staffing the Archives on Saturdays. It’s usually pretty quiet: many days I go without a single customer, but I believe it’s important to be available. Frequently I get people coming in hoping to use our Internet access, which, of course, we don’t let them do.

Today, though, it got weird. Shortly after I opened this morning, a youngish woman entered looking quite flustered. She wanted to check the Internet for something. More precisely, she wanted to check the Internet to see if something had occurred that would, as near as I could gather from what she was saying, be the sign of the imminent Apocalypse or something.

That’s right: she wanted to check to see if the Rapture was nigh. And she was quite agitated about it.

I suggested she try one of the public terminals upstairs in the library. She asked me whether it would matter if she didn’t have a library card.

Now really, if you’re expecting Götterdammerung, shouldn’t you be better prepared than that?

It’s been a bitch of a flare. As I’ve discovered, the problem isn’t always the pain; it’s the exhaustion. I’m surprised at how early I’ve been hitting the fatigue wall these past couple of weeks. I’ve never been so listless.

Occasionally, I leave my house and take pictures.

Some photos from a walk with Robert and Marilee on their property two weeks ago (Jennifer’s photos).

Photos from the Ottawa Central’s open house last Saturday (see my post on FRN). It was raining, at times heavy, and my kit lens got all spotty towards the end.

Also from last Saturday, photos from our first visit to Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in years. For this one, I put away the spotty kit lens and used my new 50-mm f/1.8 prime lens, which, you may recall, has to be manually focused with a D40. I shot without a flash, which made for very shallow depths of field (f/1.8, ISO 1600), but I’m quite pleased with the results.

This whole thing with image macros and variants on lolcats — lolruses, gebrils (NOT sic), even lolbrarians and loltrek — and the associated mangled grammar is probably on the cusp of lameness, so why don’t I help it along with my own particular … idiom. Presenting LOLSNAKE!!!1one

A $20 phone has solved the wireless network problems I’ve been having for more than a year. After ruling out other possibilities (such as hardware or software problems), it turns out that our neighbour was using a 2.4-GHz wireless phone: every time she made a call, my computer — which is in a room next to her apartment — was cut off. (Jennifer’s stayed running, because it was far enough away from the interference; I’d thought that there might have been something wrong with my computer or the router’s range.) Our solution was to buy our neighbour a 900-MHz phone, which won’t interfere with the network: fortunately those are still available! Now I only have wireless router hiccups, fibre-optic cuts, DNS outages, and my web host’s variable reliability to drive me bonkers.

I’ve decided that turning off the phone ringer during the day is a good thing, and will do so on a permanent basis. Use e-mail or IM to get a hold of me during daylight hours.

It turns out that most of the calls I answer during the day fall into one of two categories:

1. Ladies from the Archives, calling to ask a question (usually of the PEBKAC variety, and one they eventually solve on their own if I can’t be reached). Love them to death; hate being tech support.
2. Callers from one of Jennifer’s financial institutions who don’t seem to realize that (a) unlike me, she’s gainfully employed (so why are they calling her at home during the day?) and (b) even if she did give them her work number, what makes them think they’re entitled to interrupt her job? Better be important; usually isn’t.

So, a source of disruption eliminated. Just because I’m at home doesn’t mean I’m not at work. Got to concentrate, here.

In the comments on my last photo of Maya, Mike offered his condolences on our loss, to which he could relate, having had to put a cat down last year. But, he wrote,

It wasn’t quite the same when one of my corn snakes died after clutching though. How do you find it emotionally when one of the garters kicks off, or have you been fortunate enough to avoid that?

Regular readers of this blog — all six of you — will know, of course, that I’ve had more than a few garter snakes expire on me. Here’s what I wrote back:

I agree that it’s not quite the same (much as I’d like to pretend otherwise), but it was still a bit wrenching when a garter snake I’ve kept for years dies after a protracted illness, which has happened at least three times: to my female red-sided garter, who died of a liver tumour; to my male wandering garter, who died of a worm infestation; and to one of my Butler’s garters, who died from eggbinding.

I’m attached to all my animals, even the ones with little or no social interaction (i.e., the reptiles). But while I have to admit that there is a stronger emotional bond with a cat than, say, a corn snake, I’m still affected when I lose a reptile. Even if I’m not affected as much.

Either way, I feel a strong sense of responsibility: if I’m going to keep animals — especially exotic, wild animals — in captivity, I have a duty to ensure their health and, inasmuch as their little reptile brains can comprehend it, their happiness. When they die, I feel as though I’ve fucked up, even if they’re dead from natural causes or old age.

We found Maya’s body at the back door this morning. Her condition had deteriorated with alarming speed over the weekend, to the point where even swallowing water last night had become too great an effort. We feared we would have no choice to put her down when we took her to the vet today; we feared that she wouldn’t even last that long; we feared that she wouldn’t last the night. Some time during the night, in the dark, she climbed out of the basement, came to rest on the doormat, and, at that point, simply stopped.

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Recently I’ve been feeling more stressed than usual — which is saying something — and I was at a loss as to how to deal with it. So I kicked myself into seclusion for a week: I made no plans to go anywhere, and I turned off the phone ringer, and crossed my fingers that nothing would happen that would wind me up any tighter than I already was. Nothing did, and I’m feeling a bit calmer now than I did a week ago.

Coincidentally, I went back into flare a week ago. I think this has more to do with the season than my stress levels: I was in flare by this time last year. It was manageable until today, when pain levels went up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Flare’s in full force now. Ow.

Maya’s situation is much worse than we originally thought.

To the vet’s again yesterday, where an X-ray was done on her abdomen. If you look at Jennifer’s photo of the X-ray, it’s hard to see what, if anything, the problem is (click through for annotations), but the vet found something: a growth where no growth should be, about the size of a kidney. Almost certainly a tumour, and probably cancer, either lymphatic or intestinal. The former is certainly worse, but neither is exactly good. Whatever it is, it explains her inappetance.

Maya’s prognosis is poor. After four weeks of vomiting and not eating — she’s been losing about a pound a week — she does not have the strength to make her odds of surviving a biopsy any good. (The problem is the anaesthetic.) We’re giving her cortisone in hopes of shrinking the growth. It’s really her only chance of recovering to the point where a biopsy could be performed with a reasonable chance of success. Otherwise, I don’t think we have much choice but to put her down.

Another vet appointment on Monday, where another X-ray will confirm whether the mass is shrinking. That will determine what happens next.

She’s not even six years old, so of course I’m bothered by this.

So the vet’s opinion is that Maya has been entirely too lethargic — and, more worrisome, not eating enough. Essentially: she may be anorexic. After puking nonstop for a week, she ended up with no real volition to eat, is the hypothesis. She’s gotten pretty gaunt in the meantime.

So Maya’s now getting Valium. You heard right: apparently one of its side effects in cats is that it acts as a strong appetite stimulant. Half an hour after getting the pill (oh fun), she’s actually interested in eating. And, more to the point, eats. Assist-feeding of the high-calorie cat food still continues, but hopefully she’ll get enough nourishment that she’ll stop looking so frail and listless.

Getting her back to her active self is going to take a while.

So help me, I now have a Twitter account — not that I leave the house often enough that short updates on my progress are in any way meaningful, but we’ll see how this toy works.

My luck is consistent enough: I joined just as their infrastructure got screwy.

Some of you have been asking whether Maya’s recent illness might be related to that spate of cat and dog food poisonings that have killed a number of pets and resulted in a huge recall of cat and dog food. Despite some very similar symptoms, I can rule this out: I’ve checked the list of recalled products and we’re in the clear.

Maya is finally on the mend. She’s not quite back to her old self yet; for the past week she’s been doing little else but sleep, and we’re still syringing high-calorie cat food into her to make sure she gets enough nourishment. But it’s been a long ordeal for all of us.

When Jen left for New Brunswick on the 3rd I was left to look after the cat myself for the week. I was pretty apprehensive about this — I’d never, for example, given a cat a pill before — but was reasonably game. I mean, hell, I’ve pulled retained eyecaps off water snakes. How bad could it be?

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Persona is my ISP. For the past two days I — and every other Persona customer — have been suffering from seriously degraded connectivity: about half the addresses I would try to reach would simply not resolve. DNS seemed fine, but ping averages were occasionally high. Five different calls to five different tech support agents yielded a different answer each time (the core router was frequently fingered), but the final answer seems to be that Persona was having issues with a new upstream provider that they switched to on Monday. Everything seems fine this morning, though, so I’m crossing my fingers.

Maya has not improved, so today she went to the vet, who pronounced her severely dehydrated and put her on a fast IV drip. Her illness is presumably viral, rather than something she ate, but in the past three days she’s gotten herself into a negative feedback loop: vomiting begets dehydration (especially if you can’t ingest water orally), dehydration begets more vomiting. She looks like hell at the moment, but she should be on the mend shortly.

Maya has come down with something; she’s been barfing for two days. A trip to the vet may be in order unless her stomach settles down. Over the phone, the vet suggested administering Pepto-Bismol through a syringe, and if you know Maya you can guess how well that went.

Having a cat barf for two days straight isn’t as bad as it sounds, especially when there’s nothing left to bring up. (Hardwood floors help.) Having a cat miss the litter box when she’s trying to pee just once — now that’s something unpleasant.

I turned 35 on Saturday, and celebrated it at three successive little parties, at different locations, that Jennifer threw for me. It worked well — each person attending each party could not have attended the other two — but man was I beat after that.

(Jennifer treated me to one of these, so my photography jones got stroked a bit.)

Overall, I’m feeling better than I did last week. Most of the phlegm is gone, and I feel less listless. If I get enough rest and maintain my equilibrium, I may yet get some work done.

I have vague hopes of increasing both the quantity and the substantiveness of my writing on this blog. I have many new projects I want to launch that you have not so much as heard of. Web pages. Entire web sites. Short stories. Podcasts and other audio projects. In other words, I have ambitions.

But energy, not so much. Such is my problem.

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I’m bad at e-mail at the best of times, but lately it’s been getting preposterous. I’ve been owing some of you a reply for months.

Don’t take it personally if you haven’t heard from me. Appearances to the contrary, I’m actually a shy bugger for whom even picking up the phone can be a considerable effort sometimes.

A few items of local interest:

Anne McGowan, the principal of ELC, is retiring. Since Jennifer is one of their teachers and I am her spousal equivalent, I attended the retirement party on the 26th, where I put my swanky new camera to use.

Eric Campbell, a local character (and yes, you better believe he was one) who was active in heritage projects, died last week; my friend Robert Wills is assembling anecdotes on a memorial page.

The Pontiac Community Bonspiel wrapped up today; Jennifer played on the Pontiac High School staff team. It was her first time curling, though she’s no stranger to the sport as a spectator. Her team finished second in its division, but before you get too impressed, note that there are twelve divisions and 72 teams in all. Anyway, I was along with my camera today, and here is the photographic evidence.

Goober got a clean bill of health from the vet yesterday. Paw damage is superficial and will heal up eventually. He’s lost about a pound and a half since his last checkup, which doesn’t sound like much, except that it’s 10 per cent of his body mass: in human terms, that’d be like losing 18 to 25 pounds in a week. But he had weight to lose. Every day he seems to gain a little more vitality, and Maya hisses at him a little less.

Goober returned from his week-long adventure with surprisingly few scars. He’s got some blisters on his toes, and he’s lost quite a bit of weight. We’ll have him into the vet on Saturday as a precaution, but it looks like he’s got a cold: he’s running a bit of a temperature if his ears and paws are any indication, and he’s also sneezing and coughing up phlegm even more than usual (remember, we named him “Goober” for a reason: he’s always been a bit of a sneezy cat).

One thing we were able to do reasonably quickly: give him a bath. Goober was quite filthy, covered in the grit and soot and grime that he no doubt picked up from spending a week in the junkyard of a gas station-slash-snowmobile dealership. Our usual method of bathing cats involves a pitcher and the tub, since we don’t have a handheld shower head, but we manage. We missed a few spots, but at least he’s cleaner, if not totally clean.

He’s not eating as much as he used to. He’s been spending most of his time sleeping, which isn’t a surprise — he might be sleeping off his cold as well as his exhaustion.

Maya, however, is pissed: after more than two years of living with Goober, it takes one week apart for her to start hissing and growling at him. I think she got used to having the place to herself.

We spotted him a few moments ago mucking about the yard of Bean’s, the service station/snowmobile dealership across the lane from us. We ran over and cornered him inside an old freezer unit, where, with a couple of employees helping us, Jen was able to retrieve him.

He’s filthy, but alive. And not a moment too soon: the overnight low is now forecast for -31°C.

And now he’s acting like he never left …

Since my last report, Goober came back to our back porch twice to eat the food we’d set out for him: once between 12 and 2 PM on Saturday, which Jen missed because she was asleep (we’ve been getting very little sleep lately), and once at 1 AM on Sunday, when Jen spotted him but couldn’t catch him — as soon as she opened the door, he was off.

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When I found out that Goober had disappeared, I did not know where (or how far) he had gone, whether he had been picked up by someone or was still out in the cold somewhere, or even whether he was still alive. Those with more experience with wayward cats — including Jennifer, David and many other friends and coworkers — said that frequently cats would come back after a few days’ adventuring, and that this was likely to be the case with Goober. After all, he’d been fixed, so he wouldn’t wander as much as a tom; and since he still had his claws, he could defend himself as needed. So, odds were, he was alive, all right, probably having the time of his life, and would turn up eventually. I could appreciate the likelihood, but — as is so frequently the case with me — what I can appreciate intellectually and what I feel are frequently at odds.

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The computer finally got fixed yesterday, so all is well at that end.

But there’s a new problem: Goober got out either Monday night or Tuesday morning, and we haven’t seen him since. If you’re in the Shawville area, keep an eye out for him, would you? Jen is used to having cats come back after a few days; I’m not, so I’m a bit more frantic about this than she is. Actually, “frantic” is a bit of an understatement. So is “apoplectic,” for that matter.

Last Thursday we went for a walk around Shawville so that I could take pictures of our freakish weather. It hit 10°C on Friday. These temperatures (and concomitant lack of snow cover) aren’t just screwing up nature: lilacs are budding (see photo), the grass is still green, and earthworm activity is being reported on one mailing list. It’s also screwing up my health: I lapsed back into flare over the past three days, though I seem to be doing better this morning (it’s probably not a coincidence that it’s also snowing this morning). Going almost directly from fall to spring with a week’s worth of winter is not good — I need a few good and cold months for my back to recover. It’s January and I’m from Winnipeg: I expect -25°C!

Jen’s back at work this morning, so our holidays are essentially over. I have an ambiguous relationship with holidays and vacations, because I persist in trying to work through them, at least at a reduced rate: even if I’m off visiting relatives, I still try to get at least some blogging in. I have a hard time relaxing. It’s probably why my holidays have been steadily less ambitious for years: in 1999 I was in Europe for Christmas and the New Year, but in 2000 I stayed home — and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Making travel an occasional and optional part of the holidays, rather than a duty, makes it possible to enjoy them more. The Christmas season is stressful enough and expensive enough without travel adding to both, and I’m trying to watch my stress levels and my pennies. So this year we stayed home and, for the most part, stayed in. We got out, but no more than usual. My mother showed up for the first week and was under strict orders from me to do little and decompress (read, watch movies, go for walks), and was successful at it: Shawville is a good place for that, I’ve found.

I posted very little here in December, and ought to bring you up to date on what’s been happening at this end.

Pain

I declared my flare more or less over in early to mid-December. The pain never really ever goes away, it just becomes a little less oppressive. It’s hard to explain why being in pain this morning is not in flare, even if it’s more intense than when I think I am in flare, but I’ll figure it out at some point. Essentially, it’s a question of how worn out and worn down I am by the experience. I have a bit more vim and mobility lately, at least. I feel better, if still quite sore. A bit more alive, a bit less depressed.

Continue reading this entry »

The good news is, my Intel iMac is back from the shop and operational again — and in about half the time I expected it to take.

The bad news is, there’s a new problem: the fans are going full-blast, and the normally silent iMac now sounds like a jet engine. Resetting the PRAM and the SMC has no effect, so it has to go back to the shop. (Sigh.) At least it runs, and I can access my data, even if it is just a little bit deafening.

My working theory is that a heat sensor has been disconnected, and the computer is compensating by running the fans at maximum. We shall see.

An hour on the phone with AppleCare. It costs money, but they do look after you.

I knew my old high school was closing, I knew it was merging with the nearby technical-vocational school; I just lacked the details. As it turns out, they’re renovating and expanding Sturgeon Creek to accomodate the influx of Silver Heights students, and there’s some debate over what to call the merged school: Silver Heights, Sturgeon Creek or something new. An interesting point — and what was clearly the impetus behind the merger — was the respective schools’ current enrollments: 800 at Silver Heights, 400 at Sturgeon Creek. When I was in high school, Sturgeon Creek was much larger; times have changed if the International Baccalaureat/French Immersion school is now twice the size of the technical-vocational school — and with smaller and older facilities, to boot.

This is not turning out to be a good week. Computers hate me.

Yesterday I had a combined five hours’ worth of outages, between my ISP changing the IP addresses of its DNS servers without telling anyone (not least its clueless support staff, who insisted that the old IP addresses were fine despite what my router was saying; fortunately I fixed it on my own); the fourth crash of the MySQL server that powers FRN; and three hours of cursing at my wireless network. (I’m suffering the same problems connecting to wireless networks that other Mac users are confronting after the 10.4.8 update, only intermittently. I can go days without incident, then hours with nothing but.) So, yesterday was a frustrating day.

Then this morning my iMac wouldn’t start. It’s a brick. It has to go into the shop. Great.

Fortunately, I have a backup: I’m writing this from the G4 iMac — Jen’s computer. (I just wish I’d backed up my data on the main computer more recently.)

You know, I’m not really good at handling these setbacks at the best of times, but after two and a half months of abject pain (yes, it’s still going on), my emotional reserves are already exhausted. Suffice it to say, I could be doing better right now.

I’m now entering my sixth week of what has turned out to be the mother of all flares, one of the worst I can remember since I was first diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis nearly nine years ago, and probably the worst I’ve had while on naproxen (other meds were less effective, and resulted in more pain).

I first reported it here. It was relatively mild, as such things go, for the first two weeks; then it showed me a whole new gear. For the first time, my neck and sacroiliac joint feel as though they’re fusing, not just stiff; and yesterday I started feeling numbness in my jaw and lower lip. It has occurred to me that my disease may be entering a new and much more unpleasant phase.

Continue reading this entry »

I continue to move my photos over to my Flickr account. My .Mac home page photos have now been added. Best to take care of it before I let my .Mac subscription lapse, which I’m thinking of doing. I’m also thinking of letting ontarioherpers.org lapse, since I hardly ever do anything with that domain, so, though it won’t expire until next May at the earliest, I’ve moved my Pelee Island field trip photos over as well.

While my ankylosing spondylitis usually flares up in the spring and fall, this year I’ve been caught off guard by it in both seasons: it has arrived about a month before I expected it to. On Thursday the old familiar pain and stiffness began manifesting itself; it’s been worsening since then, so it’s not a brief bout. I’m back in flare again.

That will put a crimp in my plans: so much, for example, for attending the opening of the new Apple Store in Laval today, or the reptile expo in Mississauga tomorrow.

Continue reading this entry »

I finished uploading my vacation photos over the weekend; the complete set is here. (Jennifer’s photos are also up on Flickr, beginning here.)

Some belated notes on the trip:

Continue reading this entry »

Back from a nearly two-week road trip to (and from) Winnipeg. Reports and photos — lots of photos — to follow soon.

1. Wild blueberries are endemic: there were roadside stands all along the highway right up to Winnipeg. Yesterday’s Winnipeg Free Press had a story about the wild-blueberry industry (if you can call it that; it’s pretty low-paying work), but the Freep doesn’t make its stuff available online for free, so no linky-link. Note, however, Jennifer’s post about wild blueberries in Nova Scotia. They’re everywhere — and here I thought signs advertising blueberries and home baking were unique to Highway 7 between Peterborough and Ottawa!
2. Passing lanes are plentiful along Highway 17, and make driving so much easier. Once they were put in so that cars could quickly get around slow-moving trucks that had trouble going up hills. Now, though, the trucks go around us. They seem to be a tad more powerful these days.
3. iPod FM transmitters are all over the place, and they’re all set to my frequency — or at least that’s my conclusion after the 20th or 30th blast of strange music over the radio as a car passes. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering iPods’ increasing ubiquity — and, really, on Highway 17, you really need an iPod in your car. It’s that long a drive.

Well, that was exciting. Just finished mopping up the basement. Torrential rain this evening caused the town’s sewers to back up. Which, in turn, caused water to pour into our basement — two to three centimetres’ worth, or about 1,100 litres (rough guess), which, thanks to some help from Ricky and his shopvac, we were able to vacuum up, bail out and mop up in only a couple of hours.

All in all quite lucky: everything on the floor down there was either in plastic containers or, if in cardboard, fairly low-priority stuff; damage so far appears to be light. Could have been much worse. Exhausted, though, now, so to bed with me.

Back from a whirlwind weekend trip to Toronto, where, while visiting Tania, we visited the Apple Store at Yorkdale (which was smaller than I thought), browsed through EftonScience (a very dangerous scientific supply and telescope store), got Jen properly fitted, and visited the Toronto Zoo. Zoo photos to follow. Unbelieveably hot, humid and uncomfortable: those few extra degrees — and smog — really make a difference.

Update, 4:25 PM: My zoo photos — mostly of homeothermic megafauna, uncharacteristically. It was too muggy for me to think clearly, much less take photos, inside the pavillions.

Update, July 31 at 8:10 PM: Jennifer’s blog entry and photos.

DreamHost, my hosting provider, has been having a whole mess of trouble lately — enough that I started a separate blog to chronicle any outages and downtime (see previous entry). Yesterday, I noticed that rebuilds on Movable Type were abominably slow — it took as long as 10 minutes to rebuild if I saved an entry. I suspected a MySQL or network issue. So I opened a support ticket.

Continue reading this entry »

I may well be terrified by large insects, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate them from the other side of a screen: we’ve had katydids on our kitchen windows a couple of evenings this week. There are no katydids in western Canada, so this was a new experience for me. Very neat — as long as they’re on the other side of that screen.

(Meanwhile, while out on a late-evening walk, Jennifer spotted three species of frog: American toad, gray treefrog, green frog. Not bad for one walk.)

See previous entry: In Soviet Russia, zoo visits you!

I’m generally quite sympathetic to people who confess to being afraid of snakes, especially since I’ve got a phobia of my own — entomophobia, or a fear of insects — well, arthropods generally.

Phobias vary in intensity, I think, and mine isn’t particularly severe — or at least it’s not as bad as it was when I was young (and teased mercilessly about it). It helps that I have no choice but to be exposed to it every summer, particularly living out here. You just can’t avoid insects, so each summer I get a little more desensitized.

Continue reading this entry »

Mike Rankin’s long-time friend, field naturalist Fred Schueler, has posted a long remembrance of Mike that chronicles their time together doing field work for the Canadian Museum of Nature, and offers a look into Mike’s politics, sense of humour, and his generous humanity.

I intend to write something myself, if I can manage it; keep watching this space.

The Ottawa Citizen obituary is now online.

See previous entries: In lieu of flowers; Mike Rankin.

I stayed home for the fireworks, because by then I was just too sore and tired (though I could still see most of them from the bedroom window). But I did catch Shawville’s Canada Day parade, which was what you’d expect from a small-town parade. Everyone seemed to be wearing red except me. Shawville is arguably the most federalist town in Quebec, and they take Canada Day very seriously. My photos turned out very well, I think.

Thanks to my involvement in the Archives, we’d been invited to a do at the town hall prior to the parade, where I felt a bit out of place: it was a bit more formal, with a lot more politicians — mayors from half the Pontiac, our MP — than I’d expected. I don’t get out much even by Shawville standards.

In lieu of flowers, Mike’s wife Jo-Anne has asked for donations in his name to Turtle SHELL Tortue, the Ottawa-area turtle rescue and rehabilitation centre.

Visitation Tuesday; service Wednesday. Newspaper notices in the Sunday and Monday editions of the Sun and the Citizen.

See previous entry: Mike Rankin.

Mike Rankin, a good friend of mine, a giant of local herpetoculture and a founding member of the OARA, died this morning of a heart attack. We had not seen much of one another in recent years, and from time to time we crossed swords over something or other, but I was proud of him and proud to have known him. We liked and respected one another a great deal, I think, and I will miss him terribly.

I just found out ten minutes ago and I’m still in shock.

Update: I’ve uploaded some photos of Mike to Flickr.

I don’t know what happened to me that my back and hip went so profoundly into spasm earlier this week, except maybe that I overdid it a bit on the walking around on hard urban surfaces on Friday and Sunday. Seems to be subsiding a bit now, but I shouldn’t forget that just because flares tend to occur more in spring and fall, it does not mean that the rest of the year is automatically pain-free.

You will recall that Jennifer and I initially decided on deferring repairs on the car’s air conditioner, on the grounds that the expense is both great and optional. Optional, at least, in the sense that you can drive without it — not necessarily that you’d want to. It became somewhat less optional after our trip last weekend: at 4½ hours each way, it was manageable, but it wasn’t necessarily comfortable. Sweat left behind on every surface our skin came into contact with, that sort of thing. That was enough, at least, to get me thinking:

Continue reading this entry »

In Gatineau and Ottawa yesterday to have a Mazda dealership look at the headlights (previous entry) and return a book to Carleton University’s map library. A librarian very generously allowed me to sign out a reference book for a two-week period; the book, a guide to managing small map collections, is a must-read as I look towards cataloguing the Pontiac Archives’s map collection this summer. I wanted to get the book back on time; and Jennifer had made an appointment at the dealership, so off I went.

Continue reading this entry »

I’ve encountered a glitch with Front Row: it’s not playing nice with iPhoto. I’m not sure what the problem is — probably something is gumming up the works as a result of how I brought the old data over — but I’m assuming it’s solvable. More when I find out how to fix it.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten the Palm syncing with the new iMac — works fine under Rosetta — and I’ve even got Documents to Go working again. My Tungsten T2 came with version 5, while Jennifer’s TX has version 7 — so when I synced up her Palm with my old iMac over Christmas, it overwrote version 7 over version 5 and promptly hosed it on my Palm. Now that we’re on separate machines (she’s using the old iMac), that conflict is no longer a problem. Unfortunately, no sooner had I got that working than I realized that audio was totally hosed on my Palm: I get a faint, high-pitched whine whenever it’s on (not enough to be annoying), but no other sound. (You can tell I don’t use my PDA much any more; it’s been like this for a while but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.)

The car’s headlights are only working intermittently at the moment: they outright failed over the weekend — no daytime running lights, no headlights, no brights — but appear to be working now. Garage suspects the daytime running lights module, maintenance on which requires a Mazda dealership. Sigh — the car is determined to have money spent on it. You can ignore compressors, but you just can’t ignore headlights.

Can I get skin grafts without burning off my current allotment? I’m covered in insect bites and clusters of pimples that are probably sweat-related, and boy am I uncomfortable. All told, it was a hot, sticky weekend. We were off Saturday to visit Jeff and Jenny during their volunteer weekend. Despite hot weather and our lack of in-car air conditioning, the trip there and back was bearable. But it was a hot day, and they don’t have air conditioning: even with my marginal contributions to the outdoor labour, I was overheated for most of the weekend. Fortunately, my sunburns appear to be very mild, and they have a pool.

I didn’t get a lot of sleep, either, thanks to an overnight thunderstorm before our departure Saturday morning, and the fact that I had to run Jeff’s cousin to the hospital at midnight to tend to a pool-related eye injury. Not that I sleep well in hot weather or strange beds anyway. So I was tired when we got back yesterday afternoon. Good thing our apartment is relatively cool despite a lack of air conditioning.

My photos from the weekend are up. Other people will probably post theirs shortly; I’ve created a Flickr group.

• It’s fast. It’s really flipping fast. I mean, like, ninja fast.
• It’s also surprisingly quiet. I haven’t worked on something this silent since my old G3 iBook. I can feel a fair amount of heat from the top vent so, like those scalding-hot MacBooks, this thing’s cooling system may be geared for silence over really cool temperatures.
• The processor hardly ever breaks into a sweat. I ran a fairly CPU-intensive video conversion program yesterday as a test, and neither core was maxed out, even with other apps running as well.
• We ordered this thing with 1 GB of RAM, which is an improvement over the 768 MB installed in the G4 iMac, but OS X took it all and wanted more. Yesterday I was staring at a 2-GB swap file. It was still reasonably responsive — that new SATA drive is also flipping fast, and hard to hear — but it will still not be difficult to justify getting that second gigabyte of RAM.
• The Migration Assistant only worked partially well. It moved over my applications without a hitch, but choked on my user data. After a couple of attempts, I simply brought it over manually via FireWire Target Disk mode. It seems to work — certainly my apps recognize my data, including user settings and registration codes — but doing it this way might, I suspect, be the reason for a couple of the glitches I’ve encountered.
• My .Mac/iDisk setup got a little wonky at the outset, and I had to unregister and reregister the computer. Nothing got hosed in the process, but I had to sync everything all over again.
• Printing got strange yesterday: the printer’s output was just plain off, with line heights and vertical spacing a real hash. I wonder if the driver is hiccuping with the Intel setup. In any event, using the open-source GIMP-print driver for 900-series HP inkjets solved the issue.
• The scanner works just fine. I’m waiting until I install The Missing Sync before trying to sync up the Palm again.
• While I had to remove two incompatible System Preferences panes manually, all apps tested so far work properly, even using Rosetta. It’s a pleasant surprise that just about all the apps I use are already Universal.
• Let’s talk about the Mighty Mouse. Meh. I can handle the scroll nipple; squeezing the sides is a bit more of a pain. I had to disable right-clicking because my fingers keep resting on the right side of the mouse, triggering a right-click even when I’m trying to left-click.
• The new keyboard, ostensibly the same as the one on the G4 iMac, has a much softer, much less pleasant key action. I may have to break down and buy one of these after all.
• Did I mention that this computer is really flipping fast?

I was occupied last night setting up the new beast: a 20-inch, 2-GHz Intel Core Duo iMac.

Christ, it’s fast. And this big screen is going to take some getting used to. Much brighter — I had the old screen at full brightness; this one only at half. (Such an ordeal.)

The car’s air conditioner stopped working last week; it turns out that the compressor needs to be replaced. Ouch. We’ll be deferring this repair, partly because we can’t really afford its thousand-dollar price tag at the moment, but mostly because, unlike other repairs and replacements (new tires in 2003, oxygen sensor last year), we can: we’ve been told that there’s no harm in simply letting the broken unit sit there. And I’ve done without car air conditioning before: neither of my parents had air conditioning in their cars before 1994 at the earliest, so I’m used to it. Doing without will not be a significant hardship — though I might change my mind after a long heat wave.

I’m not actually surprised or disappointed: air conditioners break down, and our car is eight years old (we’ve had it for three). It’s an occupational hazard of owning an older car.

Never mind the zoo inside our apartment; there’s plenty of activity outside as well. On our lawn, we’ve observed the following, sometimes in large numbers: crows, robins, pigeons, blue jays, purple grackles, chickadees, woodpeckers (not sure which species), one or two other bird species I can’t identify, red and black squirrels, and a green frog. In the immediate vicinity, add gulls, toads and a skunk to the list.

The neighbour’s bird feeder doesn’t hurt; neither, for that matter, does the mess that passes for a trash bin behind the restaurant across the laneway. (I should add stray dogs to the list.)

Update, May 28: I forgot to mention red-winged blackbirds — with the noise they make, I’m not sure how. And I heard gray treefrogs calling nearby last night. (And there are spring peepers everywhere in this town.)

Update, May 29: As of today, add a family of rabbits and a pair of mourning doves.

I’m still trying to nail down flare season: I’m aware that my ankylosing spondylitis is worse in the spring and fall, but it’s impossible to be more specific than that. If it’s affected by seasonal weather changes, for example, the onset will be different each year; and there are probably other factors as well. Because I’m a compulsive planner, I’d like a bit more predictability; as it is, I’m reluctant to make any long-term plans for spring and fall in case I’ll have to cancel them — especially travel, which is hard on my system to begin with. So what do I block off? March through May? October and November?

This year, it hit in early March and persisted for four weeks; in 2002, though, I spent the spring largely pain-free. I’ve had flares in the fall, but not in the fall of 2003. I suspect I was simply too busy to get sick during those periods (or possibly I was too active to get stiff), in the way that people get the flu as soon as they take a vacation: their bodies hold themselves together until they can fall apart at a more convenient time.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think I’m back in flare again, as of Sunday.

Last weekend we did our bit at the OARA’s display for the National Capital Region Wildlife Festival at Billings Bridge Mall. I organized this show from 2001 to 2003; this year, our friend Nicki was in charge. For some reason, this year they had a shortage of handleable snakes: the serpentine equivalent of “bomb-proof” horses used by riot police, which is to say, snakes that will put up with all sorts of crap from the public and not spook, freak out or (more to the point) bite. We have more than a few that fit that description and that moreover were large enough to be used in photos — the shortage was actually not so much one of tame snakes, but of tame snakes of a certain size that people could have their pictures taken with for $5 a shot — so off we went. Photos here.

We put in long hours on Friday and Saturday, and were just beat afterwards. On the way home Saturday evening, Jen got quite sick. She was bedridden through Sunday. At first we thought it was simple overexhaustion, but it was more likely a case of the flu. Especially since I came down with exactly the same thing on Monday night (through Tuesday I couldn’t even keep down Gatorade). Between the two of us, we’ve spent much of this week in bed, generally feeling like shite, catching up on sleep and wondering about the state of our GI tracts. But we’ve been doing better more recently.

This bit of flu is most inconveniently timed: my father’s visiting this week. We’re beginning construction on a model railroad in the basement. More on that momentarily.

You know what irritates me? People who add me to the buddy list of their instant-messenger software, then forget who I am or why they added me to their list, and then IM me to demand to know — from me — who I am and why they added me. Usually when I’m in the middle of something. Christ almighty, folks: it’s not my job to remember that for you. I don’t mind being messaged if you have a specific reason for talking to me, but I don’t have time for chit-chat and I definitely don’t have time to justify my existence on your buddy list — you put me there!

The most recent example happened this morning:

9:29:53 AM [deleted]: hi
9:30:07 AM mcwetboy: Yes?
9:30:33 AM [deleted]: how are u?
9:30:46 AM mcwetboy: Busy. can I help you?
9:31:24 AM [deleted]: can i remember your line of business?
9:31:45 AM mcwetboy: Are you messaging me to ask who I am or something?
9:31:47 AM [deleted]: can u remind me
9:32:18 AM [deleted]: because i forget how we meet
9:32:38 AM mcwetboy: Sigh. Please don’t waste my time like this. I’m extraordinarily busy.

At which point I blocked the clueless twit.

Can you imagine this happening over the phone? Someone calls you and asks who they’re talking to? It just doesn’t happen without the assistance of senility.

My ankylosing spondylitis flared up again about a week and a half ago, so I’ve been spending my time in besonders pain recently. I expect this to hit in spring and fall, but this was a bit earlier than I expected. I anticipate elevated pain and reduced mobility through the end of April.

Even so, I’ve managed to get a bit done over the past week, including a substantial presentation to the OARA on raising baby garter snakes (which I’ll turn into an article for Bob in due course) and work on a new reptile-related web site that I won’t tell you about until it’s ready. And I’ve been working on a short story. Blogging’s been a bit sparse, but I haven’t been idle; I’d go nuts if I was.

I turned 34 about a week and a half ago, but birthdays don’t seem to be the milestones they once were. Though it’s spooky to think that I’m exactly twice the age of the oldest students that Jennifer teaches. One milestone that was passed some time last month: it’s been 10 years since I uploaded my first home page to the Web. It wasn’t much to look at — among other things, it had a “Separated at Birth” thing with side-by-side photos of the Swedish Chef and the Urban Peasant (?!) — but it was a start. It’s one thing to think that you graduated high school 16 years ago, but the idea that I’ve had a web site of some sort for 10 years, well, that boggles the mind a bit. The Internet is still new, right?

I did a podcast interview a few weeks ago with Dailysonic’s Adam Varga about The Map Room; it’s now online as part of Dailysonic’s February 20 episode; my segment is at minute 20.

Upcoming DFL-related media appearances include Dose, the Port Hope Evening Guide and Cobourg Daily Star (hey, they asked), and — if you can believe it — Sports Illustrated. Update: And, it would seem, the CanWest papers.

I was on BBC Radio Ulster’s afternoon program, Evening Extra, for about five minutes today, talking about DFL. It went quite well, I think: I needed a bit of warming up, but once I got going, I got fired up. You’ll probably be able to catch it via the “Listen Again” feature of the BBC web site.

This is my first media do for DFL’s Torino turn; they originally contacted me last Thursday, so they’re definitely the early birds.

Those of you who have my cell phone number can safely delete it from your address books. After much procrastination, I’ve cancelled it — I’m just not out of the house often enough to warrant paying for it. Odd: I’m without a mobile phone for the first time in five years.

We declared a snow day today and stayed in: Jen got to work on George R. R. Martin’s Feast for Crows; I got to work on my sites again. I’ve been off my feed a bit for the past week or two; it’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve regained my equilibrium enough to blog coherently. What the hell: it’s the holidays, I suppose, or at least they are for Jen; I’m stupid enough to try to keep