2 announcements ( Read more... )

Would anyone be up for driving me to Home Depot and back to get a 40 lb. bag of wood pellets? The usual bribes (read: baked goods) apply; drop me a line at robin at mindspring dot com or give me a call if you have my number, OK? Thanks!

Thanks to FreeCycle/gb-reuse (not sure which one now), I have 2 fairly big boxes of small food containers, and in the interests of trying to slowly de-cruft, I'm looking for someone to take them. One box has (I'm guessing) equal amounts of small round foil containers (pot pie size, but straight-sided, not slanted like a pie pan), and mini-/ ( Read more... )

I just saw this article on the BBC this morning, and decided I had to pass it along:
A man in India invents a machine for women to make low-cost sanitary napkinsThe whole process wasn't exactly skittles and beer for him; his wife (who inspired the whole project when he learned she had to use rags) left him, as did the rest of his family, and the ( Read more... )

When I got up this morning, Jezebel had taken a serious turn for the worse (she'd collapsed in the litterbox and was cold to the touch), so I rushed her in to the vet's office, where they found out that (a) her temperature was so low they couldn't record it; (b) they couldn't raise a vein to put in an IV; and, most significantly, (c) she had a ( Read more... )

Good thoughts for my kittycat Jezebel, please--we have a 9:45 a.m. appointment that I made this evening in an absolute panic, thinking she was heading downhill fast with no brakes. redcolumbine came by to lend both moral support and a second opinion, and she thinks poor Jess has a nasty upper respiratory infection, is all stuffed up, and isn't eating much ( Read more... )

Good news: my mom is doing much, much better ever since she got her pacemaker, and while she's still healing from the surgery and learning what she can and can't do now that she's RoboMom (as my brother calls her), so far things are looking good, so thanks for any and all prayers/good wishes/good vibes ( Read more... )

Although her pacemaker surgery was originally scheduled for 9 a.m., they didn't actually get her into surgery until nearly 3 p.m. (due to needing equipment/a part/something that didn't get there until the afternoon), but she came through just fine, and the doctor was very pleased with how it all went. She's resting in the ICU right now (which, I ( Read more... )

I just realized I hadn't really posted about this here, but she's had several fainting spells over the past 2-3 months that have landed her in the hospital, and to make a long story considerably shorter, her most recent episode was Friday morning (they're always in the morning, for some unknown reason...); fortunately, she was wearing a shiny new ( Read more... )

I knew my computer was getting on in years (it's an eMac), but there's nothing quite like finding out that you can't do your taxes via H&R Block on your current machine, because your Mac OS/version of Safari/version of Firefox are all Too Damn Old. *sigh* (No, we can't update any of it; it was updated as much as humanly possible a couple of years ( Read more... )