It's easy to fall in love with this country. City or country there is beauty on every scale, from flowers with a toehold in a brick wall
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My new office chair has been a totally enabling addition to my computer system. Previously I made do with a kitchen chair that worked for about an hour before turning my butt numb.
With that I've had the patience to install Windows 7 on the partition where Windows XP 64 used to live. XP had an unfortunate accident while I was experimenting with ( Read more... )

15-yo FS Golden Retriever, recumbent on arrival, faint heart beat, barely perceptible femoral pulses, blood still oozing from rDVM catheter site. Discussed quality of life, likely coagulation disorder, age, etc. Owners elect euthanasia and want to be present. Shave arm with catheter site - ecchymoses up and down transitioning to petechiae. Other ( Read more... )

Two months ago I performed a dental cleaning with extractions on Albert, my 14-yo tuxedo male cat who has diabetes. The preoperative blood work was normal except his blood glucose (BG) was over 280 mg/dl (normal range 80-150). This had a number of possibly overlapping explanations: stress glucose release from body stores, the half-dose of insulin ( Read more... )

We have two dogs, Kelpie and Aristotle. Kelpie is, well, a Kelpie only not really. At 63 pounds she's a wee bit over the breed standard weight of 31-46 pounds and her coat & color suggest some German Shepherd genes. Overall she's the smartest and sweetest dog that ever walked the earth. And she's got the cutest bat ears.
Then there's Aristotle.
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Martha: "Hola, mami. ¿Cómo estás?"
Me: (later) "I think it's sweet you call your mother Mommy."
Martha: "Not Mommy, Mami"
Me: Ahh, Zathras"

Alanna and I are on our way - her to visit us in San Diego and I'm returning home there. She asked what the bold SSSS on her bolding pass meant.
"Means it sucks to be you. You're now a selectee eligible for enhanced searching of your person and belongings."
"Thrills."
It's another five minutes before she meets me in the gate area ( Read more... )

Up until I left for the airport last Friday I wasn't certain I was going to go. I had done a surgical extraction of the left mandibular fourth premolar on my cat (a 13-yo diabetic castrated male) the day before and his appetite the next day was minimal. At Martha's urging and reassurance I gave him half his usual insulin dose, his antibiotics, and ( Read more... )

What a lie. Of course it can provided you shop in the right places.
The geegaws and trinkets arriving daily from the UPS van have clearly increased my happiness level. Martha gave me a guilt-free pass to use part of my Mom's estate to buy a new camera setup to replace my Canon F-1. After much research I've decided on:
ItemSKU Canon EOS 5D Mark ( Read more... )

I swing between amusement and concern regarding the on-going drama of California's budget crisis. As a percentage of the total state budget, California's 24 billion deficit is smaller than several other states. What makes ours more fun is the lack of legislative wiggle room to effect change. Decades of voter initiatives have set budget mandates for ( Read more... )