Month: September 2008

Pets, Photography

Unstitched

Shelly

IMG_2590

This is why you should always take a careful look after the sutures are removed. Which I thought I’d done. But then I took a close-up photo of the incision, and when I opened it in Photoshop, what did I see? A teeny weeny blue stitch that the vet tech had missed. I could have removed most of her stitches myself, because they were looser, but I had to take her back to the vet’s office to have this one taken out. It was pretty well embedded, and I figured they have better tools for that than I do. The last thing I wanted was to clip it, then have the ends disappear into the skin.

IMG_2593

Harriet did not want to get off the bed, so she hoisted up The Leg of Defiance. Loosely translated, it means, “I would prefer not to.”

Crankypantsing

Here Comes the Flood

Shelly

I called maintenance last Friday, because my upstairs neighbor’s tub (I think) is leaking. I woke up at 4am to water splashing on my bathroom floor tiles. By the time maintenance got here, at about 1PM, the dripping had long stopped. The wall still felt cool and damp to the touch, though. And, there is mold growing where there’s never been any before.

I knew that there had once been a leak in that spot, because the drywall and paint were damaged. The leak was (presumably) fixed, and the wall was patched before I moved in. This was the first sign I’d seen of an active leak in the two years I’ve been here.

The maintenance guy felt the wall and said it was dry. Funny, because it felt cool and damp to me. And then he felt around and poked a couple of holes in the spots that had the most damage. He said that everything was bone dry. Not possible. I insisted that there damned well was a leak. He went upstairs to look, didn’t see anything, turned on the tub, then the shower, flushed the toilet, and came back to say that there was on leak. WhatthefuckEVAR. I know there was a leak. I may be batshit crazy, but I don’t actually hallucinate that sort of stuff.

I explained to him that I wasn’t trying to be a pain in his ass, but that if something is leaking in the wall, it’s going to cause structural damage. No skin off my nose, but the folks who own the place might prefer that the leak is found and fixed before they have to gut the walls.

Anyway, he went back upstairs to look some more. Whatever he did made the leak reappear. I went up to tell him that there was now water streaming down the wall. He asked me what was making it leak. Huh?! Whatever the hell you just did, jeenyous. (And I thought I had a short attention span!) I expected him to follow me back downstairs to look at the amount of water that was leaking, but he didn’t. I never saw him again. I assumed he found the leak and fixed it.

Silly me.

Now, of course, it just started leaking again. Bad. This time, instead of just a few splashes, it was a bunch of splashes and a stream of water. I’m going to have to call again tomorrow, and I’m not happy about it. Mr. Fixit acted kind of put out that he had to locate a leak. Like it was my fault or something, or like I was making it up.

I am not amused.

Pets, Photography

Cone-free and Happy

Shelly

When I come home and take off Harriet’s cone, she does the happy dance of coneless freedom. This involves rubbing her face up and down the back of the couch, flopping around on her back like a trout, and much yawning and sneezing, before collapsing into a heap of happy Boxerness. And sometimes, the joy is just too much and requires a second or even third repetition of the happy dance

IMG_2525

IMG_2528

IMG_2527

IMG_2530

IMG_2532

See how wonderful the contours of the right side of her butt look? Dr. Koch did a very nice job.

Uncategorized

Instant Review: CopyTrans Manager

Shelly

I was syncing my iPod when the electricity went out last weekend. I somehow ended up with duplicates for every song, which was not good. I managed to purge everything and was attempting to re-sync, when Songbird suddenly started crashing because it didn’t have enough virtual memory.

I assumed that the power outage damaged some of my RAM, or part of my hard drive, so I increased the size of my swap file, but that didn’t help. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Songbird, but that didn’t work, either. I tried installing it on another partition, then on an entirely different drive. No go. If the problem is damage to my system, it seems to only have affected Songbird, which would be weird, but not beyond the realm of possibility.

Anyway, after pulling my hair out, I looked around for another iTunes alternative, found CopyTrans Manager, and gave it a try. Wow! It’s much zippier than Songbird. You can also add and remove files directly to and from your iPod, instead of having to re-mount and re-sync the device. Updates that would have taken hours with Songbird can be done in minutes with CopyTrans Manager.

The downsides are that it cannot edit metadata, so if you want to alter any tags, you’ll have to do so using another program. Since I’m using something else to rip and organize my library, that’s no problem for me. You also cannot add tracks at the folder level, which makes importing tracks into the CopyTrans Manager library tedious.

It also does not (yet) have drivers for iPod Touch or the iPhone, so if you have those, you’d still have to install iTunes to get device drivers. It supports all other flavors of iPod, though, including the Classic.

Like I said, it’s zippy, and so far, it’s rock solid on my quirky system. Yay!

Pets, Photography

Dead of Cone

Shelly

100_5643

We are not amused.

When I got home yesterday, the first thing I did was I remove Harriet’s cone. There was much rejoicing. And then, while I was on the phone with my mom, I turned my back on Harriet for two seconds and she started licking her incision. The cone went back on, which was, as you can see, a major buzzkill. (It came off again as soon as I got off the phone and was no longer distracted.)

I sleep with one eye open.