Category: Crankypantsing

Crankypantsing, Pets

Three Things

Shelly

First, I noticed yesterday that Roz Stendahl has some new journals posted to her website. I spent some time yesterday looking through them, and recommend that y’all do so, too. They’re truly wonderful.

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Second, Rory is back from the vet. Two nights of hospitalization, catheterization, meds, etc. cost US$322. Two techs brought him out in his carrier, soaked in urine, with a kennel lead wrapped around him. Apparently they couldn’t get it off him, which is understandable. He’s semi-feral and freaked out by strangers. Still, they’re professionals and I don’t think it’s too much to ask for them to be able to handle one cat, no matter how badly he’s behaving. More disturbing is that I was unable to actually talk to the vet. I was given my cat and his meds and sent home. That’s the final straw. As soon as he’s through with this course of antibiotics, I’m taking him on well visits to try on a couple of other vets. There have got to be better diagnosticians out there or, at least, a vet who will actually communicate with owners.

Third, I really (really!) hate it when people tell me how to think, feel, or behave. Aside from inciting an initial “you’re not the boss of me” reaction (and, seriously, they aren’t and it’s damned silly for them to delude themselves into thinking they are), it’s spectacularly rude. It’s no way to treat a child, adult, or barnyard animal. It’s controlling, condescending, placating, dehumanizing, and just plain offensive. The subtext is that you’re overreacting and that your response has no merit. In essence, you do not matter. You are nothing. You have no right to have feelings. You are denied a voice.

Inherently, I believe it is also an act of violence. Your voice is the only thing in this world that is entirely your own. When someone takes that away from you, you cease to exist. People fight wars over this sort of thing, so why is it so difficult for some folks to understand that it matters?

Crankypantsing, Pets, Photography

They Come in Threes

Shelly

Rory

Some old wife once said that bad things happen in threes. I certainly hope she’s correct, because I’m about fed up. First, Elliott, then, the MoonPie of Delight, now Rory. Thankfully, Rory’s situation isn’t immediately life-threatening.

Yesterday morning, he seemed to be suffering from another blockage. Over the past few years, he’s had recurring problems with struvite crystals, so I watch him carefully. This time, he came to me and squatted next to my foot. “See, I’m trying to pee!” Bless his little heart. So off to the vet he went. They’re keeping him for catheterization and observation for two nights, which is okay, but I’m a little perturbed at their lack of communication skills.

I called them yesterday afternoon. The vet had already gone for the day, and the office person couldn’t find any information for me. Keeping and consulting patient charts should be pretty standard, right? Then, this morning, I ran into the same problem. All I could get out of the technician was that Rory had been catheterized. She didn’t know when I could pick him up, but took my number and said she’d catch the doctor after his next patient and call me back. Two hours later–tired of waiting–I called back again, and she still didn’t have info for me. This time, at least, she went to find the doctor. They want to keep him another night.

Okaythen.

Why on earth couldn’t that information have been in his chart, so that when I called yesterday, I could be told what was going on?

I think it’s time to find a new (um, better) vet. First, I’m not comfortable with their diagnostic skills. They’re semi-emergency vets (strictly walk-in with good evening hours), which is nice, but their prices are ungodly and, at this point, I’m not inclined to trust them with unknown quantities. As soon as Rory is feeling better, I’m going to try to get him into another vet for a well visit. Or, maybe I’ll use Harriet as my guinea pig. I really hate to do that to her, though, because she’s so damned tweaky about strangers. She actually likes her current vets, which is why I’ve stuck with them, despite the fact that I always feel like I’ve only got about 1/4 of their attention when I’m dealing with them.

Oh, and to make things even more exciting, Rory absolutely and completely refuses to eat Hills C/D (crystal diet). He’s not otherwise a picky eater, but he won’t touch even canned C/D. If there’s so much as a molecule of it mixed into another food, he won’t touch it. As far as he’s concerned, it’s poison. At one point, he lost half of his body weight and started to go into organ failure because he wouldn’t eat it. So, it’s not like he’s just being bratty and waiting him out is an option. I finally had to water down the canned and force feed it to him, which is reasonable in the short term but is notnotnot a long-term solution.

Crankypantsing, News & Politics

In No Particular Order…

Shelly
  • I know I should drink more water, but the water in this building tastes disgusting. I have to add Emergen-C to it to make it palatable. Even then, I can taste the staleness. Ugh.
  • Why do all libraries smell like pee?
  • I’m still getting more traffic to my pets’ website from some damned Usenet post about Puggles, than I am any other source. Puggles, I tell you!
  • Dark chocolate covered espresso beans are a gift from the gods.
  • I’m sick of the political bickering on various art mail lists. Specifically, I’m fed up with people who freak out at the merest mention of anything that might be even remotely political in nature. I’m amazed at the amount of time and effort that gets wasted in whinging about it. Person Y says X. Twenty people are loudly offended by it and rush to put the smack-down on Person Y, claiming that she’s stomping all over their right to have a peaceful list experience. Hello? Who, exactly, is creating an unpeaceful list experience? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. So, anyway, I started an art and politics/social issues Yahoo group, wherein discussion of art and social/political debate will be welcomed. I’ll post details soon. Aside from canning spam, I don’t intend to do any other moderating. I’m a big fan of the Usenet “free speech” model. (I’ve often said that, if I ran the world, things would be different.)
  • Gas is up to US$2.65/gallon. I don’t even want to think about what my heating bill is going to be this winter. Last winter, which wasn’t terribly cold, I went through two tanks of propane. At ~$500/tank, that was harsh. This winter is sure to be even worse.
  • Big Brother is on tonight. I’m not amused that Kaysar was nominated for eviction. The guy was only just returned to the house, for Jeebus’ sake! Worse, he gave the Head of Household win to the person who nominated him. She made a deal with him, promising she’d nominate the two people he’d chosen, if he’d throw the competition. She lied, which is not unexpected, but she and the rest of her alliance have spent the entire game insisting that they will play honestly and with integrity. M’kaythen.
  • Offensive ads. Specifically, this recentish Mt. Dew ad (#3). I don’t even know where to start. It’s as bad as all those Hardee’s Food Porn ads.
Crankypantsing, Pets, Photography

Long Time No Blog

Shelly

Cars
Because life is never quite exciting enough, the MoonPie of Delight decided to die. Of course, she waited until after I’d spent $500 getting the oil pump and some damned seal replaced, before shuffling off this mortal coil. That’s how these things happen, I guess.

So now I’m car shopping, which is pretty damned funny. I know nothing whatsoever about cars, beyond “Oooh, pretty!” Somehow, that strikes me as an ass-backwards way to go about choosing a car, but what can I say? At this point, I’m leaning toward another hatchback or a small wagon (Ford Focus or Subaru Outback?), but Jeebus only knows what I’ll end up with when it’s all said and done. I know that it will not be a sedan or coupe. I need rear cargo space that will accommodate a medium-sized dog crate and/or art. Plus, I’m just not a sedan sorta person. A small SUV would be fine, but for the few occasions 4WD would actually be helpful, it hardly seems worth the expense. The extra clearance would definitely be good (the driveway is gravel and often in serious need of grading), but again, I’m not sure it’s worth the expense.

Anyway, the result is that I’m superdamned cranky. I don’t like being carless.

Dogs
On the bright side, I found myself a little virtual dog therapy. Check out this little guy. Have you ever seen anything like those ears? I didn’t think so! I really recommend looking at the video, too, if you’re on broadband. I know I said male Boxer*, but I’m smitten. Unfortunately, he’s the right dog at the wrong time. Damn, is he ever gorgeous, though! Hopefully, someone will adopt him soon, so he can stop tormenting me.

On the homefront, Harriet is still being a sissypants about going out into the yard by herself. She’s desperately in need of another dog to hold her paw and egg her on. I don’t mind going out with her, but for some reason, she says it’s not the same as chasing bunnies with another dog, thankyouverymuch. She’s enjoying getting all the attention for her very own self, though. Boxers are not lap dogs, but evidently no one ever told her that. I spent yesterday evening, sitting on the couch, trying to balance my book on top of her. It’s a Very Good Thing she’s cute.

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Arting
In other news, I’ve not been in any sort of mood to do any arting. I’ve been re-reading the first five Harry Potter books, instead. I finished the fifth one Monday and–finally!–started on the new one yesterday. If I can tear myself away from it, I’m going to spend tonight and tomorrow catching up on other people’s art.

Movies
In movie news, I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory over the weekend. It was everything I’d hoped it would be–much creepier than Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I’m a huge Tim Burton fan, though, so it would’ve had to’ve been pretty dreadful for me not to have enjoyed it.

I’ve also been working my way through a stack of Netflix: The League of Gentlemen, seasons 2-3 (brilliant, of course), Dogville (a wonderful Lars von Trier oddity), and the rest of Wonderfalls (I can’t recommend it enough). Another little film was recommended in one of “my” dog groups: The Miracle of the White Stallions. It’s a typical mid-’60s Disney film, but I thought it was well worth watching. It’s set in WWII Austria, so the Disnification of the war, Nazis, Americans, etc. is interesting. Plus, pretty horsies!

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* The master plan was to eventually end up with a female Sibe and a male Boxer. Since Harriet is such a fearsome bitch where other girldogs are concerned, the next dog will have to be a boy. Since the boy half of the eventual duo was to be a Boxer, that meant that the next dog was to be a Boxer boy. That’s what I get for making plans, right? Becaue, now I’m seriously rethinking them. A male Sibe-female Boxer combo can’t be too bad, can it? Those Boxer girls are such pains in the arse when it comes to bossypantsing, though, so I dunno. A female Sibe would, I think, be much easier to live with. I could go around in circles like this for days on end.**

** This should give you some idea why car hunting is making my brain explodiate.

Crankypantsing, Meta, News & Politics, Pets, Photography

Nitpickings and Ramblings

Shelly

Have I mentioned that if it’s not one thing, it’s ten others? Yes! Yes, I believe I have.

I keep finding pesky little issues with the website. Most of them stem from having used my host’s silly web FTP to upload files. Life would’ve been grand if I could’ve used a proper FTP client to do the uploading, but, obviously, that would’ve been far, far too easy. I think there are approximately eleventy-hundred separate files, so when loading them five (yes, *5*) at a time, it’s not surprising that a few went AWOL. I keep a close eye on my error reports and fix problems as I find them, but if y’all run across files that seem to be missing, just let me know and I’ll fix them ASAP. So far, it’s mostly been large images that have gone walkabout, but I also ran across a couple of links that were, um, pointing with their middle fingers. I dunno how that happened, as I used relative URLs for internal links. Another issue has been file names changing case when uploaded. What’s weird is that they changed from lower to upper case. Hmmm. Usually, it’s the other way around.

Anyway, that’s a rambly way of saying that I’m continuing to tidy things up around the edges. Which, you may have guessed, is the story of my life.

No art today. I’ve been driving myself to tears with this Color Erratica round robin. Someone dropped out, causing a log jam of books, so a bunch of us are scrambling to get caught up and get the group back on track. I took a break from it last night, though, and sat on my ass and did N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Well, not exactly nothing. I watched some–you guessed it!–really bad TeeVee. I’ll spare you the details, as there really aren’t any.

The unholy hot weather continues. “They” say we’ll get a break from it tomorrow. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, because Freshman orientation is over and the wee kiddies and their parents have left the building, and because the heat index has been in the triple digits, and because we supposedly need to conserve energy, The Powers That Be have declared that our building will be having periodic chilled water outages. Yep. When it gets super hot, they turn off our AC. Of course, this is an eleven story building with no windows above the third floor, so it’s not like we need AC or anything. M’kay. All that means that here are about a zillion fans going full-blast, so A) it’s impossible to hear yourself think and B) I really have to question whether there is, in fact, any sort of energy savings at all.

Le sigh. If I ran the world, things would be very, very different. Not better, mind you, just, well, different. For example, we might have year-round snow:

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And, finally, for those of you who care, the House of Representatives re-upped the Patriot Act. (A pdf of the full text of the Patriot Act can be found here.)

Bookarts, Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Wonderfalls, New Journal Part Deux, and another Big Brother Rant

Shelly

Hemp Bound Journal: Cover

I spent time last night watching the first half of the last disc of Wonderfalls. The first disc sat here for nearly a month before I got around to watching it. I couldn’t remember what it was or why I’d put it in my Netflix queue, so I waited until I was good and bored before I watched it.

It was well worth the wait. The writing is brilliant–funny and smart. It’s quirky, but not annoyingly so. And, as there was, alas, only one season of the show, it’s not a huge, on-going time committment.

While I was watching TeeVee, I put some finishing touches on the hemp-bound journal I made the other night. I used torn masking tape to attach a photo of a stormy, sullen winter sky. It’s been ungodly hot lately, so I thought a reminder of cooler weather would be motivatory. We’ll see. Because there are only 24 pages, I decided to mete them out as two-page spreads. With one spread for a calendar/table of contents, that leaves 22 plus one to grow on. My intention is to do a spread a day.

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And now some more ranting about Big Brother. This one has been germinating for a while. In a previous episode, Eric got his knickers in a twist because Mike was kissing and hitting on the women in the house. M’kay. The women in question either enjoyed it (one, in particular, claimed to enjoy it a lot) or told him to fuck the hell off in no uncertain terms. It seems to me that that ought to’ve been the end of the Situation, but because Eric is afflicted with a surplus of testosterone, it wasn’t.

Eric, as head of household, decided that it was his place to give Mike a talking to. Apparently, those poor, helpless girls weren’t capable of speaking their minds and it was up to Eric to come to their rescue. Poor little girls. After calling Mike on being a flirtatious pain in the arse, Eric spent the rest of his tenure as HoH telling everyone that Mike had sexually harassed the women and that he needed to be voted out of the house. It fit nicely into Eric’s strategy. He wanted Mike gone and branding him as a pervy bastard was an effective way to achieve his goal.

Mike was a jerk, there’s no doubt about that, but using the umbrella of sexual harassment as part of your strategy for winning a game is, I think, pretty craptacular. I also thought Eric’s ubermanly “I’m going to protect these poor, defenseless girls from the big, bad, kissy monster” schtick was far more degrading to the women in the house than Mike could ever have dreamt of being.

What an ass! And a bully, too. Eric was this close to doing physical violence to Mike because he thought he’d been talking smack about Eric’s family. Who the hell cares? You don’t go around beating up people because they’ve got big mouths. It doesn’t solve anything and only makes you look like a total and complete fuckwit.

Oh, and I’m liking Kaysar more and more with every episode. The guy is smart and, I think, appropriately devious.

Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Restrooms

Shelly

I just returned from venturing downstairs to a) use the restroom and b) search for a salad. The salad reconnaissance went well, but I have a few words to say about my jaunt to the cafeteria restroom. First, some background. The kind folks who originally designed this building neglected to foresee that us wimmins, being wimmins, might have needs that menfolk don’t have to consider. To whit, there are no tampon receptacles in any of the stalls in this building. WTF?!

To deal with this oversight, the powers that be have placed a not-so-clearly designated trash can outside the stalls. Yes, that’s right. Us wimmins have to carry our unsanitary refuse out of the stall in order to throw it away. Okaythen. That wouldn’t be so terrible, except there is no signage in the stalls indicating that one ought to do so. This is the campus library we’re talking about, so it’s a high traffic building. We get a huge amount of people who don’t know the system. And, this being orientation season, it’s a huge-to-the-nth-power amount newbies. That means that you get to wade through drifts of pad wrappers and adhesive covers as well as used tampon applicators. Again, WTF?! The pad wrappers are at least, well, sanitary. I do not, however, care pick my way through used tampon applicators. C’mon, people. This is getting ridiculous.

The other thing that pisses me right the hell off is that the toilets in this building can barely handle TP, so flushing a tampon down them is next to impossible. After the tenth flush, most people give up. And, who can blame them? It’s not reasonable to throw used tampons in the trash. It’s bad enough that we have to wrap up used pads and tampon applicators so that we can trek them to the designated receptacle–there is no way in hell I’m going to do that with a used tampon.

Is it too much to ask for refuse receptacles in the individual stalls?

Crankypantsing

Messy Marvin

Shelly

One of my coworkers has a young granddaughter. That means that we get to hear granddaughter stories. Not being into small children in the abstract, I ought to find this a trying experience. I don’t though. Her granddaughter cracks me right the hell up. So, the other day, she told us about taking GD out to eat. GD dribbled something down the front of her shirt and was quite upset about it. I don’t blame her. I hate it when I do that, too. I don’t, however, throw screaming fits when it happens. GD does, apparently, so their solution was to turn her shirt around, back-to-front. Jeenyous!

So, anyway, I caved in and got pizza for lunch this afternoon. And, not just any pizza, either. It was one of those deep fried pan pizzas from Pizza Hut. Yes, it was a mistake. Duh. A hideous mistake. Not only could I suck the grease out of the crust, but I managed to drop a piece of it on my shirt. Now I have a hummense constellation of grease taunting me.

Excuse me while I run to the restroom to turn my shirt around. What I can’t see won’t bother me, right? Much.

* Yes, I am Messy Marvin.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Pee Ess:

Shelly

And another thing… Cutesy flash intros are not so very cute, especially those that force the visitor to solve a logic puzzle in order to enter the website. I tried accessing one site with three different browsers, thinking there was a coding incompatibility, when the real problem was that I was too damned stupid to figure out that I had to drag an object across the screen in order to enter the site. That’s a mean joke to play on people. Call me silly, but it seems to me that giving visitors a reason to turn away defeats the whole purpose of having a web presence. I’m just sayin’…