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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Adina's LiveJournal:
| Friday, May 16th, 2008 | |
| 10:25 pm | Tantras's weight November, 2005 -- 12 or 13 pounds April 4, 2008 -- 9 pounds 4 ounces April 25, 2008 -- 8 pounds 10 May 9, 2008 -- 8 pounds 0 May 16, 2008 -- 8 pounds 8 Current Mood:  optimistic |
| 2:39 pm | Update on the garden update Planted out four cantaloupe and the rest of the tomatoes. So far in the ground we have fifteen tomatoes, four cantaloupe, and all the herbs. Another four cantaloupe are waiting to go in their bed, which is even weeded, but I ran out of energy. I'm planning even more cantaloupe for the front yard, but need to get a space ready for them. I received half the hostas I ordered, which gives me fifty to plant and another fifty on the way. Most of these are for the grove, though some for the shade garden. Finished mowing the ditch, including using the weed-eater around the peonies, with unfortunate effects on a couple of the peonies--as in, oops, there go a few stalks. The plants will all survive, but I think next time I need to stick to hand-weeding around them. For the first year we're going to have blossoms, I think! The irises are poised to bloom in a big way. Huge, white, showy. Possibly some purple, but they seem to be behind times this year. Maybe later. Current Mood:  accomplished |
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |
| 5:27 pm | He's up, he's up! Weighed Tantras this afternoon: he's up between a third and half a pound just since last Friday! Last Friday he was eight pounds nothing--way too skinny for a cat who should be about twelve pounds. That was down 10 ounces since two weeks before, so very not good. But I switched him back to salmon catfood, which is both stinkier and higher fat than his usual turkey, with canned pumpkin to help control the diarrhea, and that seems to have done the trick. He eats constantly, nose in the food bowl every fifteen minutes or so. I think his sense of smell may be going--he only likes the strongest smelling food any more. I thought he was feeling heavier, but I was afraid that I was fooling myself. I was planning to weigh him tomorrow--every Friday, now--but I just had to see if he was up at all. I wasn't expecting this much! The meds seem to be keeping the hyperthyroidism under control, finally. In other feline news, Miss Cleo from across the street had a stroke last Friday, shortly after anesthesia for getting her teeth cleaned. Her person can't get to visit her easily at the vet because she's in a wheelchair, so I've been going in to visit with her. Miss Cleo is...recovering...is the best I can say. On Tuesday she was having trouble standing or feeling her feet--trouble figuring out where her feet where, really. Today she was standing, walking, and making biscuits just fine. But she's blind. The vet thinks she can see shadows, which is an improvement, and further improvement is possible, even probable. The other odd thing is that she growls constantly and meows not at all. She acts loving and cuddly, yet even as she was nuzzling my chin and making biscuits against my arm she was growling constantly. Her person and I are wondering if her "speech" centers are messed up and if she thinks she's purring or meowing. Miss Cleo's stroke is making me even more nervous about getting Tantras's teeth cleaned, which needs to happen once he's healthy enough to do so. |
| 10:52 am | Belated poetry A belated entry for poetry month: Breathes there ever a woman with a soul so dead That she to her cat has never said: Are we full of salmon, purr, purr, purr? Current Mood:  silly |
| Saturday, May 10th, 2008 | |
| 6:04 pm | Garden update I made some progress in the garden this afternoon. Weeded the herb bed, removing everything that wasn't supposed to be where it was, including some chives that were trying to colonize the space meant for the basil. Planted out basil, oregano, and rosemary, which are all either annuals or not-hardy-in-Ohio perennials. Decided that tomorrow's "flower communion" at the UU church, cleverly scheduled after the last of the spring bulbs are done for and before any of the summer flowers have quite come, is going to get chive blossoms as my contribution. Someone's may be puzzled at the pretty purple flower that smells like onions, but that's their problem (could also take tiny, incredibly fragrant lily of the valley, but not with chives *eww*). How they manage to schedule the flower communion every year to fall in the valley between late spring bulbs and early summer flowers is one of those mysteries, because it's not even the same time every year! Weeded one of the raised beds and planted out six Beefmaster tomatoes. Still have six Romas and three Mortgage Lifters to go for the tomatoes, and six Honey Rock cantaloupes. Mowed as much of the ditch as was dry enough to be safe. Need to weed the non-grass part and plant annuals--was thinking I might plant more melons there, just to be different. I like having food plants in the front yard. Counted 86 hostas in the shade garden, front bed, and grove. Planted about 160 over the last two years; more may still pop up, it's early, but even a 50% survival rate is pretty good for bare-root bulk purchase (paid an average of 75 cents per, would have been pissed if I'd paid $10-15 for 50% survival). Have another 100 on order, should show up in the next couple of weeks. Need to talk to Julie tomorrow--she invited me to visit her farm, meet her horses, and borrow her truck to bring home...horse products...for the garden. Current Mood:  tired |
| 12:16 am | FanFic100 I'm contemplating signing up for a "100 prompts" fan fiction challenge, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} varietypack100. This challenge lets you select any fandom for any prompt--the wrinkle I'm thinking of giving it is trying to write 100 different fandoms. Thanks in part to Yuletide, I already have stories in fifteen different fandoms (that I'm willing to be seen in public with *grin*). How hard could 85 more be? (Don't answer that.) Current Mood: crazy |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 5:16 pm | Medicalese A friend's experience with a doctor indirectly made me think of my two (least) favorite bits of medicalese, idiopathic and iatrogenic, AKA "dunno" and "my bad!" |
| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | |
| 10:35 am | Cold and code I have a cold right now, and a crisis at work that means I can't just crawl back in bed and die, so I'm doped up on cold medication. I've found that it's affecting my thinking, but not quite like I'd expect. I seem to think as well as ever--problem-solving skills still intact, thank god--but my ability to switch from one thing to another is impaired. I'm working on two version of the same software, and yesterday, when I started troubleshooting the older one, I couldn't remember how to do a simple, vital task in it. This morning, when I was asked something about the newer version I couldn't remember where I was on the project, couldn't remember whether I was using a database deployment or file server, didn't remember that I'd finished the largest chunk of it, despite having finished two weeks ago. It's like my head is so full of mucus that there's only room in it for one thing at a time. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 9:53 pm | Happy dance! I conquered the demon-infested software from hell! I whupped its ass, I found its Achilles heel, I owned it. I took a hunch and ran with it, I stuck a pin into a seemingly unrelated issue and killed the ravening bugblatter. I solved a mystery that we've been worrying at for a week and a half. I'm also loopy on cold medicine, so forgive the weirdness. Current Mood:  jubilant |
| 11:39 am | Evolution and god The question was asked (on an NY Times article), Can you believe in God and in evolution at the same time? which is something of a pet peeve of mine. My answer: You can believe in god and understand evolution. Evolution is not subject to belief--you either understand it, thus giving yourself a basis for understanding the rest of biological science, or you don't understand it, leaving no foundation to build any further scientific advances on. If you understand it, you are free to believe "But actually god made the world in seven days and only created the appearance that evolution was the process." If god created the appearance of the process of evolution, one can only assume that he meant us to learn something from it, including the operation of natural and artificial selection and the interrelationship of species, including humanity. So either way you need to learn, study, and understand evolution. More bluntly, I don't fucking care if you "believe" in evolution or not. But learn what the hell you're talking about. If humans evolved from apes, how come there are still apes? My Michigan relatives descended from relatives who lived in Minnesota. How is this possible when I still have relatives living in Minnesota? How can evolution be right when modern evolutionary theory contradicts what Darwin said? Darwin's books aren't the bible--they can be built on, contradicted, expanded on.... Someone, sometime must have figured out that pi equals 3.1415927. Well, now we know that pi equals 3.14159265358979323846... Oh, lord, the first number was off by one on the seventh decimal! It must be completely untrue! For what it's worth, I don't believe in a 6000-year-old Earth and a literal Genesis (or Christianity in general, actually). On the other hand, nothing in science or religion can prove that the world wasn't created at 11:55AM (US Eastern Standard Time), April 29th, 2008, complete with my memory of having written this post when really it was created ex nihil with the rest of the universe. Current Mood:  cranky |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 3:53 pm | Food pantry Rita and I just finished arranging for two cases of toilet paper to be delivered to our local food pantry every month. A janitorial supply company has a very good price, they'll deliver for free, and the church that runs the pantry is contributing a tax-exempt number, so we don't even have to pay sales tax. All good. In the process of arranging this, the social worker at the pantry mentioned another, um, underappreciated need of food pantry clients: tampons, pads, and panty liners. These are non-food items, so they cannot be bought with foodstamps. But they're definitely necessities, and especially when there are several teenage girls in the family it can be a real hardship. So if you're ever wondering what to give in a food drive, or you're ever thinking of a charitable use for a windfall, consider giving sanitary pads (pads are more needed than tampons, according to the pantry's social worker). Even open packages--who hasn't ever bought the wrong variety?--can be used as long as they're individually wrapped. Something to think about. Current Mood: accomplished |
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |
| 5:48 pm | Bike odometer: 1918 I've had my recumbent bike for almost three years--as in April 26, 2005--and have almost two thousand miles on it. I had hoped to break 2000 by April 26, but it's just not likely, unless I manage twenty miles a day for the next four days. Ah, well. I've done more than a 100 miles this month, so that counts for something. Current Mood:  recumbent |
| Monday, April 14th, 2008 | |
| 9:51 am | Bleh Bleh. Sick, vomiting cat. Sick, headachy self. Hard freeze warning for tonight, which may kill the fruit blossoms again for the second year running. Project from work that will not die. Must do taxes. Current Mood:  depressed |
| Friday, April 4th, 2008 | |
| 2:10 pm | Tantras joins the old cats' club I just got back from the vet clinic with Tantras. I made the appointment this morning because he's been vomiting fairly frequently, has frequent diarrhea, and has lost a lot of weight. The vet looked at his skinny ass and glossy coat and reached the obvious conclusion: hyperthyroid. So he's now on a trial run of thyroid medication, to see if that improves things. If so, he'll probably be on the drug for the rest of his life--fortunately the (usually for humans) pharmacy Rita uses will make a fish-flavored emulsion of the medication, for less than half the price of the pills from the vet. Just about every cat, if they live long enough, will come down with thyroid disease in the end. Current Mood:  determined |
| Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 | |
| 2:18 pm | Today's amusement At the end of a very dull series of tests, I discovered that functions 1, 3, 5, and 7 worked without error, while 2, 4, and 6 failed. Yes, every other one worked perfectly. Current Mood:  amused |
| Thursday, March 6th, 2008 | |
| 1:16 pm | Balanced on the edge The dominant theme of my life right now, today, seems to be indecision--not my indecision, but the rest of the world's. This ranges from the relatively trivial--I'm supposed to be cooking for a big fundraising bash on Saturday, but we're waiting to see if the huge snow/ice/winter-nastiness storm is going to hit us or if it will hit Kentucky or eastern Ohio instead--to the impersonal, who's going to get the Democratic nomination, to the highly personal that I'm not ready to talk about it unless it actually happens. Each of them is a quantum situation, where it's one thing or the other, no sort of, no maybe. Well, except maybe the weather, but even that's a matter of we postpone the event until April 19 or we don't. It's rather odd, because none of these decisions are mine to make, none of them are even anything I can influence any more. So I'm waiting, and planning contingencies, and waiting. Current Mood:  weird |
| Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 | |
| 12:03 am | Obama and Clinton I just listened to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama being interviewed on Tavis Smiley--not together, of course. *grin* I have to say I was more impressed with Clinton. ( Cut for politics ) Current Mood:  confused |
| Friday, February 15th, 2008 | |
| 10:17 pm | Counterintuitive Counterintuitive is to use code in one programming language to dynamically build a code file in another language, to update a display in a third language. But hey--it works. If anyone cares, I'm using PHP to create JavaScript to reload the drop-down lists in HTML. It never occurred to me before seeing this code sample, that if you can put JScript code in an outside file, that outside file can in fact be a PHP file that's generated on the fly. Pretty cool. Current Mood: amused |
| Thursday, February 14th, 2008 | |
| 9:26 pm | Writing update I have a story (fan fiction) that I've been writing off and on--mostly off--since October of 2006, more than a year. In the last month or so I've written about 7000 words, on top of the 4000 I already had. Just today I realize--this isn't winding towards the climax, it's just starting! Two more subplots turned up in the last two days, and a whole new subgroup of characters just got involved. Today's subplot was something that was supposed to be a one paragraph "character gets accidentally transported someplace (doesn't matter where) and then goes home," but he needed someone to tell him where he was because the knowledge is important to figuring out why the accident happened. The woman who turned up to tell him was just too accepting of strange people bopping into existence and asking weird questions, so I had to explain that, which meant that he needed to do something about her problem, which meant he had to call in a different character. Him voluntarily calling in the other character is turning out to be an important turning point in their relationship, so I'm going to have to deal with that. All told, my one paragraph has turned into about a thousand words, plus additional scenes in the future to deal with the changing relationship--which needed to happen anyway. This could well be a novel by the time it's finished. Current Mood: creative |
| Monday, February 11th, 2008 | |
| 3:11 pm | J'vess and W'ster - a crossover from hell This is all ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nineveh_uk's fault! I deny all responsibility! (I should also warn you that this snippet is probably going nowhere.) ( *** ) Current Mood: silly |