As promised - and with Michelle's permission - here's a picture of our little girl dealing with the indignity of the whole situation by taking a nap on Michelle's back.
She really doesn't like the cone thing at all. It prevents her whiskers from doing their thing and helping her figure out her surroundings.
The plan is to take her back to the vet tomorrow afternoon to have the drain removed and then sometime next week for the stitches. What we're not sure about is whether she'll need to wear the cone for all that time also.
More as we find out...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
of Cats and Vets
Had to take Cornflake to the vet today when we noticed that the right side of her face was pretty swollen. It turned out she had an abscess that needed surgery - possibly caused by a bite from another cat; although certainly not from a fight that Cornflake started, or if she did it was because she was provoked and was defending us valiantly in some way - and now has a shaven face, stitches and a rubber tube sticking out of the scar to allow bad stuff to escape as it heals. Ugh!
Having to deal with injured or sick pets sucks. They don't really get that you're trying to help them and, particularly with cats, don't understand that they can't be jumping around and doing their usual thing as soon as they get home. And it's usually far more traumatic for the owners than it is for the pets themselves.
Anyway, once we get over this rough bit we'll post a pic of her wearing her cone collar thingy.
Having to deal with injured or sick pets sucks. They don't really get that you're trying to help them and, particularly with cats, don't understand that they can't be jumping around and doing their usual thing as soon as they get home. And it's usually far more traumatic for the owners than it is for the pets themselves.
Anyway, once we get over this rough bit we'll post a pic of her wearing her cone collar thingy.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Euro Million Sweepstakes Win
I received an official looking email today from a Dr. Graham Robert - who can you trust if you can't trust a Doctor? - letting me know that I'd one 'One Million Euros' in the 'Euromillion Email Sweepstakes' drawing that took place on March 27th. It has a number of very official looking reference, ticket and 'winning' numbers spread liberally throughout in addition to the confident and authoritative reference to Dr. Robert himself.
I haven't told Michelle yet - it will be a surprise when we head out for our 3 day getaway when we're picked up by helicopter from outside the house and flown to the waiting private jet that will take us to San Francisco. From there we'll have a chauffeur driven Rolls Royce (limos are two-a-penny here in California) to our penthouse suite at the W Hotel in the City, a night at the Opera, a tour of the LucasFilm compound hosted by George Lucas himself, and a Napa Valley winery tour before dinner at the French Laundry and multiple sequential spa treatments upon returning to the Spa. I say it will be a surprise because I'm sure what she'd really like to do is bet it all on a single hand of Blackjack in Vegas.
Of course, the reality is that this all just a scam. You generally don't win things that you don't enter, and even then rarely - that's how lotteries make money, by having the odds stacked heavily in their favor.
One last thought - you would do well to be wary of people with a first name as their last name.
I haven't told Michelle yet - it will be a surprise when we head out for our 3 day getaway when we're picked up by helicopter from outside the house and flown to the waiting private jet that will take us to San Francisco. From there we'll have a chauffeur driven Rolls Royce (limos are two-a-penny here in California) to our penthouse suite at the W Hotel in the City, a night at the Opera, a tour of the LucasFilm compound hosted by George Lucas himself, and a Napa Valley winery tour before dinner at the French Laundry and multiple sequential spa treatments upon returning to the Spa. I say it will be a surprise because I'm sure what she'd really like to do is bet it all on a single hand of Blackjack in Vegas.
Of course, the reality is that this all just a scam. You generally don't win things that you don't enter, and even then rarely - that's how lotteries make money, by having the odds stacked heavily in their favor.
One last thought - you would do well to be wary of people with a first name as their last name.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Happy 13th Birthday Meleena!
Friday, April 3, 2009
It was 16 years ago today...
... that I wore that tie. I am so, so sorry.
On a more positive note, I still get to hang out with the same wonderful person as I was pictured with here 16 years ago (almost to the very minute of this post).
And life is good, and getting better.
On a more positive note, I still get to hang out with the same wonderful person as I was pictured with here 16 years ago (almost to the very minute of this post).
And life is good, and getting better.
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
From Rambo to self doubt
I'm working on a presentation in which I intend to use the premise of Rambo 2 - the one where he single-handedly rescues a bunch of POWs, causing lots of chaos and collateral damage, winning the battle but not the war, etc. - as an analogy to help make my point and while looking for an appropriate image of the (anti)hero himself to include in the corresponding slide I came across the image used on the Commodore 64 movie tie-in game cassette cover and it reminded me of an important moment in my teenage life.
Let me take a quick moment to clarify some points for those younger readers among you for whom that last paragraph may have been a little confusing:
Rambo 2 - mid-1980s movie by Sylvester Stallone about a renegade/disillusioned Vietnam war veteran.
Sylvester Stallone - movie actor who starred in the Rocky and Rambo movies before falling into obscurity when he tried his hand at comedy.
Commodore 64 - popular home computer/gaming system that was far superior to the Sinclair Spectrum and which allowed owners of such systems to look down upon their Sinclair Spectrum owning friends and say "I don't care if it doesn't have many good games on it, it's got 64k of memory AND I can program it in Basic to say 'Hello World' over and over again".
We were lucky enough to receive one of these fabulous machines for Xmas one year (bless you for all your sacrifices, Mum and Dad) and it was upon this device that I wrote my Computer Studies 'O' Level project program called 'Shipment Manager' (in which I received an 'A' grade, no less), before attempting a more ambitious project to create a Word Processor as a follow-up. The latter was never finished due to my discovering that girls didn't really think it was that cool for you to have a Commodore 64 in your bedroom. Of course, I also never told them that I had written a computer program and was often heard denying that I'd ever done Computer Studies or joined the Computer Club at school. But that's another story...
Cassette - antiquated portable storage medium that was used for music distribution (looked up Walkman on Wikipedia) and latterly for computer games that would take up to 15 minutes or more to load on to the home computers/gaming systems of the period.
The moment in my teenage life that it reminded me of was when I submitted a tremendous high score I achieved on the Rambo 2 game and submitted it to the then leading Commodore 64 gaming magazine Zzap64! I can remember the pride when I received the issued in the mail - I was a subscriber (paid for my by paper round/fish & chip shop income), although I never admitted that to the girls either (especially not Kate Spencer) - with my name featured prominently in the Scorelord section as the leading scorer for the Rambo game. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a score that was a few thousand points more than then next guy. Nor 10 or 100 thousand points more. I'm talking millions and millions. There was no one else even close to me. It was like night and day - alot like Justin in the local swim meets he's been attending before getting back into the serious long-course meets in a month or so's time. I had good reason to be proud - I was the leading scorer for Rambo on the C64 (as we affectionately called it) in the whole of the United Kingdom. Of course, no one else really cared. But, it was something that I had achieved all on my own. It was my success. And for the last 20+ years it has been part of what makes me me.
Anyway, seeing the cover of the game reminded me of this success and I wondered if anyone on the Web had published anything related to the Zzap64! magazine. Sure enough, upon entering a google search I was whisked away not just to a site the mentioned it, but to one that had a complete catalog of scanned pages of all copies of the magazine that had ever been printed. I was momentarily stunned. And then I started to wonder; would they have scanned the high score pages? Would I be able to find my name once again, immortalized on the internet for everyone to see and allow me to bask in the glory of my incredible prowess at a long forgotten game, on an obsolete gaming system?
And so I started to search through the scanned copies of the magazine; starting somewhere around the middle of 1986 when I think the game was published and I recalled playing it with Tim Burgess and Andrew Nicholas. Month after month I eagerly looked at the contents page, found the Scorelord section and viewed that page. And click after click I couldn't find my name. Had I got the dates wrong? Was it released earlier and I needed to go back to 1985? Did I only achieve the high score after stopping playing for a while and going back to it the following year? I checked 1987 - no luck. I checked all of 1988 - still no luck. I then checked all of 1989 (when I had finished school and started working as a trainee accountant at Logan & Brewerton and probably didn't have time to play silly computer games any more anyway). After a few hours of searching - it was ok, M was running late at FHS anyway - I had to admit defeat. My name wasn't there. But yet, if it had actually happened wouldn't it be there, printed in black and white for me to prove to everyone what a star gamer I had once been?
And so, dear readers, here I am - a broken, dejected, shadow of my former self. If this had all been a fantasy, perhaps more of what I remember from my childhood and formative teenage years are also just a figment of my imagination. Did we even receive that Commodore 64 for Xmas that year? Was it really the fairies that decorated the house on Xmas Eve each year, filling our hearts with joy and delight upon waking up on Xmas Day to find that Xmas had magically arrived while we slept? Did Mum ever really make those fantastic home made pies that I remember? And did that fancy American chocolate coating for ice cream really solidify so hard that we couldn't break through to eat the ice cream underneath?
I have one hope - after double checking all the issues once again to make sure I'm not missing something - and that is that Jay remembers me talking about it and showing him the magazine when my name got printed.
And, if not, I will just have to pacify myself safe in the knowledge that I did get to kiss Kate Spencer once. Unless, of course, I made that up in my mind too...
Let me take a quick moment to clarify some points for those younger readers among you for whom that last paragraph may have been a little confusing:
Rambo 2 - mid-1980s movie by Sylvester Stallone about a renegade/disillusioned Vietnam war veteran.
Sylvester Stallone - movie actor who starred in the Rocky and Rambo movies before falling into obscurity when he tried his hand at comedy.
Commodore 64 - popular home computer/gaming system that was far superior to the Sinclair Spectrum and which allowed owners of such systems to look down upon their Sinclair Spectrum owning friends and say "I don't care if it doesn't have many good games on it, it's got 64k of memory AND I can program it in Basic to say 'Hello World' over and over again".
We were lucky enough to receive one of these fabulous machines for Xmas one year (bless you for all your sacrifices, Mum and Dad) and it was upon this device that I wrote my Computer Studies 'O' Level project program called 'Shipment Manager' (in which I received an 'A' grade, no less), before attempting a more ambitious project to create a Word Processor as a follow-up. The latter was never finished due to my discovering that girls didn't really think it was that cool for you to have a Commodore 64 in your bedroom. Of course, I also never told them that I had written a computer program and was often heard denying that I'd ever done Computer Studies or joined the Computer Club at school. But that's another story...
Cassette - antiquated portable storage medium that was used for music distribution (looked up Walkman on Wikipedia) and latterly for computer games that would take up to 15 minutes or more to load on to the home computers/gaming systems of the period.
The moment in my teenage life that it reminded me of was when I submitted a tremendous high score I achieved on the Rambo 2 game and submitted it to the then leading Commodore 64 gaming magazine Zzap64! I can remember the pride when I received the issued in the mail - I was a subscriber (paid for my by paper round/fish & chip shop income), although I never admitted that to the girls either (especially not Kate Spencer) - with my name featured prominently in the Scorelord section as the leading scorer for the Rambo game. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a score that was a few thousand points more than then next guy. Nor 10 or 100 thousand points more. I'm talking millions and millions. There was no one else even close to me. It was like night and day - alot like Justin in the local swim meets he's been attending before getting back into the serious long-course meets in a month or so's time. I had good reason to be proud - I was the leading scorer for Rambo on the C64 (as we affectionately called it) in the whole of the United Kingdom. Of course, no one else really cared. But, it was something that I had achieved all on my own. It was my success. And for the last 20+ years it has been part of what makes me me.
Anyway, seeing the cover of the game reminded me of this success and I wondered if anyone on the Web had published anything related to the Zzap64! magazine. Sure enough, upon entering a google search I was whisked away not just to a site the mentioned it, but to one that had a complete catalog of scanned pages of all copies of the magazine that had ever been printed. I was momentarily stunned. And then I started to wonder; would they have scanned the high score pages? Would I be able to find my name once again, immortalized on the internet for everyone to see and allow me to bask in the glory of my incredible prowess at a long forgotten game, on an obsolete gaming system?
And so I started to search through the scanned copies of the magazine; starting somewhere around the middle of 1986 when I think the game was published and I recalled playing it with Tim Burgess and Andrew Nicholas. Month after month I eagerly looked at the contents page, found the Scorelord section and viewed that page. And click after click I couldn't find my name. Had I got the dates wrong? Was it released earlier and I needed to go back to 1985? Did I only achieve the high score after stopping playing for a while and going back to it the following year? I checked 1987 - no luck. I checked all of 1988 - still no luck. I then checked all of 1989 (when I had finished school and started working as a trainee accountant at Logan & Brewerton and probably didn't have time to play silly computer games any more anyway). After a few hours of searching - it was ok, M was running late at FHS anyway - I had to admit defeat. My name wasn't there. But yet, if it had actually happened wouldn't it be there, printed in black and white for me to prove to everyone what a star gamer I had once been?
And so, dear readers, here I am - a broken, dejected, shadow of my former self. If this had all been a fantasy, perhaps more of what I remember from my childhood and formative teenage years are also just a figment of my imagination. Did we even receive that Commodore 64 for Xmas that year? Was it really the fairies that decorated the house on Xmas Eve each year, filling our hearts with joy and delight upon waking up on Xmas Day to find that Xmas had magically arrived while we slept? Did Mum ever really make those fantastic home made pies that I remember? And did that fancy American chocolate coating for ice cream really solidify so hard that we couldn't break through to eat the ice cream underneath?
I have one hope - after double checking all the issues once again to make sure I'm not missing something - and that is that Jay remembers me talking about it and showing him the magazine when my name got printed.
And, if not, I will just have to pacify myself safe in the knowledge that I did get to kiss Kate Spencer once. Unless, of course, I made that up in my mind too...
Morning Sunshine
A quick photo taken via Blackberry as I left the hotel this morning.
Feels like it's going to be a good day.
Feels like it's going to be a good day.