Archive for the 'Personal' Category

Today I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor following my surgery back in January.  Got in there and got some basic stuff done, then mentioned I’d been getting dizzy standing up lately.  So they checked my blood pressure and it was somewhat low.  Then they had me stand up, and my BP dropped so low they couldn’t read it.

That’s when they told me to head to the emergency room and get checked out.

I got to the E.R. at around 4 PM and they ran some tests (including drawing 3 vials of blood, which is pretty funny for someone they called “dangerously depleted”) and decided that I was “severely dehydrated.” They also did an EKG, took a couple of chest X-rays, and did repeated pulse and BP checks.

In the meantime, they put an I.V. in to give me fluids.  Two liters of fluids.  Took about five hours to get out of there

It was a long and frustrating day, and I got absolutely nothing worthwhile done.

This morning when I went outside, there were smears of blood on the floor in the mud room.  That was a bad start to the day.  I cleaned it up and went about my business.

Late in the afternoon, Sarah had some folks coming by for Girl Scout business, so she was hanging out outside to handle that stuff, and Sophie and I were out there with her.

Suddenly Sophie cries out, “A mouse!” and heads for the mud room.

I follow her to find Buddy (that would be the cat) dropping a small fuzzy thing at her feet.  I called out to Sophie to back off, then went to get a look.  It was a tiny, tiny baby rabbit.  About four inches long or so, with wounds around its neck and breathing erratically.

Great.

Sarah corralled Sophie out of the way and I picked the rabbit up with a shovel and, with not just a little hesitation (it was still breathing, after all), put it in the trash.  It was clearly not going to survive.

Then I mopped up the goo on the floor.

Not five minutes later, Buddy was back with another tiny little rabbit.  This one, when he dropped it, managed to make something of a very slow getaway, and I chased Buddy off.  The rabbit made its way into a corner, cowering in fear.  I donned a pair of gloves and picked it up carefully.  It had one puncture wound in its side that was oozing some kind of white fluid.  Not a good sign.  But I put it back out in the woods, hoping (probably foolishly) that it would find its way home.

By this point, it’s pretty clear that Buddy has found a den, because by the time I was done dropping the second rabbit back off in the woods, there came Buddy hopping over the fence with a third one in his mouth.  This one I managed to get him to drop, but it was badly hurt and, again, clearly not going to make it.

Sophie was following me around asking to see the rabbits and asking if they were having fun playing with Buddy.

I think I handled it about as well as I could, under the circumstances.  Basically, I figured that explaining what was really going on to a 3-year-old wasn’t going to work, so I just said that Buddy was playing with the bunnies and that I had to take them home.

Those rabbits were so tiny, they can’t have been more than a few days old, I think.  Poor things.

Of course, Buddy’s just doing what millions of years of feline evolution are telling him to do.  Can’t really fault him for that.  Still, it’s not something you really want to walk into in the morning.

I’m starting to get antsy for an iPhone, but need to wait for it to be 3G.  It’s kind of weird.  I get cranky when I’m out someplace with my iPod touch and don’t have access to a WiFi connection for Internet access.

I find it quite enjoyable to do mail and the web on it — except for the limitations on when and where I can use it.  I’m pretty confident now that I’ll be one of the losers waiting in line early before the release in order to be among the first to get one.  I’m awfully eager to get one.

It’s gotten to the point where I wholly resent my Treo for being large, cumbersome, and unpleasant to use by comparison.  This is a sad state of affairs given that only a year and a half ago, I called it the coolest gadget I’d ever seen.

The new entertainment center is now all set up, with the exception of ongoing tweaking to the configuration of the Logitech universal remote I bought. It sure is a nice setup.

Eventually I need to come up with a plan to hook up and place the surround speakers. I left them off for now because the wires we have aren’t long enough to position them properly.

I recently went out to eat dinner with my family, and ordered a simple grilled chicken breast.  What I received was something that caught my eye:

This is exactly the way the plate was presented to me upon arrival.  Now, compare to this:

It’s not every day you get a continent served up to you on a plate.  Complete with Tasmania, no less.

You may be asking what this has to do with Mozilla.  Well… nothing, really, but I thought it was the sort of oddball thing that would amuse you.

After my provider fixed my mail outage, among the messages that came in was one from my mom letting me know my grandma had died on Thursday. I’ll leave the issue of why she didn’t use the phone as a mystery for the ages.

I’m not sure what the right words are to describe how I feel. It’s not sadness, exactly. I guess maybe I feel… troubled. I’m not as close to her as I am to my mom’s parents, but I think back to all the fun we had with her when I was a kid, and those are great memories.

The fact that both of Dad’s parents suffered from Alzheimer’s leaves me nervous. What does that mean for my dad? How about for me?

Genetics can be a heartless bitch.

The new entertainment center is here and mostly set up.  I need to go out and pick up a component video cable today — to get the cable box working without one, I borrowed the Mac mini’s DVI/HDMI converter and cable, so I need to get the component cable to swap things back around.

The center looks beautiful.  So far, we have the TV, cable box, receiver, Blu-Ray player, and even the old 5-disc DVD player hooked up to it.  The Mac will join it later today after I run out and buy that cable and return a spare audio cable I wound up not needing.  I’m also going to look for a good universal remote; we currently have to use three remotes to drive this setup.

Tomorrow, at long last, our new entertainment center into which our HDTV will fit is due to be delivered.  We got a lot of the old stuff torn down and moved out of the way tonight, and will do the rest in the morning.  The afternoon will be spent waiting on them to show up with it, then assembling the new setup in it.  It’ll be interesting.  I’m pretty sure I’ll need to go pick up some cables in order to do it right (now that we have the digital TV, I’d like to use digital audio cables, for example).

I also hope the cable company’s office is open on Saturday, so I can swing by and pick up the cable they insist I use when activating HD service, which I also need to do.

I have the “Kit” Mozilla Developer Center desktop on the main screen on my iMac here at home.  My daughter likes to come in and ask me to move windows out of the way so she can see and talk to the “Firebox.”  She also likes me to have iTunes play some of her favorite songs so she can pretend the Firebox is singing to her.  It’s hilariously cute!

Sophie went poop on the potty tonight for the very first time.  Woohoo!