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Date posted: November 20, 2006 | Filed under humor | 2 Comments »

Dinner on the road

Date posted: November 19, 2006 | Filed under travel | Comments Off on Dinner on the road

This will make you lose your frickin’ mind. A loop of endless Caruso one-liners. You’ll learn to realize Roger Daltrey is screaming in pain, not excitement.

Date posted: November 19, 2006 | Filed under humor, shortlinks | Comments Off on Caruso One-Liners

My Pop is out of the hospital after getting good blood tests back; the infection is gone, so he’s simply trying to rest up and heal. We’re loading up the Jeep and driving north to see him tomorrow for an impromptu Thanksgiving visit. I’m looking forward to seeing him.

This morning I went into the office to pick up some stuff for an early client meeting, and it was quiet and lonely.

Date posted: November 18, 2006 | Filed under family | Comments Off on Win Some, Lose Some.

Penn, the Holy Orange Terror, is not in a good way. After much fucking around, the internal medicine vet got back the results which neither confirm nor deny the presence of FIP. In his professional opinion, though, he thinks it’s nonspecific cancer of some kind, which sucks, because we can’t treat it with anything.

penn

After several days of forcefeeding, general apathy and lack of sleep, the little guy was wandering around like a meth-head on a four day bender, so we brought him back in to the referring doctor (herself a subject for a later post in detail) for some subcutaneous fluids, a steroid shot, and a healthy painkiller/tranquilizer to help him sleep. Of course, because he’s Penn, he’s burning through the trank like it’s a glass of Coke, so he’s still awake but very interested in checking out the floor from eye-level. (If you remember, this is the cat who went through an entire pharmacy of attitude adjustment medication in the search for the One True Drug that would allow him to roam the house free and not view Geneva as the target of ninja assassination. Jen recently threw these expensive drugs away, as they were all taking up valuable space in the egg holder of our fridge, and the urge to self-medicate with some of them has come up now and again.)

I picked Penn out of a lineup at the Baltimore SPCA for two reasons: He was orange, and I have a love for orange cats. He was also the only cat in a room full of cats begging for attention who (I thought) was smart enough to be meowing constantly, at a metronomically precise rate, to get my attention. He was staring straight out of the bars of the cage at me, his little mouth yammering at a frantic pace, until I asked the lady to pick him up, and then he was quiet. He crawled around my arms a little while until he found a comfortable spot, and then he started purring contentedly. I was hooked. (Little did I know that his method of gaining my attention was also his standard method of being alive; this hyperactivity got exponentially more hyper as he got older.) His given name was actually Dandy. I can’t think of a more horrifying, stunting name to give a child or a pet than Dandy—besides, perhaps, Britney.

helping out

His brother, Teller (originally Raymond) took the opposite tack. Teller laid in the bottom of his cage on his back, playing contentedly with a yarn ball, oblivious of the people outside the cage staring at him and forty other cats. I thought this hard-to-get ploy was pretty slick, and as soon as I picked him up, he seemed to fit perfectly in my hands. Again, this naiive process of selection has come back to haunt me in later years, but at the time it seemed reasonable.

Back at home, in my rowhome in Canton, we settled into a comfortable routine, and the boys seemed to get along with each other pretty well. After I finished the basement, I would let the boys run free in the house, and every once in a while one of them would sleep in the sidewalk-level window. Before long, some of the kids in the neighborhood saw them, and they became a fixture on the walk home. I had the opportunity to introduce them to the kids, and one of the girls couldn’t get the name right, so she called him “Mr. Ben.” This name stuck, and we’ve been using it ever since, along with Pennyonce, Penndandy, Mr. Pencil, Pendleflex, Pendleton, and Pennsyltucky, to name a few.

sacktime

As I’ve mentioned here before, merging two households of cats was 4/5 successful. Penn, who thought he was alpha male, did not recognize Geneva’s rightful claim to that title, and they fought to the point of bloodletting.

After having Geneva stitched back up, Penn got banished to the upstairs office (dubbed the Pennitentiary) and the atrium by himself, and in the summer he had the run of the attic as well. The first year of captivity was pretty lousy, as he didn’t get to see as much of us as anybody wanted. We weren’t in the office more than a couple of hours a day, and the loneliness got to him. His favorite trick was to wait until we were comfortably asleep and then he’d sit on his haunches and scribblescrabble at the office door, making it bonk against its hinges, until I got up and put him out in the atrium.

sex bomb

I’m having a hard time with this situation because I have a lot of guilt over having to lock him up by himself. The other cats got to glom all over us in the cold winter months, stapling us into the bed under their sheer weight and leeching our precious body heat; they had plenty of lap time on the couch, and they got to socialize with guests who found themselves unlucky enough to be trapped in a house with the crazy cat people. Penn had to sleep and eat by himself for two years. There were many days when I had bad things to say about our problem child, and plenty of days when I just wished he was gone so we could have some harmony in our household. For these thoughts, I’m feeling horrible, like Penn deserved a better Dad than me. I am a pretty selfish, misanthropic human a lot of the time, and I didn’t spend enough quality time with Penn when he was on his own.

After our failed attempts at chemically altering his behavior, I looked into adoption services with little success. There is no easy solution for adoption when the cat is full-grown, and I couldn’t bear to think of Penn sitting alone in a cage at a PetSmart for three months waiting for someone to pick him, especially after he’d already been through that experience before.

Since Jen’s been working from home, and especially this last year after I joined her, we’ve been around him for eight or ten or twelve hours a day, and he’s been much happier and a lot mellower. Jen set up a wine box with a pillow in between our desks and he’d spend long afternoons asleep with us, relaxing us while we stressed out and staying up with us to hit deadlines. He became a fantastic studio cat, only occasionally spilling the odd glass of water or scrabbling at the door. (He never did grow out of his habit of meowing constantly the minute I got on the phone with a client.) This summer we remarked more than once how different he’d become, and that the change made us both feel better.

This last month has been tough for all of us. I didn’t notice the changes in behavior or weight loss until Jen pointed them out, and because they were gradual at first, it took a long time for me to accept that something was wrong. As his condition worsened, the changes sped up until he became a shadow of his former gregarious self. I feel guilty about this too, although from what the doctors are telling us, there really is nothing we could have done anyway. That’s cold comfort, though.

penn

Last night we corralled the other cats in the basement, moved his box into our room, and let him stay with us for the first time in ages. He laid on the bed and stared off into space, unable to sleep, and he was like that when we both drifted off. This morning, after the painkillers wore off, he gave us a wheezy purr as we scratched his back, and that made us feel a little better, like he actually realizes we’re there and that we love him. I’m making an appointment with the vet in the afternoon, and I have to decide if I want a wooden box with a plaque or something more ornate for his final resting place, but that seems kind of garish for a working-class cat like Penn. I’m also wondering where I’m supposed to put this thing. On the mantle? On my dresser? In the closet?

This sucks.

Date posted: November 16, 2006 | Filed under family | 3 Comments »

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Date posted: November 16, 2006 | Filed under family | 2 Comments »

This is a linkdump of info about Nikon Lens Compatibility, Nikon D70 specs (Particularly lens information), a better compatibility chart and accompanying review, another review of the D70s.

Date posted: November 16, 2006 | Filed under flickr, shortlinks | Comments Off on Nikon Linkdump

My sister called this morning to let me know my father is in the hospital having his appendix removed today, so our Thanksgiving plans are out the window. Cross your fingers for my pop, will you?

Date posted: November 15, 2006 | Filed under family | 2 Comments »

I’ve spent about 22 of the last 48 hours working on some last-minute updates for a website I’ve been building since last year; this included pulling some Flash out of my butt, making a lot of sitewide updates, and a few hurried conference calls with folks in California.

The company’s name is TalkPlus, and the deal is that they add services to your existing mobile phone. If your phone has a Maryland area code and you’d like to have a Los Angeles number for your presence there, TalkPlus can give that to you. The service also includes a bunch of features not available with some standard mobile acounts-the ability to screen calls by incoming number, voicemail that can go to your email account, multiple outbound IDs (you could spoof your own caller ID, essentially) and a few other goodies.

They’ve just opened a public beta, and for a limited time you can try the service out for free. I’m not sure what numbers they have available right now, but if you spend a lot of time on the road, have multiple offices, are dating and wish to keep your actual number private, or just like fooling around with technology, check it out.

Date posted: November 14, 2006 | Filed under art/design | Comments Off on Talk, Plus.

Penn is home again, and his belly is shaved from one side to the other, so he looks like a standard poodle shaving experiment gone horribly wrong. The vet isn’t sure, but this could be one of two things: Feline infectious peritonitis, which is an untreatable virus thing that cats can get at birth, or, more seriously, mysenteric cancer (a fancy way of saying he might have a nonspecific cancer throughout the sac that surrounds his organs).

The vet is sending some of the fluid that’s gathering in his abdomen out for some tests which might tell us something more conclusive, but the nature of FIP is such that they can’t be positive about it. The next steps will probably be some form of exploratory surgery to determine exactly what’s happening inside.

Neither one of these things is good news; FIP is lousy, and cancer is shitty. This sucks.

Date posted: November 14, 2006 | Filed under general | 3 Comments »