After enduring years of living with a yappy little dog next door, I’ve been blessed with years of blessed peaceful silence after the dog disappeared. It’s always been my belief that some irate neighbour finally shot the thing, but who knows.
But today there was yapping and yipping once again, and looking out the windows, I saw not one but two yappy dogs. The good news, ironically, is that this was accompanied by the presence of a horde of yappy humans, so I presume and hope that this invasion, including the yappy-dog contingent, is temporary and will depart from my presence and my hearing.
If not, however, I’m prepared for war, even if it means ruining the good relations I’ve had with the neighbours. The city has recently tightened up its noise regulations, and while certain noises are allowed at certain times, “barking dogs” now comes under the category of “prohibited at all times”. I fully sympathize with the dogs, but as I’ve said before, the problem is always with the owners.
But hopefully these dogs and the human horde are guests who will shortly be departing.
Might work for cats. My last dog, a Bernese Mountain Dog of exceptional stature, weighed 120 pounds. He was fit and not overweight – he was just BIG! We used to have wrestling matches on the floor.
But a couple of weeks ago, I was running into a situation where a new employee was being brought on board and I needed to make sure that they had a good laptop ready for their use, and through various circumstances I didn’t have one available. So I was basically all, fuck it, they can have mine. And I cleared all the extra tools off mine and got it prepped for a new employee, and grabbed a raggedy old piece of shit computer out of my back room that I wouldn’t foist on my worst enemy.
Then the machine, no shocker, didn’t want to work right, and I had to spend hours fixing my own “new” computer instead of working on other things I should have been doing. Was it worth it? It didn’t matter, because I absolutely had to make sure that my customers are good, as always, and as usual I have to do whatever it takes regardless of my personal inconvenience. That’s the job. Being tech support doesn’t make you immune to tech support woes. Nobody can escape it.
(By the way, in the end I got it working well enough and I’m getting by until I can get myself something better in a few weeks. That’s why I give myself the garbage; I am the one who can handle it.)
Lie on the floor, face down, with him on one side & throw some Milk Bones on the other side of you. He’ll scratch your back as he walks over you to get the treats. Of course, that big, my may just step over you w/o a paw on your back.
As many visitors to the house would attest, Bernie’s enthusiastic greeting would involve his front paws extending up to their shoulders! Bernie needed no heavy lifting equipment to scratch my back – just the proper training! Alas, he never received the training. I just used a spatula as a back-scratcher.
My afternoon crashes are back, which means I’m tanking around 2pm again. My only idea is to start work way, way earlier. Maybe recover an hour in the evening. I just can’t focus like this. It sucks. Especially considering how much there is to do.
Now if you’ll allow me a #rantbrag
My six year old just beat me at chess.
Full disclosure: I’m not very good at chess. But still!
It was an honest to goodness stalemate for sure, as he reduced me to nothing but a king, at which point I gave him a little coaching to finish the job (get your pawn over and get your queen back, try to corner me.)
Just melted my heart today when I asked him to play and he turned off the TV and said, “I would LOVE that!”
Oh, so did our tech team. It’s just that they were not the ones in charge of procuring the machines. They just kept them somewhat working. My ire is (well, was) aimed at management who thought that IT buys were too complicated for anyone with knowledge to have any input.
I’m part of the team that decides on standards for the entire agency. And for the first time in well over a decade, our decision was overruled by folks higher up, who set a standard lacking a ton of features people have relied on forever in order to save some money, because we’re in a budget crisis.
What sucks is having to go to my customers and let them know that their new computers won’t have touchscreens, or ports to connect to the equipment they were issued to work from home, and so on.
I’ve come to learn that conservatives really don’t like providing evidence for their claims. I’ll see a post by a conservative on social media making some outrageous claim, such as that Muslims have “taken over” 50 countries, or that This School or That School has kitty litter boxes in the classrooms for kids who identify as cats. I’ll ask for a cite, and in response I’ll get something like “go look it up yourself, the information is out there,” or “do your own research, sheeple.” Not once have I asked for a cite and gotten one.
Because they don’t exist. No school in this country has installed litter boxes in its classrooms for children who identify as cats. And while at least 50 countries are either majority Muslim or have significant Muslim populations, those populations have been Muslim for as long as Islam has existed (or at least, have been so for a few centuries). And if a poster means once culturally-Christian countries that have been “taken over” by Muslims, a) even if a culturally-Christian country being “taken over by Muslims” is a thing that happens to countries, it sure as hell hasn’t happened to 50 of them, and b) what does “taken over by Muslims” even mean? Western Europe has seen a lot of growth in its Muslim populations in the last few decades. As far as I know Islam is not the state religion in any of them, nor has Sharia Law taken over.
Or I’ll get the old canard, “prove it didn’t happen.” Um, no. It’s up to the person making the assertion to provide evidence to back it up, not the other way around. But they don’t teach this in high schools in the US, apparently, and MAGAts are, by and large, not college educated.
There have been some studies on this and the findings are essentially this: conservatives don’t care about whether what they are saying is true. They care more about winning people over to their side and have zero problems spreading misinformation they know to be false if it helps win people to their side.
Liberals have a hard time understanding this. We tend to think that of course the truth matters, and if we do spread misinformation (and we do), it’s usually stuff we actually believe. We appear to value the truth more than winning.
Which, you know, can really bite us in the ass.
This is one reason conservatives are mistrustful of liberals’ motives for believing the things we do and wanting the things we want. It’s difficult to imagine that we could possibly be truthful because they are routinely not. Thus any sincere desire for justice and empathy is labeled as performative.
Generalizing, of course.
(This effect is more pronounced during election season.)
I did a really stupid thing last night. My cat Seven has been on insulin twice a day since April. Since I’m a night owl, I give it to her at noon and midnight. The shots have to be given 12 hours apart and she has to eat 30 minutes before that so I have alarms set up to keep on track.
Last night when the “feed” alarm went off, I gave her the insulin shot. I didn’t realize this until the “insulin” alarm went off 30 minutes later. I immediately fed her and then checked Google for advice. It said that if she ate after the shot she would probably be ok but to watch for signs of hypoglycemia for several hours. I got the carrier out in case I needed to take her to the animal ER and had honey ready to put on her gums if she started seizing. I was terrified that I might have killed her. I sat with her on the couch all night.
One of the signs of hypoglycemia is lethargy. Seven is an 11 year old cat. Lethargy is her default state. I woke her every 30 minutes and got her to walk around. She scared me at one point when she stood up on the couch and tried to jump up on the back of it and missed. I fed her again at that point and she was steady as she walked around. Around 6 I decided she was doing ok and I went to bed. She is back on schedule today and seems fine.
Now I’m worried about my brain. That was such a stupid and dangerous thing to do. The thing is that when I went in the kitchen to get the insulin, Seven and the other cat were whining at their bowls (as they do when they hear the alarm) and I actually said to them “this is not the feed alarm”. I should have realized right then that I was wrong. When I get the insulin ready, the cats have eaten and are elsewhere. I should have recognized that something was wrong with my thinking. But the signs didn’t register at all. Like any of us who are getting older, I know that our minds can start failing and now I wonder if I’m going to start doing other wrong things without noticing, It’s scary.
Can you devise a physical set up with the insulin and food (such as placing the food on front of or over the insulin) such that you have to move the food to reach the insulin? Might not be ideal if the insulin is refrigerated, but even so perhaps place a post it note on the next dose that says “food first”. Remove the note when you feed, and then apply it to the next dose. Basically just set up some sort of physical reminder on the medication that reinforces the feeding rule.
We had a cat that required a topical thyroid medication applied to the ear twice a day, and had to alternate ears each time. We came up with the mnemonic “Right at night” to remind us what ear to use based on if it was the morning or evening application. If the physical reminders I suggested can’t be used, perhaps you can train yourself to say a phrase to yourself every time you give the insulin that reminds you about the feeding.
I was trying to come up with another step to add to the process and this would work. I keep the insulin in a box in the refrigerator. I could put a sticky note on that. Thanks. You can never be too careful when it comes to medication.
Another thing that we professional procrastinators are good at is extending deadlines, so we can procrastinate some more.
I thought it was a few months ago that I mentioned to the ex-wife concern that I’ve never made out a will. These days there are reputable online firms that provide you with standard forms and legal guidelines for many such routine documents. My niece, herself a lawyer, though in a completely different line of practice, used such a service herself, which was also recommended by others.
To encourage me, the Lovely Ex-Wife bought me a subscription to let me enter and update information for a will, POA, and living will for up to a year. You could print it all out at any time but after the subscription expires you could no longer make changes, and the online information would be deleted.
I just got several reminders that the subscription is about to expire in days. I started filling out the forms but got bored halfway through and left it for awhile. I can’t believe it’s been a year! So I sent them $15 to renew for another year, which takes the pressure off, otherwise the whole enterprise would just collapse and have to start all over again.
Naturally, this will be just more excuse to procrastinate some more. $15 well spent!
