(OLD) Hey! It's The May-Day MMP!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Real Fish, I hope you feel better soon.

Niner (not sure what your Mumper name is), your meal looks absolutely beautiful.

Weekend was a mixed bag. Things were going well until mom admitted she’d had a lot of pain in her abdomen and lower back for a week and a half, and it was now bad enough she wasn’t sleeping.

After much badgering, I got her to call the doctor’s office and the nurse agreed to prescribe her antibiotics for the weekend contingent on her ability to get in for a test NOW (somewhat understandable). Her tests came in Saturday. I’m not a doctor, but I’ve read her labs enough to know that she has a) a raging infection and b) likely kidney damage/the start of renal failure, both of which have happened before. So, it will not be a surprise if she’s on antibiotics strong enough to fell a horse and is asked to come to the hospital for a visit unrelated to her radiation. She told me not to tell her anything too bad, so I didn’t (again, not a doctor so I should keep my mouth shut anyway), but I did tell her she’ll get a call soon. The antibiotics gave her some relief, which was amazing.

Once I was sure mom was stable and safe and feeling good mentally, we we went to a family game night at a friend’s house. All the kids jumped on the trampoline in the rain, ate too many sweets and played boardgames while the adults drank spicy bloody Marys and played board games, too. It was fun. With all the kid and mom stuff going on, I forget how much I enjoy hanging out with people while the kids go a little nuts in the yard. The older they get, the less they get to go a little nuts in healthy ways. Things’ll start going south pretty soon, so I’m holding on to stuff like this while I can.

Today is bright and sparkly outside. Hope I’ll get in a waddle or at least some time on the back porch in the sun.

22

FCD talked to the manager - there probably won’t be a fine but we will have to pay the spill response team cost. Could be worse, right?

We heard from MIL’s new apt - she came back clean so they’re working up the lease. Yay!! Moving should start soon. Just remains to be seen how much her current place will charge to break the lease. FCD plans to go to the office with his dad’s death certificate and see if they’ll cut him some slack.

Meanwhile, we’re hoping to finish a couple of boat chores today. I thought about doing some scrubbing but it’s too windy and chilly to play with water…

23

So the Smalls heave was short, then I got sent to the 100 table. And everybody left, except for 2 other Smalls folks. And I was the only person who could lift the heavy stuff. Which meant at one point, I was running down a 5 foot staircase, heaving boxes onto the rollers, running back up the stairs, and then heaving the boxes from the rollers into the cages. Repeatedly. When I got home, Spot was loving and playful, till I ate an orange with breakfast, after which I was shunned till I repeatedly washed my hands. Who knew Feline Citrusphobia was a thing?

So does it show up on radar, so ATC can give you a safe vector?
Appropriate song

I had something similar for Sunday dinner. And glad you’re getting help for you steering.

“Tradition is peer pressure from dead people”

{{{{wordy and wordMom}}}}

24

Morning, all! It’s finally sunny again, but breezy and only 56°F (at 11:45am) with an expected high of just 60. Temps will be in the mid-50s to low 60s all week, with light rain on Wednesday. This weather is more like March than May, but I’m alright with it…and the weekend is supposed to be pretty nice. :slight_smile:

I’m happy to report that Bailey’s recovery continued over the weekend, and she finally ate some kibble yesterday. I still gave her a ton of “special” wet food, to encourage/ensure eating, but this morning I went back to her usual breakfast (kibble + her “normal” wet food) and am waiting to see if she’ll eventually eat it. It isn’t unusual for her to decide that breakfast is actually lunch, plus she wasn’t a very food-motivated dog even before the surgery, so I’m not worried that she hasn’t eaten yet. Worst case she’ll get more special food later on. She still has some trouble getting on the couch when she’s tired, but now she can get on/off the bed alone (and has stopped crying when she’s ready to get down! yay!) and is much steadier and faster on the back steps. She isn’t barking yet, though…if everything else about her weren’t so much better, the quiet would be eerie.

Tomorrow will be one week since the procedure. I think I’ll try taking the recovery suit/sleeve off her after work today, because I’ll be able to keep an eye on her this evening (vs Tuesday-Thursday’s online training). I have no idea whether she’ll still want to lick the incision site a lot; I’m trying not to get my hopes up. The suit would be a pain to have to put back on again (it was a pain even when she was weaker), but I might try bandages if needed with the suit as a last resort. We’ll see. (I have some bitter apple spray, but I’m not going to put that – or anything – on a healing incision.)

I guess I’ve done enough procrastinating for the day. I don’t mind the day job stuff today, but I’m not motivated at all to do the proposal stuff. Which is what I really need to do. Even worse, it’s my own damn fault that I need to do it…meh!

Oh no! :people_hugging:

Like doggio, I’m curious: so what happens/how do you handle this?

(If the answer can easily be explained in laymen’s terms, at least for me…?)

I’m so glad you got a break!!

25

How much of the series have you read? The 11th (and so far latest) book, Games Wizards Play, came out in 2016. (There are also the three Feline Wizards books.)


57 out and NOS; high 62, low 47. Nice to have a break from the rain, but it’s supposed to start up again around 0200 tonight and continue through Thorsday. At last they’re (currently) saying no rain Fri, Sat and Sun.

Gave Angel her morning glop, and took some kibble out to Fluff. Normally she just hisses at me when I reach down to put food in her bowl, but this time she apparently thought I was getting too close to the kittens and put a few small holes in my arm.

Getting used to the new dishwasher. One thing we don’t like is that it doesn’t have a separate heated dry cycle like our old one did. And the old one had a knob on the front that showed where it was in the cycle, so we knew when it had stopped washing and we could open the door to take things out if they were needed quickly. (“What do you mean, all the wooden spoons are in the dishwasher?”)

Mortgage goes out automatically, so we don’t need to worry about being late with it.

Plans for the afternoon are breakfast, a longish walk (which in my current state means about half a mile), and a trip to the lab so they can put another small hole in my arm. :slight_smile:

26

Afternoon all. Sammich has been eaten (the computers at the Jersey Mike’s were acting up so I just gave them enough money; been there often enough to know the cost). Then a couple stops at the grocery stores (one didn’t have the rye bread I like) and on home. Letting lunch digest some before putting on the swimming trunks and doing the backstroke for 750 yards. Then soccer at 5:30pm; we haven’t won a game this season so far, will try a couple things at practice to work on getting better.

Herald, don’t know if I’ve met Fluff before, sounds like a fairly fierce resident. And I know what you mean about dishwashers; mine has a bunch of buttons and will run from about 63 minutes to 271 minutes depending what buttons I push… currently I’m at about 144 minute cycles.

Oopsie, good news about Bailey, hope the recovery proceeds.

doggio, you can kind of look at work as saving you money because no gym membership will give you the kind of workout that job does.

FCM, happy MIL moving!

talkie, it is Niner (at least in my notes) and agree the meal looks great. And {{{hugs}}} for mom-unit. Glad you were able to get out and have some fun.

Jasmine, guess the cop got up on the ‘respect my Authority’ side of the bed today.

I am exercising regularly and drinking Diet Pepsi, but let’s not get crazy here… :wink: :smiley: :smiley:

Niner, glad you have good family and friends to help you out, I am sure the time will come you can pay them back in kind.

wet one, hope Ursula Kitteh is just funnin’ with you but probably a good idea to see the vet.

OK, need to let digestion do it’s thing then head over to the gym. All y’all take care.

27

Took a break to take some stuff off the boat, go by the convenience center, then had lunch, switched from the truck to my car, pick up some stuff we forgot, and we’re back on the boat. It’s stoopit windy and too chilly for the first of May.

FCD is installing the fuel tank inspection panel. Once that’s done, we’ll suck out the water that pooled in the bilge overnight, the pull the wire. I hope. More rain is coming.

28

Hi All from hazy Mexico City. Lived to tell the tale. Big plans for an afternoon of social and hiking with other pilot & 2 newbie FAs. Got some good pix of a seriously ash-spouting volcano, but we’re not allowed to share them.

The short version of volcanic ash: If it’s daytime and there are no clouds, the ash within a few miles of the volcano is easy enough to see and avoid. You all know what direct ash-spewing looks like. Once it gets 5-40 miles away from the volcano it looks like a thin tan cloud. Even farther away it gets hard to recognize or is diffuse enough not to really see. And of course there’s nothing to prevent a dangerous ash cloud from mingling with an ordinary safe water vapor cloud, making it invisible to the eye. Neither ATC radar nor aircraft radar can see ash at all. Utterly undetectable.

So how to we avoid it? The volcano monitoring people of the local government should know when something is erupting and how severely. That info gets incorporated into the worldwide weather tracking & dissemination systems. Where various computer models are run to determine the altitude the ash will mostly float at and how it will fan out laterally downwind of the volcano. Whichever way “downwind” is now or will be or has been since the eruption started. From that they compute a very large area of sky both laterally & vertically to avoid. Which is then passed to the host government ATC to route airplanes around or sometimes over or under. And to the systems that feed input into the airline’s planning systems, so they plan to fly around / over / under it too. And of course each airplane going by that can spot the cloud gives updates to ATC on where it really is.

All that worked as planned today. Plus it was daytime and no ordinary clouds were anywhere nearby. We saw the peak & the ash cloud from 100 miles away. So it was easy to plan around, be helped around by ATC, and see to avoid. An inadvertent ash encounter is not necessarily immediately fatal, but it is very hazardous. The approved response is “Run away! Run away!” the opposite of how you came in. An once of prevention is worth a couple hundred tons of cure.

I have gone into Mexico city at night where the eruption started after we were on the way. That converted an expected 2-hour snooze enroute into multiple conference calls with HQ to make alternate plans. Once we landed, the whole city smelled like a fire in a fireworks stand. Lots of burning wood smell, plus burning sulphur smell, plus something that somehow instinctively smelled like burning rock. Such fun.

I had a police encounter this morning of a very different, but still happy, kind.

I’m zooming down the freeway at serious speed in light traffic when I notice a SUV-type police vehicle getting on from the onramp ahead. He’s got his red & blue lights on, but not flashing. Some departments around here have taken to driving that way all the time as a speeding deterrent - makes the cop & car very conspicuous. Anyhow, I quickly slow down to 80-something, and he stays ahead of me in the far right while I’m in the far left. He slowly pushes up his speed to about 100 and starts weaving through the traffic. Which, as always in Miami, is doing 90-ish and utterly ignoring him and his lights. So although he’s passing everybody, it’s not by a lot; 10-15 mph tops. I recognize the paint job on his car; he’s a local cop from a jurisdiction about 25 miles down the road and my offramp is 20 miles ahead. Presumably he’s driving to work using his priority lights to ease his commute.

No reason I can’t use this to ease my commute too. So I give chase from a respectful distance. He parts the seas for both of us and I’m back there someplace in the pack of anonymous headlights. He eventually walked away from me but it was fun while it lasted.

Miami: it’s not like other places. :grin:

That’s what I call going out with a bang! :grin:

Sorry about your car; steering pump failure is always expensive. Good thing you didn’t have an accident. Cars don’t become unsteerable, but they do become a lot harder to steer if that stuff gets really bad.

And damn, that’s a nice pork loin! Beautifully done.


Hooray for all the happy pets. And {{hugs}} for the struggling or absent ones.

29

Very interesting and sounds exciting! Stay safe, both on volcanoes and highways. LOL

30

The vet called a little while ago: Bailey’s biopsy results are negative/the mass was benign! :tada: I wasn’t worried, but it’s still nice to know. I asked about the sleeve/licking question, and she recommended keeping the sleeve on until the 2-week mark. She said because Bailey had been licking the site pre-surgery it could be a habit to lick it now, and waiting will help ensure that any licking won’t hurt. So, that’s what I’ll do. Luckily the suit/sleeve doesn’t seem to bother the dog at all, but I’ll be happy when she can stop wearing it (8 more days).

I know when mine has stopped washing because it stops making noise. :joy:

(It also beeps 2-3 times after the drying cycle is done, even with “heated drying” turned off…I wish I could turn the beeping off!)

*whew*! And, thanks for the explanation. :slight_smile:

31

Consider this vigorously celebrated from far, far away! Wonderful! :tada::confetti_ball::partying_face::tada::confetti_ball:

32

Happy Moonday!

Happy May Day!

It was chilly at the park this morning, a damp 47 degrees.
I didn’t dress warmly enough.

It was irritating though. I should have stayed home.
Barky/Humpy mom went, so it was just her and me on the big side with a new person.
B/H mom pulled her usual bs whenever I tried to talk with the new person. She would do something to block it. Like shift her body so I couldn’t see NP, or jump up and start clapping her hands and tell her dogs to go play.
Every f’ing time.

Oh well, when I get the new puppy, I won’t be able to go to the park for a while. Not until he has all of his shots at 12 weeks. Park rules say he has to be 16 weeks.

First of the month means the mortgage payment is due. Usually, I have it paid long before the first. Last month was kind of screwed up so nothing went according to plan. I dread paying bills this month, as I know I easily spent over $5000 on vet bills over the last 2 months. I owe the IRS money too, and have to pay for the new puppy. I’ll probably have to dip into savings.
It’ll work itself out.
JtC, I am quite embarrassed to say how much I am spending on this puppy. I should have talked about the price first, as prices have gone up.
Ripple was $2150, that included chipping, and shipping.
Echo was $2300, that included chipping, shipping, pet nanny, and returning the soft sided crate.
New Puppy will be $3274, that includes chipping, shipping, and pet nanny.
There are cheaper breeders out there, but because Shar Pei have issues with both health and temperament, I prefer going with an established breeder that has worked with vets to improve the overall health of the breed.
The problem with Shar Pei is that they almost went extinct. China placed a heavy tax on dogs because dogs were considered decadent, so the dogs were dying out, or being killed. Matgo Law is credited with saving the breed by exporting them out of the country. Actually, he may have smuggled them out? However, the exported dogs were a small gene pool to breed from, which is never healthy for a breed.

Anyway, it’s probably a good thing I have a puppy on order, because the new person this morning had a husky who gave birth to 7 puppies 7 weeks ago, and 3 of them are looking for a home.
It was so very tempting, but the last thing I need is a husky.
They are on my ‘no way in hell’ list of dogs.
Too much fur, too much noise, too much energy.
They are great dogs, but not a good fit for me.

I had a long chat with Cerby’s new dad yesterday. Cerby is doing well, but we got a little deep into Cerby’s bad behaviors. This guy knows what he’s doing though, when Cerby acts out he makes him work until he is too tired to act out anymore.
But I talked with him about a topic that I wanted to avoid, and that is that I am pretty sure Cerby was abused. I hate to say that, as I am talking about my family here, but the truth is, the signs are there. His new dad thinks so too.
So that is another obstacle to for him to overcome.

Spot is a very handsome boy, Doggio, and I am glad he is coming around for attention.
I hope Darci shows up soon,

Flying through volcanic ash made me think of this
Death by MIsadventure

When I worked for State Police, well actually, The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, I would leave irk at the same time as a number of troopers. I would get in the middle of all their unmarked cars and speed with them down the beltway. I figured they wouldn’t pull me over if I was in the middle.
They never did.

I’m glad Bailey’s mass is benign! That is happy news.

I hope everything is okay with Ursela.

{{{Wordy}}}

I really need to get to irk. The bills aren’t going to pay themselves.
Well, actually, most of them do.
My son got the lawn whacked this morning. Then the sun came out, but now it looks like it’s going ro rain any minute.

33

Howdy Y’all! Sloth has ruled the day along with nappage. We’ll take twuck to the hospital tomorrow morning so they can look at him and hopefully get to leave him there. I have been approved for a 25 day car rental as well. The Eyetalian chikin smells yummy. The rest of sup shall be prepared shortly.

Oopsie yay for the good report on Bailey!

Niner the poke loin and veggies look nummy. Glad you got help with the car woes. Hope it’s fixed soonest.

Wordy hope things are better for your mom soonest. Glad you had a good time with your friends.

Pilot glad the volcano didn’t get ya.

34

Yay!!!

Update: Final paper turned in. I have officially completed my program. Grades won’t be in for a while, but I could literally get 50% on these last few papers and still comfortably pass the classes - I’ve got 95%+ of the points in all of them. So I’m not concerned. So long, grad school. Don’t let the door hit ya.

I’m kidding - most of my classwork has been inoffensive and several of the classes were really enjoyable. Only one or two gave me any trouble, and only trouble of the motivating-myself-to-do-boring-stuff variety. I’ve maintained a 4.0 through the whole process. Honestly, now that it’s done, I’m a little worried about what to do with myself. I’m Very Depressed :tm: and classwork has been something to focus on. I’ll have to make a real effort to start reading my years-long backlog of books now that I’m not bogged down with school reading.

35

Great news about Bailey, oopsie!!

Niner, happy end to grad School!! And yeah, having a reading backlog will keep you busy.

swampy, best wishes to twuck.

Sari, had no idea Shar Pei’s cost that much and were that endangered. And yeah, given the space you have, a Husky would not be a good fit.

Pilot, thanks for the learning about what pilots face. And enjoy Mexico City, another place on my bucket list.

Have done my swimming and sauna and the scale there reads 255.6 lbs, so it continues in the right direction. Coaching soccer in about an hour so need to dress for it, about 66F now and going down to 61F as the sun sets. Probably stop at Culver’s for dinner, Butterburgers are pretty good but their crinkle-cut fries could be better.

Take care all.

36

2 4 6 8 who’s a grad skool graduate? NINER! NINER! NINER!

37

JtC, I make two of the cookbooks a year (we’re on v4.3 now) and choose two family members to receive them. It’s my annual time to touch base with my late mother and I enjoy doing them.

I think you are now owned by Spot doggio. :slight_smile:

That sucks about your car niner. Your Sunday dinner looks really good. Congrats on finals!

I’m glad that you had the opportunity to have some fun time wordy.

Yay on the negative biopsy for Bailey oopsie!

Irked (total Monday of a day, complete with the supe calling two meetings to tell us how badly we suck), came home, walked Nelson and et. Now for studio time.

Stay safe and healthy y’all!

38

Home, fed, and exhausted! FCD installed the inspection hatch he made for the fuel tank. Then we sucked 3+ buckets of water out of the bilge (Rain intrusion??) And the last chore was pulling two small cables from the fly bridge to the cabin steering station. I’d hoped to get the tools and stuff organized and put away, but it got to be after 4 and we were both beat.

So we came home and I made us sketty for supper. We’re now in chillage mode. I get Tobias a bit earlier than usual since his dad has PT at 8:30. Weather is going to be unpleasant for the next 3 days, meaning no playground time. We’ll just return to Daughter’s house and wait for her to get home. The weekend promises to be really nice, and we’re already planning what we’ll do in the boat, since it will still be out of the water.

It was really really windy today, and it was weird being on the boat. Had we been afloat, we’d have been rocking and drifting in the slip. But hearing the wind and all the associated noises while we sat perfectly still - it just wasn’t right!!

OK, chillage beckons!

39

Late to the laptop, but I just want to say Hooray, hooray for the first of May!

Turd day in a row of big wind but today is sunny and the trees are pollinating my eyeballs. I’m off to the job hunt.

40

The MMP seems to grow in real time as I read it! Finally got to the end.
I’ve read all but don’t have time to reply to everybody, so yay, or boo, or hang in there, and hugs all around.

The side cabinets were relatively easy to anchor to the wall (the key word here being “relatively”).

Imgur

Drawers and shelves next, and then we’re done!

Didn’t get to the swammin’ pool this weekend like we thought we might. We put a rug down in the living room yesterday, which turned out to be a bigger project than expected. So we proceeded directly to happy hour on the sofa with a couple cold martinis.

Enjoy the rest of your Moanday, everyone!