Memnison Journal

The pancreatitis has died down enough to bring Dot home from the vet’s office / animal hospital, and while she’s still shaky, she’s obviously a whole heck of a lot better.  And there’s a ferocious vet bill, over a grand, and I really DON’T want or need that with Christmas coming up.

Susan’s knee is better, but she’s still not anything close to 100%.  Mere apparently ran herself ragged at the con, and she was really tired the rest of Sunday and all of today and tonight.

Susan says that my wound is looking a whole lot better / more closed up, and that sounds awful damn good to me.

Photos after the cut.

Yes, I will be at Windycon over the weekend.  I’ll be not-very-mobile. I’ll probably locate a prime lurking post and hang there a lot.  Mere will be with me.

The docs took out the last of the foot stitches, and the wound has come open again, about an inch worth.  The docs and Susan are really strong on the NO PRESSURE ON THE FOOT HOKAY????  part.  Axes have been waved around and sharpened.  I am extremely unhappy with this turn of events.

Susan has been seriously crippled up this week with a very inflamed and swollen knee area; the docs finally  said today (after a lot of tests) that it’s likely some sort of early arthritis.  This came out of the blue, and she’s seriously been laid up with it.  As in bed-to-lounge chair in the living room and that’s about it.

Connie is the remaining adult (my 65ish MIL) and it’s wearing her out.

One of the dogs (Dot) is probably the most ill of all of us.  She’s overnight at the vets with pancreatitis, a swollen small intestine and some sort of blockages - this came totally out of the blue.   We’re aware that pancreatitis is something the breed is susceptible to, and this all came up very suddenly and over about a day and a half.  She’s running a fever on top of everything else.  My personal guess is that she got into something she shouldn’t have, and that she may not make it.   Susan is *very * upset.  We all are, and Mere and Dash, the other dog, are obviously very concerned.

The main house TiVo is dead, and I have a new hard drive in hand and am about to do up a new system drive for the thing.  It’s not the simplest thing in the world to do, and a little hairy.  The household is highly unhappy about No Living Room TiVo on top of everything else.

The house was without phone and internet for a good long time earlier this week, and the Comcast people sent a tech out - the line outside and the cable modem were both bad and got replaced.   Much better.

Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘.

Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in  OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response.

Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if you aren’t married in Arkansas.

And monks are beating the crap out of each other in the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

An interview with Elizabeth Edwards, who is throwing herself into health reform.

A random act of kindness by a stranger - you’re at the airport, and you’re overseas from your new spouse, wanting to get home so bad it hurts.  The airport staff at check-in tells you that your suitcase is way overweight, and that you need to pay a $100 surcharge to get it on the plane - money you don’t have.  You break down crying.  And a total stranger behind you in line steps forward, and covers that surcharge for you.

Twenty years later, that stranger is now a major party nominee for US President.

John Scalzi and other DUDES! rhapsodize to the New York Times about their love of cats.

Chinese elephant forced to undergo heroin withdrawal, takes methadone instead of spiked bananas.

Part of the effort to not-upset-the-foreigners, dog is off Beijing menus during the Olympics; it’s a cold-weather food anyway, as noted in the article.

Warning: video of man singing puppies to sleep will expose you to risk of saying *aaaaaaaawwwwww*.

“Since 1958, we’ve had rats,” Marjorie told Barak Lurie during her deposition in May. “I’ve lived with rats since 1958, honey…. When I got the house in [1958], that’s the day I started feeding all the animals. And I fed them as long as I lived there.”

An LA Weekly story about a couple who found out that their next-door neighbors were hoarding things.  Like tens of thousands of rats, at the most conservative estimate.  Possibly hundreds of thousands.  One, two, three - aw, rats.

The rat exterminator soon cracked the code,a discovery that would make most Angelenos’ skin crawl. The exploding rat population was being purposely fed. Rico, peeking through the overgrown hedge, spotted rats eating and drinking from pie tins full of dog food and milk. To his shock, sisters Margaret and Marjorie stood there, observing approvingly.

“They were standing there watching them,” Rico tells L.A. Weekly. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ That’s something a person doesn’t forget. I have never seen it before, and I have never seen it since. That’s something you never forget.”

But Rico, afraid of getting in the middle of an ugly Palisades homeowner war, did not tell the Denhams these facts. Nor did he tell them that in late 2006, Garner insisted he remove his bait stations because the Barthel sisters were furious over the rat poisonings and the possible threat to other animals. How dare Garner slaughter their beautiful brood?

“The sellers disclosed nothing” of this, said the Denhams’ real estate agent, Elizabeth Stein, late last year, referring to Garner and uppercrust Sotheby’s International Realty.

Tough Marmots, too, in this neighborhood:

“Dog available for adoption.  Very friendly with children.”

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak.

My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount of material that isn’t in book form, and I’m going through that all the time and hacking away at it to be able to organize and marshal the stuff. At present, the idea is to digitize everything, and use various management utilities to be able to find and figure out what’s what.

Here’s a *short* list of the topics I’m still digging for:

Sounds like our house. Hey, it IS our house….

Meredith, her cousin Kelbi and two scouting friends of Mere’s went to the Brookfield Zoo with Susan; there was supposed to be a open-air showing of the new Disney tween movie CAMP ROCK, and it was rained out. Still, they had fun taking pictures and roaming around (flickr set link).

Here’s one the girls took of the Go-Rilla: