Friday, December 19, 2003 This year can’t end soon enough for me. And that’s the truth. Brian’s work being so slow, the low funds, losing so many animals (not only have we lost Boney, Lucky and Junior, but also the outfronts: OC, Repete and we haven’t seen SpotTee since Wednesday night), the fires….it’s just been a horrible year, all around.
And I seem to be having more computer issues than normal. Well, some are of my own making, I freely admit that. I finally got so tired of the Gateway being sluggish that I backed up some of the programs and held my nose, closed my eyes and jumped right in to reformatting the hard drive. It really went pretty smoothly, all things considered. But the system no longer sees the “D” drive, which was the CD-ROM drive. But it sees it at “J” (I’ve got some other hard drives leftover from old computers that I use for storage). There is a problem with the Zip drive, though. I can’t download files to it, it tries to format the disks or something and they become useless (at $10 a disk, I can’t have that). But I can download to a hard drive, then move the file to the Zip drive without any problems; maybe reinstalling the software would help, I’ll try that later. This little glitch (not seeing the D drive) added quite a bit of time to the reformatting (because I wasted so much time trying to resolve it). It took over ten hours to complete the job, to get everything re-installed and up and running. And, of course, there were the downloaded programs that I hadn’t saved to disk (or if I did, I couldn’t find them) and I had to re-download them. And, sadly, a few of them had upgrades and I had to buy new licenses to run something I’d had no problem with. *sigh* After all was said and done, though, the computer is now much faster. And where the hard drive was over 80% capacity, now it’s less than 5%. There was a lot of garbage that got removed.
So last night, I think “maybe I’ll put my old DOS games back on”. Bad idea. The first one I tried wouldn’t set up. I should have taken the hint after the first two tries, but on the third try, I crashed the system. *deep sigh* I had to re-install windows. Which in and of itself is no biggie. But for my Windows to run, I’ve got two disks. The original Windows, then the Windows SE upgrade, so that I can see the Dell. I had to use a boot disk to even get the system to start. And because of what the game software did, I had to keep retrying. I finally got Windows re-installed, then had to defrag the hard drive before re-installing the upgrade. That took about an hour and a half, even though there wasn’t all that much on it. I went to be last night at about 11:30. After installing the other three DOS games (hey, I had to try….only one didn’t work and that’s in the closet now).
Then, last weekend I was working on the KOTM calendars, had them all done, printed a test page on the new paper I got (I got it earlier this year) and it looked like :poop. The print wasn’t taking on the paper. This was the only two side coated paper I’d been able to find when I was looking. Argh! So, here I have four hundred pieces of worthless paper. It’s probably for laser jets, not ink jets, but that wasn’t made clear on the order page. I did another search and found that Epson now has paper coated on both sides, so I ordered quite a bit of that. I know Epson will work. Of course, it cost three times as much, so I’ll be biting the bullet on the calendars. I’m sure people would understand the rise in cost, but I quoted one price, that’s what I’ll stick with. For these calendars only. I talked it over with Brian and there was no question in his mind that I can’t raise the price. With any luck, the paper should be here early next week. I did contact the company where I got the crap paper and I can send back the unopened packages for a refund. There are three of those. But I’ve got an opened package of matte and an opened package of glossy here that I can’t use. Oh, well, maybe I’ll use them with the black and white laser printer.
I haven’t stopped eating since we got back from Colorado. I’m hating it. But that should stop soon because there’s nothing left to eat. I finished the graham crackers yesterday. We did start our everyday walking last week, so that’s good. Now, to get this nibbling under control again. I hope to get down to my goal weight of 145 by the end of March. Hopefully taking a year to lose the weight I wanted to lose. Then, I’ll most likely change my goal weight to 130.
And you’ve heard of snowstorms? How about sootstorms? Everytime the desert or mountains, the burn areas, get wind, the air gets full of soot. It looks really hazy outside, almost foggy. Then, the next day, everything is covered in a fine black dust. It’s horrible. We try to keep it washed off of the cement around the house (I especially don’t like the thought of Potter dragging his backside through it) because of the cats.
On to the animules.
Junior’s ashes got here last Friday. UPS delivered them. The guy was a twit. Not paying one bit of attention to anything. I told him that the package was our dog. He said “oh, that’s good”. Huh? Okay. Whatever. Don’t make small talk, though, Buddy, you’re not too good at it. Just stick to dropping of packages, okay?
We’ve noticed that Lisa has been spending a little more time outside since Junior’s demise. Some of the other cats, too, but she’s most noticible.
Annie has been having the occasional bloody discharges again. I’m sure it’s been pretty stressful for her the past couple of months. Us being gone, new people in the house, new cats in the house…. So, she’s back on elavil. I can’t find hers, I’m using DeeJay’s from earlier this year (DeeJay? I think it was Georgie who was on it; I think this was labeled for the wrong cat).
DeeJay found his appetite. His weight had dropped to just under seven pounds the week we got back from vacation. Remember, a few months ago it was hitting eight. I started giving him Fancy Feast again, the stuff we’ve been feeding the outfronts. I add a little water (it’s ground, not sliced or julianned) and mash it up. Yesterday, he ate close to two cans. I feed him in the exercise room and I have a fork in there which I use to mix the food up. When he licks it, it flattens out in the bowl and he’s more willing to eat it when it’s fluffy. And this morning in bed, I heard his purr. It’s been a while since I’ve heard his purr. Well, he does purr, it’s just hasn’t been very strong. Unless you knew what it was, you wouldn’t realize it was a purr. This morning, there was no doubt about it. And he’s not minding being covered. He most seems to like one of my shirts, something that has my scent on it. I hope this is an indication of good things. I had a dream last week with Lola in it. I saw her sitting with the other cats and I said “hey, Lola, nice to see you. Hey, aren’t you dead?” She just slow blinked at me. And I asked her “are you here for DeeJay? I looked away, looked back and she was gone. Oddly, ever since, DeeJay seems to be turning a corner. Where it will lead us is unknown. All I know is I like seeing him eat and I like hearing him purr. And the scale is showing a very slow weight gain.
Wally had something going on with his bad eye earlier this week. I put ointment in it and it helped. If it hadn’t, I’d have had to take him to the vet. Brian just gave me a look when I told him that. What choice would I have had? I’m not taking chances with eyes. I won’t do it.
Potter is not nearly as needy as he was at first. Yes, he’s still needy, but it’s not a constant thing. And Sagwa can be quite a lapcat. Lapcats are one of the reasons I haven’t been able to get as much done as I wanted. It’s so hard to remove them when they’re curled up or stretched out and sleeping so comfortably in my lap. Potter is playing a lot more hard during the day. And it’s obvious it bothers his leg, because he spends the next day sleeping and recuperating.
Well, I’ve got things to do. Like put Advantage on all the cats. I’m finding more and more flea dirt. Oh, well. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
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