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      Thursday, August 26, 2004



11:12 AM - 08/26/2004

The topic: Heh.

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Thursday, August 26, 2004  I guess that’s my state of mind right now.  Heh.  Doesn’t say much, does it?  Now for the updates.

I noticed yesterday that Ciara’s breathing has suddenly gotten better.  I thought maybe it was a fluke, but this morning, she’s still breathing quietly.  Last week, she was sneezing quite a bit, snot flying all over.  I thought to myself “maybe it’s finally breaking up and she’ll be over this soon”.  Looks maybe that’s what happened.  It’s sure a relief to not hear her hacking and coughing and swallowing hard.

Last Sunday I came online to find out my catler.org website was down. At first, I thought it was the server, but this website and my other ones were working.  It turned out that sometime after midnight, my website got really busy, so busy that it was using up 96% of available CPU and they shut me down.  Now, if you aren’t familiar with this, think of having a big communal generator for power.  Everybody shares the power.  You get one house that’s pulling 96% of the power, that only leaves 4% for the rest of the community.  My site host did the only responsible thing.  I don’t fault them for shutting it down.  But I wanted to know why this happened.  The only thing I had on catler were two forums, one run by dcscripts, the other a variation of Matt’s WWWboard, and a chat room.  It was the WWWboard that was pulling the power.  What I think happened is that I was hit by a denial of service attack.  See, on that WWWBoard I’d been getting quite a bit of spam.  Drug spam and porn spam.  The porn spammer would leave close to a hundred really nasty spams each time.  I think it was some sort of bot script that was doing it.  I fought back.  I denied the IP, I reported the abuse to the ISP of the spammer.  I did this each time I was spammed.  Anyway, it seemed odd that a script I had been running for three or four months would all of a sudden get really busy at a time of day when the majority of my users were fast asleep.

Fortunately, they didn’t suspend me forever.  I think when they understood that it could have been an attack on my site, they didn’t hold me accountable.  Unfortunately, all of the logs were lost for the two days the site was down, so there’s no way of investigating the cause.  And I think that’s another reason they didn’t shut me down permanently, which is what they usually do.  I’ll never know with a certainty what happened, but I’ll go to my death believing it was an attack. What we did was disable the WWWBoard scripts (I did this on all instances of it on all of my sites) and now, my only running forum is at Benny’s. But that’s fine, I always preferred Benny’s because there are so many options for both me and the user. I have to be honest, I was surprised that so many people made the move.  For years, it seemed that most of the posters on the WWWBoard forums were resistent to registering to be able to post, but over at Benny’s, there are multiple levels of forums, private, registered and open.  The forums that you have to be registered to post on are busier than the open ones.  This will make it much easier to prevent spammers.

Now, I bet you’re wondering how Marco is doing? 

First, I’d like to thank those of you who donated money or bought something from the store.  This went towards the crate and litter box we got on Sunday.  It’s a good sized crate, plenty of room left for Marco to lay down in even with a litter box.

I called Saturday to see about visiting him, but they were really busy and didn’t have spare rooms, but that early Sunday would be a better time to come in.  And I was also told how much they had all fallen in love with him, what a great cat he was.  Sunday morning, I went in to visit with Marco.  He looked good and purred for me.  They brought his breakfast in and he ate a little, but after about ten or fifteen minutes, he started getting restless and wanted down.  I had to let them know he was ready to go back into his cage.  I didn’t want to be responsible for him getting worse.

I called the vet’s office shortly after 10:30 Monday morning.  I was told to call back between six and seven Monday night to find out how he did.  I called back between six and seven Monday night and he still hadn’t been in surgery.  Finally, at 9:30 Monday night, the phone rang.  It was the doctor, Marco had come through the surgery without a hitch.  They’d cleaned his teeth and fixed his leg.  No cast.  I was to call after 10:30 Tuesday to find out when to pick him up.

So, I call Tuesday.  Marco could go home.  I can pick him up at any time.  Cool!  I’m on my way.

I get down to the office and it’s packed.  Not only that, there’s a lot of construction work going on in the parking lot and it was hard to get a space.  A woman came out of the building and said she was leaving, I could take her spot.  I parked, went inside, signed in and waited.  A half hour into the wait, one of the construction workers came in and asked the person who owned the green Bronco if they would move it.  That was me.  They couldn’t move their equipment.  I said (and loudly) “now you know how we all feel”.  Anyway, I got the car moved, then went back in and waited another fifteen minutes, at least.  Marco was ready, but they didn’t want to let him go because they all loved him so much.  ON his check out sheet, they’d put a little heart by his name.  It was so sweet.

Marco is on a pain medicine three times a day for six days, an anti-inflammatory twice a day for nine days and an antibiotic for five days.  His sutures come out in two weeks, he has another x-ray in a month and a followup x-ray in two months.  And he’s to be crated for eight weeks.

Eight weeks!  Gah!  Eight weeks will be over when we get back from our annual Disney trip!  I called Becky, our sitter to tell her about Marco (after all, she gave us Marco).  She’s going to come visit with her kids, they’d like to see the cats they had to give up.  I told her the dates we’d be gone and that because Junior wasn’t here any longer, she wouldn’t have to spend the night.  If DeeJay is still here, he’ll need to be given fluids, but that’s it.  I told her that she could take the kids swimming if they wanted to.  But I don’t like the idea of him being crated without us being home. 

The vet called last night, a followup call. Asked me how Marco was doing.  I told her that he’s eating, drinking, pooping and peeing.  That he seems as comfortable as he can be, considering the circumstances.  And I asked if that eight weeks in the crate is written in stone.  I told her about our plans for October and she said we could do the second x-ray early and see how well he’s healing.  It’s possible he could be out of the crate earlier.

I also had asked if his knee had pins or plates in it.  He has intramuscular pins. 

He’s not liking the crate.  I hope he gets used to it soon.  I let Ross in there yesterday to keep him company.  Ross just ate his food, then wanted out.  *sigh*

Since Marco has been laid up, Oliver has stepped in.  He spends the nights in the bedroom again.  Last night, though, he was being very, very aggressive towards the other cats.  Brian went to bed, then there was a fight in the bedroom.  Oliver had Daniece pinned on the floor.  I ended up finding the ovaban I got earlier this year for when Oliver got aggressive towards me and he got one last night.  Calmed him down.  I think he’s trying to reassert his authority since Marco isn’t able to.  It’s funny, Marco doesn’t seem all that bossy, but I guess he’s good at keeping troublemakers in their place.

Well, that’s all for now.  Marco needs medicating.

Oh, I almost forgot.  Brian will be putting up wood fencing over the last 80 feet of chain link.  It should be up by the end of this coming weekend.  This will give me more privacy at our pool and prevent a repeat of the dogs rushing the fence.  If they rush it after the wood is up, I hope they knock themselves out.  The neighbors tore down a little storage area they had yesterday.  This area is on the other side of the top corner of our property, next to the bank where the cats like to lay in the grass under the pine trees.  In doing so, a piece of wood that was between the top of our front fence and the chain link was removed.  This removal left a considerable size gap between our front fence and the chain link.  Big enough for a cat to get out.  They never said a word to us about it.  Then they left.  I freaked out when I saw it, saw Pete checking it out.  I paged Brian and told him about it, then I turned on the sprinklers on the bank, to keep the cats off of it.  When Brian got home, he and his brother were able to slide a plank of fencing up there and block off the opening.  Brian screwed the wood to the existing part of our fence. 

When the neighbors got home, I heard his surprise at seeing that new piece of fencing up.  I guess he had to change his plans about how to put up new wood on the chain link that goes across to his house. Too bad.  From the stack of wood he has out there, it looks like there’s only enough to do across the front, not enough to build a new little storage area.  One thing about it, it sure opens up the area, letting a lot more light in.  That won’t last long though.  My nasty side is grinning, thinking about the loss of breeze that will happen when Brian gets the fencing up.  How it will just cook between the fence and the house.  I get great pleasure out of considering this.  Great pleasure.


I’ve thought about all of the crummy things they’ve done as neighbors.  And there’s been quite a bit.  They both drive too fast, he’s quite the tailgater.  I’ve stepped on the brakes more than once to get him off of my ass. Their daughters had friends who loved to come over and toilet paper the house.  Problem was, they always got the wrong place. The got our house, not the girls’ house.  And Brian always went out and got as much toilet paper as he could reach off of our trees.  The last time we got papered, we heard the kids doing it.  Brian yelled out that they had the wrong house, they were papering our trees.  The kids stopped on our trees and did the right house.  The next day, the only time this happened, one of the daughters was cleaing toilet paper out of our trees.  And it was the last time either house got papered.  One time, the kids behind the neighbors were playing some really annoying music.  The next door neighbor went to the back of his yard, turned on some really obnoxious AM station, as loud as his radio would go, then he left.  There was no one at his house.  What he did affected everyone around him.  It was a really nice day and I had to close up the house to mute some of the noise. 

Their grandson would come over to the fence and throw things at our dogs.  He’d yell and spit at them.  He yelled at the cats.  He’s one of those screaming kids.

Then there were the dogs.  They had beagles. And these dogs howled and barked incessantly when there was no one home. Which was often.  I’d go out and give them biscuits.  I’d talk to them.  I’d try to calm them down.  When they’d get out of the yard, I’d chase them down and put them back in.  When our dogs went nuts barking at the dogs behind us and kitty-cornered to us, Brian put up wood fencing so they wouldn’t see the other dogs.  And that cut down on a lot of the barking.

Shortly after we lost Buddy and Junior had been diagnosed with diabetes, we walked over to Brian’s mom’s house.  It was around Thanksgiving. When we came home, Junior was soaking wet.  It would appear that he had barked and gotten hosed for doing so.  Now, Junior never liked the hose.  He’d run from it.  Thinking about it, they must have teased him to get him to the fence to hose him like they did.

They aren’t good neighbors.  Nope, far from it.  I’ll be glad when the fence is up.  Good fences make good neighbors.  Because you don’t have to deal with their shit.

Damn dogs.


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lisaviolet is seventy something, married with no kids, takes care of lots of cats, likes taking photographs, loves Southern California weather and spends altogether too much time avoiding her responsibilities.

In her spare time, she makes pretty things to sell in her store.

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