This is a public service announcement for Susan. She won an Amazon Kindle ebook reader in a raffle at a conference she was at recently and has decided to sell it. I used my ebay account since I have a 10 year history and an excellent feedback profile, so if you’re interested, get on over there and bid on it. Aside from being pulled out of the box to tinker with it for a couple of hours this weekend it’s never been used. Susan’s selling it mostly because she wants a new laptop and selling this will put her over the top in terms of the purchase price.
Category: General
The worst week of Soolin’s life
So, check out my poor dog:
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This looked much worse on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. It’s the largest part of a hotspot that formed as part of a rash she developed across the whole upper half of her torso and extending in small patches across her entire body. I brought her into the vet in a panic about this on Tuesday and discovered not only did she have this rash and hotspot, she had a urinary tract infection, a yeast infection in her ears, and Lymes disease (again). I went from the weekend, with what I thought was a happy healthy dog, splashing around in the river in the dog park, to the unhappiest, unhealthiest Soolin I’ve seen. It was really heartbreaking to see. She’s normally always got this happy go lucky grin on, and Monday and Tuesday that was nowhere to be seen, her tail was tucked completely under her rear, and she was moping around with her head hung low.
So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that so far she seems to be making a good recovery. The cheek outbreak is already looking tons better, it’s no longer weeping constantly, she’s often back to her happy go lucky self, and the rash seems to be receding. The bad news is we don’t know for sure what happened, though Lymes is a good guess, and she’s got to be on 6 different drugs over the next couple of months – 2 weeks of a course of antibiotics for the hotspot, ear drops for the yeast infection, topical skin stuff for the rash and hotspot, and an antihistamine to try and keep her from scratching, then 8 weeks of a different antibiotic to fend off the Lymes. She also can’t swim or be bathed for the first 2 weeks and man does she ever stink from the yeast infection, plus it’s been hot and humid so she’s dying to get in the water and cool herself off.
Anyway that’s the story at present. I’ll post again if anything significant happens with her from all of this. I’m seriously considering shaving her next summer to try and help her avoid another hotspot outbreak too. She may look ridiculous but she’ll look less ridiculous than she does now with her patchwork shaved spots.
Japanese pizza is the stuff of life
So check out this delicious pizza from the Japanese Pizza Hut:
Pigs in a blanket, fakeburgers, edamame, and corn, just to mention a few of the deliciously greasy items you can get on your pie. Sign me up!
A product everyone should own…
…which doubles as your laugh of the day. Do you live in fear of monkey butt? You should head over to antimonkeybutt.com and buy yourself some anti monkey butt powder, which is apparently a real product you can buy to…you know, keep yourself from getting monkey butt.
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Headed off to Seattle for the week
I’m off on vacation this week. Susan and I are headed to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula for a week of exploring, hiking, dining, kayaking, and more. Possibly I’ll find wifi connections I trust enough to login and post, otherwise I may not post again this week.
Friday fun link: use your imagination
Instead of a game I’ll link over to one of my favorite frivolous RSS feeds – Pulp of the Day, which shows a different cover from a pulp magazine every day. Pulp magazines had their heyday back in the 40’s and 50’s and often featured fantastic art on their covers. Their name is derived from the crummy ‘pulp’ paper they were printed on, and this site and others strives to remind us of these vanishing objets d’art. Bonus points for the chance to invent your own caption. Subjects range from the salacious to the fantastic to the sinister to the bizarre. Check it out!
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But …I have a good excuse!
Sorry on the lack of updates. A little vacation and a little illness have conspired to keep me away from blogging. I’m off to the doctor today for a look-see. I got bitten by a tick while I was on LI and am a little worried that I have Lymes, but my symptoms aren’t really consistent. If not for the tick, I would have said I simply have the flu or something similar.
A weekend spent in Maine
Susan and I spent the weekend in Maine. It was her brother’s birthday and her Dad’s birthday is next week while we’ll be in NY, so we headed up to Brunswick Saturday morning, had lunch with her family, played mini-golf (I came in third out of 9, not bad given I haven’t played in at least 10 years), went clothes shopping in Freeport, played boardgames till the wee hours in a borrowed unfurnished condo, wandered about Portland reliving my youth and sipping mediocre au laits, and finally took the dogs for a romp on one of my favorite places:
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(that’s Higgins Beach in Maine, looking south down the rockfaces)
All in all it was a pretty fun weekend.
Oh, forgot to post this – I’ve been using Vimeo to send my niece Isabella little greetings from the places I visit. She’s on the other side of the world in Australia and it’s one of the few ways I can connect with her. We filmed this while we were at Higgins Beach this weekend:
Susan and David at the beach from David Hamilton on Vimeo.
Nothing special I know, and here mostly for her, but enjoy it for what it is and scope out the windy higgins beach action 😉
I’m done selling things on ebay
I’ve had it. Two times in the past year, I’ve put up large batches of stuff on ebay, something I’ve been doing for literally a decade now, my own periodic virtual flea market. Each of the last two times though I’ve had serious problems with at least one of the sales. Last time, a guy from Canada managed to freeze my paypal account because he got impatient waiting on the shipping and after 6 days filed a grievance with paypal, who froze my account for weeks while I waited for the idjit to receive his package. Apparantly in his version of the world he can pay for the cheapest shipping and have the item make its way across the continent (he was in British Columbia) in under 4 days. This week, I sell a relatively high end game (The Witcher) to some numbskull who has crashing problems with the game, describes how he ‘tried cleaning the disc with a microfibre cloth,’ then demands a refund because he claims I sold him a damaged disc. This on a game still going for $50 at retail which he purchased for $10.25.
In order to protect my perfect feedback rating, I’m going to have to give this chump his money back. The whole exercise just isn’t worth it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my constant stream of surplus stuff now, from used computer parts (I’m sitting on 2 video cards, a SFF case and a motherboard as I type this), games, and misc. electronics like my GPS which I want to upgrade. I guess it’s worth trying craigslist for some of the stuff, but the whole ‘arrange to show your stuff to perfect strangers’ seems like more of a hassle then it’s worth.
A happy Susan eating her first coop meal
Here’s a photo of a happy Susan eating her first coop meal, a delicious steak from a locally raised cow.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 