Category Archives: General

Event: Trying to get ready

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I have a wedding to go to on Saturday, one of my nephews who I haven’t seen since he was 2, I think that’s how long it is, maybe another time, but mostly it’s just through pictures I know him. At any rate, I don’t feel so good this week, things feel more behind than usual because Frank was here for so long without any trips due to his contract being let go suddendly when he didn’t have any others at the time, and then now he’s been gone this week since he picked up another one.

We don’t really have extra money lying around, so it’s been super tight, missing one paycheck, but OK as long as … but that’s not the case now. I don’t have anything to wear on Saturday. My daughter needs new shoes to wear with her one decent enough dress to wear on Saturday. My 9-year old son needs something, no doubt, just what I’m not sure. My 2-year old son needs shoes to wear with the linen outfit my 9-year old wore for Easter in 2002, if it fits my 2-year old, which I don’t know yet, since it was dirty from cats sitting on it & now it’s wet … so maybe he does need shoes for it, or not. If not he needs new shoes & a new outfit.

My husband & 13-year old son have things to get by with.

I’m just frustrated with moving things around here as well, lately, and the mess that uncovers and makes everything else worse. I don’t have the energy to deal with much of it, and I have to get some other things washed and found earlier too that the baby seems to have gone into the laundry room and stopped the load I had going. That’s the most frustrating thing about a front loading washer I must say.

I need to color my hair, for the first time in ages and ages. My hair color is difficult to deal with, and gray/white is coming in more and more here and there, and it’s not nice on me. So I want to go more ash colored not darker, but a tad lighter. Problem is my reddish hair, a lot isn’t red, but light brownish, and others are slightly reddish and others are metallic red. I have a color kit to try and I’ve chickened out every time I’ve tried to make myself do it. Now it’s Thursday before the wedding and I have to wash my hair and dry it before I can do the coloring and I have to go to the airport in less than 3 hours and so it won’t get done today. Oh no! I’m in trouble.

I’ll be seeing at least 2 of my 3 sisters and some Aunt/Uncle/Cousins maybe too. It’s not that I have to travel far, not in trouble for that reason. It’s only a couple of hours away that we need to go, so we don’t have to get a hotel or anything and do this all in a strange place. I just like prepreparation way ahead and I am totally behind because of lack of energy and just as much, lack of money these past few weeks. Frustrating to no end.

About My New Hummer Feeders

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I was able to get a new bird feeder yesterday, a lovely copper and glass Hummingbird feeder. It’s where I used to put one when I had a deck, the hanger I installed won’t come off, so it’s permanent in a way now. I have to use a ladder to access the spot.

I can view it where I am now, typing, it’s through the kitchen out the window, a far distance but I can see it. Also there is another one I got some months ago and finally installed out front off of the porch, and I can see it from where I stand as well. So far I’ve seen only 1 bird, either a female or juvenile. It seems to really like the newer one the best. The one out front has 3 copper chains that come down to a “basket” that holds the clear plastic dish w/ clear glass top. It’s a beautiful glass top with formed flowers of red glass around the feeding holes. The new one out back is a vertical cylinder glass tube with a copper top and copper base. The base has a perch extended from it that circles the entire bottom. The feeding holes have red painted metal flowers around them.

Frank says he’s seen the hummer out front a lot, since he’s out there on the phone for work often. I haven’t seen it there much, just did in fact, and just the other day for the first time since putting the feeder out some days before that, though others in the house say they’d seen it. There it is again now.

I’ve uploaded a photo of my new feeder on Flickr and also made a Photo post of it here.

My Kittens

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My newest kitties are 12 weeks old today. I’m keeping the boy and girl (Prince and Princess Aurora) of the feral kitten group born April 20th under our house … the largest two of the kittens. I separated them right before they turned 6 weeks old because the mother cat was starting to bring dead birds to them (they had all moved into the basement a few weeks before with our slow aide in suggestion since they were born) & she was absent from them for many hours a day. These two seemed the most advanced, and still are. They are very sweet, purr a lot, play with each other wonderfully, and our other cats have accepted them for the most part. At first they stayed exclusively in my bathroom, and then I let them out some, and then more. They still do spend the night in the bathroom, and parts of days, always in there if we aren’t home.

The other kittens stay in my daughters bedroom, and the one cat we have that isn’t spayed yet (we found her outside when she was a kitten, we keep her inside) has adopted them, she nurses them (though she hasn’t had any kittens ever, or tomcat service) and does the basic mothering that a cat generally offers her kits. She’s very attached to them, and they to her. They rarely purr, but do play with each other, and are nice. My kittens are purr machines and seem very well ajusted.

Those other 3 kittens need homes still, and we have no one that we’ve found that wants one yet, and shelters are filled up already thus far … We just can’t keep them, but do NOT want to bring them to a kill shelter, the only type that is open to receiving right now.

My two sweeties are laying on the couch together right next to me, stretched out sleeping. I posted a picture today that’s in my PHOTOS category, that I took on May 29th when I had just separated them from their litter/mother. They were so cute and have only gotten cuter.

Link: My two new kittens video on YouTube … avail. in HD

Seeing things much better

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I wrote about my new contacts the other day and now have an update. My re-visit I saw a different eye doctor and she listened to my complaints about the Mono Vision and tried a few new hand-held lenses for my left eye and finally adjusted my prescription and got me a new left-eye contact to put in. Voila! Magic!

She says I have 20/20 vision now with this change, which is unusual, difficult to achieve in Mono Vision contacts wearing. I can see far and nearer much better, no more wobbly weirdo feeling about it, conflicted in what I was seeing or feeling I was seeing a-times. As I put it when reading some lines for her, I could see them better, but more-so I felt CONFIDENT to say what I was seeing. A vast improvement.

I am able to read books now with my contacts in, have to still come to terms still with using one eye or the other as my main eye for different tasks, but it’s easier now to do so since one eye is much better than the other for this or that, no conflicting information any longer as I was having with my first week of Mono Vision contact wearing. It’s just a practice of which for what that I need to hone in on, closer work being the thing that matters here, not basic looking at the world, just the closer things like books, computers, things right nearer to a bit further, but still close, that need inspection. Right or left, not both or the other, but a focus with left being weird to automatically choose for close, and then switching to only right for further away close after that, being harder. That’s the best I can explain it in, it’s a trial and error approach to functioning, but the vision I get with things is good in other words, just need that bridge to change HOW I view things.

Seeing things differently

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I don’t have good distance vision, start losing detail a few feet from myself without corrective lenses. I can get by like that but don’t drive a car like that — I could if I didn’t need to read street name signs at all. I mean I can get around fine where I know everything, just can’t read at a distance and things get a bit fuzzy but are still recognizable. Corrective lenses just bring relief and readability. It’s more useful than that sounds, but that’s the basic truth of it.

My biggest need for corrective lenses is in stores. Bombarded with images of product is more than overwhelming. Send me to find something in a grocery store without having glasses on, for instance, and I might not find what I’m looking for, and I surely wouldn’t ask for help either (I’m just like that.) Simply having corrective lenses on in a store is a godsend.

I’ve been living for a few years with my old glasses, and finally had it yesterday when my toddler brought me my glasses he found on the table and they were in two pieces. They were my oldest glasses, the last ones with decent frames (not broken.) I had last had an eye exam some years before, not sure, in the 2000′s for sure though. At any rate I didn’t like my last prescription, so quit wearing the contacts after awhile and only wore the glasses at times when I desperately needed them. I then quit wearing them and pulled out a nice old pair of glasses from the 80′s that was a much simpler prescription and felt better to me, not quite strong enough, but that felt better than what my newer glasses felt like.

The past few years I’ve been using nothing or one of those two pairs of glasses. The frames on the newer ones broke on one side, I taped it up, but later the other side broke and I abandoned them for my eldest glasses thoroughly. Until yesterday, that is.

I haven’t gotten new glasses yet, have a prescription though. I am wearing a trial pair of contacts for a week. The doctor talked about maybe doing a mono-vision thing, but didn’t say he prescribed that, but now that I’m wearing them for awhile, I think he must have done such.

For me I want contacts for going out, shopping, outdoors, etc. I want them for watching movies, or just doing stuff in the house if I want to. I don’t want reading glasses, my own eyes read fine. My last contacts kept me from reading so much so that it’s the final straw I had about actually wearing those contacts and I endeavored to just get by with my own vision if I could, and maybe improve it if I could, but I didn’t find what I wanted to improve it per se, but feel I am not as bad off as before, that I learned to deal with it better, maybe that’s a better way to put it.

All in all, it’s a matter of I feel best without glasses on and need corrective lenses for being “out there” or else I sort of sink instead of swim. So I’m trying to be a swimmer and not be stuck in funky glasses that I don’t like on with my hair down, or wearing that outfit they look really stupid, that sort of thing. Freedom from presenting myself to the public with frames on if I so wish, but still wish to see something crisper than just the stuff right in front of my face.

Today is my big trial day since it’s the first full day with these contacts, and the sun is supposed to be shining, and it’ll be a nice day with a high later of about 70 degrees F. A very fine day for being outside. It rained yesterday, so my garden must be in want of a bit of attention and I’d be happy to do it and be able to see the other side of the yard, the birds in the trees over there, while not having to push up my glasses that keep slipping, or have to clean the pollen off the lenses … freedom within the boundaries of contacts is something I once loved and am giving a go about once again. I hope I can make sense of which eye is better for what since I am sure it’s not what I have ever had before (how the lense prescription is for me.)

I must recall my first experience with getting corrective lenses. I got glasses when I was 13 and my first remark outloud about them was “I didn’t know you could see the leaves on the trees!” It was a new world, not brown tree trunks with green tops, but individual leaves visible from a distance. Wow. That’s clarity for you. From wide to narrow. Fuzzy to crisp. Find Edges, found.

My Dear Cat Princess Sonia

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I wrote a post on my other blog about my oldest cat dying this past weekend. Here’s the link: In Honor of Our Dear Princess Sonia.

I also sent a tweet about the event after the fact. Here’s the link: My Tweet about Princess.

She was 16 1/2 years old, and lived with us for over 16 years. She was a feral kitten that we helped to woo and catch since seeing her and her litter-mates in December 1992. I miss her terribly and words cannot explain that enough.

New kittens being born

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The feral mama cat that had adopted our crawl space previously for a batch of kittens had gone away and come back every so often for food, and then started in the last several weeks to come around more and more with increasing time as time wore on, and was looking fatter and fatter and fatter. The past week I really thought she looked full to capacity and would give birth soon. She’s very 1/2 wild, won’t really let us near her, but has accepted us looking at her at least, when before she’d scat as soon as we made eye contact.

I was working on putting the desktop computer together this morning in the basement and heard distinctive mewing. So I got my eldest son to get a screwdriver and take off the panel to the crawlspace from the basement. (the cats get into the crawlspace from the side vents that the covers fell off of and we just let them stay in there …) I couldn’t see really well into the space, with it being rather dark the further away from the little light bulb by the access space I looked, but I did spy a dark blob far to the other side of the crawlspace. The mama cat is a black cat, green eyes, and longish fur, some sort of mix. I got my glasses, which I need for astigmatism correction and distance, and it was an animal for sure, by shape, and I moved some loose extra pipes around there for a little noise and the thing lifted it’s head and looked, and for sure it’s the mama cat as the full furry face with light green eyes was staring at me.

I hope this mama will tame down and that we’ll get to handle the kittens before they get too old and become hard to tame as well. I’d like to see what they are like and keep one if it’s a black girl, I love black cats, truly miss having one in my inside crew since my Samantha died in 2005. We’ll have to do something with the kittens, and the mama too, as she and they will only populate more and more.

We’ve adopted and rescued several cats over the years, currently have 7 indoors. Adding another to the mix is too much, it seems. I don’t really think so, just some others in my household have that opinion.

The biggest problem about having so many cats is flea control, when one of the cats we have was adopted as a young kitten we were assured she was treated for fleas and had none, and within a couple of weeks we started having flea problems in the house on the other cats and the new kitten when we’d not had any and hadn’t had to treat anything for fleas ever. It’s been a problem up and down ever since. Maddening. We have to treat the cats and do it every month and it’s something I need help doing and since DH is hard to motivate in the area of helping with my loved animals, be it cats or hens … they haven’t been treated regularly in months and months and the fleas and their eggs and dirt are just awful. So we keep the cats in one room and I want to let them out to roam the house, but can’t. I actually like to have 3 or 4 out, rotate who’s out so they all get to enjoy each other differently with us, without everyone mixing constantly. That is the way I think adding a new kitten would work well. :)

InstantCake + DirecTivo R10

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We have two R10 units (DirecTivo) and have used them fairly hard. We got them right before DirecTV had stopped selling them in stores and put out their own dvr.

We have one in the bedroom and I had Baby Q in bed with us and turned on a Blue’s Clues that was recorded. It played and was nearly done (a noggin card game was actually at the end) and just when the game was to finish, *blonk* the box Self-re-started and never came back to work. It was stuck on “Welcome! Powering up …”

Hitting the reset button only caused the system to try to reboot, but stayed in the same “stuck” position.

The next day I swapped the living room box for the bedroom faulty box. Then I worked on the faulty box, opened it up, made sure cables were in right, etc. That wasn’t the cause. So I started searching the internet and found several threads which indicated I could have a power supply problem (less likely) the hard drive could be bad (likely) and I forget the other things. They weren’t important, in other words.

I looked at sites that have upgrading services and finally settled on Instant Cake. On Friday we were out shopping so we went to Best Buy and got a new hard drive, 320 GB, compared to the previous 80 GB one. I’ve looked into upgrading the capcity of the boxes before, but since we can do very little hacking just said “forget it” and lived with the alright 80 GB’s.

On Saturday I purchased Instant Cake and downloaded it, burned it to a DVD. Then I read through the instructions a few times to be sure I did everything right, and then opened up my desktop computer.

I had just started Baking my cake and my son came in from outside crying that he had a thorn in his foot, and I had to leave the room and take care of that, it was a quick fix, but upon getting back to the computer I found a blank monitor and my system shut off. I have no idea what happened.

I went through to make sure the eide cable was in my motherboard well enough, and found that it wasn’t, so I began the battle to get it to work, when it would have been easier in many ways to just take all peripherals off and unscrew the motherboard and put that MB on the desk by itself, then I could have had much more maneuverability in getting that cable into the ide 2 of the MB … but no, I wrestled with it inside the box. The things are very squished onto the side of the MB, very awkward to use.

I thought my cable was in finally, and ran InstantCake again, but it couldn’t find the HD. So off with the power again, and some more wrestlin, but I got it in better (I never figured how it was so very hard, when the cable plugged into other spots just fine, and I have had an easier time plugging the ribbons for DVD drives into that same spot in question, FWIW.)

I ran InstantCake and very quickly it Baked my HD and was done. Success! If I’d just take my system more fully apart from the start.

I put the HD back into the R10 unit, but didn’t screw things down. I plugged the box in, and the “Welcome! Powering up …” screen came on, and I waited and waited and waited, and just when I was getting more scared that it wouldn’t progress, “Almost there …” wordage came up. Yes!

I let it fully boot, let it get further along in downloading channels for a bit, then decided all was good, pulled the power and did the final screwdown/tightening of the whole box.

Wasn’t long until we were watching with that box again and now have approx. 301 hours of recording capacity. The system is much quicker than the old 80 GB one was for a long time, or maybe ever.

I’m thinking about eventually upgrading the other box, but that one I’ll have to do something about some of the recorded stuff that I don’t want to lose, and probably should do that soon, lest what happened to the other one happens to the one that is still running with 80 GB’s.

It was interesting in Best Buy to see how prices have changed in hard drives, and sizes have increased into such affordable avenues. That hd we bought was the same one we got for my desktop in the recent past, either last Mother’s Day (I picked this present) or the previous one. Anyway it was $79 off the shelf on Friday, and well over $100 when we got the one for my desktop.

In the end I’m very pleased with InstantCake, and would like to build a new computer. I’m tired of my desktop setup, would like to have a better processor and easier working on it like I needed to the other day.

I guess we could keep it as it is. I’ll just build a whole new one, with a T2 hard drive, and a dual-something processor, and way more modern memory, and a blu-ray player/burner, a large case, and an HD widescreen monitor. The children can knock around on the old desktop. :) My wish is not to be fulfilled too soon, it’s not right up there with all the other things that need done. It’s just a hobby that I love tackling and usually have to scrap and fight for getting a chance to upgrade anything, or to get anything new built. It’s been awhile …

Laugh at yourself

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We are in Tampa for a couple of days. Thurs. we moved to a different hotel and the new one is right on the bay. We sat on the balcony and watched gulls and blackbirds flitting about for awhile. Then a new bird showed up and another just like it. I hadn’t thought of any of the shore birds as “gulls” just as sea, shore, birds, like that. So I got out my Sibley book I take around with me and didn’t find the gull section right off, puzzled over it and finally thought “GULL” and fastly found what I was looking for, eventually. At first it was evident that these new birds were different and after seeing a bird ID that is considered Rare in the book for this area I got out my Canon Digital Rebel camera and took several photos with my Canon long lens.

Satisfied that I had recorded enough digital data of the birds I sat down and looked hard at the identifying points in the Sibley book and realized that part of the ID I’d made was based on thinking and not thinking at the same time, with outside influence of my 10-year-old daughter pointing at the book. Right there on the previous page was a common bird, yeah, Laughing at me.

No matter. Laughing Gulls in juvenile feathers, then two come along in brilliant mature spring array. Worth a bumbling ID and some picture moments.

Rain, Rain and Spring

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Today begins rather gloomy, but a warmer than colder gloomy and we can still use it. Rain. We have needed the rain for awhile, and this past week has really overdone itself in that regard. We first moved to GA in Nov. of 1996, and a year later moved into the house we now live in. We’ve been through 2 other drought times, with the first the worst, dragged out, and the next one everyone was so reactive about it, it’s been tough but overall it came down to looking at the lakes, ponds and rivers it’s evident as to conditions.

We get milk in SC from a dairy in Starr. On our way there we pass the major waterways that border GA/SC and I’m very interested to know what that will mean for our next trip (Fri. 4/01 or Sat. 4/02) — what we’ll see, or not see. I’d love to see that the brown bottom parts of the rivers are not showing anymore, docks are actually in water, and such.

All this new rain will mean that our yards are going to be overgrown with weeds very soon. It’s Springtime and greening up tremedously already before all this rain, and even moreso the last week.

Spring Sidenotes:

    Twitterpated Wildlife

  • Right now as I type I can hear Mr. Eastern Bluebird twittering in the tree outside my window. Blinds are shut so I can’t see him, but his soft & musky trilling sound is very evidently him.
  • Earlier I saw the mother cat to the ferals that are living in our backyard. Those kittens are about 6 months old now. They first were noticed with another in the litter and the mother last fall, when they were mobile but very small, living in our crawl space (vent cover had come off giving them access.) The mother stayed with them through winter, and then one kitten wasn’t around most of the time, mother either, but two kittens stayed. The mother has been coming back again more and more the last couple of weeks, and it’s very apparent, she’s expecting again. She’s a very frightened feral, but at the least will stay around humans. In any case I saw her this morning running to the crawl space access and trying to dive through fast to hide, but she sort of got stuck and had to wiggle that middle part of her through before her backend and tail disappeared.