“First of all we wish to thank you for hosting with us during the past year.
We certainly hope doing business with us was a very pleasing experience.
-Featureprice.com, in an email received today but dated March 22, 2003.
My younger daughter is spending her first night in a Big Girl Bed.
Last night it was like there was a conspiracy to keep me from sleeping. First Cuervo snuck upstairs and started delicately eating kitten food from the bag. Then Maddie decided she was Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore from Max, and chased him around the house for a good 30 minutes, slamming into the kids’ bedroom doors along the way. After I chased off the dog and calmed down the cats, I crawled back into bed and had just started to fall back asleep when I heard a couple of moans and a plaintive “Mommmmmmmmy” from the baby monitor. I crossed my fingers that she would just go back to sleep. All was quiet for the next couple of minutes, save a little thump that might have been the Jo hitting the wall as she rolled over.
Then I hear Caroline’s doorknob rattling, and a voice just behind the door saying “Ey! Openna do! Openna do!”. She had vaulted out of her crib and was trying to escape her room. I opened the door as instructed and she declared, “I got outta bed!”. Agreeing as to how she did, I scooped her up and brought her back to sleep in our bed, where she proceeded to wiggle for an hour or so until settling down sometime around dawn.
Today I sat Jo down and had a long talk with her about the bed situation. She has a built-in window-bed-nook in her room, which we planned to use for her bed. A while back she thought she saw a bug in there, and has refused to sleep in her “tall bed” for over a year since. I somehow convinced her not only to try the bed again but to get excited about it, and we moved the other bed from her room into Caroline’s, which had been our plan all along.
And a good thing we did. The other night, one of Caroline’s stuffed animals, appropriately named Kitty, disappeared into thin air within the space of an hour. This was bad. Kitty is necessary for bedtime. We tore the house apart looking for it in all the places the kids had travelled that day, to no avail. When hub moved the bed tonight, we saw Kitty, as well as a stuffed monkey, dog, and rabbit. Apparently Max the Kitten was making a stuffed animal stash for himself.
What a stinkhead.
The elm tree in the back yard is already starting to turn color and drop leaves. It seems like signs of the impending season change come earlier every year. It’s hard to believe in autumn and winter when it’s 94 degrees outside. I wonder if a temperature drop will come early this year. I remember when I was a kid, maybe 13, my mom and I went to eat at a diner. Next door was a time and temperature banner. As we ate lunch, we watched the temperature drop forty degrees, from the nineties to the fifties.
One of my favorite things to do is watch a storm roll in. Texas gets some really fierce and elemental storms twice a year – first in spring, around May, which is when the tornado happened in Cedar Park and Jarrell; then in fall, when the cold fronts battle with the existing warm air. The ranch in South Texas is the perfect place to watch a cold front approach. The house is set on a high hill, with views that go on for miles. The view to the north and northwest is unfettered, and the lights from the refinery 5 miles away look like a fairy land from the hilltop vantage. Since cold fronts usually come from the northwest, I can sit outside at the picnic table for hours, watching the black wall of clouds and lightning approach. This viewpoint is also perfect for watching the sunset. In fact, it was my “safe place” thought during the 24 hours of labor I had with my first daughter. I pictured myself drinking a longneck, with a mild breeze in my face, and a perfect purple and orange and red sunset that lasted as long as I wanted; a star peeking out from between the tree branches above.
Mom told me that as I got older, time would go faster. I didn’t believe her then. Now I do.
I’ve posted about my migraines recently. Lately they’re out of control. I’ve been getting incapacitating headaches around 2 times a week now. It used to be that I would get them twice a year. I’ve tried all of the new migraine drugs – frova, zomig, imitrex, relpax; the old reliable that used to work, midrin, heavy amounts of advil and caffeine; elavil and muscle relaxants to take at night. My lord, that is an insane amount of medication, all taken in trial and error form, and nothing working.
Last night I had a brainstorm. After my second daughter was born I was getting occasional migraines, a little more often than usual. I changed my Pill to a different kind. I called the nurse at my doctor’s office today and after hearing what I had to say about the migraines and some other stuff, she agreed that something was woefully wrong and that I shouldn’t take it anymore. I’m so glad it only took me over a year to figure that out.
What’s awful is when I get one of these headaches and guinea pig my way through the new medications I’m supposed to try. Nope, relpax didn’t work, wait an hour, try another. That didn’t work either, wait an hour, try midrin. Nope, that’s not it either, wait an hour, try a pain pill. Now I’m woozy and my eyes are rolling back in my head, guess I’ll just sleep through the pain as best as I can. It’s scary. I don’t like taking all that crap. What if I have a reaction to something? Bad juju.
Max the kitten is amazing. He’s stuck to me like glue. He follows me everywhere I go and jumps into my lap while I’m still in the process of sitting down. He looks and acts a lot like Gus, with some of the same weird idiosyncrasies. Like digging underwear out of the dirty clothes pile and running around the room with it on his head. That’s weird. And gross. But Gus did it too, when he was a kitten. I did a little research – cat gestation times are 57-65 days. Max was born 57 days after Gus died. Hub thinks Gus was a Buddhist. Which makes me feel pretty good, I think. Following that line of reasoning, his reward for a good life (and it was good, he was in every way a wonderful cat) is to come back and spend another lifetime with me?
Not to say that I think I’ve replaced Gus. Max is definitely his own little cat. But he does remind me of the good times with the kitties who have gone before, and I’m remembering the cute things they used to do before getting elderly and ill. I think of Gus and Lilly with more smiles than sad now.
Of course, the only problem is that Max has a godawful case of the farts today, and if you have never smelled a cat fart, you don’t know from noxious. That’ll teach me to switch his food.
I think I’m going to join the panel at the Journalcon this October. I’ll find out some more about it tomorrow at the Meetup (barring unforeseen circumstances; I’ve been adding that caveat to just about any plans I make recently because of how often I get migraines).
Um, yeah, so the other day I was thinking that it’s been a pretty mild summer so far, not many highs over 100, downright tolerable. Wanna know what the temperature is outside? 105. That’s what I get for thinking.
The doc says I definitely have rosacea and should avoid temperature changes. Which means that I should keep the house at 105 degrees or not go out again until November. Option 2 is looking better to me.
I would have posted about this last night but there would have been far too much profanity. As it is, this post is full of geekish talk, so if that makes your eyes glaze over, skip it.
We’ve got a home network with several computers using a linux machine for IP masquerading, which basically means that the linux box is our firewall. We’re completely dependent on that machine for internet access.
Yesterday someone let me know that reverse DNS lookup was broken, and it was causing the mud and the box to lag for 30 seconds when someone tried to log in. I got pissed since I had just set up the caching DNS server, so I went to try to fix it and couldn’t possibly see what was broken. I had changed nothing since I set it up. Things usually don’t just break like that. Totally flummoxed, I set the linux box just to use another nameserver and went back through the log files to see if I could pinpoint the problem.
The log files made a brief reference to “linsniffer”. Uhoh. A sniffer is a program that a hacker puts onto a computer in order to access information about traffic going in and out of the box. Anyone who logged onto the linux box from the internet (meaning all the mud coders) had their passwords logged into a file accessible by the script kiddie who hacked the box. Hub’s friend from the AR-15 boards and I got on the phone. He’s a linux developer and quite familiar with various security flaws and their consequences. An hour later he had found hacks dating back to 2000, plus several ports open and listening that shouldn’t be.
Well, it figures. We hadn’t updated the kernel since Jo was born. We just don’t have the time to administer a linux box properly. Right now I’m in the process of downloading the latest Debian linux distribution and am going to install it on a new, clean machine. We’re going to buy a hardware router/firewall and use that for our internet access, and put the mud box on the other IP.
Also lately I’ve been noticing that my face is doing really strange things. My skin’s gotten really dry and the face gets flushed with red bumps on it, especially after the shower. My nose has been consistently red for the last couple of weeks and I look quite a bit like the town drunk. I need to go to the doctor to see what the heck is going on. Sounds a lot like those commercials about rosacea. I found out that W.C. Fields had rosacea, which is what made his nose really lumpy. This woman has the same kind of thing I’m talking about. Oy.
Greetings from 2003: the year that the United States takes huge leaps backwards.
“Parents: White Teacher Should Not Teach Black History” – guess this means we should keep black people from teaching European or early American history. Right? Right?
“New York to Open First U.S. Public School for Gays” – super, so now gays and straights will have even less of an idea what the other side is like and will begin to fear and hate each other even more. I guess this means it’s ok to open a school just for straights, too. Note this is a public school, not private.
Inquest into hanging death opens in Belle Glade – Then let’s insist that someone was lynched for dating the white sheriff’s daughter, then look surprised to find out that he was hung with his own sheet, there was cocaine in his system, and his blood alcohol level was .334. Way to be reactionary, folks!
On a lighter note – when Bob Hope’s daughter asked him, just before he died, where he wanted to be buried, he responded, Surprise me”.
Yeah, I know one of the stages of grief is anger. No matter how much I know it’s normal to get mad about losing two cats within 6 months, I’m still really freaking pissed off. I’m mad, who can I sue?
On the other hand, I’m afraid to let Maddie go too long without another cat to keep her company. There’s a lady in Houston who has 3 bluepoint Siamese boys. I’ve had a male bluepoint since Caesar, who we got in 1978, and Gus, who I got in 1990. I’ve been thinking about the kitten thing since Gus died in January and had planned on getting one if one of the girls died. However I know it’s going to mean a few weeks of cat fights and probably pee on the bed and getting-to-know-yous with the kitten. I called several different breeders tonight, and one of them nearly talked my ear off without letting me get a word in edgewise. “Your last cat was also a bluepoint male? Well you know you’re not going to be able to replace him, blah blah blah”. No duh lady, I’ve been around cats since I was born. They’re all different. Yeah, I wanted a carbon copy of my dead cat because I just can’t move on in life and I’m dumb enough to think I’ll get one.
Told hub that I really appreciated him burying my cats for me, but I sure am tired of watching him do it. Do you know I’ve never had a cat die of old age? Feline leukemia, FIV, heart attack, hit by car, kidney failure, stolen, ran away. ‘Course most of those options are erased now that I refuse to allow them outdoors. Still. Maybe I shouldn’t have cats. Who knows.
