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RIP Flyer 3/13/99-11/13/09
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Nov. 19th, 2009 @ 09:36 pm
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Sunday November 8 started fine. 3 happy silly Flat-Coats were playing. Then 10 year old Flyer fell over with a Grand Mal seizure. It stopped; she seemed okay. The vet said to bring her in the next day. That night, she had 2 more seizures; after the last one she was blind, disoriented, and weak.
They took blood; analyzed some there and sent the rest off for more specialized testing. We started her on phenobarb and prednisone to stop the seizures and prayed the lab would find an infection we could treat. Otherwise it would be a brain tumor, not uncommon in an older Flattie.
Over the week, she got weaker. Friday morning she woke us at 4AM with a seizure. She had another at 6:30 and yet another was starting at 7:15 when we arrived at the vet's office. That afternoon, the lab results came in. No infection. No hope for recovery. We gave her that last shot that sent her to the Rainbow Bridge.
She was the best dog I've ever had in 50+ years of living with multiple dogs. She was always willing to go anywhere, to try anything. She was my primary motivation to come back from my stroke in 2005. She needed her human to be able to take her places and do things with her.
Flyer has been gone almost a week now and our household just seems...wrong. Penny and Giddy are very subdued; Earl and I cry a lot. We miss her more than words can express.
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Three things not like the others
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Nov. 17th, 2009 @ 12:43 pm
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1) For anyone looking to buy a laptop or netbook, you may be interested in the results of this study which indicated Asus and Toshiba are the most reliable models, but that regardless of brand, 1 in 3 laptops fails to last 3 years. I wish they'd also done a study on desktops which are presumably less vulnerable to accidents. Aside from the fact that these expensive purchases are exceedingly unreliable, what most made me blanch was the idea of the monumental amount of waste being generated by so many short-lived machines.
2) In more optimistic news, health care costs may go down if successful vaccines are developed, and apparently there are a lot of major ones in the pipeline.
"Among other possible vaccines out in the coming years: herpes simplex, rheumatoid arthritis and a better seasonal influenza vaccine. A malaria vaccine -- a development that would revolutionize public health around the globe if successful -- could be on the market in the next several years."
3) When looking at the tags being used so far at the AO3, I got the immediate mental image of the classic comedy/tragedy masks (Angst! Humor!). However, I was also quite struck by how many stories are apparently carrying the humor tag – far, far more than for some other stories we commonly see like an AU or crossover. It's not that we rarely see funny stories in fandoms, but I rarely see stories advertised as such (whereas, by comparison, people label their stuff "crackfic" quite often). So I just thought I'd throw the question out there: what percentage of what you read or write would you consider to be a humor story?
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A time for fun and a time for work
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Nov. 16th, 2009 @ 05:38 pm
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It's exciting to see contributions surging into the Archive of Our Own now that open beta has begun. I have hopes for the archive being a one-stop, highly searchable site for all kinds of fan content. LJ and its clones may be really good blogging/interaction sites but they're lousy for actually finding things. And unlike the Buffyverse, SPN fandom is not rife with archives.
Speaking of one-stop shops for fannish content, in case others weren't aware of it, Clicker.com is a search engine for finding places to see TV content online. Just type in the show you want to see and it'll show what episodes are available and where. You can also create playlists.
I was boggled today when I read this article about men, women and power at work. Funny how the entire thing is written to demonstrate how men are merely well meaning but baffled and women are always at fault for creating problems at work. Case in point:
"“Men often seem to think (heroically) that they should be masters at the conversation–that they should know the ‘right’ things to say.” His advice to men and women: “Be more curious about each other and their experiences."
It's heroic to be self-centered and domineering in a conversation! Who knew?
"Meanwhile, women’s tendency to be super-serious (as men perceive them, at least) compounds the workplace dysfunction. “Women can make anything a chore,” a former Microsoft executive told me. “They’re too serious and don’t seem to understand that work is a game.”"
It's wrong to be serious about serious matters! Now there's a rather fitting explanation for why our economy's in the state it's in. I look forward to the way men will turn unemployment into a game.
( Read more... )
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