After getting up late today, my mother in law walks into the door with the kids. My nephew takes off and for the next three hours I am entertaining my niece. The Atari Flashback 2 is getting a little boring for her and so we moved on to the Sony Playstation 2.
A year ago, my coworker and I would have lunch together every day. It has been a long time since we last had lunch together. Lately, plans have been made only to be broken by unforeseen circumstances. Today was no different.
The lunch planned yesterday was rescheduled to today. Yesterdays plans were thwarted since the whole office was going to a Thai Restaurant. Today our plans were foiled again as it was someone’s birthday. The party was supposed to start at noon, but the guest of honor didn’t show up until a little later. It was a surprise party after all.
The party only involved a cake. After a half hour, I sneaked out. I had only a half hour before a meeting so I grabbed some lunch from the deli in our building. There really wasn’t enough time to go out on our lunch break. We shall see what tomorrow brings.
Tags: Lunch, Office, Plans, Work, Lunch Hour, Birthdays, Parties, Food
Out of five kittens rescued last week, Bandit is the only survivor of his litter. His last sibling was euthanized this morning. All of the kittens came down with a respiratory illness. We had thought that the last two were really pulling through fine until I was woken up last night.
Bandit is very small. He shivers a lot and I don’t know if it is too cold, or if he is frightened or sick. Angel watches over him constantly and makes sure he gets his medicine and special milk. She has a warm rubbery water pack that she lets him lay on to keep him warm.
He let me get a few pictures without a flash, but started to become picture shy.
We are hoping for the best for this little guy. Every day that passes brings with it a better chance for him to survive. He is very adorable.
Tags: Foster Kittens, Bandit, Kittens, Cats, Pets
My mother in-law came over today with the kids. We took off and went to Rent-A-Center and found that they were closed. We were going to go home, but a certain individual in our party wanted to go to the toy store. We decided to set our destination towards Mr. Dollar.
We went through the aisles and my niece would pick out something here and there. We walked out with a sheet of Halloween Stickers, foam letter block puzzles, a bubble set, and a white teddy bear with a heart.
I had some fun blowing bubbles with the kids until most of it was spilled. We played with what little solution we had left and then went back inside and played on the Atari Flashback 2.
Mom had brought over the two kittens that had survived from a respiratory illness so that they could get some of there shots. After she came back with Angel, we ordered Chinese food.
My coworker invited me into her office today and presented me with a few t-shirts and a cap that she got from the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2005 (a.k.a. PDC). I still need to catch up on some PDC blogs about what went on this year.
Angel took a look at the shirts when I got home and took to the Intel 64 sports sweater. There was another shirt advertising Automated QA and one for the PDC conference itself. I love wearing these shirts around the house. I can get messy and not have to worry about ruining the shirt since it’s just a promotional item.
Today I’ve done a lot of mucking around in Crystal Reports. I dealt with exporting as Word and Excel files and emailing them as attachments. I also got the html version to print without our sites template when the end-user prints it out. As always, there were tons of formatting issues and troubleshooting with the report. I’m just glad that it isn’t like the old days where I would spend days hunting down dll’s, hot fixes, and patches on the Crystal Reports website. It’s been a few years, but I’m doing ok with them.
Tags: PDC, Developers, Conferences, T-Shirts, Free, Crystal Reports, Work, Angel, Shirts, Clothing
My manager and co-worker went out to the west to attend some conferences that introduce upcoming Microsoft technologies. I would have gone, but I have this insane fear of flying. I came into work this morning and found a cap on my desk with the emblem “C#”. It is supposed to be a spoof off of the Superman logo of the big “S”.
The back of the hat says “Save the day with C#”. I’ve saved plenty of days with C#, but I could have done the same with VB.Net. These days, the language you code in is more of a preference rather then a requirement of what the application that you are creating needs to be capable of.
I may be a C# guru, but I doubt I’ll be wearing this hat into work. Angel tried the cap on when I arrived at home and she looked great. I don’t know why, but women in baseball caps can be attractive at times. Unfortunately, my own mug doesn’t go well with caps.
Angels mother was here when I got home. It seems that another kitten has had an unfortunate demise, but did not have to go through as much suffering as the other kittens. Angel is strong and is hopeful that the other two will make it. Every hour that passes makes the situation more optimistic.
After her mom left, we tuned into our Video on Demand cable channel. Although we have digital cable, it was very slow loading up and navigating through the movies. After watching a preview, we choose to watch
Are we there yet? The movie was funny and cute. It reminds me of
Johnson Family Vacation
. Here is a quick summary of both movies:
A man buys a brand new Ford Escalade complete with spinning rims. On a long trip across the country, the vehicle is ruined by multiple synchronized unfortunate events that are beyond extraordinary. The fate of his most prized material possession doesn’t matter because at the end, the kids respect him, he gets the girl, and most of all - he has insurance.
Tags: Hats, C#, Are we there yet?, Johnson Family Vacation, Movies, Kittens
Five kittens were in a tree that did not yet have there eyes open. A little girl told our friend Lisa about some kittens falling from a tree near an abandoned house in our neighborhood. The place is well known as a safe-house for ferrel cats. Lisa took the abandoned kittens and worked with my wife to nurse them.
Today I woke up and Angel asked me to take her back over to Lisa’s house. One of the kittens was having a tough time breathing. We came back as there wasn’t anything we could do but wait. Later in the day, he died and one of his siblings was starting to have the same problems.
Angels sister came over and took the kittens to the vet to have them checked out and see if anything could be determined. We are all just hoping that everything turns out ok.
Update
The second kitten has also passed away. The vet was able to see the four kittens before the last one died. It turns out that they all have respiratory problems. Angel told me that the two that have died so far are the same ones that had fallen out of the tree that there mother dragged them up into. The three remaining kittens are now on medicine and quarantined.
Tags: Kittens, Emergencies, Abandoned, Pets, Fostering, Nursing, Death
I may have gotten up late today, but that was no exception for the days work. While Angel got her hair cut, I went over to the grocery store and picked up some non perishables. After I was done, I headed on over to Blockbuster. I picked up a DVD of a Japanese animation movie called Steam Boy. I returned to the salon and Angel was in the middle of paying for her hair cut.
We headed on over to Wally World (Wal-Mart), and then went on over to do some grocery shopping after that. I was a bit surprised to see that for the amount of food that we purchased, the price was pretty low. It seemed like we had a greater variety of food then we normally purchase as well. We didn’t feel like cooking tonight, so we both went ahead and grabbed some food at the buffet provided in the grocery store.
We went home, put things away and had dinner. I then left to pick up some pet food at the pet store. As I arrived, an employee was blocking the doors and I saw a sign indicating that it was past closing. I went over to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things for the gerbils, but I would have to return tomorrow for our Nutro cat food and some kitty litter.
I spent a good amount of time just cleaning up gerbil cages and then configuring them in a new way. I was happy because I finally figured out how to get everything connected in my little gerbil city. They now have 7 compartments that are connected with tubes all over my computer desk and dresser. Every time I change this stuff around, they go crazy running around. They will run around for hours figuring out where everything goes. I think it is good to help keep there minds active.
I fed some treats to our cats and had to ask my wife how many we had. Now that her sister has left, we are short a few cats. Her reply was “Seven” and I was only counting six. It turns out that Ashe was not present, but he never eats the treats anyway.
I started watching Steam Boy. I was a quarter the way through it when Angel came to join me. I started it over for her and cleaned up the kitchen until she got to the part where I left off. The movies scenery is just astounding. The plot is ok, but some of the characters are just horrible. Scarlet was perhaps the worst. She would punch her little dog, treat everyone like trash, and was just oblivious to what was going on around her. My wife and I thought the movie was about to end a few times, but something else would just come up to make it go longer.
After the movie was over, Angel and I went over to her friends house. Her friend had four kittens that were rescued. Angel is going to nurse and watch over them. These don’t even have there eyes open yet. Angels sister also showed up with her husband, supplies and some helpful advice. Everyone’s concern seemed to be focused on finding the mother to help take care of the kittens during the time that everyone else sleeps. Otherwise you have to make sure to feed them some kitten milk formula every few hours, all throughout the night and day. We then left to go back home and Angel tended to the kittens.
I got a shower and worked on the kitchen a little more. I dismantled many parts to the stove and cleaned them pretty good with a steel wool pad. There was a lot of gunk building up everywhere. I pulled off the knobs, elements, and oil drip guards. I still have much to do to get the stove completely cleaned, but at least I got the top of it looking better. My legs are just worn out now and it is time to get some sleep.
Tags: Steamboy, Movies, Shopping, Angel, Groceries, Gerbils, Litter, City, Cat Treats, Cats, Kittens, Kitchen, Stove, Cleaning
I’m trying my hand at podcasting again. Rather then going with dreams, I’m just going to give a commentary on my blog for the current week. There are both RSS and m3u feeds available for anyone who is interested.
Produced by: Lewis Moten
Channel: Lewies Weekend Wrap-up
So a while back, Aurora posted an entry about some creative desktop wallpaper. A group of individuals have taken a picture of there computers environment without the computer screen. Editing the photo, they were able to crop the area where there monitor should be and reshape the image to fit on the screen. The screen was then displayed with the image while another picture was taken to achieve the effect of a transparent screen.
I have been wanting to try my hand at this for a while. I finally decided that I was in the mood for a quickie and went to work. My pet cat Gizmo was setting next to me. This cat never wants to leave once he has found a nice spot to set near me. What a perfect centerpiece.
The first image was easy. I just set up a tripod and took a picture. I placed my laptop in front of him and then took another picture. Now I knew what area to pull out of the picture. Now at this point, I could just cut out one picture and let the second picture show through - but that would be cheating. I needed to take a picture of the laptop with Gizmo as the background wall paper.
I pulled out a portion of the image that I needed and reshaped it to be a rectangular image to fit the entire screen. I used scaling and perspective transformations. I then loaded the image onto the laptop as the background. I then set it up to a screen saver too so that I could get a picture without all the icons and the start bar in the way.
The tripod was still in the same position from the first photograph, but the laptop was not. I had used the computer and moved the laptop to get to it. I didn’t even think before I took the picture. I forgot to line everything up! Of all the things to do wrong.
Gizmo at this point had spotted a more comfortable spot where the laptop wasn’t setting against him and moved himself away. It will have to do. I now have experience of the process of doing this. If there is a next time, I will put more effort into perfecting my technique.
Tags: Photography, Transparency, Wallpaper, Pets, Gizmo, Experiments, Tricks