 |
|
Thursday, August 01, 2002 I hate days like today and yesterday. I really, really do. What a waste of time when I've got things that I need to be doing. And what did I do? I sat here at the computer, trying to get the new one to talk to the old one. And it's not happening. *sigh*
As a matter of fact, late yesterday afternoon, after loading the upgrade for Win98 SE, I completely lost my connection to the internet with my cable modem. Last night, at 11, I finally had it up and running. I thought. Not so. Which I found out bright and early this morning. I tried the 800 number my ISP has, but got a number not in service. I know this sounds strange, but they used to be Home.com and now it's Cox.net and I figured they'd changed their number. And the website has nothing about 24 hour service, just says customer service is available from 8am to 8pm. Fat lot of good that does me at 10 at night or 6 in the morning. Just for kicks, I call the customer service number this morning before 8 and got right in to tech support. He said that the 800 number I had was the correct one, then he tried dialing it and got through. I guess I was just really tired and worn out and misdialed. Oh, well. It took about an hour and we got my system working again, but boy, what a mess it was. I had to remove programs, I had to unplug the modem, I had to reboot my computer about fifteen times. And my computer isn't a fast rebooter. I found out that he didn't like cats, but his aunt does, and he gave me her address and I sent her some catnip today. *lol* Anyway, our cats were pretty good, not all over me and the desk and keyboard, which is normal when I'm stressing. One of the things I had to do was to remove all of the USB connections from the back of computer and the drivers off of the computer. He told me they'd all come back when I rebooted for the final time.
Well, guess what? The cameras didn't all come back. What a nightmare. I was trying to get set back up since the call this morning and finally got it all up and running properly at about 2:30 this afternoon. Then I went into my chatroom, the private one for the trial and got in a big fight with one of the chatters about declawing. I was so mad, I left chat. Then I went back in and he asked if I was mad and I said yes, I was, that I wanted to grab him by his hair, put his head in the toilet and flush about fifteen times. But after all that happened, he promised not to mutilate a cat again.
Friday, August 02, 2002 Damn. Here I thought I was back to where I was Tuesday night and I realized that my little file transfer program wasn't working. So, I had to delete the drivers from each computer, then reinstall. And I went by the installation procedure that they had for the cable that didn't work. The cable that is now in a plastic ziplock bag, with the installation CD and the printed out manual. So, after about an hour of trying to set everything up, I read the documentation for that particular program. What a bozo I can be. I would have saved some time had I taken the time to read the instructions. It worked properly after I did that. Then, this morning, I got the information transferred to the Microsoft Money that runs on the Dell and deleted the program from the Gateway. And in the Add/Remove programs, I saw two listings for Eudora. Eudora and Eudora Pro. So, I remove the Eudora. Ack! It removed both of them! So, I went over to their site and downloaded the latest version. And my mail wasn't there! Usually, when I remove programs, some residual stuff hangs around. All of my mail, gone! Shaking, I ran a search on my harddrive for different keywords. Nothing came up. I went to the Eudora website and called their support. What version did I have? I didn't know. I started to cry (silly, now that I think about it, but this has been a pretty stressful couple of weeks, what with Meetoo, Little Boy, all of the stuff I've been trying to do on the computer, it all seemed to hit by losing all of my email). Anyway, the poor kid who initially took my call transferred me to tech support and she told me what to search for and I found all of my mail. Then she stayed on the line until I had the new version installed and working, with all of my mail. *sigh of relief* Then, I bought the upgraded version. All is well in computerland at the cathouse. At least until I get another scathingly brilliant idea. You'd think I'd have learned by now. I just hope that all is fixed now, no more surprises.
Gee, I started this entry yesterday afternoon and it's almost one in the afternoon now. How long could it possibly take to talk about my pathetic existance? I guess it takes a while.
Boney has been driving me nuts today, yowwing, yowwing, yowwing. He yowwed when I was with support at Eudora. He yowwed when I hung up. I gave him food, he looked at me and yowwed. Shut UP, Boney. Damn. I ended up putting him outside the office, he jumped up on one of the lounge chairs and now he's sleeping front of the loveseat in the living room.
I can't believe how crabby I am right now.
Annie seems to have moved into my bathroom. I think it might be because that's where I take Boney, Lola, Lucky and DeeJay for the soft food mix I give them each day. Annie gets to eat, too, when the others are done. Now, she just waits for food, I guess. Silly Annie Nanner.
Boney is driving me nuts.
I think I just figured out Boney's problem. He was hungry. I just dished him up some soft food and left him the bathroom with the door closed. He's eating. Maybe now, he'll give me some peace. I was already crabby to begin with and he wasn't helping.
I've notice DeeJay lapping the sides of my Pepsi cans lately, getting that cold water off of them. I just gave him a bowl with ice and cold water in it and he drank a bunch. I've never seen a cat want cold, cold water. Ice cream, yes.
Well, I just keep getting sidetracked here. Can't keep a coherant thought to save my soul. So, I guess I'll just be done with this for today. I think I need a mental day. At least Boney's being quiet.
Saturday, August 03, 2002 What a day.
It's 9:30 pm. Brian is gone. He left around six this evening, with his brother, for Ranchita. See, there's this fire that started burning by Julian earlier this week, Monday as a matter of fact, National Guard hit a power line. Line broke and the fire started. Well, here it is, Saturday and on tonight's news the fire is real close to Ranchita. It jumped the road sometime today. *sigh* So, he and his bro decided to go up there and bring the trailer back. Not much can be done with the heavy equipment. It's in the trailers (you can see them at our Ranchita Ranch page). Hopefully, everything will be fairly safe, if fire hits. But the trailer is in the open. They had to go get the worktruck, since the Ranger isn't strong enough to pull the trailer back to town. And Brian's truck is still in pieces (it should be put together by the middle of this month). I don't know where they'll park the trailer, most likely over at Mark's or Brian's mom's house for right now. We've got tile in the driveway that was delivered earlier for the rest of the house, tile that had been backordered since last April. What timing, huh?
And this morning, my bathroom sink got stopped up. Brian wasn't home, had to work. I did an online search and found some ideas for getting rid of the clog. I don't use that sink often, so I'm thinking it's just from quickly rinsing it out when it's got cat hair in it. There were a couple of different ways to go. One was with a plunger. I couldn't find a plunger anywhere. Come to find out, we don't have one. Add that to the shopping list. We do have a snake, but I couldn't get the drain plug thing out. Brian's comes right out of his sink, but mine won't. I tried using a robogrip to get it out and ended up twisting the top off. The plunger part was still in the drain, making it impossible for the snake to get down to the clog. *sigh* Then I found a natural way to loosen the clog that I thought I'd try. A cup of baking soda followed by three cups of boiling water. If it doesn't work at first, try it two or three more times. If it's still clogged, dump a cup of vinegar down and that should loosen the clog to where the drain will run free. It didn't work. Then I found another suggestion at oxygen.com. Pour a gallon of bleach down the drain. Okay. I thought about this, it made sense. I couldn't imagine anything other than fur in the drain. I'd give it a shot (besides, I used up all of my baking soda trying to unplug the clog earlier). The instructions said to just let it work, it should take about an hour. Okay, this was really weird, I know, but I stood there, watching the occasional bubble come up. And there was a whole lot of stuff I had no idea what it was, but it was icky looking. But I was pretty sure it was something at the clog. Fortunately, the bleach did the trick. The drain runs really fast right now. And now, I know what to do. Forget those lye drain cleaners. I'll use good old Clorox.
I had to keep the door shut through all of that because some of the cats would go crazy for the bleach smell.
And I marked my territory again today. Had to be done. There was a report on today's news where a woman opened her car door to let her pug/chihuahua mix out and it was attacked by a coyote. The woman went after the coyote, kicking and screaming at it (reminded me what I did when that Akita had a hold of Bobby). And the gummint keeps making excuses for the coyotes, telling people what to do to keep them away. Get rid of the damned coyotes is my suggestion. Move them up to the mountains, to where they can live like they're supposed to. Up to where they've got predators after them.
That's all for now.
Sunday, August 04, 2002 Brian got home last night at about ten. No trailer. They had the roads blocked and were only letting folks with horses or livestock go up. He said there were quite a few people wanting to go up and they were turned back. Of course, we watched the late news on KUSI, which started at ten, then at eleven switched over to the local NBC channel. And first thing this morning, I turned on the news, but I was up before the newscasters were, I think. Anyway, there was nothing new. I'd really like to see some fly overs, to see the area. We went to Costco today and on our way back from Santee, we saw the smoke arising from behind one of the mountains. We drove up to the top of Icky Hill to see if it was visible from there (it was), we came home and I grabbed the camera, then we drove back up the hill (it sure looks a lot steeper driving up than walking up) and I took a couple of shots.
Hard to imagine that was about sixty miles on the road from here, forty five as the crow flies. Brian took a picture last night with his new camera, but he left the camera in the work truck. I'll have to wait to see it. He said it was of the glow from the fire, very visible from where they were told to turn back. I'll post it if it turns out (new camera, first time he used it).
I washed the floors today, they were pretty bad. I'm just amazed at how much worse the family room is than the other floors, like the entry hallway, my bathroom and the hallway to the office, where the litter box is. Water was really gross. But it's nice now.
I thought about vacuuming, but Brian is going to start pulling up carpet in the living room, so why bother. I'll wait until the carpet is up, then I'll wash the cement. After the carpet is up, the next thing will be to spray the ceiling (he's not going to use a roller again, not after the problem with the old stuff peeling off). Then I paint the walls, then the floor goes down. We bought a really nice looking fountain at CostCo today, they were having a road sale and we saved $200.00 on it. Yeah, we didn't really need it, but I thought it would be cool to have one in the house for the cats. It cost $300, but it will be really nice in the corner when the tile is down. It's not something you'd want on carpeting or wood floors, because of the splash over, but that's one of the cool things about the tile. We can do lots of stuff without worrying about the flooring. And I just know the cats are going to love it. I'm sure it will be pretty messy to begin with, but we'll all adjust.
And I am so looking forward to not having carpet. It's going to be so very, very nice. The part that Brian is pulling up now just reeks. Ah, it will be nice to no longer have to deal with it. The floor will be so much easier to keep clean. The cats, of course, are busy checking out the work that Brian is doing right now. Opie and Kirby are very interested. I'm sure Boney isn't going to know what to do, because Boney has been one of the worst for peeing on the carpet. What's he gonna do when there's no carpet to pee on? Whatever he does, I'm sure it will be better than what's happening now.
Tuesday, August 06, 2002 Well, I think the fire hit our property. On the 4:30 news yesterday, you could see the places where it was burning and Brian said it was a quarter mile from the Sticks. And on Sunday's news, they were interviewing the people at the bottom of our road. They were on yesterday's news, too. Different channel. They didn't say when they'd done the interview. Brian called our insurance man yesterday to find out about our coverage. When we first got the property, Brian called on getting it insured. He was told it would be under our homeowner's insurance. Well, yesterday, Brian found out that we'd only get 10% of what our coverage was for a certain area of our insurance. $10,500. I told Brian to make a list of what was up there. He spent $40,000 on the equipment, but he and his brother put lots of work into it, getting it running. (continued tomorrow)
Wednesday, August 07, 2002 Brian figured the replacement cost for the stuff at the Sticks would be $68,000. Then on our walk yesterday morning, he remembered a couple of other things up there that would raise the cost to $78,000. The insurance wouldn't touch that.
So, when Brian got home from work yesterday, he tells me that his brother wants to go to the property that night. Oh, well. Want in one hand.... Then Brian was putting the bumper bolts on the Bronco (we got a new bumper for it) and the phone rang. It was Brian's brother. He wanted to know if they were going to eat on their way up or eat before they went. Huh? Hmmm...Brian seems to have left something out. It seems that he's already decided to go up. I wasn't happy. The roads were blocked.
I put his brother on hold then went out to tell him he had a phone call. After the call, I started in. "How are you going to get up there if the roads are blocked?" They'll go the back way. "What do you expect to do?" Check the equipment and put out any little fires around it if there are any. "Put it out with what? Spit on it?" We have fire extinguishers and water. Well, I knew I was fighting a losing battle. His mind was made up, as foolish as I felt he was being. And I let him know it. There's a reason the roads were blocked. I haven't seen Brian since five last night.
But I did hear from him at about a quarter to eight last night. They made it. Going the back road, they saw a couple of firefighters who were stuck and trying to dig out. Brian told them if their bulldozer was okay, that they would go back to help them out. The entire property was burned. But the storage trailers hadn't been touched! All of the equipment was safe! The windmill was still standing, still working. It was pumping water as we spoke. But the wooden platform was gone, the platform that was 25 feet in the air. And the clubhouse was okay. There were fire marks on the outside, but the interior was fine. And the oak tree that towers over the clubhouse was still standing. He said that they could see flames on the other side of the valley reaching at least one hundred feet into the air. He was a happy camper, you could hear the relief that we had been spared. He said that they would probably spend the night, he'd let me know. He signed off saying they were off to help the stuck firefighters. I guess they decided to stay because he didn't come home last night. It's 8 am now and I still haven't heard from him, but I'm sure I'd hear if something had happened. The old "no news is good news" thing. He took his camera. The picture he took last weekend didn't turn out. I hope the ones he took last night and today do.
So, right now, it's just the cats, the dog and me. I was up at five this morning. I didn't go for a walk (bad me). I fed the out fronts their morning fare, saw Meetoo, Meezer, OC and SpotTee. All of the food was gone from last night, we had a hungry bunch.
I have a doctor's appointment in a little bit, so I guess that's all I have to say for now. I do wish my husband would call.
 |
|
|
© 1996-2014 lisaviolet
Photographic images are the property of the photographer,and may not be copied, printed, or otherwise reproduced on any other site or used in any other publishing medium without the written permission of each individual photographer and kennel/cattery owner. Cathouse privacy policy.
