myShoggoth

Crap

We had piper put down this morning, she died around 11:15am PST.

We loved her, and she loved us.  She was a Good Cat.

piper takes a turn for the worse

Today I noticed that piper (our surviving cat of 14 years) was breathing very shallow and quickly.  At first I thought she might just be about to throw up or something, but it continued for most of the day.  Once my wife returned home, looked her over, and called the vet we headed over.

I really expected some basic news, a short to medium term fix, and for her to return back to her normal (but not perfect) health soon.  Unfortunately, the vet said that it was likely the beginning of the end due to congestive heart failure, and we needed to make the very hard decision soon.

We weren't able to do it then, so he gave her some medication and we brought her home.  I'm doing my best to keep her comfortable and happy, hoping the drugs will kick in enough to make her feel relatively normal soon (2 hours or so since, and she's breathing a little easier but not a lot).

We have an appointment with the practice's other vet tomorrow morning to get a second opinion and once again confront the hard decision.  If she lives through the night, we'll have to make the call on how high her quality of life will be.  The problem is not fixable, so it is only a question of when and under what circumstances.

We adopted her and her brother Lysander a couple months after getting married 14 years ago.  Since then we've lived in a condo, a townhouse, and two houses, and they were our wonderful companions.  Lysander went missing a few years ago, he was always an avid outdoor cat and hunter and probably fell prey to racoons or coyotes.

It is very hard to imagine what life will be like without either of them being part of our daily routine.  I didn't deal well with Lysander's disappearance, but some of that was likely the lack of closure and the self blame (after all, I'm the one who let him out that night).  With piper I'm able to say goodbye, at least.

Still, no doubt I'll be a total mess.  Glad I have such a great wife to lean on.  She's still in good health AFAIK.

PS - I couldn't post this entry for a while due to MSN Spaces wackiness, but now that that's resolved I should add this update:  she's resting, she seems comfortable and I think her breathing has slowed down some.

Windows Live Messenger is... um... Live!

http://messenger.live.com/ !  Yay!

Let me know what you think.

Global Alert to All

Being an interesting and engaging speaker is a skill that takes effort and practice to hone.

That is all.

Elvis is IN the winery

For our *coughmumble*th anniversary, my lovely wife bought us tickets to Elvis Costello's concert at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery.

I can't wait, time to crank some Costello tunes in my office in preparation.

Not that it was in any doubt, but my wife is now officially winning.  All I got her was a gadget from Japan that she insisted be my anniversary present to her instead of my vacation present.  Bah.

Impromptu Messenger Q & A

I browsed a few different user communities the other day to see what people thought about the current state of Windows Live Messenger etc. and there was a lot of confusion and speculation.  Some reasonable, others not.  Although I probably have all of two people reading this blog, I'm going to open up this entry for any questions any of you have about Messenger, and I will answer them as best I can.

I won't be able to answer all questions, but I'll try to explain why I can't.  Some of it is frankly confidential information, some of it I might not know at all and so on, but I'll do what I can and maybe hit up other members of the Messenger product team for answers I don't have.

This is an experiment on my part, so here we go:

What questions do you have about Messenger?

Gregory's Obit

http://www.legacy.com/hartfordcourant/DeathNotices.asp?Page=Lifestory&PersonId=18028302

Very nice, I can't think of anything to add.

Back on the wagon

A few years ago I saw a picture of myself at a temple in Penang, Malaysia and decided instantly that I needed to go on a diet in a big, bad, ugly way.  I had several chins and looked pregnant, and wasn't happy about any of it.

After doing a lot of research I decided on a low carb diet based on the book _Life Without Bread_, which I preferred over the Atkins thang.  This was a year or two before the Atkins craze took hold.

Over the next year to a year and a half I dropped around 30 pounds, purposefully not doing any regular exercise.  I wanted to see what kind of weight I could sustain without working out before getting back into that groove.  It was very successful... not easy, but successful.

Unfortunately, with the success came complacency and I started slowly re-adding more carbs back into my diet.  For a while this was fine, I gained maybe five pounds back total and was still feeling very good about the whole thing.  I'm not sure what tipped me, but now I've gained another ten pounds on top of that and my pants are getting very tight again, and I'm looking back to see what went wrong.

The typical problems with eating too many carbs have been haunting me:  I'm hungry all the time, constantly snacking, craving carbs, and rarely feeling full even when I know I am.  It got so bad over the last year or so that I've been eating candy again, and stress just makes this spiral worse.

I suppose that the one bright side is that I've only put on the amount of weight that I have, it could have been much worse.

So now I'm back to the strict low carb diet and will be much, much more careful about adding any back in once I'm down to a reasonable weight again.  Additionally, this time I'm working out. 

I would really, really like to avoid getting diabetes.

I'm on my second day of my new old diet and it is already having a dramatic effect.  Just cutting out my breakfast banana has made it easy to make it to lunch without feeling hungry at all, and yesterday for the first time in a long time I didn't have any desire to have a mid-afternoon snack.  I brought low carb snacks in to work just in case (almonds and landjaeger) but didn't need them at all.  Just had lunch and I feel nice a full, and expect to be able to make it clear to dinner again without needing more food.

Ecstasy to Agony

Gregory, a good friend since I was at Carnegy Mellon University briefly right out of high school, died today after complications from a relatively straightforward surgery.  He had had a lung transplant a while back and was doing well with it, but the additional stress must have been too much.  After a hell of a fight he died peacefully with his loved ones by his side.

I'll remember a ton of things about him, but probably top of the list is he was a top notch DJ who singlehandedly got me into Techno and Trance music.  His website is having issues (hopefully one of his many technical friends will get it back up and running), but you should be able to get to the AAC versions of his mixes here.  A great Mac enthusiast, too.

As Russ said better than I can:

It is hard to even know what to say, except that we already miss you, gregory.

Dee Dee Bridgewater

Last night we went to Jazz Alley and saw Dee Dee Bridgewater and her quartet.  An incredibly fun show, I've been a fan since I stumbled across her album Dear Ella.  The venue was great, too.  It is essentially a restaurant with a centrally located stage, and the food and service were very good.  We had a table just off the stage and were maybe ten feet away from her as she performed.

Not cheap, but given a fine meal and top notch show like that it was worth every penny.  I'll be back to Jazz Alley again and will see Dee Dee in a heartbeat.

In fact, we're going there again to see Oscar Peterson play.  His website is pretty lame, but he's an incredible pianist (he played with Ella Fitzgerald for quite a while as I remember) and I cannot wait.  Hopefully we'll get great seats again, it would be great to see his hands dancing across the keyboard like I was able to see Dee Dee's pianist.