Posts Tagged ‘Bella’

An aging pup…

Friday, May 13th, 2016

The past week has been a complete and total shit-show. On top of a few family members having heart issues, Bella is now having them as well. On Tuesday I accidentally kicked her and she cried in a way that I’d never heard before. Immediately after she peed in the carpet in the living room and had a bowel movement while she was laying down hiding in the corner. She was brought to vet because on all accounts nothing was normal about the situation. I felt horrible for kicking her, then to see the aftermath I knew her going to a doctors office was important.

During the exam the Vet noted that she heard some crackling in Bella’s lungs and wanted to do a chest X-Ray. Per the xray she claimed that the striations on the lungs confirm the sounds she heard and wanted to start her on medications for Congestive Heart Failure. I was given Lasix (Diuretic), Enalapril (ACE inhibitor), Vetmedin (for CHF) and then Metronidazole (an antibiotic) to address the stomach problems. $500+ later we were out the door and heading home with her. Being as it was fairly late in the evening, and I wanted to be sure I was fully awake for any possible side-effects to occur I waited until 12 hours after leaving the vet (Wednesday) to administer the first round of meds in addition to her daily Insulin routine. Within 1 hour of receiving the pills her water intake increased dramatically. I expected this with the Lasix but it was needed to remove the build up of fluid around her heart. A few extra wee-wee pads down in the house was just going to have to happen. Note: I’m very good about bringing her outside on a regular basis rain, snow or shine. We just put new floors down in a few areas of the house that have yet to be ‘water proofed’ so an increase of pee pads in case of an accident was a must.

Seeing her reaction to all of the pills I made the choice to only give them to her once daily instead of the recommended twice daily. This decision I believe, is ultimately the only reason she is still alive.

As of Thursday morning, 14 hours after receiving all three pills and having two accidents in the house and consuming approximately 64oz of water because of the Lasix, we started having issues with diarrhea. I assumed there would be some kind of issues there based on the introduction of new medications, even with an antibiotic she’s always had a GI reaction to something new going into her body.  But this was something different, this wasn’t just liquid bowel movements every few hours until the Pepto Bismol (2 units) worked its magic. This was borderline amoebic dysentery as she was going both in the house and in the yard every 45 minutes or so. There was absolutely no form to it, pure liquid. I knew I needed to call the vet but I was doing a late mothers-day dinner for Karen so we had dinner. During dinner, not thinking twice about it, I gave her the second round of pills because we were in that 24 hour mark. After the pills we drove Karen back home and then when we walked in the house we entered into a complete shit show. She was vomiting, pooping, gagging. I called the vet. While on the phone explaining all the symptoms she was in the den crapping pure blood. Before the vet even got the chance to say “Bring her in.. this is the emergency fee…” we had the key in the ignition and were on our way to their office.

She threw up a few more times in the car on the way over. I had her on a towel for the blood leaking from her back end and thankfully the towel had enough slack towards her front end for me to catch what was coming out of her mouth. We get to the office, they bring us into an exam room and she continues vomiting. I’m seeing every single one of the pills making an appearance and listing them as each one showed up. It was to the point that the vet tech asked if I was a tech myself (or just in the medical field in general) because I identified every pill by proper name. No, darlin’, this just isn’t my first rodeo and I know which 4 pills went into her, obviously I’ll know which are coming out of her.

They ran blood work, did another x-ray, took urine samples and then brought her back to us. While waiting for results she started back with the diarrhea, I purposely left one (of 7?) instances on the floor for the doctor to see because he wasn’t in the room at the time. It had a lot more blood than he’d thought it would have at this stage of the evening, and now we’re looking at blood clots which is 100% abnormal. He decided it would be an overnight stay for her and ran down the list of treatments to be provided. After 3 hours in the office Sean and I were on our way home, no doggie.

I didn’t sleep last night, I was too busy in tears wondering why this was going on and could I have caused everything with the kick on Tuesday. About 5:30 in the morning I called the office, the vet noted that she’s resting but stable and had her insulin to help her sugars. He noted I would hear from someone either this morning or this afternoon after the next shift of doctors came in and did their rounds for the day.

I don’t know how but I was able to finally catch a few hours of sleep to be woken up by a vet tech around 2:30pm. She noted that Bella is doing much better and actually trying to eat something (which is great) but since it’s dog food and not her usual human-food based diet she’s turned her nose up a few times. She’d basically called me to say “come and get her”, I declined.

I was not rushing over there to pick her up (as badly as I wanted to) because I’m really unhappy with how quickly they wanted to send her home when the issues have yet to be addressed. Why was she crapping blood? Why was she throwing up every five minutes? Why did one doctor put her on Lasix and Enalapril only to have the next one take her off of them because he didn’t hear the same crackling noises in her chest that that the first one did? I wanted a THIRD opinion there. Why is she still hooked onto the IV to help rehydrate her if I can just walk out the door with her? Why are her liver enzymes through the roof? Is it Cushings? It sure looks like it. Why (minus sickness) was her Glucose so high considering she’d only had her insulin a few hours before I brought her in. Does that need to be adjusted? Why did you go out of her way to tell me she has a high fat content in her blood and then not say anything further about it?

I appreciate that they ran every possible test that they could on her and ruled out countless things, but the “cause” of these issues is still up in the air. OK, I get it – she’s a senior dog with Diabetes and CDE/Blindness – but there’s absolutely no reason for any of the problems noted above to be there as they are not connected to her Insulin or Eye Drops. There’s more damn questions than there are answers right now and they just wanted to boot her out the door. The tech went as far as saying “If you’d prefer us to deal with the little bit of diarrhea she still has, that’s fine.” I wanted to scream that she was literally crapping all over me while we were talking to the doctor and I didn’t even budge – but I didn’t. Poop and Vomit don’t bother me, never have and never will. Sean got a little light headed but he can’t even handle a pimple being popped in front of him. No aspect of bodily function bothers me, I can deal with it – so don’t even try to throw that one in my face. I’m not leaving her in your office to wipe her ass, I want to know why these issues are there to begin with damn it.

I 100% believe that, while a few areas of bloodwork were something that’s been ongoing, the introduction of 4 medications this week is exactly why we are where we are, but not a single person will admit to it verbally. I could tell on the vets face last night that he thought the Lasix/Enalapril was the wrong call but he said absolutely nothing because it questions a colleagues decision.

Fast foward to 5:30 this afternoon (Friday). I receive a second call from the same tech and she kind of mumbled to me in a “You were right…” kind of tone about my decision to leave Bella under observation for just a little bit longer. Bella did eat dog food, which is a choice I don’t agree with but it’s the vets office they aren’t going to be sharing their lunches with her. The only way to get her to eat was by hand feeding her and she wasn’t overly thrilled about what she was consuming. She then received her insulin. Around 4-4:30 the diarrhea restarted. She then went on to note that the IVs will continue to keep her hydrated and Enalapril will never be given to her again. Lasix is something we may need to reconsider in the future but Enalapril is the cause of everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours so there is no reason for her to be on it. The Vetmedin is the heart medication she will remain on, and it has the least amount of GI interference. She will not be getting a dose of that until tomorrow afternoon though. They want her system to fully flush the Enalapril as it is now over 48 hours later still upsetting her system. We all could easily confirm via the contents of her vomit and the xray that no pills were left in her stomach last night so her only dose of the Enalapril is there from Wednesday, maybe a micro-dose before vomiting last night but the full dose from Wednesday is what’s working through her right now.

After a half hour conversation with the tech I’m feeling more confident that two nights will do the trick for her. Another 12-24 hours on an IV to fully flush her system out is what is necessary for her to move forward right now. I’m fine with giving her ONE heart pill per day if it helps with her quality of life. She’s already getting her insulin twice daily, and having her eyes treated twice daily as well so that won’t change. By tomorrow we’ll see where we are and hopefully I get to take her home.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions, based on bloodwork I’m pretty much convinced of Cushings based on her liver enzymes but that could also be connected to the Enalapril and would need to be something we revisit in the future. I also want to know if since they’re monitoring her glucose for the next 24 hours if that counts as a glucose curve exam for insulin adjustment at home. We’ll see what they say tomorrow when I’m standing face-to-face with the doctors.

Now: I know there’s at least one asshole out there who says “Just put the dog down”. I can assure you that’s not going to happen for not only my own selfish reasons of not wanting to lose her, but knowing full well that she has plenty of fight left in her and has yet to give me “The Look” that all pet parents know too well. Someone telling me “Just put her down” when I know it’s not time is the equivalent of someone throwing Grandma into the garbage instead of a nursing home because their care is an inconvenience for them. To that kind of person – all I can and will ever say is fuck you and fuck off.

I should be receiving an update either later this evening or tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I have a house to tidy up because I thankfully have nothing to work on today. I need to clear my head and the best way to do that is to blast some music and vacuum up the house. Gives the little patient a nice obstacle free zone for her to walk around in when she gets home anyway.

Fuck you Savannah Animal Hospital!

Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

Note: Grab a bottle of vodka and count the fucks, cause girlies on a rampage today.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and frankly I don’t care – I have a life and a job and that’s where my focus is… so, oh fucking well.  Why am I posting now? Because I’m beyond fucking pissed the fuck off.

Bella’s veterinarian has decided that they will not provide me with a written prescription for Bella’s medication. Originally I had one in my hand, but they made it null and void when I requested a refill on her eye drops. It was given to me a few weeks ago, but based on schedules and deadlines I was unable to get it mailed out to 1-800-Pet-Meds to have it filled.  I had to make the choice (which I wasn’t thrilled about) of calling the vet today to request the immediate refill as she ran out last night.  The reason they revoked the prescription? They claim that 800PetMeds is not a ‘compounding pharmacy’ and the eye drops (1% Cyclosporine Ophthalmic Solution – Basically Restasis for dogs) received via 800PetMeds would need to be ‘diluted’ so it’s safer for her to get her drops.  Now, initially I though “OK, that’s a very weird reasoning to refuse affordable medication – lets look into it.” Because that’s exactly what my brain does – I question the fuck out of everything.  So, it was time to get on the phone.  After speaking with a rep from PetMeds they advised that the product I’d be receiving would be identical to the one that is provided via the vets office and the rep on the phone basically said “You’ve been misinformed as you’d be receiving the exact same product they’re overcharging for with no dilution required.  There’s also a good possibility that the prescription your vet is providing is coming from the exact same pharmaceutical company we received ours from.”

I appreciated the new information and now the gears are in overload. I went back to the listing for the medication on pet meds, read through the FAQ and it was confirmed a second time that the drops are in the correct strength LIQUID solution that I need.  So… that really only means one thing to me: It’s time to find a new vet.

I’ve praised this office over the years because of how nice the staff is, and how well of a job they did when I almost lost her a few years ago thanks to the fucking Milo’s Kitchen/DelMonte Foods debacle.  The one thing I was never thrilled about was just how much money I spend every single time I’ve had to go there – no matter what the reason.

Every time I walk into that damn office it costs me an arm and a leg. I’ve been to EMERGENCY vets in New York that didn’t cost me this much every month. I understand that having a special needs dog can take a toll on your bank account, but to be continuously ripped off because the vet would prefer their overprice prescriptions to be handled in house is highway robbery. It’s something I’m no longer going to stand for.

As of right now – I do have a one month supply that I had no choice but to pay for today since they voided the prescription from outside use. So now I’ll be spending the next month trying to figure out where else I can bring her and if some company SOMEWHERE IN THIS WORLD makes a baby-safe version of moisturizing eye drops that can be picked up over the counter.  Based on what I’ve been reading so-far, as an alternative I can get away with utilizing a simple saline solution in her eyes twice a day in replacement of the ‘medicated’ drops.  I know that no aspect of the prescription is doing anything for her at this point in time.  They aren’t going to magically bring back her vision, and considering the amount of gunk I’m cleaning out of them on a daily basis – the crap is clearly not even working anyway because for ‘moisturizing drops’ – her eyes are bone dry and bloodshot.

No one ever said that having a special needs dog was easy. This is something I’ve known for a while, I’m not naive, I’m not stupid. I’m someone whom loves her dog more than her dog (or this world) would ever know.  As a pet-parent, to a senior blind & diabetic pup, I’m watching her slow down more and more each and every single fucking day. She’s miserable when she gets her eyes cleaned out, she’s miserable with the two injections a day, she’s miserable when taking a walk around the block because she can’t freaking see anything and has to fully depend on me to make sure she’s not running into a ditch or about to bump into a curb. Her anxiety levels are through the freaking roof to the point I can’t even pee without her right under my feet, and forget me even going outside for two minutes to dump the trash – in her eye’s I’m leaving for a month long trip and she instantly starts with the temper tantrum because she’s not right on top of me.  She’s got growths all over her, one large one on her chest that’s in the same area as the massive tumor she’s previously had removed.

Minus the two diagnosis actually being medicated – I constantly bring up EVERYTHING ELSE to the doctors every single time she’s in the office and they just brush it off.  Why? I’m in here for HER health, not to worry about whether or not the other 10 dogs in the overcrowded waiting room get their 2 minutes of your time while your nurses do everything else. All I’m asking for is ten minutes of respect and the ability to have someone not only answer my questions, but tell me what’s wrong with my dog when I ask – or at least offer the tests to give me the answers.  If I’m concerned about a growth – run a damn test. If I tell you that the amount of water consumed every day has not gone down – even with the insulin – then run the test for Cushings that I’ve been demanding for the past 6 months.   If I’m constantly telling you about her shaking-in-the-corner-pissing-herself anxiety attacks – give me a pill OR even the recommendation on an over-the-counter sedative that’s safe to give her.  Why is it so difficult?

It’s not like I’m some junkie asking for drugs for me. My anxiety is easily fixed with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigs. If that doesn’t work, time to remodel the house cause mamma’s punching a god damn hole in the wall.  All I’m trying to do is make her last of the time she has left (no matter how long that is) more tolerable for her.  In no way shape or form do I want her to suffer through ANYTHING going on with her right now.  I’m refusing to put her down because she’s not suffering. When she’s ready to go, she’ll tell me.  If you’re even remotely close to your pets you know damn well when its their time (unless an outside source is involved).  Offices like these, who claim they take pride in their work and really care about their animals blow my god damn mind when they really just function completely on the fact that you would do anything for your pets even if it means taking out another mortgage on your house to cover their greed.

Why is it so wrong that someone whose barely keeping their head above water is interested in not only providing proper medical care for their pet but wanting to do it in a way that’s even remotely affordable? At this point I don’t have a single fucking credit card that isn’t completely maxed out because of medical bills or just daily life in general.  Every aspect of being an adult requires money, I’m not bitching over the fact that they also have ‘adulting’ to do in their own lives and they’re working to survive as well.  But being as they aren’t the ones whom actually MIX these solutions and then have the audacity to do a 300% up-charge because of “Supply & Demand” mentality – why do I have to just sit back and take it?

I work for a living too. I’m not some freeloader whose figured out a way to live off the system. I came from a blue collar family and know what doing 100+ hour weeks can do to ones psyche.  I don’t drive a brand new car and I’m living in a house that needs more work than I think I’ll ever be able to afford in my lifetime. I just need to be cut a little slack, and charging me more than double what something actually costs, on top of the $80 “Oh look, you walked through the door” fee is a freaking slap in the face.

So now, even though I’ve been ranting for the last 20 minutes I still need to not only finish a site that’s due this afternoon but locate and contact every single vets office within a 100 mile radius of me just to find out if there’s any possible way in hell of getting her medications for cheaper.  I’m so tempted to call her old vet in NY but I know damn well that a visit would be required and I have absolutely no money to even consider making that happen. I’m at my whits end. I 100% honestly have no idea what to do anymore.

Remodeling… Redecorating.. Medicating?

Monday, April 13th, 2015

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic.  We’ve started some big projects in the house that have, in turn, verified a few suspicions.

Our kitchen was pretty closed off from the rest of the world.  Even though there’s an addition on the house, nothing was really done to help with the flow (and lighting) for the original house.  So, after determining that the wall that was bugging me the most was load bearing, we took the steps to turn a section of it into a window by removing the drywall, adding a header to transfer the load, and then framing things out.  There’s some painting to do, but the window was finally trimmed out this past week by our friend Colin whom came down for Easter.  We used a wide windowsill for the bottom to give a bar top kind of a look and feel to it, and now even though there’s no flow in terms of walking, it helps to increase a little counter space in the kitchen and offers the ability for more light to come through.  There’s an unfortunate lack of overhead lighting in the living room, so the extra bump of light from the large window in the kitchen makes the difference.  With doing this construction, however, we had to move a few things around in the living room and this is where we found that our problems were a little bigger than the lack of lighting…

As I’ve previously said, Bella’s been having a difficult time for the past few months.  Her eyes have been gunky, she’s been drinking a lot of extra water, and her anxiety is pretty much through the roof.  After finally getting her to the vets office and having some tests run on her, the preliminary results brought back a diagnosis of Stage 1 Diabetes, and her vision loss is in the 75% range.  The vision was something that seems to have been brewing for a little while recently, but moving the furniture in the living room to do the construction on the wall proved that she was a lot further along on the blindness scale than originally anticipated.  The diabetes came as a complete shock to me, her glucose numbers were well into the high 700’s when they’re only supposed to be in the low to mid 100’s.  This unfortunately means 2 insulin injections daily. I would love to say that’s only until her numbers come down and then we can adjust things, but I think it may wind up being for the rest of her life and I can’t even begin to describe the anxiety she’s experiencing because of it.  The back of her neck is so sore from the injections and she’s lashing out like all holy hell if you get anywhere near her.  It’s a work in progress, but we’re trying our hardest to make her as comfortable as possible.

The gunk build up on her eye wasn’t completely due to an infection as we originally thought.  She does have a minor infection in the eye that houses the cataract, unfortunately this eye is the one where she’s lost complete vision.  She’s receiving antibiotic eyedrops twice daily for this. But the gunk build up, overall, is due to chronic dry eye. She’s receiving two more drops daily to keep her eyes lubricated.  The issue though.. I believe they cause either a slight dialysis or just blurred vision because her vision seems to have been getting worse since we implemented the drops into the daily routine.  She’s walking into walls more often than usual and I’ve noticed she has no interest in being outside while the sun is up because she can’t seem to get comfortable when there’s a brighter light shining into her eyes.  I’ve also noticed that they clearly sting a little because as soon as either of the drops go into her eyes she’s wanting to rub them out as quickly as possible.  I’ve made it a point to kind of rub around her eye to make sure the medication gets to the back of her eye were it’s needed in hopes that she doesn’t wind up completely rubbing it into the carpet as soon as she has the chance to rub her face after we’re done.

Everything combined, however, is a major stress factor for her life.  She’s getting the injections every 12 hours, and also the eye drops every 12 hours.  The injections is more of a stress factor than the drops, the drops just seem to be happening more often because she needs multiple drops within an hour of each other so ensure that one doesn’t cancel out the other. I’m also still using the saline eye wash to help keep the gunk from around her eye from getting hard so her eyes are as clear as they can possibly be.  She’s fine with the eye wash, but I’m sure that’s due to the fact that she’s not getting anything IN her eye, I’m only wiping the crust from around it.  As clear as her eyes appear, I know the vision just isn’t there anymore and unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about that.

Her drinking has subsided, but her bladder control is pretty much out the window. I’m doing everything I can to ensure she’s going out as regularly as possible to relieve herself, but there’s still been accidents in the house and even with everything else going on with her – that’s where MY anxiety levels have skyrocketed. I’ve been shampooing carpets regularly but she was clearly going in the house more often than I originally noticed so there’s heavily perfumed areas of urine in my carpet that I can’t get out with a regular home-based cleaner, to the point that I may need to have Stanley Steemer come in for the deep clean in hopes the steam and cleaning solutions penetrate down to the padding where the smells are being held.  On warmer/humid days the smell is overwhelming and as someone who takes pride in keeping a clean house, having pet odors to this degree is embarrassing as all hell for me.  Having a house guest for a week and needing to have candles going at all times just to mask the smells that I couldn’t get up with the cleaner wasn’t a pleasant experience. I know that he didn’t care, and he only said “ooh, I smell pee” once in the 7 days he was here but the fact that it was even the topic of conversation wasn’t something I was thrilled about.

I knew when we purchased this home that I’d eventually be removing all of the current ‘flooring’.  The floor in the living room/dining room is a weird tan tone that’s been on the floor for probably 30 years.  The carpeting in the hallway and three bedrooms is also 30 years old and a very traditional rose color for the late 70’s that is just ugly regardless of stains.  The den and my closet have a newer berber carpet, but even low piles hold smells and there were stains that I couldn’t removed with the cleaner last year that have only gotten worse over time. So, by default, I’ve been looking into wood flooring.  While it’s more expensive than just replacing carpet, it also gives me a solid floor to easily wipe up instead of having to worry about something soaking into padding.  I also feel it would help to increase the value of the house since it’s more ascetically pleasing in it’s own right. At this point I’d be content with having solid vinyl floors throughout the whole house just so there’s a barrier there for no liquid to penetration.  So, the best of both worlds, I’m looking into laminate hard woods through Lumber Liquidators. I’ve found a few that have the tone I want, and would look amazing with the color I plan on painting all the walls with (Sherwin Williams – Canvas Tan).  The issue is really just buying it and putting it down, cost for everything was about $1200. This covers the cost of wood the entire first floor (minus kitchen and bathrooms), the padding and tools.  Considering having a company come in to do this job would run me over $8000… it’s a pretty good deal.

This isn’t something that will happen in the near future though, finances don’t allow for that kind of modification being as we still have a roof in need of repair, a kitchen that requires the completion of a remodel and a basement to reconfigure to accommodate the possibility of having a few people move in within the next year or so.  That mixed with the fact that I now desperately need to completely fence in the back yard because of Bella’s lack of desire to take a proper walk at night… money’s tight.   We’re absolutely fine on paying bills, there’s no lack of food, we’re not going ‘without’ for anything. We’re comfortable month to month and putting money aside for what we need, but there’s no overflow where we can just pull out money and get things done at once. This house will continue to be a ‘work in progress’ for the next 30 years, but we do have our priorities.

It would be amazing if like $75,000 fell into my hands somehow.  I know our Mortgage still has over 200k on it, and we could easily pay down the principle with 75,000 to help in the long term, but when you factor in everything that needs to be done in and around the house – that bit of money could go a really long way. It would cover all debts (minus mortgage), the roof, a fence, tree removal, landscaping, new flooring, kitchen remodel, and the basement.  It could also cover getting a shed into the yard so I can gain use of my garage for more than a dumping ground and actually have the ability to park in there. It could go so, so far it just needs to appear. Will it? Probably not, but that’s because I don’t live in a dream world where it grows on trees and gets handed to you.

In any event, it’s time for someone’s eyes to get some drops and there’s plenty of work to get done around the house while my inbox is still empty.  Those dishes won’t do themselves… and trust me – I’ve been hoping for that too.

Wrapping my head around it….

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

The last year on Bella has been pretty rough.  We bought a house, so not only did she have a new floor plan (and two-level living) to get accustomed to, but she also had a new neighborhood to get used to as well.  Anytime she got into the car it was either a 10 minute ride to Sean’s mom’s house or a 4.5 hour drive up to NY to visit my family.  We’ve done everything we could to try to keep her as comfortable as possible, but lately things are taking a turn and I’m trying to keep myself together to figure out the best road possible.

For a little bit now Bella has been dealing with conjunctivitis.  I’ve been doing everything possible to keep her eye clean and remove all the gunky discharge and any crust around her eyes on a daily basis. It’s been a battle, because she’s not exactly keen on having anything near her eyes but it’s something that needs to be done and that’s that.  I’ve noticed over the last few weeks that she’s been having trouble getting around.  Going up and down stairs has been rough on her, and she’s refusing to walk at night.

To help a little bit I purchased new pet steps for the bedroom, this has helped her for the getting on the bed aspect of her night, but it doesn’t help her with getting off the bed as she just stumbles down.  I have two sets of stairs in the room, neither one is the right depth for her to manage them.  When she goes down the stairs now (for the house itself) she pulls herself to one side and kind of zig-zags down each step. So she’ll pull towards the right with her front paws and swing her legs down, then pull towards the left and repeat the process.  She isn’t able to do this with the bedroom stairs because they aren’t as wide, so the only thing I can think of is to just build a staircase in the room, but unfortunately the master is just not big enough to be able to pull that off.

Now, Sean and I have been hit with some serious deadlines over the past year so we’ve gotten ourselves on a schedule that is fairly chaotic but gives us the ability to get things done. While it’s only the two of us and there’s no distractions in the house we probably could get away with working at any time of the day but we choose to go with the overnight hours.  Why? I honestly don’t know. But I know I’m more content with finishing up for the day at 6am instead of 6pm.  It’s been like this for as long as I can remember and I think it’s based on the fact that up until a year ago we lived in homes with others so during the day it was harder to concentrate with all of the commotion. I think this trained us into thinking the overnight was better, and that’s just the way it is.

Having our schedule like this means that Bella’s had to adjust to ‘overnight’ life as well. So where most people would walk their dog at 9am, I’m walking her at 9pm.  That’s really the only major ‘adjustment’ she’s ever had to make.  She sleeps all day, and she’s done this since she was a puppy.  She eats 3 times a day, it’s not like her diet / appetite has changed in her 11 years of life. The one thing she’s been doing a lot more of lately is drinking water, but I’ve assumed that has to do with the fact that for quite some time the humidifier on our furnace was broken and EVERYONE was drinking a lot more since the air was so dry. I think I was going through about a tube of chap-stick every two weeks just to keep my lips from bleeding. So her having a little more water hasn’t phased me..

She’s a normal dog, living a normal life. Recently though, in an effort to help make her life a little easier, I’ve begun walking her while it’s still light out. I figured the darkness for a dog who can really only see shadows at this point was just cruel and maybe it being brighter out during the day would help so she could at least take a proper walk without her eyes playing a factor.  That’s not the case though…

I don’t know if there’s something outside that she just doesn’t like, or if she’s scared of something, or has less vision ability than I originally thought, but she downright refuses to walk. Daytime, nighttime, doesn’t matter.  She won’t stray far from the end of the driveway and I feel cruel dragging her up the block when she’s planted all four paws on the ground and refuses to budge.  She pulls herself back so hard that she wiggles out of her leash and then runs home as fast as she possibly can.  Today I brought her out the front door and then instead of going to the street I decided to just try and take her around the house.  There’s plenty of grass for her to relieve herself so she had ample opportunity to do whatever she needed to do.  I got her to go #1 a few times, but #2 is where she seems to draw the line.  Someone happened to close a car door while she was sniffing around so her attention went elsewhere.  By the time she realized where she was running she just went right to the front door. She wasn’t scared of the car door, she was her usual “Where’d that come from?” determined investigator. I kind of dragged her towards the other side of the house and thankfully she finally went #2, but she just was not willing to be outside at all. I could finally get her towards the back door of the house and she ran in, laid down, and hasn’t moved since.

At this point I’m pretty much at my whits end.  It’s not that I’m lacking the patience that is required when dealing with an older animal, that’s not the case at all.  I’m lacking the ability to wrap my head around what I can do for her to make her life easier.  If she was actually sick I would bring her to the vet and see what they recommend (meds  / diet wise) to give her a better quality of life.  Since the only thing physically wrong at this moment in time is the loss of eyesight and the anxiety, I’m not going to even bother wasting the money on going to the vet for them to tell me there’s nothing that can be done.

I’ve been through countless websites, I’ve put in all of her symptoms and everyone has something different.  One site says she’s a diabetic (and requires medication), another says she’s got Cushings (which requires chemo). Then they have a whole list of things for anxiety that all require some kind of medication.  I don’t like the idea of putting her on any meds, she’s gotten through life this long without them and I think that once you introduce medication her quality of life goes down (specifically if she does have Cushings and I introduce Chemotherapy).  There is no quality of life for a dog undergoing chemo, if anything it shortens her life because chemo has a way of not only removing the bad cells in the body, but taking the good ones and burning them off too.

I just don’t know what to do and I’m at a complete loss.  I know that smaller breed dogs live longer than larger breeds, and the oldest smaller breed dog I’ve been around was 17 when needing to be put down because she developed seizures later in life.  Bella’s only 11, part of me wants to believe that I can have another 6 years with her, but at this point in time, with how dramatically she’s slowed down, the lack of eyesight and the possibility of her having cancer that requires chemo, (not like the cancer she had when she was younger where the tumor was completely removed from her stomach),  the massive anxiety about ANYTHING going on, and the attachment issues of my not even being able to pee without her attached to my foot… it’s all just overwhelming.

I know that she’s not exactly having a field day either, I’m not trying to take anything away from her in that regard. The biggest difference between animals and humans is based heavily on the fact that they can’t communicate verbally when something is wrong. I know that when she pulls back she’s experiencing her bouts with anxiety, I know when she keeps bumping her head into things it’s because it’s not where it’s supposed to be and she wasn’t expecting it, this falls with her vision problems.  I’m just so frustrated with the fact that I physically can’t do anything to help her and have absolutely no control over the situation.

I’m also downright heartbroken because she’s my baby. She’s been the only constant in my life for the past 11 years.  I’ve lost so many people close to me that she was who I’d turn to for comfort and cuddles when I needed them the most.

After re-reading this post I realized it seems as though I’m considering putting her to sleep.  Please know that is the absolute farthest thing from my mind, I want to keep her for as long as she’ll allow me too.  I’ve always believed if an animal feels it’s their time to go (and there isn’t an outside factor involved) they will let you know. I know that at this point in time that’s not an option, and it’s just not the time.  I’m just stumped over what the next step is, what I need to do in order to give her a good quality of life before her time is actually up.

It’s just a tough road ahead.

We’re getting there…

Monday, May 12th, 2014

I’ve wanted to actually sit down and post for well over a month and a half, but the joy of homeownership when the place is constantly a wreck tends to take the priority.  So, since it’s been so long, I now don’t even know where to start.

If you follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook you’d know that we did actually close on the house and get the keys, it happened on March 14th instead of March 12th but it happened. Since then it’s been a mad-dash of “Get This”, “Fix This”, “Clean This”, followed by INSERT MORE COFFEE!!  The house was so freaking disgusting after we got here on closing day. It took me over a week of shampooing carpets before I was even remotely comfortable with moving in my stuff over here. The bathrooms were scrubbed a few times with A LOT of bleach, the garage was full of crap that the previous owners should have gotten rid of and it fucking cost us money to do it, money we didn’t have because they completely fucking screwed us during this entire god damn process.  After going through this house we’ve easily determined that these people were low-life scum who had absolutely no idea what broom was, let alone any advanced cleaning accessory such as a SPONGE. The layers of slime that were scrubbed off of the showers is still mind-blowing to me… to the point that I’m now scrubbing the shower down almost every day just to make sure there’s none of their residue making an appearance – my O.C.D. in this house is possibly 10 times worse than it’s ever been before.  I swear to god if they were ever dumb enough to step foot on this property I’d probably shove a few of the shot-gun shells found in our crawl space straight up their asses.

In the past month we’ve gotten the bare essentials taken care of on the house, the rest are all happening this summer. We’ve got a huge couch and a big comfy chair (for Sean) in the Den. We recently picked up a gorgeous 6-person cherry dining table to start building up the dining room, we bought a small kitchen table the first week so we had somewhere to eat, picked up some bar stools on clearance from Lowes that were a really good find. George and Sean have been busy with some of the maintenance around the house so that we can be in a livable environment, and the only major thing left to accomplish this upcoming summer is to get the roof patched up.  If we had a little more wiggle room with the bank account this summer we’d have a company come in to take down a few of the over-grown (and dying) trees in the back yard so we can start putting in posts for a fence.  Why? Cause the neighbor behind us has the most annoying dog in the world and I’d rather it no longer have the ability to see us whenever we pass by one of our windows, and I want a damn pool so a fence must come first!

Sean’s been really happy down in his basement office, I was able to spend some time getting my office painted and setup so the only thing at this point that’s missing is a new desk but I’m making due with the folding table for now, it’s holding the iMac up pretty well, as well as the side monitor so I think I’ll be OK for a little while. Of course I’m going to need to get my Windows desktop setup at some point for cross-browser testing but I’ll continue to utilize the free services for now.  I could really care less if IE6 supports something anyway, if you’re still using IE6 then you shouldn’t have a computer to begin with.

The one big draw-back for life recently is the fact that my cell-phone is pretty much useless. I dropped it on the day of closing and the back popped off, it’s currently being held together with electrical tape and the battery only holds a charge for about 30-60 minutes. I literally have to keep it on the charger unless I’m talking on it, in which case I have to make sure there’s a charger close by.  Now, the battery was shit before I broke the back off of the phone, it’s just gotten much worse over time so I’m going to assume that replacing it should help to solve a few of my problems.  Thankfully, even though the Droid-4 was made in a way that Verizon would have to change the battery for you, I was able to break the piece off that Verizon has the tool for and I don’t need to waste money by bringing anything to them.  So, I’m gonna spend $20 on Amazon for a replacement and hopefully be good to go. I’m not due for an upgrade, but with the cost of cellphones I’d rather salvage the one I have for as long as humanly possible.  There’s no point in my spending $200 to upgrade every two years when I can just pick up a $20 battery that should hopefully give me at least 12 months without any problems.

BUT – the one thing we’re doing to help with the problem is turning our Double Play with Comcast into a Triple Play. Sean didn’t really see the point in having a house phone in the beginning, but now that he’s seeing how many problems I’m having with my phone and seeing how often I need to be ON the phone because my entire family and all of my friends live in NY he’s realizing that the house phone will be an essential part of life here for me. So tonight while we were in Staples we found an AT&T phone system for like $100 that included like 5 phones which would pretty much cover every room in the house, Sean figured it would be cheaper on Amazon so we walked away from it, but I saw saw it for like $130 on Amazon so I guess I’ll be heading back to Staples… when will men learn to listen?

In any event, I have an inbox full of crap to take care of and eyelids that are not willing to cooperate, so it’s time to increase my caffeine and while that’s working through my system it’s time to walk the dog. If it weren’t for her snoring next to me, I honestly would have completely forgotten it’s time for her to head around the block.

Move quicker damn it!

Tuesday, February 25th, 2014

We’re still at the mercy of the bank.  We’ve had to add a second co-signer to the loan because the first one (while well qualified) pays rent so they then needed to re-crunch the numbers.  The issue now is the fact that they sent all of this to us on Monday 24th, which is the day when we’re supposed to be letting the current home owners know we’re “good to go” and they can work on getting their stuff out of the house so we can close on Friday. We, unfortunately, have not gotten the green light – all we got was an extra 60 pages of a contract that needed to be filled out and sent back ASAP – now we’re not going to know a damn thing until tomorrow afternoon.

It’s a 50/50 chance that we’ll be closing on Friday, but at this point I’m leaning more towards next week based on how royally we’ve been screwed this entire time. I, personally, could care less about how this is effecting the current home owners because they lied way too much for me TO CARE.  I got this sob story about how they’re going into assisted living, can’t afford their bills, yada yada. Meanwhile, they were just downsizing and moving to a different community.  Why lie? Why even concoct a story? You didn’t need to say a damn thing to us, you could have been honest and said that the house was just too big for you to handle. Why even come up with some bull shit to try to tug the heart strings? You’re not dealing with a native Delawarian.. you’re dealing with a New Yorker who couldn’t give two shits about you at the end of the day anyway!

So by tomorrow afternoon (fingers crossed) we’ll know our closing date. I’m still hoping it’s Friday just because I’m itching to get the hell in there and scrub the crap out of the place but who knows. Either way I have a stock of cleaning supplies already written down that I need to buy and bring over there. I just want start the cleaning process, have Comcast come in to wire the place and the rest is cake.

I haven’t even started packing, it’s not because I’ve been too lazy to get started it’s because the “Waiting Game” aspect of things has lead me to believe that this wasn’t actually going to happen for us. Is there a lot to pack? Sure. Is it something I could knock out in a few days? Yes. That’s the beauty part. When you own the home and you’re not leaving a “Rental” property – you’ve got a little time to get yourself in and settled. So by default the first task is to get the place cleaned up, while cleaning have anything installed by an outside company that needs to be installed (In our case it’s just Comcast).  Then we’ll be heading over to a few furniture places because the only pieces of furniture we currently own are a bed and two desks. Clearly in a 2900 sqft home we’re going to need a lot more.  So, first purchase will be a couch, and then I’m hitting up every Thrift Store I can find to get the rest of the house furnished. I will NEVER buy a ‘used’ sofa from anyone. You never know where the sofa really came from, and I don’t want the headache of scrubbing things down to the point I’m stripping the color off the fabric because it’s just not clean enough for me to have any piece of mind.  So the sofa will be brand new, where as anything wood based (dining room table/chairs, end tables, coffee table, dresser, nightstands, etc) will come from thrift shops and flea markets. Why? Cause I know I can easily scrub them down and I’ll probably wind up stripping the paint off and staining them anyway.

Do I have it all figured out? of course. Will things go any faster because I have them figured out? Of course not! Sean’s a complete impatient mess right now, but I know he just wants to get this whole process over and done with so we can focus on more important things. I typically will keep the frustration levels to myself, but that’s because I know when it comes to certain things I can handle stress better. I also know I can handle paperwork better, but when you’re exposed to that stuff it’s just something you get used to.

The only thing that I’m increasingly growing impatient about is the fact that Bella’s hair is way too long and she’s been panting like all holy hell because it’s always so damn warm in this house. I spend a lot of time in the bedroom with the window open and the overhead fan on but that doesn’t help her comfort levels. I want to know the exact monetary numbers we’re dealing with for the closing on this house so that I know if there’s an extra $100 in the budget for me to get her groomed just so that’s one less thing to stress about.

A big stress factor right now is work has really, really slowed down to the point that it’s scaring me. I’ve always got little things to do but there’s nothing to really solidly keep myself as busy as I’d prefer. The only benefit to this is it’s given me time to get a new template together for AGn Designs, to replace the “Temporary Site” that’s been sitting there for two years that I freaking hate. I still have like five or six pages to format though, so lord only knows when that will be completed.

Either way, my inbox is showing me that I have a few things to accomplish today so hopefully I’ll be able to get them knocked out and keep my mind off everything with the house.

Down with Del Monte!

Saturday, August 3rd, 2013

I’m going to warn all readers in advance, this is a very graphic post and if you can not handle canine bodily fluids – this is not the post for you to read.

I’ve been flustered for so much of the past week that I honestly didn’t even notice it was Saturday until I looked at my phone this afternoon. I’ve been stuck in the world of “WOW, What the hell am I going to do now?”.

Last Saturday (7/27) I noticed Bella had a little hint if diarrhea after vomiting. Since this only happened in a small amount, and it’s not uncommon for her to have the occasional diarrhea, I honestly didn’t think anything of it. Within a few hours she appeared to be feeling just fine and was jumping and playing all over the house.  She was playing and enjoying life on Sunday and even Monday too. You can imagine my surprise when on Tuesday she went downhill, and fast.  The poor thing was dealing with excessive vomiting, and by excessive I mean she was throwing up every 10 to 15 minutes for a solid 3 hours before I could actually get her into the vets office.  By then, she was so weak that she didn’t even care where she was.  Normally, at the vet she’s very quick to want to jump off of the exam table and run out the door.  She couldn’t even hold her little body up to do that.

After telling the tech what had been going on, and providing her with a list of everything she eaten in the past 72 hours they brought her into the back room to run blood work.  After that, the vet came back in and asked if anything like this had every happened to her before, I confirmed that it hadn’t because, for the most part, she’s a healthy dog.  She requested that we do an X-Ray on her to be sure that she doesn’t have anything stuck in her system that could be causing this. I did note that the first instance of vomiting included a non-digested piece of a new treat that we were trying out. She noted that the food consumed over the past 72 hours wasn’t really cause for concern, but then noted that the addition of new treats (MILO’S KITCHEN – GRILLED STEAK) to her diet have her worried.  She wound up having to do a third X-Ray on Bella as her blood work came back and something just didn’t seem right.

She came back into the room, said that they see no blockage but Bella would need to stay overnight based on what they found with blood work and X-Rays. Her liver was three times larger than it was supposed to be. Size wise it was the equivalent of what they would see on a 250-pound Mastiff, not a 20-pound Lhasa Apso.  Her blood work showed that her Enzyme levels were dangerously high as well. She believed this to be due to the excessive vomiting.  She also noticed that her intestines were two times larger than they were supposed to be. There was a lot of liquid in her intestines with gas pockets. It was not a healthy-looking situation.

I told them to do whatever they needed to do to keep her alive, and I shit you not I was 100% convinced I would never be seeing my dog again based on how horribly ill she was at that point. She’d thrown up a few times during the exam, and the final ‘vomit’ smelled like Bile. It wasn’t the stomach-acid type of throw up, it literally seemed as though she was pooping out of her mouth.  She was rushed into the back room so she could be placed on an IV, she was dehydrating fast and they wanted to make sure there were enough fluids in her for the chance that she could make it through the night.

The doctor came back in the room and noted that she’d seen something like this recently. When we’d mentioned “Milo’s Kitchen” to her, she knew things would need to be rushed moving forward. She’d had a dog in that past weekend who was unfortunately in full renal failure and did not survive the night. The only thing that stuck out in the very healthy dogs diet was the “Milo’s Kitchen”.  The vet knew of a previous recall on the Chicken Jerky, but this dog consumed one of the “Sausage” treats that actually lead to the death of the animal.

Since there was nothing that I could physically do, I left Bella in their hands.  I called the office around 11pm, they’re a 24-hour facility so I knew someone would be there, and I – at that point – was a complete and total worry wort. This is my baby after-all.  The overnight vet noted that she is now dealing with excessive amounts of diarrhea and they’ve increased the fluids to keep her hydrated.  She was also given quite a few ‘butt baths’ so she wasn’t sitting in her own fecal matter.  She messed the cage a few times, and was taken outside quite a few times as well. The vet repeated, that this is a very, very sick dog.

I had a lot of trouble falling asleep, all I wanted to do was rush over there and hold her but based on how ill she was I knew that wasn’t a possibility.  I wanted her to just get better, she separation anxiety would have to be on hold for another day. The office called around 12:30PM, they noted that she’s doing much better and said that if I could bring in some light food for her, that I could bring her home so she had the ability to heal the rest of the way.  I wasn’t comfortable with this statement, not after the day before.

I did head over to the office a little later that afternoon with boiled chicken and rice in a bowl for her to try to get her to eat. Prior to going in there I did speak with the vet, she noted that that mornings X-Ray showed that her intestines had gone down to normal size, and that her liver had also gone down in size as well. We weren’t in the clear, her liver was still very enlarged.  The doctor and I agreed that she was to have a cat-scan prior to my even attempting to bring her home just to confirm that there were no stones or anything blocking her digestive track that could have been causing this. We were both 100% on the fact that it was related to “Milo’s Kitchen” but wanted to make sure either way.

I went into the back room, she was super excited to see me and crying excessively.  She was on her second IV bag of the day to keep her hydrated and she had absolutely no interest in any of the food I was trying to give her, she wanted out more than anything. After trying for about 10 minutes the vet said that the two bites of food should be enough for us to know if something is going to come back up and from there they whisked her away to the cat-scan. That scan confirmed there was nothing blocking any of her digestive track that could have caused this, it also confirmed that the treats were 100% of the cause being as her normal-diet could NOT have had this effect on her.

I agreed to take her home based on their findings, and was also provided with more medications than I had ever seen before in my life. Hell, when Karen was on Chemo she didn’t need this many pills. Anti-Diarrheal, Anti-Nausea, Anti-Biotic, Pain Killer and ear drops. The drops are there because, on top of everything, Bella also now had an ear infection.

As soon as we got home she peed like she hadn’t gone in months and went right to sleep. She was still woozy from all of the medications she’d received that day, and had absolutely no interest in eating ANYTHING. Her diet now consists of boiled chicken and ground beef. I can use either rice or potatoes to pair up with it.

I began reading through the ingredients on the packaging for her treats.  I don’t keep a ‘stock’ of them, she goes through one bag at a time. Usually she’s on Beggin’ Strips, but since she’s shown no interest in them I figured it was time to change it up – this is why she was switched to “Milo’s Kitchen” because it looked semi-natural and claimed it was made in America.  I picked up the Grilled Steak and the Sausage w/ Rice treats for her from the supermarket. These are the “items” that were in her system prior to it almost completely shutting down.

I’m 100% taking Bella off of any store-bought pet foot (wet & dry) as well as treats.  She’ll be eating only homemade dog food AND treats for the rest of her life. Why? Because every single dog treat on the shelves contains one (or both) of these ingredients.

#1 – Propylene Glycol – Commonly found on the ingredients list as a way to preserve moisture content in dog foods (hard and soft) as well as treats. It’s actual use? It’s the key component in newer automotive ANTIFREEZE.

#2 – Glycerin – Commonly found in dry food, wet food and dog treats. Until recently it was a byproduct of soap making. Today, however, it’s a byproduct of biofuels.

These two ingredients were found in her system on the blood test, to further confirm that it was the treats that did it for her.  The food she was eating prior to any of this starting was (for the most part) people food. If I can’t pronounce what’s on the packaging, why would I feed it to her? This dog has survived the past 9 years on pasta, chicken, beef, rice, potatoes and veggies. If all of these ingredients are supposedly IN her dog food, why shouldn’t I give her exactly what the packaging claims it will be?

The chemical mark-up for dog treats is disgusting, point blank.  These items are not found in cat treats/food because the FDA smartened up and regulated it after so many cats had passed away after consuming it.  At this point, however, no regulation is being made on the dog food. With this, Bella will never be eating dog food OR treats again. Anything by the parent company of “Del Monte” is the first thing to go. There have been so many recalls for every single one of their brands (including “Milo’s Kitchen”) that I wish I would have known something about it sooner.

So how do I fix this? Well, being as her time at the vet completely wiped out my checking account for over $1,200 it’s a little hard to bring money together right now to make proper dog food for her but I am utilizing what I have in my freezer to insure that she’s only eating food that humans eat. Why? Because if I’m not getting sick off of it – I know she won’t either.  When I get paid on Monday, however, I’ll be taking some money and purchasing a food dehydrator. From now on I’ll be making my own dog treats and there will be absolutely no way in hell that she will ever be touching one of the ‘fancy’ ones that you see in the supermarkets.

How should you fix this? Avoid the same things that I am, this should insure that your dog is living a much happier life.

Avoid anything manufactured by “Del Monte” foods. They clearly do not care about the health of your animal, why continue to fill their pockets with money?

Avoid anything treats that were made in China, Brazil, Chile, South-America in general. This includes Raw Hide!

If you’re keen on raw-hide, make sure you’re also avoiding that “Made in China” label. It’s posted on 100% of the bones you find in your local super market. As long as you see that notice, it’s time to put down the treat and walk away.

The company I’m 100% supporting right now is Wholesome Hide, they’re made in a America, they actually look like a proper raw-hide, and they do not contain the bits of random animal shavings in the middle. It’s a solid roll of hide and 100% natural. There’s no funky food coloring, there’s no rope-like material holding it together. Wholesome Hide is a company you know that you can trust, there have also been 0 (yes ZERO) recalls on their products.  What does that tell you about how much they care about your animal? Lord knows Del Monte doesn’t, look at their track record!

Del Monte Foods –  These are a list of what to completely avoid.

  • Kibbles & Bits
  • Milkbone
  • Pup-Peroni
  • Meaty Bone
  • Milo’s Kitchen
  • Gravy Train
  • Canine Carry Outs
  • Jerky Treats
  • Snausages
  • Nature’s Recipe

And, by default of course, I will no longer be eating ANYTHING they make. Not that their ‘human’ food was any better, but I’m officially boycotting the entire fucking company.

So yea, that’s been my week.

All I can say to sum it up, make sure you’re reading every single label for your dog the same way that you do for yourself. If you can not pronounce the chemical in the food, you’re better off not allowing them to have any access to it either. It’s better for their health in the long run. Yes, there may be brands out there that are 100% safe for your dog to consume (food wise), but make sure you’ve done your research too. Even Beneful, a “trusted brand” for pet-health has had numerous recalls and pet-deaths attached to their names.

Be careful.

Busy…busy bee…

Tuesday, June 25th, 2013

Life hasn’t stopped in the past few weeks, I’m honestly surprised I have an ounce of downtime to even sit here and blog but I’m doing it, and the only way to get through it will be numbers…

#1 – A new pet…
While outside for my usual 4am smoke break I couldn’t help but hear excessive meowing coming from the lawn across the street. I believed it to be either a cat in heat, or one about to give birth. So, of course, you could imagine my surprise when there was all of a sudden a little face coming out from under my car begging for attention. Me, being an animal lover by default (one of my weaknesses), I figured she’s super tiny, more than likely a kitten and very thin so she’s got to be hungry. So I threw some of Bella’s food at her – she scoffed it and kind of went away but was lingering because she was clearly feeling us out (Sean and I were both outside at this point).  She lingered so much to the point that she wound up walking around on the deck while we were sitting there.  For an animal this social there was no way in hell she was a ferral cat because if they aren’t socialized within the first 2 months of birth they typically will never like people. Obviously someone was caring for this little thing in the past but lord knows where that owner is now (it’s been 3 weeks, and to date there’s been no one looking for her).  After she hopped up in my lap I instantly knew that this had to be someones cat, even if they were only feeding her outside, she absolutely had to be someones cat.  So all of us (Karen, Sean and myself) continued to check on her during the course of the next few days. She was easy to find, she never left the porch.  Karen and I brought her to the vet where she was treated with frontline and given a distemper. The vet confirmed my thought of her being between 6 and 12 months old, she’s way too tiny to not be a kitten – no matter how malnourished she potentially was.  We kept her, regardless of the fact that Sean’s allergic to her and she was scared shitless of Bella (bull in china shop that dog is, I swear).  We got her all setup in Karen’s room, she’s been overloaded with toys and the luxury of sleeping in a super fluffy King bed with Karen (who has a feather topper on it so it’s extra damn fluffy, like sleeping on a cloud).  There’s no way in hell this cat’s going anywhere, she’s too comfortable… even though none of us are…

Why?

#2 – FUCKING FLEAS
This cats infested with fleas, well – was.  Her time spent on the deck was enough for a few of them to jump off of her and go under the house and then I’ve been playing exterminator for the past three weeks.  My legs are bitten to crap from mosquitos because I was out on the deck every single day scrubbing it down with borax, bleach, dawn (which supposedly kills them) and ammonia.  Thank goodness I was outside considering I was technically making mustard gas just to get rid of the damn bugs.  Nothing I was doing was working and we couldn’t get the exterminator to the house thanks to the absolutely dreadful weather we’ve been having.  Thankfully I did start to get things under control, and damn do we have the cleanest deck in the complex.  Mother Nature, instead of working against us (in numerous different ways) decided to work in our favor this past week and on Friday the exterminator came in and sprayed down the whole exterior of the house. For two days I didn’t see a single damn bug, and they had plenty of opportunity to pop back up. THANK GOD FOR EXTERMINATORS!  The inside of the house was treated a week and a half prior to them treating the outside. The first guy showed up on a day when it was pouring and there was a moat around the house, but he got through it and got us started on killing everything off inside of the house.  It didn’t 100% do the trick because there was still the massive infestation outside. So thankfully with the second coat on the carpet, and the coat put on the exterior of the house and the whole perimeter of the property – we’re good to go… just a bit itchy from all of the bites but at least I know they’re gone!

#3 – WORK SUCKS
I’ve been non-fucking-stop with the tight deadlines. My eyes are burning from staring at the screen all day and each deadline is getting tighter than the last. The thing that kills me, and never ceases to amaze me… Clients will take 3-4 days to get back to you and then decide they want something done in 24-hours or they won’t pay for it. Listen up dickwads… your lack of ability to read your email instead of sexting with your wife/girlfriend would probably make ME less bitchy when you do ask for something… just saying.

#4 – Travel, Travel, Travel
I feel like for the past year I’ve spent more time in my car than I have anywhere else.  While this might not seem odd, for someone who works from-home… it kind of us. Either I’m up in Baltimore, or just over the MD border on Delmarva or up on Long Island… I feel like it just doesn’t stop and I should always be prepared for a long ass car ride. The most recent one was yesterday, Sean and I are up in NY for my father and sister’s birthdays this week.  We’re rushing back on the 30th so I can get Bella to the groomer on the 2nd, and hopefully have enough time to completely clean up the house for the 4th when our friend Colin is coming down to stay with us until the 9th. And yes, there are days in between but this isn’t like driving an hour out east to visit family like we used to do. It’s a 4.5 hour car ride and when you’re dealing with traffic that number has the ability to be doubled at any given time.  Case and point – driving up here yesterday took us over 6 hours. Why? We had a nice storm following us up and major construction on the NJ Turnpike so of course getting to Long Island in a timely manor was completely thrown out the window. To make matters worse, the poor dog is in desperate need of a grooming and it was a super muggy day so it took forever for the car to properly cool off so she could be comfortable.  I felt so bad for the poor thing, she must have had a full 20 oz. bottle of water just for the ride up – she never drinks that much but could not stop panting, and even though we’re in a relatively cool house now (being maintained at 68*) she’s still panting.  I can’t wait to get her shaved.

#5 – Heat Wave…
The official first major heat-wave of the NY season (to my knowledge) is starting tomorrow. Of course I’m extremely grateful that Colin helped me to recharge the AC in the car tonight because the amount of time it takes for the damn car to cool off was pissing me off to no end.  It should not take an hour before I’m comfortable in the car when the AC is running at full blast.  It does eventually get cold, 6 hours in the car yesterday my toes were turning purple because we were absolutely frozen trying to get the dog to cool off. So you could imagine my surprise when I went into the car just after he finished with the booster and it was already cold. THANK GOD FOR COLIN!  I could not have managed getting around while I was up here without that AC being taken care of.  NO WAY IN HELL.

#6 – The week ahead..
I know off the bat that there’s two major deadlines to complete, and to top that off I’ve tacked 3 deadlines onto it that are a little more on the tricky side but at least I’ve got help.  The two major ones are under NDA with the usual boss so I can’t discuss those, but the 3 smaller ones are two personal deadlines and one kind of big deal for me.  The personal ones are knu and agndesigns. I know I talk about that all the time but I’ve finally been getting off of my ass and doing something about it.  Adam, my bestie from the Westie, has created a base theme for me utilizing a few colors that I threw at him and I finally got around to coding it so that should be up on k.nu within the next week or so.  He also created a theme for AGnDesigns for me as well based off of a few themes I fell in love with but couldn’t quite figure out how to place the sections on the page without it looking completely off balance. He took care of both of them for me and I can’t help but thank him for it.

He’s part of my “Help”, we’ve partnered up and he handles the Photoshop stuff and I code everything.  Case and point would be his domain, rockchild.net, he came up with the concept – I made it work. jQuery is in every nook and cranny of that site but it made it flashy and that’s what he was going for.  He throws a few projects my way whenever they require coding – I would love to throw him design based stuff because he can get it done so much faster but when you’re under contract it’s hard to pass things off to someone else when you know you’re the one who’s supposed to be logging the hours and need to have the ability to answer every single question on the fly at any point of the day.

The other help, which is connected to the last project, is actually my Mom.  I’ll be building the Fire Dept. website over the next few days and she’s comfortable enough playing around with just about anything you throw at her so she’s in the process of getting her bearings on WordPress as she’ll be responsible for all of the content that goes up on the site.  I’ve been able to come up with a fairly awesome template for them, jQuery up the ass, all kinds of galleries, custom post types, advanced custom fields, and fancy templates for the mailing lists that will be built into the site.  A lot of people don’t realize how advanced you can get with WordPress. It’s not just a blog, or standard CMS anymore – the possibilities really are endless.  Case and point would more than likely be Dover Downs, that site is 100% powered by WordPress.  Not many people believe me when I say it… but take a look at the source code – you’d be surprised.

In any event, it’s knocking on 1am which (oddly enough) is about two hours past my bedtime. My schedule has completely switched by 12 hours. Usually I was going to bed at 10am but now I’m ready to pass out by 10pm. I’m up by 8am (at the latest) and working all day. The plus side is I’ll be able to get myself to the beach more often this summer, I only live 2 freaking miles from it after all… and my pale ass is in desperate need of a tan.  My arms are nice and dark, but my legs (no matter what I do) are still pale as hell.  I always say that my legs are Irish and my arms are Italian, I’m typically burnt on the bottom and as dark as one of those Jersey Shore fuckers (without the Orange tint, obviously).

New Year…Same Shit…

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

I’ve wanted to be able to jump on here for a while, but as usual – life gets in the way.  I’m experiencing downtime, which isn’t normal this time of year.  Usually January is when things pick up to the point that I’m about to rip my hair out.  That’s not the case this month.  I’m hoping this low doesn’t last for too long – I do still have bills to pay.  I’m finishing up a small site, and working on some domain transfers but that’s really all that’s going on right now.  It’s driving me crazy. I’m looking at six different email accounts where the inbox is completely blank… scares me.

Usually I’d take the time to finally get the chance to work on my own things.  That’s really not the case this time and I’m not sure why.  The lack of inspiration to build something for myself concerns me a little, being as I always did better in Delaware than I did in New York on creativity coming out of my ears…. hope that funk goes away before someone comes at me with “Just run with it” template/logo request. I’ve wanted to come up with a new template for krissy.nu, agndesigns.net, acidgloss.net and even agn-solutions.net but I’ve got no inspiration at all.

The perk to today is our new bluetooth case for the tablet came in, it’s nice having a keyboard to type on, and kind of irks me that this tablet is more powerful than my actual laptop right now.  It’s the goal for this year to pick up a Macbook, and typically we like to get at least one big electronic purchase in during the year to help out on taxes. Of course it’s still upsetting to know that I’ll no longer be able to pick up the 17″ MacBook Pro, and everyone keeps telling me that the screen resolutions on the 17″ are close to the 15″ but to me it’s just not the same. I’m so used to having a 17″ that anything smaller is just not going to work out for me.  I don’t like the Retina displays, I think that’s a complete and total waste of money considering they’re supposed to be some type of super HD bull shit, but you couldn’t even load in a DVD to watch on the thing because they’re done with super drives.  I don’t know what the hell Apple is trying to do, but there’s some unhappy consumers out there right now, that’s for damn sure.

Anyhoo….

New Year’s was spent in NY with my family and a few old friends that I’ve been missing. We saw Colin almost immediately, but I’m sure that’s because he was the most vocal about missing us, I hung out with Muir for a little bit (didn’t see the munchkin ’cause he was pretty sick), I got to have dinner with Franny and see a few of the old crew of my last job, I spent some time with my sister doing some shopping, hung out at my moms a little and while I was home I floated around the kitchen to do some restocking of a very bare fridge for my dad.  They’d been eating a lot of take out for the last 6 months apparently, all I saw was a few TV dinners and a bottle of Vodka in the freezer and almost immediately began writing up my shopping list. I’ve gotten so used to regular ‘big meal’ type of cooking over the years that it’s second nature to me.  It was hard only being able to stay up there for a week though.  I really wanted to stay longer.. I feel there wasn’t enough time spent with people and when you’re away for so long it’s hard to catch up knowing that you’re on some type of a schedule.

So we went up a few days after Christmas, and returned a few days after New Years – thankfully we left late enough where there was really no one on the road and were able to get down here in pretty good time.  Bella did really well during the drives up and down.  Unfortunately we weren’t that lucky when we actually got to the house early Saturday morning (in DE).  She ran up the stairs so quick that I think she got one of her nails stuck in between the slats on the wood stairs and was then limping around barely putting any weight on her paw at all.  Since it was 4am there was really nothing I could do for her at the time, I checked her paw she had full mobility and I felt nothing in between the pads in reference to swelling or some type of a splinter.  We wound up bringing her to the vet the following afternoon to have her checked out. I was given some anti-inflammatory meds (that gave her diarrhea  but the next few days she did pretty well so thankfully I was able to stop her at the 2 pills instead of the full 6.

Since then, we’ve all just kind of been hanging out.  Sean’s got quite a bit going on and since it’s all programming based there’s really nothing I can do to help him other than handle the side-job emails, quick template updates, and even moving domains around.  There’s nothing substantial for me to work on right now and while it’s driving me nuts – it’s also telling me that I’m going to have a very easy weekend to get all of the Christmas decorations taken down and the bedroom cleaned up because things are completely out of place ever since we came back from NY and the lack of organization is another irk of mine. I’m even considering having Sean hang a few shelves up for me, but I’ll wait until I’ve fully decided upon that one since he’ll jump at the chance to hang shelves any day of the week – he’s weird like that.

Safe and Sound…

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

Hurricane Sandy came ripping up the Eastern Seaboard this past weekend.  Numerous homes from New York down to South Carolina were completely destroyed because of the high winds and even higher Water.  Three storm cells merged on a full moon in the Atlantic Ocean and the rest is pretty much going down in history as one of the more devastating storms in the past 100 years.  I find that outlook amusing, we so quickly forget how bad those along the Gulf got it during Katrina.  It’s the fact that it happened in the North East that’s causing it to be such a media sensation.

From where I was – this wasn’t much of anything.  We got very lucky here in Rehoboth.  Yes, there’s quite a bit of property damage throughout the entire town but the complex that Sean and I live in, the only clean-up we’re doing is the leaves that were blown off the trees with a few small twigs. Things were much different on the South Bound side of Route-1 though.  Dewey Beach down to Ocean City was pretty much one big flood zone (Note Dewey is only 1 mile south of me).  If you know this area of Delaware, you’d know that once you start going South after Rehoboth the road goes from “Damn, look at all of these stores!” to “Wow! Take a look at those two huge bodies of water that we’re driving through on this thin four lane road!”.  It’s not so awesome when that Bay and the Atlantic Ocean decide it’s time to merge and the only thing stopping it is a tiny road in the middle.  The levels rose, and the rest is history.  There was no roads in or out of this area of Delmarva and it left a pretty devastating aftermath to the numerous homes and businesses along the route whom are now pumping 4 feet of water out of their storefronts and basements.

We had no property damage here, not even a shingle taken off the roof. I almost feel guilty when I see the pictures of all of the devastation up in Long Island where my entire family is.  My father said that there’s trees down everywhere, excessive flooding and power outages pretty much across the board.  I told him, during our call, that I’m sitting here surfing the Internet because there’s been absolutely no issues down here other than the usual flooding that would occur with any substantial rain – or even a damn drizzle – in this area.  He was then amused when I told him about the only drain in the entire complex.

Bella, like any unusual dog, decided that she would prefer to be outside in the wind and the rain instead of hanging out in the window (as she would prefer on nice warm sunny days).  So I bundled us both up and took her for a walk around the complex so she could do her business. After a few hundred feet into our walk  I noticed that I wasn’t just chugging along anymore and was actually starting to walk through – what I thought – was a fairly decent sized puddle.  I didn’t think about it because I had my boots on, but as I turned to begin pulling us both towards the right side (away from said puddle) I then noticed that my dog – who hates water and has never swam a day in her life – is now doggy paddling towards the big hole in the ground.  If she wasn’t on her leash she would have been somewhere floating in the Delaware sewer system right now.  I pulled her to the street, she shook off and looked at me like “What the hell Mommy, why didn’t you warn me!”  Needless to say, she got a nice warm bath when we got home and then sat in a blanket the rest of the night to warm up (this was Sunday – before the storm by the way).

The eye approaching us on Monday actually caused the rain to stop and the winds to pick up, we then had round two outside with the dog but I went in the other direction as far away from the drain as humanly possible.  Of course this meant that every time she plopped her little butt down to squat she wound up getting blown over mid-piss but while she was frustrated I couldn’t help but laugh being as she was barking at the door to go out – making it completely her choice to deal with it! She needed a second bath to rid her of the effects of that one.

The “worst of the worse” was supposed to happen between 7pm and 12am on Monday.  Yes, it got pretty windy here but after doing a drive around town today and comparing it to what we saw on Monday when taking stroll around the complex – we got close to nothing as damaging as predicted.

Numerous people did go to shelters, and there was A LOT of flooding along the shore. I’ll bet all those million dollar homes have quite a bit damage to them and at that point all I have to say is “Was the waterfront property even worth it?”, but that’s cause I’m middle class and wouldn’t ever spend the kind of money that millionaires spend if I had that unlimited-funds-debit-card myself.

The thing that pissed me off the worse, throughout all of this, is the POLITICS going on behind everything.  I’m not someone who usually discusses them, mainly because I don’t care, but could the Republicans seriously come up with ANYONE better than Romney?  To go on record and say “States can take care of themselves, don’t send FEMA”, or “Have everyone go to their second homes, they’re safer there” thinking that anyone who lives along the coastline is a multimillionaire, is the most fucking ignorant thing anyone could say.  A few other “supporters” of him have also gone on record claiming that because of Gay Marriage – mother nature aka GOD is fighting back.  Give me a damn break you biggott bitches.   Even Honey Boo Boo isn’t that damn ignorant – and have you SEEN that show!?

I’m so over this election, I’m about to vote for Ms. Piggy and call it a day.  She may be the epitome of Vanity but at least she’s consistant!

Woah!

Friday, June 10th, 2011

It’s been one hell of a week.

When I was finally home on Thursday after a very long weekend at my aunts house, Bella was picked up by her groomer and things have been – interesting – ever since. I’m not sure if something happened while she was with the groomer but to be blunt, the dogs been crapping liquid for the past 7 days.  We’ve finally gotten it to solidify but its taken a lot of different food ideas and quite a few days of bringing her out every 3 hours, and let me tell you that waking up at 5am when I no longer have to was kicking my ass.  Last night after giving her some pepto (who knew?) her and I were both able to sleep the entire night for the first time in almost a full week.  I think my body was confused because I wound up crashing until about 1pm this afternoon.  While she’s been very clingy today being as she’s still not 100% (and the storm to roll through scared her a bit), there’s still a dramatic change in her.  She’s eating more, drinking more, playing with her toys, and not scratching on peoples legs every 20 minutes to go outside.  It’s been peaceful.

On Monday I officially started back up with AGn Designs, spending a lot of time on numerous freelancing sites.  By Tuesday morning things were beginning to worry me being as I hadn’t heard from anyone.  Tuesday night was a whole different story, I wound up picking up three projects which is bringing in a decent chunk of change for what’s going to be three days of work in total.  I’m almost finished with one site, it’s the matter of loading it onto her server and tweaking the wordpress widgets so that everything flows right, and the others I’m waiting on a few responses from.  Either way things have been picking up, and so far everything is going beautifully.

I had to spend some time tweaking my template on krissys-portfolio.net because the Lightbox script I was previously using was very obviously out dated so I needed to upgrade to Lightbox 2.  That solved the issues I was having with the images, the bigger issue right now is how horrible the template looks.  However, that’s going to be a long drawn out process to change. I want to some-how merge krissys-portfolio and acidgloss.net.  I was thinking of coming up with an over-the-top template that would work on both sites to just flow everything together. I have the idea in my head, and some doodles in photoshop but nothing has really stuck yet.  I don’t just want AGn to be a blog, I want to bump it up but I don’t want to lose k-p.net… either way I’m sure I’ll have something figured out within the next couple of days being as the creative juices are flowing.

I have to say, and don’t want to admit it, but Sean really kicked my ass this week with a revision to one of the sites he’s been working on.  Whatever script the idiots from India came up with was NOT working when trying to recode the site for the WordPress template.  There were like 7 DOCTYPE tags, numerous HTML and BODY tags being called for absolutely no reason.  When running it through the validation check it was coming up with over 600 errors.  I just about shit my pants when I saw that!  I’ve never seen so many errors on such little output in my life, and that’s including a time years ago when I actually started to care about validation and recoded everything I had!

In any event, I have a few more emails to respond to and a bed that’s calling my name.  I missed staying up until 1am, but it’s kicking my ass – that’s for damn sure!

Happy New Year!

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Ok, so I’m 13 days late in wishing everyone a Happy New Year but that’s also based on the fact that I really don’t get to spend much time in front of the computer for personal things anymore. I just pulled my laptop out of the closet today because I had to take two days off from work and I decided to help out the girls considering my department gets pretty backed up during the day, it’s even worse when we’re down a person so I logged in and assigned some claims so everyone could at least get out of there close to on-time. Oddly enough it worked out pretty well. If we could only figure out a way to do it when all three of us our there it would be a pretty cool deal hah.

So yea, this year hasn’t really gone too well but I’ve pretty much been under the weather since it started so of course I can’t say that there’s anything interesting going on. I’m waiting very patiently for my paycheck on Friday so I can punch all of the numbers into the FAFSA website and hopefully get a decent amount of coverage so I can get myself back into school. The University of Phoenix is pretty expensive so I really have to figure out how to get myself fully covered so I can complete a Bachelors degree. If I really wanted to stretch a penny I’d figure out a way to get my Masters but for now the Bachelors will suffice. I know I’ve been talking about going back to school for a very long time but I’m finally able to do it without having to worry about being under my fathers income. Essentially.. waiting until you’re 25 is a good thing when it comes to trying to get as much help as you can. It also mentally prepaired me to learn how to buckle down and get myself organized.

I’m working some pretty long hours lately, it’s not working out too well for me (mental health wise) but at least the overtime is paying the bills. It sucks that I’m averaging over 20 hours of overtime each paycheck but I’m also working six days a week and typically doing 10-11 hour days from Mon-Fri, that’s more than enough to say “I no longer have a social life”. Granted, my social life kind of died off when Lucy passed away last year but I’ve been making up for it by surrounding myself with people who are actually worth an ounce of my time and writing off the ones who aren’t. It may sound cruel but it’s just the way life goes. I know what I need and what I don’t need and having enough strength within myself to cut any ties with the people who just weren’t really worth it to begin with is more than enough of a reason for me to do what I need to do to get by. I’m lucky enough to be graced with the good people instead of the bad and that certainly works for me!

Sean and I are doing OK – yes, we’re still together. We had a bit of a rocky-point last year but I want to assume that everyone was smacked in the face with their mistakes. In July it’ll be four years, and while I know that’s still six months away, it’s still a shock that I’ve been able to stay with the same person for as long as I have. With him it’s really not an issue though. We get along, we’re living in a semi-tight bedroom but we manage to make due. Financial matters have kept us from getting a bigger place but for the time being we’re content with what we have. It gets a little stuffy when you throw Bella into the mix (who’s also doing very well now that the Tumor has been removed from her stomach) but we make due and that’s all that matters.

I’ve been home for the past two days and the only thing I’ve managed to accomplish is the laundry. I know I’m sick and should really just be resting but I hate just laying down and doing nothing, I need to do SOMETHING productive or I wind up going crazy. It was my ultimate goal to just clean up the bedroom today and that just didn’t happen. Maybe when I’m done here I’ll just get up for the sake of organizing a few things to make me feel better about the mess in here. I desperately need to organize my closet, it’s a terrible mess right now. Instead of hanging things up I tend to just fold them and stack them. I’ve had to keep shifting the stack around so I can get to the clothes that I’m wearing that day. It’s been pretty annoying.

As far as “resolutions” are concerned, it’s my ultimate goal to get myself back into school and finish what I’ve started. It’s also my goal within the next six months to come up with enough money for the down payment on the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox because that has been my final choice in a new car and the one I know I’ll stick with. I bounced around for a little while but after reading the reviews, doing the research and really just learning everything I can about the Equinox, the 2010 is the most well designed and fuel efficient model that they have. The older models had a lot of design flaws, one of which I saw as a safety issue and the gas mileage just wasn’t worth the price tag. Everything that’s offered with them now is everything I could ever need and I know that I’ll have it for at least 10-15 years so it’ll certainly hold up well for me.

So yea, School, Car, find a better job that pays at least double what I’m making and it’ll wind up being a good year for me. I just need to keep myself on track.

:: crosses fingers ::

Difficult Morning

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I’ve only been up for an hour and it’s looking to be a pretty stressful day.  For the past couple of days I’ve been working on quite a few different websites.  I did a PSD to WordPress convert for Jackie.  I’m currently working on another WordPress convert for a client I picked up on GAF and on top of that I had to redo a few things for a template I completed last week for my new “boss” so to speak.  Tomorrow I’m taking on another template and while it’s constant work it’s also a constant headache.

The landscapers woke me up today, but that’s fine because for me sleeping until 10 means that I’ve overslept and I needed to be jolted out of bed anyway.  The reason behind the jolt is Bella, naturally.  If someone is under the window she’ll typically bark her head off and slap a big machine under them and that’s grounds for all kinds of barks and growls on her end.  Knowing that Sean worked all night and didn’t actually get to sleep until about 5:30 this morning, I made it a point to get her out of there as fast as possible.  Now she’s hanging out with me in the office, she’s got her window seat and some fresh food on the floor and that’s about all she needs.

Another reason for the down-day isn’t going to be the predicted 70* weather, it’s the email I received from my mother.

Living four hours away from friends and family has been difficult for me, and while I love Sean and do like Delaware – It’s taking me a lot longer to getting used to not having so many people around.  I come from a big family, and the only time it really feels “homey” is when Karen’s sister comes down with her kids because there’s more noise in the house and it feels more like what my life was like in New York.

I really miss everyone, my grandparents, aunts and uncles and I truly have no idea what’s going on with any of my cousins, even the two out of five that I’d stand the chance of seeing.  My one aunt doesn’t get out to visit very often and the other one just held a Christening for her son, and I saw the pictures he’s absolutely adorable.  He looks a lot like my aunt, and has this tiny button nose and looked so cute in his little white suit with gold chain, definitely an Italian child, I’ll tell you that much.

It kind of just hit me today that I’ve missed out on a lot of things.  Hell, I even miss my sister sometimes and when I lived up there I absolutely could not stand her.  But, considering our situation we did get along well – we were just frustrated with each other the way that siblings typically are.

Another irk of the day is the fact that I can’t find my USB cable for my digital camera.  I took some nice pictures this morning to put up on my health blog.  I guess something will appear after I go through a few boxes.

I need to get my butt in gear and finish this template.  I’m hoping to be able to start something for this site sometime today but that really isn’t too important at the moment, work comes first.

Internal Alarm…

Friday, April 11th, 2008

I’m really not sure why but my schedule is beyond screwed up right now. I’ve finally got some work to do thanks to a new contract position but for my initial project I stayed up until about 5am putting a lot of finishing touches on the photoshop aspect of things. I rolled into bed and then popped right up at exactly 10:32am. Now, the reason that number is so “hrm….” for me is based on the fact that my body has trained itself to wake up at the exact same time every day for the past week or so. I really don’t understand why, either. I know that yesterday the landscapers showed up around our house at the same time yesterday morning which then triggered Bella to sit in the window and bark her freaking head off. I’m seriously going to start going to bed with her sonic zapper because I can’t take waking up to a barking dog anymore. Today was no different. They’re showing the house next door and having people walk around is never a good thing when you have a bitchy dog to deal with. So of course she insisted on barking. Come to think of it, she’s been the reason I’ve popped up so frequently in the morning. I wish I could figure out why she’s the new resident alarm clock.

It’s taking it’s toll on me though. I’ve been up for an hour and a half and I’m already exhausted. I can’t continue on 5 hours of sleep but I really don’t want to go back to bed because I have so much to accomplish today. I have a couple of posts to do, a lot of emails to respond to, a PSD to convert to XHTML/CSS and then I think I just landed my first big project with this company of creating a template for a social networking site. I’ll base my template on the network site that Sean’s designing, and then add MySpace, Facebook and Vidilife to it. Why? Because I’ll do the complete and total polar opposite of all of them. I see no point in having them all look the same so I’m going to come up with something different. :hmph:

Guess I should get myself in gear. I think I’m going to need to put on a pot of coffee. If I don’t get some kind of energy boost I’m probably going to be asleep within the next half hour.