February 17th, 2009

    We've had a good rainy February and with the rain brings mountain adventure! In the wee hours of this morning a branch fell off a redwood and pulled all the lines down from our neighbor's house. They awoke to the noise and found themselves without phone or power. So they called PG&E and they sent out a truck to inspect at 5 AM. The truck had difficulty finding their address and went up our road by mistake. In the darkness the driver didn't see the turn around at the end of the road and attmempted to back down Sunset in the dark which ended up with his driver side tires, both back and front, going off into the soft shoulder. The downhill side of the road, which were the bucket truck to tip past it's center of gravity, would result in the truck rolling and sliding down into the creek, many feet below.

    A tow truck was called and arrived at 9 AM to assist and without much ado, mostly due to the tow truck operator have a very good idea of what he was doing, managed to get the PG&E vehicle back on the road. I joined some of my neighbors in watching the spectacle and enjoyed being the peanut gallery to the whole thing.

    The coda to the performance was PG&E actually shipped up two yards of base rock, on their own initiative, to fill in the large rut the bucket truck had made in the road shoulder. I found that fairly impressive.

    So the rain is here and it finally feels like winter in Boulder Creek. Eerily the power is still on...I'm waiting for that shoe to drop but trying not to speak it aloud.

February 12th, 2009

    I was never a MySpace person but for some odd reason Facebook is appealing in mysterious ways that MySpace never was and it would appear that others seem to share my sentiment because I am simply amazed at who I have regained contact with so effortlessly using that site. In fact Kim and I used Facebook last night to go through her high school class and found friends of Kim that were right in the Bay area that otherwise we would have never had reason to know. Very neat.

    I guess I mention this as sort of an apology for why updates (which are usually slow anywise in coming) may become even more lax.

    I have recently finished two Neil Gaiman books: American Gods and The Graveyard Book. I would recommend both of them (though the former I would recommend to peers while the second I would recommend to most anyone, young readers especially).

    I have also been enjoying using a pressure cooker that I bought at the thrift store in Felton. I purchased it for $15 and it is in perfect shape and works beautifully. It really should be used on a gas range but it manages adequately on our electric.

January 23rd, 2009

    We just took Buddy to the vet for his monthly visit and the news is mixed. Amazingly his white blood cell count which was quite high this time last year has actually dropped back to normal. The vets are dumbfounded. They strongly suspected lymphoma which is almost certainly a death sentence and here it has disappeared. We also had a blood panel done on him to check his internal organs and all of those check out okay! The bad news is that Buddy is grossly overweight. His body weight went from 1.7 Kg to 1.94 in one month. That would be like me gaining 22 pounds in 1 month! This is a dilemma of him being on a steroid to help with his insulinoma and the 3 hour feedings he requires to keep his blood sugar at a reasonable level. The vet suggested we start to wean him off his chicken paste and put him on Carnivore Care which is a food for recuperating small carnivores. However, after just 1 day of substituting half of his normal meal with the new stuff, Buddy seemed much worse off to me. Very listless and out of it. So I've put him back on his normal diet. We are stuck between his weight problem and his blood sugar. Of the two issues the blood sugar is much more urgent and so gets the priority. The good news is that back on his routine diet Buddy seemed in good spirits this morning.

    The other strange thing about Buddy is that he very rare drinks and the vet reported that he was quite dehydrated. So I am mixing more water into his food to try and keep some fluid in his system. We are quite baffled that he is eager to eat but shows so little interest in drinking water.

January 10th, 2009

    I'm very saddened to say that Hank, our ferret, died yesterday at the vets. He was diagnosed the very day before with dialated cardiomyopathy but it was considered to be only at a mild to moderate stage. With two prescriptions it was thought it could be controlled to keep him happy for a good while to come.

    Yesterday morning I found him asleep in his one of his sleeping spots in the house, tucked in among the tissue paper. He seemed very sleepy and when I set him down on the kitchen carpet he stayed very listless and seemed uninterested in food. I woke up Kim to show her and we agreed to call the vet and bring him back in.

    At the vet, they took an x-ray and put him on an IV to try and get him back on his feet. They were going to keep him the night and thought it likely he'd need to stay the weekend. They found he had a fever and started him on anti-biotics and pain medication. We left to get some breakfast and came back to check in before we headed home. Hank was attached to his IV and shivering. We gave him our assurances and left hoping for the best.

    Our vet is in Monterey and it is a bit of a drive for us to get there. It usually takes just under an hour and a half. We had just arrived back home and given Buddy a feeding when the vet called and told us that Hank was dying. His heart was fluttering and he almost certainly did not have long. We got back in the car and drove back down. When we arrived, the vet tech told us that Hank died very shortly after we got the call. He was brought in to a room for us where we were left to say our goodbyes to him.

    We opted to have the vet do an autopsy and we drove to the beach to see the sun set and watch dogs play in the sand. We ordered two pints at the local London Bristish Pub and toasted Hank's life which had been eventful indeed. We got the call from the vet that Hank was ready to be brought home and we took his body with us to bury.

    Our neighbors stopped by that evening to pay their respects and they helped prepare his grave. I cut off the last two feet of the hollow log he so loved to scrach and roll in and Kim wrapped his body in tissue paper. We strung a cord through the hollow of the log and with Hank inside, lowered it into the ground. The ashes of Andre, who we had adopted together with Hank at the shelter, Kim placed in the log as well. So they are companions once again.

    I'm afraid the worst of it is that Buddy was still looking for Hank this morning. We showed him Hank's body last night and he sniffed it but I'm not sure it registered. Perhaps he knows, because he has hardly left his sleeping bag since we got back home but still hangs onto hope that somehow his companion will return. It is not a privilage to be the last one left alive. We'll do our best for him that we can.

January 8th, 2009

    Kim and I had a full day yesterday. First we had to drive down to Monterey to drop off the ferts at the vet. Hank has been very sluggish and has developed a bad cough. He had a visit with a vet cardiologist yesterday and today we picked him up and get the news (fingers crossed). We brought Buddy as well to keep Hank company as we had to board them since we wouldn't be around to pick them up after the appointment.

    And that was because we had play tickets in Berkeley to see Mary Zimmerman's reprisal of her "Arabian Nights". Mary Zimmerman is a director/play-wright that Kim and I are familiar with from Chicago. She has done productions that portray the stories of the Argonauts, Odysseus, fairy tales and Greek Myths all with a lot of dance/movement on a sparse set with a great deal of wit and playfulness. So it was a real treat to see her work make it out here to the Bay Area.

January 1st, 2009

    Another new Gregorian year before us! Kim and I have a very mellow New Years eve and satisfied ourselves with sharing a split of Veuve Cliquot and listening to a recording of James Taylor sing Auld Lang Syne at midnight. I baked a quiche and watched "Man with the Screaming Brain" starring Bruce Campbell while Kim went out and bought toilet paper. Now that is some wild stuff.