I am making some use of a fit of insomnia to write this so hopefully it will make sense — if not, cut me some slack because I wrote it at two AM

Over the past several months I’ve managed to post maybe once or twice a month at the most, not because life has been that dull but because there has been so much going on it seems almost impossible to stay caught up. And because working 12 hour days in a stressful environment just sucks the life out of you so there isn’t enough energy left for things like updating the site and the blog. Now that I actually have a bit of life left in me at the end of a day I’m slowly catching up on things… for now here is the “condensed version” of some of the things that are going on. I’ll be elaborating more in some cases.

1. Winter has had a consultation with an orthopedic surgeon and needs surgery to repair her bilateral luxating patellas. The left one is worse and will be done first. It’s not critical yet but it does need to be done within the next couple of months.
2. We’ve had some behavioral issues with Olive involving aggression towards the other cats and general neurotic-ness (is that a word? lets pretend it is) and after trying several different medications what is actually helping her is Prozac.
3. Wednesday had two suspicious lumps on her back removed. The histopathology results were bad news — fibrosarcoma, which will most probably recurr.
4. I (Chris) am now working as a computer technician for a company in Waynesville, NC and enjoying it very much. I’m learning a ton of stuff and getting to actually use all the stuff I learned for my various certifications.
5. We’ve been volunteering our Saturday mornings to spend time with a dog named Hank who lives at a local vet clinic and needs a home. (pictures and more details will follow)
6. We’ve started making cotton dog and cat collars and dog cookies which we’ve been selling at the clinic.
7. We’ve taken on a rescue case who we have named Maggie. She’s still in pretty critical shape. We’ll post her story and some pictures soon.

I think this covers most of what’s been going on. Other than that we’ve been enjoying spending time in our yard with the dogs and Simon, have been exploring some of the cool places in our neighborhood, and are tremendously enjoying our first full spring back in NC.

We came home yesterday from Easter dinner with Joy’s family to find a dead computer and a very sick dog. Somewhere in the flurry of all that  — and hurriedly putting the pants I had been wearing into the laundry to get rid of a spaghetti sauce stain — I also inadvertently washed my little 1/2 gig USB thumb drive which had been in the pocket of those pants.

The drive, amazingly, seems to be working just fine after I dried it out.

The computer, which had frozen and had to be shut down by cutting the power, absolutely refused to boot. Not even in safe mode. And I discovered that my big ol box o’computer junk, which had my install CD in it, was at our storage unit so I was out of luck on troubleshooting. I brought home an XP Pro disk from work today and managed to get it back up with the Recovery Console.

Lindsy, who is at the vet with Joy, is a puzzle. She was really sick when we came home, had vomited in the bathroom in front of the toilet, and was shaky and seemed sore in the abdomen. There was corn in the vomit, which we have not fed her, and she hasn’t been out of the yard — but I did catch her eating something outside yesterday morning before we left. I had assumed it was dog poop, which is a vice of hers. But now we wonder if someone threw something over the fence. She had a temp of 103.2 and was drooling… we gave her some pepto and kept a close eye on her and she seemed better, so we watched her carefully last night and didn’t feed her. This morning she was much better, ate a bit of boiled rice, but her ears seemed ‘twitchy’ and we discovered she was leaking urine — a lot of it — when she laid down. Joy took her to work and  they didn’t find a thing wrong with her at the clinic, her temp is now normal, they even ran a urinalysis. She is acting completely normal now. Guess we will just have to watch her close for a while. We’re just completely baffled by the whole thing.