Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 09 Sep 2006 10:57:00 GMT
Regret to inform you of the passing of Howard the goldfish (born 1998), who slipped away peacefully on the worktop this morning.
Howard came to the household after we were asked to look after him “for a week or two”. After over four years of residence, his leaving was felt by some to be long overdue.
If there is another place for him, then he is probably being chased around by Murphy right now. Let’s hope there isn’t!
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:54:00 GMT
Murphy didn’t wake up this morning. There are no words that fit here.
Posted in Cat, General | 3 comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:27:00 GMT
“Lucky should be avoided too”.
So said the vet when we picked up Murphy yesterday morning.
This photograph is from two weeks ago, but he doesn’t look much different facially, except that the swelling in his right eye has gone done some.
He is blind, very skinny, somewhat atrophied and currently on liquid food only. When he eats, it goes up his nose and he has to sneeze it out.
I was worried that he hadn’t been to the toilet in 24 hours, despite his huge intake of water, but this evening he graced us with some dark matter and urine.
Frankly, I’m finding this pretty hard to deal with. I was explaining how I felt to Stef just before dinner, saying that I felt that he was just sitting there until it was time to walk or stick his face in his food again. He probably heard me, because then he started walking around yelling at stuff, just before bumping into it. He hasn’t stopped in two hours. This is, at least, some progress and he needs to get some kind of exercise.
Stella is freaked, and can’t believe that there is another cat in the house, let alone one behind a closed door (we never close doors).
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 29 Jul 2006 18:26:00 GMT
It looks like the cat will be OK. He is still in the vet, and there is still a question mark over his eye sight, but he might be alright.
In order to keep our shit balanced, one of Stef’s close family is dying. Like the man said, “life will not break your heart, it’ll crush it.”
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:26:00 GMT
Wednesday night, just before midnight, the phone rang. After nearly nine months being AWOL, a vet in Bridgend had found Murphy, still wearing his collar with our contact details. Bridgend is quite far from here, even if you’ve had 9 months to find it.
As the name suggests though, there was bad news. He had been found because he had been in a road traffic accident, and a pretty nasty one too. He had fractures to his upper jaw, his lower jaw, his palette. His good eye was inflamed and there is a possibility that he has lost or will lose sight in that one too.
The specialist had said that there was no hope of resetting the fractures in the head and that it would be necessary to just wait and see how (and if) they heal before knowing the next step. I’m not sure how good large amounts of opiates are at dulling pain, but they seemed to think that he wasn’t suffering at present.
After getting over the shock, I managed to get to the vet to see him today. They had discovered more problems. Just seeing him again after so long was emotional enough, and although he looked slightly better than I had expected, the damage to his eyes was worse than I had hoped with, cruelly, the worst of it on his good eye. Of course he’s having to be fed via a tube, so his neck was bandaged where it had been inserted. He has made no effort to stand, although his legs seem to be sound. Also, his tail has been damaged which, as we learned with Stella some years ago, can often cause the loss of bladder control in cats. Again, the vet is at a loss to predict how this will pan out right now.
We had a chat and I brought him up to date on what has been happening since October. He wasn’t too talkative and didn’t want to be drawn on what he’d been up to, but under the circumstances this is understandable enough. I believe he recognised me, or at least my voice, too.
I agreed with the vet that we’d wait the weekend to see if he could get some healing done in that time, and when Stef gets back into the country on Monday we’ll go back and see him, perhaps for the last time again.
Recovering from his loss was difficult the first time round, but to have him come back to us in these circumstances is simply cruelty. It has taught me this, however: if you are going to start crying and bewailing, do it before you hit the motorway. Also, never cancel insurance on a missing pet — having to consider finance as a factor at these moments is bitter indeed.
Posted in Cat, General | no comments
Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 20:05:00 GMT
Note to self: no matter how much she cries, no matter how much she begs — never, ever let Stef crush rotten eggs by squeezing them.
At least not in the house…
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:44:00 GMT
We were walking around Roath Park lake today, admiring the sunshine and eating our ice creams.
Roath Park sports a large and varied collection of bird wildlife, including swans, ducks, cormorants and at least three types of goose.
At 1645 on the dot, every goose on the entire lake ran, waddled or flew to gather under the same tree on the western bank. There were at least one hundred geese stood around under this tree for a couple of minutes and then, just as suddenly as they had all rushed there, they started to wander off back to whereever they had come from.
There is no reason for this. Nobody was handing out food, they weren’t doing anything when they got there, and no other species of bird followed suit.
It was completely awesome and bewildering. Hope I get to see it happen again some time.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 02 Jun 2006 11:38:00 GMT
No shit - if I could get a job that carried no duties and a country mansion, that would be pretty “interesting” to me too. You don’t even need to maintain a web site anymore.
As a little yang to that yin, the Conservatives are looking pretty retarded today as well.
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Posted by Ceri Davies
Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:42:00 GMT
In an echo of the trouble two days ago, shrike died again this morning just after 3am.
This time it came back up after Stef gave it the finger, which indicates that the fsck problem was bad luck, but there’s nothing logged, there’s no crash dump, nada.
The accounting utilities are coming up with no likely causes. Time to try out the new audit(8) bits, perhaps…
Posted in FreeBSD, General | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ceri Davies
Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:01:00 GMT
At around 2am this morning, shrike died.
shrike comprises the entire backbone of my setup here. It’s the network router and external firewall and runs the database server, the web server, the web proxy server, the CVS server, the SMTP (in- and out-bound) and IMAP server.
Since this happened in the early hours, I didn’t notice until Stef called me in work to complain that she couldn’t reach the Internet. Attempts to connect to anything on shrike just timed out, so I told her to powercycle it.
A couple of minutes later, I attempted to SSH in and see what was up: Connection refused. Waited another five minutes, and attempts to connect just timed out. Five minutes later, connection refused again. Moments later, time-outs. WTF?
Read more...
Posted in FreeBSD, General | no comments | no trackbacks
