It’s freezing outside, so there’s a flurry of activity here at the Cole stronghold:
Lazy piglets.
by John Cole| 57 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging
It’s freezing outside, so there’s a flurry of activity here at the Cole stronghold:
Lazy piglets.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Midnight Confessions
Life comes at you fast pic.twitter.com/XZNslzX6Uv
— Jamie Stelter (@JamieStelter) September 4, 2016
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Try Restore. Fail again. Try Reinstall. — Samuel Beckett, Sysadmin.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) September 4, 2016
Sitting here decrufting my notes-for-blog-posts files, my email folders, etc.
I’m tired of learning new information. I want to hit the pause button, just for a week. Or a month. Or…
This post is in: Dog Blogging
I hate to pass this along:
I’d mentioned in comments that Walter was gimping again after responding so well to the Adequan treatments. As he was running low on his pain meds and I wanted to discuss either upping his dosage or pain management strategies with his vet, I made an appointment to get an assessment of his condition. During the general exam the vet said that his skin, coat and muscle condition was vastly improved. However, he noticed the same thing that had concerned me; Walter would sometimes walk like his hind legs were dragging, shifting most of his weight to the front legs.
So, we had bloodwork done, and a full set of x rays so we could see exactly what we were dealing with. The answer, unfortunately was not the one I wanted. As expected, they showed he has arthritis just about everywhere, in every joint in his legs, in his hips and even has back. Only his tail is arthritis free. Both the ACLs in his hind legs are shot. But we kind of already knew all that. The x rays also showed that he has bone cancer in his left hip. There’s already significant loss of bone density and my vet warned me that it’s only a matter of time before it breaks.
My vet is not optimistic about treatment for this. Walter is not a candidate for hip replacement due to his age and condition. Chemo or radiation might be an option, but it’s something I’ll have to carefully consider, again, given his age and condition. I don’t want to put him through a few months of additional discomfort on top of his current pain only to prolong it. My primary goal remains the same as it has been from the start, to give him the best quality of life possible and to ease his pain as best I can.
So. For the moment we’re switching him from Rimadyl to Prednisone and some other pain medication I couldn’t catch because I was crying. My vet is sending his x rays off to a professor at the U of M vet clinic for a different perspective. Walter is going back in for a biopsy just to confirm the diagnosis, and once it is, I’ll ask for a rough timeline and the signs to watch for that will tell me when to let him go. According my vet, he’s in constant pain. If we can’t give him some relief from it, I won’t be selfish and make him suffer any longer.
I would have called, but I can’t stop crying and can’t really speak coherently at the moment.
This sucks.
by TaMara| 138 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads
Cat TV. I put a bird feeder and a bird tray outside my bedroom window so that cats would be entertained. Birds have been scarce, but this squirrel has finally found a way to jump on the tray without dumping it on the ground with his weight. He seems completely unperturbed, even when the cats sit on the window sill.
Anyone have any suggestions for attracting birds? I know it takes some time and although we have an abundance of flowers and bushes in the yard, providing seeds and shelter, the birds are still a no-show. I have feeders in various locations around the yard. Different food, perhaps?
Open thread!
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging
I spent a significant and embarrassing amount of time in bed this morning lying there wondering if my pets could vote, who would they have voted for in 2016? Rosie and Thurston were the easiest to figure out, but Lily and Steve were tougher.
Thurston, of course, was easy. His main goal in life is to be disruptive, loud and barky, to tear up and destroy things, raise a ruckus, and to insert himself into the middle of everything. He’s also kind of dumb, so without question he is a Trump voter. I’m pretty sure he holds the same positions on climate change and evolution as most actual Trump voters, or at the very least understands the issues as well as them.
Rosie, of course, is smart, pragmatic, bitchy, doesn’t care about glitz and glitter, is willing to take things into her own hands (“I’m not gonna sit in the middle of this road all god damned day, and this moron has opened his car door, so in I go”), has a checkered past, isn’t liked by everyone, and when she wants something she just gets it done. So of course she is a Clinton supporter.
Lily was tougher. Lily is sort of apolitical. She’s just sweet, and nice, doesn’t care about the issues, just wants to be warm and happy for everyone to get along and to share the comforter and the treats. She would probably have been Bernie curious at first, but if a lot of her friends convinced her to vote for Clinton, she’d be ok with that too. She’d be absolutely horrified how mean the Trump people are, and would try to change the topic any time politics came up because it just makes her sad and she doesn’t understand why everyone just can’t be nice and sit on the lap like a good dog. Regardless, Lily forgot to register and didn’t get out from underneath the comforter to vote anyway.
Steve, on the other hand, has libertarian leanings, but is a ward of the welfare state. So while one might think he would be a Johnson/Weld voter, I’m betting there was no one who really suited him, so he probably just wrote in Queen Elizabeth the 2nd because if we can’t have freedom we might as well have some class and dignity.
At any rate, go Steelers.
Your Host is a Raving Lunatic and NFL Open ThreadPost + Comments (219)
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Science & Technology
(Commentor Delk‘s dog Gav, who is even cuter than a cartoon bunny in a top hat)
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Upbeat story from the Washington Post:
Anita Foeman’s students had just gotten the results from their genetic tests, and they couldn’t wait to talk…
“Some people have never had a happy conversation about race,” Foeman said. But in her class at West Chester University, there’s laughter. Eagerness. And easy connections where there might have been chasms. “Our differences are fascinating,” she said.
At a time when tensions over race and politics are so raw, the stakes, Foeman said, seem particularly high. Her students have been talking all fall about riots, building walls, terrorist attacks, immigration, the election. “You can feel it buzzing around the halls like electricity,” Foeman said.
Asking people to take DNA tests — an idea that has spread to a campuswide effort at this public university — grew out of consulting work Foeman does in race mediation. Instead of a confrontational approach, trying to provoke people into recognizing their own biases, she wanted something that would pull people together, or at least give them a neutral place from which to start to talk. And with racial divides so stark, she wanted to add some nuance and depth.
She wondered: What if people started finding out things they didn’t know about themselves?
So she begins with a short survey asking people their race and what they know about their ancestry. They spit into a vial. Several weeks later, they get an email with an estimate of their ethnic makeup, a color-coded map of their past.
That leads to questions, stories and curiosity. It is a welcome reset from awkwardness, defensiveness, suspicion. Now that the DNA tests are cheaper, Foeman is able to ask all the students in her honors class — almost all of them freshmen just getting to know or redefine themselves — to take the test…
Foeman, who is African American — and genetically more than one-quarter European, as she now knows — would like to test as many people as she can. It’s a way to study everything from medicine to history. Most of all, she’d like to get everyone talking.
She has found people willing, even eager, to take part, with more than 1,500 on campus volunteering.
“I think people want this,” she said. “That surprises me — in a good way.”…
And to think how excited we were, forty years ago, just to test for our own blood types in freshman biology. The main reason I haven’t (yet) bothered to take one of those mail-order gene tests — apart from the Round Tuit issue — is that I have every reason to believe it would be excessively boring. Celtic, with a strong dash of Nordic-Viking, plus some percentage of Anglo-Saxon from the grandmother we never knew had been born (Irish Protestant) Orange until after she and her only son were dead. I’d probably be more interested if I or any of my five sibs had kids…
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What’s on the agenda as we wrap up the week that (hopefully) wraps up this misbegotten year?
by John Cole| 72 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging
So after the Shitmas episode on Christmas, I made an appointment to take Steve to the groomer yesterday, but I had to cancel it because the circle of trust has been irreparably broken for a while and I could not find him. I called and cancelled and said I will try to capture him today and bring him in for some manscaping.
Fortunately for me, last night, when Steve thought I was asleep, I watched him slide open the closet door in my bedroom, go in, and close it behind him. For months I have been yelling at Thurston for going into the closet because the door was always open. Now I know who the real culprit is, though, and no, I am not going to apologize to Thurston. I’m sure he did something else that deserved a yelling.
At any rate, I caught him this morning, took him to the groomers, and when I came back he was still being worked on so I took the opportunity to take some pictures. This is what I saw:
Normally when I come back to the groomer, he looks like he has acquired a thousand yard stare from months of trench warfare, but this time he said Steve was a gentleman and very well behaved. Maybe after the indignity of Shitmas, this was nothing bad for Steve.
He currently is napping in his cat tree and appears to be happy, so he might let me live.