On Top of the World

End of month drinks at work have finished, and I’m sitting at my desk with the rest of my glass of wine, killing time until I go to tonight’s Auslan workshop at the Casino. I’ve missed out on the last 3 or so workshops, and since they’re held every fortnight it’s been quite a while. So tonight I wanted to make a special effort to go so I can practise signing, and the fact that it’s at the casino is good because I can have a few drinks

I’m on my third glass of wine and am feeling a little fuzzy, so signing will be an interesting endeavour. But hopefully noone will mind, and with my level of signing being what it is, I doubt they’ll notice anyway.

OK, wine finished, so I’ve got 20 minutes or so to go until I head off.

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Yesterday we got our dining chairs! I was meant to be going to my interpreter course, but last night’s class was cancelled so it meant that we had two cars to use to pick up the chairs. I thought we’d have to make a couple of trips, but as it turned out we fit 5 chairs in M’s car and 3 in mine, so they’re all home!

It’s quite bizarre walking into the dining room and seeing the chairs there, after almost 3 years of having just a table sitting in the middle of the room. This weekend we’ll have our first dinner at the table - how civilised. Currently the dining table is being used as a bit of a storage area, but once I tidy it off and make it look nice, I’ll take a photo.

The chairs are a teensy bit low, but the chairs we got seemed to be the standard height, so any new table we get should be ok. The one we have was custom made by the previous owner, so that’s probably why it was too high.

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M’s going to call a hotel in NYC tonight to try to negotiate a good rate for our stay there. It’s almost certain that I’ll be going with him on his business trip, as long as my mum says she’ll look after our cats. I’d really like to go - it’s too good an opportunity to turn down, really. We got a quote from a travel agent, so we’re trying to see if we can do better through the hotel itself.

Sorry for the abrupt end, but as I mentioned before I’m feeling fuzzy so I can’t think of a good conclusion.

Jack has decided that he’s had enough of those tablets. It was quite difficult to get him to take it tonight, and my hands are getting somewhat scratched, so I think I have to come up with a new strategy. If he decides that after every week he’s going to be difficult, there’s three new strategies I have to come up with before the tablets are finished. And he’s sick of the food now and doesn’t want to eat it any more. I keep trying to get him to eat because if he takes the tablet on an empty stomach, it can upset it and make him sick. It’s all a bit depressing, and I can’t wait until the month is over so I can go back to being relaxed and enjoy my cats rather than worrying about how much I’m traumatising him by making him take drugs he doesn’t want, and how much of the skin on my hands will still be there after it’s all done.

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You may have noticed that the first word in my post looks like a link. I’ve installed a new plugin where you can make a list of words or phrases that you use often (but that people might not be familiar with), and the plugin pops up a tooltip with a bit of information when you hover your mouse over it. Since I’ve been talking about my cats lately, I thought that that was a perfect use for it, so I’ve put a picture of him in it. I’ve also made one for Frisky. So now I can just mention them without wondering whether I should explain every time who they are, because the tooltips are there.

*****

It was another good lesson at tafe tonight. I mentioned that last week’s class was spent watching people doing their assessments. Today saw the rest of the class doing theirs. To follow on from the wine and cheese from last week, someone showed us how to make cocktails. She made a Mad Cow and Japanese Slipper, and gave us all a little sample of each. I really enjoyed the Japanese Slipper, and think I should get some Cointreau so I can make one (I’ve already got the Midori!). Yummy.

Australia lost, but I’m still glad I stayed up for the game. If I’d just woken up this morning and heard they’d lost 1-0 I would have thought that it wasn’t any great surprise since I figured that they were going to lose, but then I wouldn’t have seen how well they did play. Well, I thought they played well anyway, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about soccer. It wasn’t a walkover so that was good. I thought they did really well.

The downside about staying up for the game is that we got around 4 hours sleep, which meant we weren’t functioning that well at work today. We left work at 2 because an electrician was coming to give us a quote to put in some new light switches, but even if he’d called and cancelled I would still have wanted to leave early. By the time we left I was feeling positively weary, although oddly I’ve woken up a bit now.

By total fluke, tonight I saw an episode of Grumpy Old Women. I remember blogging about it last time it was on; I love that show! All the women are so funny. I hope I don’t forget about it next week.

Well, I’ve accepted that Jack isn’t going to willingly eat the tablets when I put them in front of him, so that means I have to administer them myself. The good thing is that I’ve developed a technique that seems to work quite well, causing minimum damage to both of us (at least, I hope he’s not too traumatised). I’ve got the process down to be quite brief, so that can only be a good thing. If only he’d eat the damn things, then none of the trauma would be necessary, but never mind. Only 26 more doses to give him. Sigh.

I’m staying up tonight to watch the World Cup match between Australia and Italy. Even though I know absolutely nothing about soccer, and can probably be labelled as one of those people who doesn’t care about a sport at all and then all of a sudden becomes interested when my country’s involved, I know enough to realise that we probably don’t have much of a chance and this will be the end. On the other hand, I am hopeful that Australia will do well.

The game is starting at 1:00 tomorrow morning, so I probably won’t get to bed before 2:30, which in turn means that I’ll be really tired for work. I’m sure other people will have stayed up to watch as well, though, so we won’t be the only ones looking rather bleary-eyed.

Last night was the first attempt at giving Jack his antibiotics. They’re called ‘Clavulox palatable tablets’, and it says on the packet that they are often just accepted from the hand. Naturally, I had high hopes that Jack would do this, particularly because the last time he had palatable tablets, when he went missing a couple of years ago and came back with his claws worn down, he ate them with no problems, which was a lot less stressful for both of us.

So I got the half tablet out, and held it in my hand for him. It was looking promising - he sniffed at it and tried to eat it, but I think it was a bit too big and wouldn’t go down. So I broke it in half and offered it again. He ate one portion of it, decided he’d had enough and walked off. So I followed him around, putting the remaining bits of tablet in front of his face until he ate it all.

This morning, however, he wasn’t having a bar of it - was not interested at all. He gave it a cursory sniff, then turned his nose up at it. The only way I could get him to take it was by force, so as a result I have a bit of a scratch on my hand, and a cat who doesn’t like me very much at the moment. Tonight I’m going to try to give it to him when he’s hungry, so maybe he’ll be more receptive to the idea of just eating it, if I haven’t traumatised him so much this morning that he’ll see the tablet and run a mile. Given that I have to do this twice a day for the next month, I’m hoping that the wait-until-he’s-hungry approach will work. Unfortunately, while he’s on this diet, he’s not allowed to eat anything else at all - if I could just mash up the tablet and put it in some yoghurt, I’m sure he’d eat it!

I’ve missed quite a few weeks of the photo hunt, but now that I seem to be back in the blogging groove, I’m going to make a better effort to keep up with it.

So, for this week’s theme I thought what better image than one of my true loves:

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Jack (my cat) peed on the floor again after a few weeks without incident. Since he had been on his new diet for a few weeks, M collected a sample which I took to be tested, to see if the new diet is helping with the crystals they found last time they tested. I heard back from the vet last night, and unfortunately there are still a lot of crystals present, and that the pH of the urine was higher than normal. She thought that a possible reason that the crystals are still there could be a bacterial infection, which is changing the pH and causing the crystals to form.

So now he’s on a course of antibiotics for the next month, as well as his special diet, and I have to take back another sample after that time to be tested. Sigh. If the tests still don’t show any improvement, they said they’d have to x-ray him to check that there aren’t any stones in his bladder. She asked me if Jack is appearing to strain to go to the toilet, and I said that he seems fine in that respect, so all was good there.

I picked up the antibiotics today, which cost $50, and another bag of food, which was another $28, and I also had to pay for the last urine test which was also $28. Bye bye $100. Of course it’s all worth it if it fixes my baby, but it’s still expensive! I don’t even want to think about how much the x-rays are going to cost if he needs them. I remember when I had my persistent sore throat a few months ago, I was on one form of medication or another for around 2 months and in the end I was just so sick of taking tablets every day, so hopefully the antibiotics will help and he won’t have to have any further tests.

As you may have noticed, I’ve made a few changes to my template. I’ve kind of gone a bit bananas with plugins as well.

So… the most obvious change is the new themes. Or, rather, the ‘new’ themes, since I tried to get back some of the ones I had before I upgraded. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m so happy that I’ll mention it again - installing themes and plugins was so much easier now that my version is consistent. It was just so much smoother, although some designers didn’t code their themes consistently so I made a couple of changes to neaten them up. Anyway, at the moment I have 3 themes, and you can change them by clicking on the links at the bottom of the sidebar. Whichever one you choose should be remembered for the next time you come back. Most likely I’ll add more themes as I find ones I like. Maybe I’ll even try to write my own, but I really have no imagination and every time I try to come up with something, it ends in failure.

I’ve also updated my weather section in the sidebar with the latest version, which has lots of customisable parameters in it and some new icons. I had a teensy bit of trouble with it, but I guess that that’s when being a programmer comes in handy. And speaking of my sidebar, I’ve got my mood back! The original creator of the drawings took down the site last year, but they’ve been revived by someone else, so they’re back again. Originally called Unkymoods, they’re now back as Punkymoods.

The other changes I made are in the commenting. The first thing is fairly major - I’ve taken out the comment verification stuff. Yay! Yes I know you loved typing in a code every time you left a comment, but I’m afraid you’ll have to try to live without it. I’m using a comment security thing embedded in WordPress, and so far it’s going ok. So I’m hoping I won’t have to put the verification back in.

Secondly, I’ve added a little flag next to each commenter’s name according to the country they’re in. It’s not infallible (or so the developer says), but the comments I’ve looked at so far have all had the right flags, so I’m happy. I think they’re quite cute really. If you want it, it’s called IP to Nation.

The final change is one that I’m not sure how much I’ll use (if at all), but it’s there anyway, and if you want to use it, please do! The plugin is called Quote Comment; next to the timestamp in each comment is a link called [Quote]. So if someone posts a comment that you want to refer to in your comment, you click on the link, and the other comment will appear in the comment edit box above your comment.

That’s it for now! I’d write more, but my hands are so numb with cold that I’m having difficulty typing. Time for bed. Aaaah electric blankets are wonderful.

Around 20 minutes before my tafe class finished last night, someone came to the classroom and told us that there had been a stabbing just outside the building, and so the exit to that road was blocked off and there were police all over the place. I was a little nervous because I didn’t know how long ago the stabbing had occurred, and that was the place I wait for M to pick me up.

When tafe finished I headed towards an alternate exit, and called M to let him know that I may not be able to meet him in the usual spot because of the incident and all the police, but that I’d try to wait as close to that point as I could. I walked around to the usual meeting spot, but there was noone around at all, so I don’t know what time the police left. I heard on the news this morning that the incident had taken place at around 6:30, so that was a couple of hours before my class was finished.

At the time I called M, I was a bit surprised that he didn’t say anything about the stabbing, but I found out this morning that it was because he hadn’t heard what I said, and only caught the part about possibly not being able to meet him in the usual spot. When he realised that the stabbing had occurred right outside tafe, he said I had to quit. Awww. I don’t know what the circumstances surrounding the attack were - I heard that a group of 4 guys attacked the victim, but don’t know whether they knew him or if he was a stranger and they were trying to rob him, or something else.

I guess it gives me the willies knowing that nowhere really is safe, but on the other hand, I can’t really quit tafe because of it. I’m just glad that I wasn’t late for class last night.

I’m in the process of trying to upgrade my version of WordPress, so if you read this and then can’t get to my blog later, that’s why. Hopefully it will go all right but we’ll see. It will be nice to have an RSS feed that actually works, just for completeness. It hasn’t worked for ages because I didn’t do a proper upgrade last time and have still got leftovers from an old version hanging around. So this time I’m starting from scratch, which I’m hoping will be the easiest way to go about it, rather than wading through all my files, trying to work out what I should keep and what I need to get rid of.

Tafe was good today - we had an assessment, and since I did mine last week it was a relaxing class spent watching other people do theirs. The topic of the assessment was showing the class how to do something that they probably didn’t know how to do, and we had to bring appropriate props for our demonstration. For mine, I made a paper boat (extremely boring but it was all I could think of). I bought some paper and gave everyone a sheet, so they all made a boat as I attempted to sign the instructions. It went well, with most people not having any difficulties, and it was kind of cool after I was done, looking around and seeing all these little boats sitting there.

Oh, brief interruption while I try to upgrade WP. Back soon I hope.

Update: I’m back and it worked! I’ll try to get a more interesting theme shortly, but fortunately everything went as smoothly as could be hoped. Starting from scratch is good, but of course it means I have to set everything up. But now that I’m consistent, future upgrades will be a lot easier (that’s the plan anyway). Oh, if you are subsribed to my RSS feed, it’s now working but you may have to unsubscribe and then resubscribe to get the latest posts (that’s what I had to do when I was testing it).

So, back to what I was saying about tafe. One woman brought everything required to make cottage cheese, and got a couple of ‘volunteers’ to help her out. She even brought crackers and wine, and since I hadn’t had any dinner other than the cracker, I felt a little tipsy after a few sips of wine. I wasn’t the only one, though, because the teacher said she hadn’t had any dinner either and was becoming slightly affected. We only had a tiny bit of wine though, so the effects wore off pretty quickly. But it was the best assessment I’ve been to for a long time.