Saturday, January 13, 2007 , early evening

Dear Mother Nature

Last night, it was 24 degrees in our backyard.  Today, in full sunshine, the temperature was 33.  The temps are supposed to remain the same for the next three days.  These are the same temperatures they’re having in New York state!  It’s just freaky (and cold).  We even had a smidgen of snow, although it didn’t stick.  It’s been pretty comfortable indoors, and since I bought a micathermic heater for downstairs, I don’t worry as much about Eli and her arthritis.  Still, I worry about our plants and trees, which can handle the cold for an evening, but aren’t use to three or four days on end of freezing temperatures.  We’re going to have to start wintering in Arizona to get away from this nonsense.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/13 at 06:35 PM
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Monday, January 08, 2007 , the wee hours

Right at home

Look who’s making himself right at home, napping on the couch and using Scampi as a pillow:

January_2_2007 (1)

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/08 at 12:05 AM
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Saturday, January 06, 2007 , evening

The secret lives of rescued pets

It was two years ago today that Chelsea and Jackson came to live with us.  For the first few months, they lived under the sofa, and Chelsea even tried to starve herself to death.  As they gradually came out of their shells, however, they gave us hints about life with their former owner.  The first time Chelsea voluntarily approached me, it was because I’d thrown a blanket over my lap while I sat on the sofa.  All of a sudden, there was Chelsea, sitting on my lap.  She barely tolerated me otherwise, but she had some positive memory of laps and blankets.  Chelsea also loves potato chips, and will come running if she hears the crinkle of a chip bag.  She’ll drool into the bag if it’s left open, and she likes to eat little crumbs of chips, all different flavours.  Both Chelsea and Jackson are enamoured of plastic bags, which makes me wonder if they were given crinkly things to play with.  They also both dislike being picked up and held.  My vision of their former owner is an older woman, perhaps sickly, who sat covered with a blanket, eating potato chips.

Derek is another rescued cat, and we don’t know much about him officially except that he wandered into someone’s house in Utah one day.  Unofficially, I know Derek was raised with very large dogs.  He treats the dogs as if they don’t exist, and will even smack Dante, our Anatolian shepherd, on the nose if he gets too pushy.  Derek is so comfortable around dogs and cats that he must have once been part of a menagerie.

Frank was the big, bruised tomcat we found on our front porch.  He was very nippy and bitey at first, but now he’s a huge cuddle-bunny who loves to be kissed and held like a baby.  He’s not feral, so someone once loved him—as a kitten, someone was very kind to him, and he’s grown up loving people.  I wish the person who loved him had seen that he was neutered and kept indoors, but perhaps he accidentally escaped.

Phoenix is the shih-tzu we adopted from the local animal shelter.  Although she was dirty and crusty and full of infections when we adopted her, she immediately jumped into the car and sat in the front seat when we drove her home for the first time.  When we opened the door to our apartment and took her inside, she ran into the bedroom and jumped onto the bed.  Her former owner must have taken her for car rides, and even let her sleep on the bed—I wonder what happened to that person?  Phoenix also does a really cute thing where she stands on her hind legs and begs for treats, and again, I’m sure that was either taught or reinforced.

Our least-revealing adoptees are our birds.  None of our rescues talk, so they can’t divulge the secrets’ of their former owners.  The birds will never help solve a murder or lead us to buried treasure!

It’s been a lot of fun for us to try to unravel the mysteries of our pets’ earlier lives - we never know when another surprise will reveal itself!  If you have any dog, cat, or bird rescues, have they ever done anything, or acted in a certain way, to give you clues about their past?

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/06 at 08:37 PM
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Friday, January 05, 2007 , late at night

B is for birthday; B is for balls

Today was my birthday; I turned 41.  Today was also the day that TJ got neutered.  We got up around 7am to drop him off at the vet’s and then we planned to go out for a sushi lunch before picking him up mid-afternoon.  Unfortunately, our plans got a bit messed up because the weather was bad and we were both exhausted after not sleeping very well the previous night.  We dropped TJ off without incident, went to the grocery store for some necessities, and then stopped by McDonalds for an Egg McMuffin.  We then came home to eat and read the newspaper, but we were so tired that we decided to nap.  Well, the nap turned into a longer nap, then we decided to reschedule lunch for Monday.  I tried to wake up around 11am to shower and get ready to go out, but all I wanted to do was sleep—I felt too tired to eat!  One look at the cold weather (39 degrees plus high winds) and we figured lunch on Monday sounded great.

We were told that TJ was ready for pickup around 2:30, but we’re such slackers that it was 5pm before we showed up to get him.  When we arrived, the vet who’d done his surgery had made me a little present:

image

It’s TJ’s testicles in formaldehyde!  It doesn’t get much more thoughtful than that—the vet even drew little birthday balloons on the container for me.  It’s definitely a gift to remember.  TJ’s doing fine, by the way—he’s been a bit crazed and over-active since arriving home, but I think he’s mostly happy.  He keeps throwing himself on us and purring, as if he worried for a while today that we wouldn’t come back for him.  He was sent home with pain meds, which I thought was a bit unusual, but it’s keeping him feeling fine.  He has one last set of shots next Friday and then he’s done.

One of the nicest surprises of the day was TJ’s surgery bill.  He was neutered under an employee’s account (she’s the person who gave us the three kitten siblings back in October), and while the bill was originally $281.50, with the discount, it cost us $66.48.  Someone made a donation of $25 to use to put towards the surgery, so our out-of-pocket cost for this was just $41.48.  Sweeeeeeeeet.  Getting Tie, Scampi, and Bing fixed cost us over seven hundred dollars, but if I’d been an employee, it would have cost about $200 total.  And that’s one of the reasons I want to work in this business!

Fast-forwarding through the rest of the day, we had dinner at the Red Rock casino (so I could have bread pudding), then we came home to watch the movie, “Men With Brooms”.  I also opened gifts—a nice necklace and Hoops & Yoyo stuffed toys from Flippy, a boning knife from my parents, a CD (Susannah Hoffs and Matthew Sweet) from my brother, and the newest Amy Sedaris book, also from my brother.  From some friends in Seattle, I received a great collection of hard-to-find Starbucks teddy bears and collectible stuffed toys, as well as a sushi-making kit.  This should finally be the incentive I need to find a place to buy sushi-grade fish!  I’d love to make sushi at home, especially with salmon.  The gift that really made me smile was a video my sister emailed me of my niece and nephew singing Happy Birthday to me, then blowing out the candles on the cakes they’d made in the Easy Bake oven.

I had a very nice day.  I was a tad emotionally unstable (I have a tough time dealing with Christmas, New Year’s and my birthday all in the span of 10 days, not to mention dealing with them when I’m hormonal), but Flippy was patient with me and humoured me and even watched a movie about curling to try to appease me.  I love Flippy.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/05 at 11:59 PM
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Thursday, January 04, 2007 , late at night

My promised rant about US Airways

I know I promised you a rant about America West airline, but AW has actually been taken over by US Air.  Thus, this is a rant about US Air, with America West as the primary defendent.

When I lived in New Mexico, my parents briefly lived in southern California.  I was able to visit them often, and always flew via America West.  I accumulated 32000 frequent flier miles.  At one point I redeemed 20000 miles for vouchers to buy a ticket to visit my parents, but then I ended up moving to Las Vegas and they drove to visit me instead.  Then they moved back to Canada.  This was in March, 1999.

Fast-forward to today.  America West is owned by US Air, and I still have my “Flight Fund” frequent flier account, as well as my unused mileage certificates.  I contacted US Air a few days ago about my mileage account and was told it was “dormant” because I hadn’t used it in over three years.  If I wanted to reactivate the miles that were in it, I’d have to pay 1 cent per mile, plus $50 ($170 for 12000 miles), although the point is moot, because I was also told that any miles which went unused for three years had been taken away completely.  I was also told that my 20000 in mileage certificates were useless, and that they expired after one year.

Of course US Air has the right to make any rules and regulations they wants regarding their mileage programs, but that doesn’t mean the rules are fair.  I earned my 32000 miles by giving America West my money, and I chose to fly them (and sometimes even paid a higher fare than on Southwest) so I could earn a free airline ticket.  There’s no reason my account needs to be “dormant” (it can’t cost very much for their computer to store my file), and there’s no reason my mileage certificates shouldn’t still be valid.  I’d be completely willing to pay a redeposit fee if that was necessary.  Can you imagine if banks treated your money this way?  If you didn’t add any money in three years, they’d just take what was in your account.  If you withdrew money and didn’t spend it, it would become worthless after one year.

I’m mostly angry because I was excited that I’m finally able to visit Canada, and that I had a free ticket.  Not only don’t I have a free ticket, I don’t even have the 12000 lousy miles I thought I had left so I could start building up my account again.  It’s ridiculous that US Air can’t spare one empty seat on any of their flights for someone who could again be a frequent customer.  As it is, I’m going to try to avoid flying them completely, if I can—I’m not letting them take anything else from me.

I imagine this also means the 20000 miles I had in my American Airlines account are dead, too… I guess I’ll check that out next.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/04 at 11:07 PM
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Wednesday, January 03, 2007 , the wee hours

I’m going to vet tech school!

It’s January 3rd and I’ve already worked my way through two of my goals:  I got my first donation for Wee Paws from a very kind blog visitor, and I’m enrolled in vet tech school.  I’m taking the Penn Foster distance learning program, as it’s the only program which fits into my schedule, as well as the only one I can afford!  There are two programs available in Las Vegas, but one is completely on the other side of town (and expensive), and the other is a limited-acceptance program at the community college, which wouldn’t allow me entry until 2008 at the earliest.  The Penn Foster program is a mix of textbook studies, proctored exams, and two nine-week-long practicums, so I think it will give me a good overview of what I need to learn and master.  To work as a vet tech I’d need to pass a national exam after graduation, so I think if the program teaches me enough to pass the exam, and if the on-the-job-training gives me a good working sense of the basic skills I need, I should be able to find a job.  I know it will take a few years of real work to really become competent, but I’m content to finish the course, pass the exam, and then to restrain animals for years if need be.  I think I’d probably only want to work part-time, depending on my health, but I’ll just play that part by ear.  The fastest I could graduate is in 18 months, and that’s only if I can pay the tuition that quickly.

Maybe I could graduate from this program, and then some bigwig publishing company or TV producer would want to pay me to go to veterinary school while I wrote about it or they filmed it for a reality show.  I’d be the 40-ish gay vet student with fibromyalgia.  Showtime, HBO, Mark Burnett, anyone?!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/03 at 12:08 AM
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Tuesday, January 02, 2007 , late at night

Full disclosure

There’s been lots of talk on the Internet lately about “full disclosure”.  The biggest cause of this is a program called Pay Per Post, which pays bloggers to write blog entries about specific items or topics.  Advertisers will pay a blogger a small fee, for example, $5, to write about another website or a consumer product.  The hope is that by having people write about and link to a product or site, that product or site will become more visible in search engine rankings.  As was expected, Google is rather livid about this practice, as it takes advantage of their search engine algorithm, and they’ve already started to threaten to penalize bloggers who write for Pay Per Post, and advertisers who buy ads.  Bloggers are also now being required to disclose their PPP entries, and to reveal that they’ve written the entries in exchange for cash.

While speaking to another blogger about PPP, I found out that it’s supposedly bad form in the blogging world to use affiliate links in blog posts.  Affiliate links allow bloggers to earn a small percentage of any sale made through a link, and while they don’t cost the consumer anything, apparently they can be construed as being dishonest.  I guess you’re not supposed to trust what I write if I might make 54 cents if you make a purchase.  I do use affiliate links periodically, but not all the time.  If I’m writing about a brand of dog food, I’ll link to the manufacturer’s site so you can find the best information, and I won’t make any money doing it.  I could link to an online store that sells the food (and perhaps earn a commission), but that won’t give you extra information to help you make a decision.  In contrast, if I write about a book I’ve read, I’ll link to Amazon so you can go to read other reviewer’s opinions, and where you can get the lowest price.  In that case, I will usually use an affiliate link to the product (unless I’m feeling lazy).

Anytime I write about any product, I always write my true and honest opinion, good or bad.  I may write that I hated a book, yet still use an affiliate link to it, or I may write that I loved something, and not use an affiliate link.  I do not choose my subjects/topics based on their ability to bring me income.  If I did that, I’d have a blog with imaginary mesothelioma stories and a bunch of AdSense ads.  I try to always tell the truth and to be “transparent” in my writing, and that’s why I’m writing this to clarify that sometimes I use affiliate links in my blog, and that I occasionally earn a few cents.  Literally, the money earned is in cents… if you bought the “Sock Creatures” book I wrote about a few days ago, I would have earned 54 cents.  In an entire year, all income from all affiliate link on my entire blog earns me about $20 total.  If someone reading this thinks that $20 is enough to sway me to lie in my posts, then that someone really doesn’t know me very well.  And if someone else thinks that I’ve got no right to earn $20, then I’ll happily send you my vet bills.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/02 at 11:19 PM
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Me in the Wall Street Journal

Part of my rant about Dell made it into today’s Wall Street Journal:  Online Sales People Get Pushy.  To correct one error in the story, I was just buying RAM, not an entire computer.  I’d hope the reporter would include my blog url but alas, no!

Later this evening or tomorrow, I shall be loudly ranting about America West Airlines (now part of US Air), and their unfair mileage reward program policies.  Bet you can’t wait!

Here’s something to put the fun back into my blog for a bit—it’s me and Richard Simmons (back in 1983)!  Click the picture for a larger sized image of Richard’s huge head of hair:

richard_simmons

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/02 at 07:21 PM
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Condolences to Niobium

Deepest condolences to Niobium, whose cat Caesar passed away yesterday.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/02 at 04:24 AM
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A quick plug for AGLOCO

AGLOCO - is it a scam?  I have no idea.  All I know is that AGLOCO is a new “get paid to surf the Internet” program which is being run by the folks who used to own “AllAdvantage”.  Flippy and I used AllAdvantage from its birth until its demise (the late 1990’s until the early 2000’s), and we did indeed get checks for the time we spent surfing through the AllAdvantage browser.  The company is now trying to launch the “get paid to surf” concept again, this time naming their company AGLOCO (it stands for A GLObal COmmunity).  It works by paying you to use a special web browser bar that shows small ads.  In theory, you’ll have to see the ads in the bar on your desktop, so the advertisers are getting exposure.  It’s non-intrusive, though—you can see the AGLOCO bar on their website, and the bar and ads are small.  You use the bar for up to five hours each month, and you’ll be paid $1 per hour.  Not much on the surface, but you’re paid for two levels for referrals as well, and that could add up (someone has 7000 referrals).  Right now the toolbar is in beta testing, but you can still sign up and start to recruit others.

Again, I can’t say if it will eventually pay off or not, but it’s worth a chance.  I can complete my five hours of surfing in just one day, so using the toolbar will be a minor inconvenience.  It’s worth it to me to have a bit of pocket change, even if it’s just enough for a couple of Starbucks beverages, or a few cans of dog food.  If you’re interested, here’s the sign up link: sign up for AGLOCO.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/02 at 02:21 AM
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