September 2005 Archives
Magda has given up on belly crawling and uses her hands and knees to get around -- and quite rapidly, too. It's nice for her to be able to get wherever she wants (unless we scoop her up away from the water bowl or oven) and it's nice for us to be able to move to another room and for her to follow.
She's recently started raising herself up on things and is often on her knees reaching up the ottoman or the side table or hugging your leg. Last night during her bath, she decided she'd had enough of getting her hair washed and almost seemed to tried to climb out of the tub. She's changing a lot from the chubby, uncoordinated baby into a toddler with destinations on her mind. The world that's accessible to her is expending on a daily basis.
Oh, and she says mama and tata and means it!
I've finally uploaded the rest of my pictures from out trip to the CR. A bit anticlimacting, seeing that the trip was almost two months ago, but better late than never. And, actually, it's not all of our pictures (which I had to burn to four or five CDs during the trip), just a small representative sample. It seems like half of the pictures we took were of Magda. My faves are from The Old Town Square and the Airport Bus (in London, I think).
So here are the albums:
Magda has recently transitioned from doing the commando crawl to scurrying around on her hands and knees. She still reverts to the belly crawl when she gets tired, but she can now travel good distances and fairly fast, too. Not just to the nearest toy, but from living room to kitchen -- often heading for the nearest dog bowl.
I've managed to install the plexiglass to protect our DVR from her grubby fingers. Of course, it then took her a day or two before she got interested in it again and tried to mess with the blinking lights. Thwarted -- bwuah-ha-ha!
Yesterday I took Rose to the vet for her spaying. Although I know it's good for her, I still felt bad about leaving her there. When we got Homer back after his nads got removed, his loopines was more funny than pathetic. Rose isn't dealing with the sedation as well, looking sad, tired and tossing her cookies every once in a while.
Beside getting cleaned out, she also got upgraded with an RFID chip. When we were initially checking for her ownership, I was imressed that the emergency clinick, animal shelter and my vet immediately scanned her for an ID chip. I'm also curious if the RFID readers we sometimes have at work detect her type of chip -- I'll need to check that out some day.
The vet told us to accompany her when she goes outside to do her business, so last night I followed her in the back yard. The yard is a bit of a mine field right now, so since I couldn't find a regular flash light, I used a headlamp instead. What a totally freaky effect! With the headlamp on, Rose's eyes glowed a vibrant blue, no matter how far away she was. This wasn't a little glimmer, either, but a bright, pale blue light. It's possible that the chip has taken control and turned her into a evil cyborg -- or more likely, the light was caused by the tapetum lucidum, a light reflecting layer behind the retina that some animal species have. This is similar to the flash photography red-eye effect.
I called Homer outside to see how he looked as a posessed pet. Funky, especially when he blinked, but it was not nearly as impressive as Rose. I think that's because Rose's pupils were still fully dilated from her anestesia or meds, so her eyes were reflecting more light than Homer's.
So if you want a fun experiment, get your dog or cat hopped up, take them out in the dark and illuminate them with a flashlight that you hold close to your face.
It turned out that permanently fixing my cable hookup wasn't all that difficult. Radio Shack has a cool, easy to use Coax Splicing Kit, so that and a 6' coax cable were all the parts that I needed. Of course, I also ended up buying some tools, including a hex crimper and a Coax Stripper.
So now the cable is nicely burried and hopefully safe from Rose. Just in case, though, I keep spraying the Yuck! stuff in the area for the foreseeable future.
When I got home yesterday, the cable was out. A quick check -- no internet connection, either. I immediatelly suspected Rose and sure enough, the damn cur had yanked the cable hookup out in the back yard and almost completely chewed through the cable in a couple of places.
Since my Internet connection was down, I culdn't google for cable info and was on my own trying to fix it myself. It actually wasn't too hard jimmying something up temporarily -- and less exciting than working on high-voltage wiring.
I sprayed the cables with Bitter YUCK!, but without much success; today she unplugged it again. Luckily I fixed it before The Daily Show started, but I've got to come up with something more permanent...
I stopped at Cosco over lunch and saw pallets of water and food being loaded from donations that they -- like pretty much all stores now -- collect on behalf of the Katrina victims.
I encourage everyone to help, but it's much more effective to give support with money, rather than goods. Think about it, instead of having to pay for transporting the goods you bought at retail, Red Cross can use your donation to buy what's required at wholesale prices close to the place it's actually needed. That doesn't mean you should stop contributing to local foodbanks -- they'll always have people needing the goods, whether it's the poor, homeless or displaced persons from the Gulf.
Give.org can direct you to worthwhile relieve orgs that'll get the best bang for your buck. So go ahead and donate to one of their reccomended Hurricane Katrina Relief Organizations. Personally, I donated through the Rainbow Fund to America's Second Harvest -- I think of it as turning the other cheek (see this BoingBoing reader comment).
Frankly the news from New Orleanse have been surreal since the flooding started. While the local rescuers are working their hearts out, the incompetence exhibited at the federal level is nothing but astounding. Whether it's the "nobody could have anticipated this" President, or the "what convention center?" Homeland Security head Chertoff or "we've taken care of everything" FEMA head Brown, they make you feel like we live in a bannana republic. At least Mayor Nagin says it like it is.
CNN's has a great comparison of the sping out of Washington vs. the real world. And you thought they were in their little world just when it came to Iraq!
