Sheep Guarding Llama

I was awake at 6:30 this morning worrying about Oreo. He had a really rough night and hardly got any sleep. I was up with him every few hours just watching over him. There is so little that we are able to do. It is really frustrating.

At 7:00 Oreo got up again and stood at the edge of the bed looking out at the room. He does this periodically so we really don’t think anything of it anymore. Then he hopped off of the bed. He does this often, when he isn’t sick, so that he can get a drink. I listened for him to be lapping water which I was hoping for because I felt that he was not getting enough fluids. The sound that I heard was not Oreo drinking, however. Apparently he is having bladder control issues as well. He paniced and ran all over the bedroom while he was peeing. It was a total mess. So disgusting. I couldn’t get out of the bed without stepping into it. Every inch of the floor had been hit, it seemed like. He was really scared that we were going to be mad. I can’t believe how much pee could come out of such a little dog. I took him outside then and he peed out there as well. I guess, at least, he can’t be all that dehydrated!

So I ended up spending a bit of the early morning cleaning the floor while Dominica and Oreo went back to sleep. It was very encouraging to see that Oreo felt more comfortable and was able to sleep again. After I got the floor cleaned up (thanks to dad’s portable steam cleaner thing) I went back to bed but not to sleep. Oreo was actually snuggly for a change and that made me feel a lot better. He got some much needed rest even if I did not.

I called the veterinary hospital at 8:30 and managed to get Oreo squeezed into an appointment at 11:15. They are going to run blood word at our request so they want to get him in early so that they can get the results back from the lab yet today. Dominica is back on her regular schedule today. So she was up at 9:00. Oreo stayed in bed. Thank goodness he was feeling well enough to stay in bed.

I was supposed to be helping out over at Union Presbyterian at 11:00 this morning but I had to call and reschedule for noon. I had a really short morning before leaving at 11:00 to take Oreo over to the animal hospital around the corner from us. I got him over there and he was able to get right in to see the doctor. He has two doctors that he usual sees. One is the doctor from Geneseo and the other is the swing doctor that goes back and forth between Geneseo and Avon. Oreo goes to either place as needed. Today we were in Geneseo with the “swing” doctor that he sees about one third of the time. We talked for a little while and he got some ideas about what might be wrong. We made it in time to be able to get his blood work sent out today so we hope to know something this evening. Oreo has to spend the day at the hospital so that they can get all of the samples that they need along with the X-Rays. We really have no idea what is wrong at this point and need to establish as much information about Oreo as possible.

I ran home real quickly so that I could update Dominica on Oreo’s progress and status. Then I went down to Leicester and managed to get to the church right at noon. It turned out that they really just needed a computer set up for them. And by “set up” I mean it was previously installed with all of the software. It was just “as shipped” and needed to be plugged in and fired up. Only took ten minutes. So that was much easier than I had anticipated.

I hadn’t had any breakfast and I have not had nearly as many Cook’s subs recently as I have wanted so I drove down the road to Greggsville and got me a toasted cheese sub at Cook’s. Yummy! Boy those are good. That is two in a row.

I spent the afternoon being totally useless eagerly anticipating some information from the vet. I was supposed to call at 3:00 so I had to wait until then. When I called they said that they had been really busy today and that they had not yet had a chance to get his X-Ray taken care of. So I had to wait until 5:00 to call back.

I called back at 5:00 and they said that Oreo was ready to come home. They said that they wanted to send out for some additional blood word down at Cornell. I agreed and they took the blood quickly before I got down there. It was almost 5:30 before I got down to pick Oreo up. Boy was I glad to get him back. I don’t like having him stay someplace else. It worries me that he might react badly and be sad thinking back to being left with the SPCA in Houston. The plan had been that I was going to pick him up and then return at 6:45 to talk to the doctor but I managed to arrive just in time to talk to the doctor without having to return later. That worked out really well.

The doctor walked me through Oreo’s blood work. The results? He has extremely high blood fat content and high cholesterol. His blood fat content is so incredibly high that the doctor described the results as “his blood ‘sludging’ as his heart tries to pump it.” So when the blood stops flowing through something like his back leg that area runs out of oxygen. Then when the blood moves again he will get that painful tingling sensation you get when your foot falls asleep only this is more accute and without any warning. He thinks that that will explain Oreo’s bizarre reactions and sudden changes.

So why is his blood like this? We won’t know better until the blood work returns from Cornell’s labs in over a week. But the first guess is a hypothyroidal condition. That is most likely in older dogs. A simple hyperlibidemia disease might be the case which is, unfortunately, harder to treat. Or their might be a liver failure issue. However the tests indicated that all of the liver functions were most likely doing fine so the doctor thinks that that is particularly unlikely. Thank goodness. With all of his steroids over the years we are always worrying about his liver. Poor little boy.

He had a pretty good evening. He only had one major “fit” all night and is behaving a lot more like our Oreo for the first time in a week. That is making us feel a lot better. We are guessing that all of his excercise yesterday and his fasting today for his blood word might have helped just enough to bring him back over that line. He is now on a prescription low fat diet. That is all that we can do until we get the result from Cornell. But it might be enough. At least to keep him acting like Oreo. He will likely need some sort of drugs to get him actually healthy though. His blood fat content is just so high.

I am driving Dominica into work tomorrow. We are supposed to be getting wind gusts close to 70 mph (that’s around 100 kph) and it is going to be awfully dangerous out there.

Dominica discovered this bizarre video game today. I can’t even begin to describe the weirdness.

Our trash pick up route was changed today. They called yesterday and said that we were going to be having our route reversed and that our trash would probably be picked up around 6:30 in the morning. So we should put it out the night before. So I did. Late last night I put the trash out. I went out this morning and I was the only person on the entire street to have bothered to have put my trash out at all. And they didn’t come early to get it either. I thought that the route had been cancelled or something. They picked it up around 9:00 or so. Only about an hour before last week’s pick up. I am very confused. I have no idea what is going on. Why didn’t any of my anal neighbours put out their trash this week? I have never seen them miss trash day before.

Dominica went into work early today just to find out as soon as she arrived that they had decided to cancel her early training on Monday but since she works Wednesday to Saturday, she didn’t get the email until she arrived today. So they had to reschedule her for next week. Early hours on Wednesday work out pretty nicely for her, though. It gives her an extra hour to rest before her next shift and on these long days that can be very beneficial.

Dad came over to Geneseo and we got lunch at the Omega. It is a bright and shining day today. Oreo was having a great time moving around so that he could lie in the sunlight wherever it was. He was acting pretty healthy this morning.

I spent most of the day just working at home. Just the usual. Oreo was doing pretty well this morning but by this afternoon he was having his problems again. The issues are so weird that we can’t even explain them. Mostly it is his behaviour that is tipping us off to there being a problem. He is walking around the house like he is trying to find something or go somewhere but ends up just going in large circles. He whines and whimpers a lot. He spends a lot of time looking at the outside walls as if something is there. He is really starting to scare us. The doctor has no idea what is wrong with him and him symptoms come and go so it is not something that we can show to anyone reliably. He is very cold. He both feels cold and he is shivering almost all of the time. I have started keeping his coat on him all of the time to help him stay warm since he will never lie down once evening comes.

I had an order of books arrive today from Amazon. I had them sent to dad’s house because they were not supposed to have arrived this early and we thought that we were going to be out of town when they came. So he and I did dinner over at Cook’s in Greggsville and I picked up the books and dropped off some stuff for him. I got “Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management”, “Programming with Ruby” aka The Pickaxe Book and “Build a Website Now” MSPress’ new ASP.NET programming beginner’s book. We got delicious subs at Cooks – I am pretty sure that they make the best subs around. I consistently am happier with their subs than I am with the ones from Aunt Cookies. And I am pretty sure that it is cheaper too. Although the drive is quite a bit farther. I can walk to Aunt Cookies if the need arises.

On her way home from work Dominica went to Walmart and picked up food for the dog. We are switching him to wet dog food instead of dry because it has enough moisture in it to maybe make a little difference. If he isn’t going to drink his water then we have to do something to get him rehydrated. He was very excited when Dominica made him dinner and he didn’t have to have dry food.

We are hoping that the whole thing is being caused by him switching to a new bag of dog food that may have had a different formulation than his old bag (the vet says that that can happen sometimes.) It is very possible, especially considering his other allergies, that he could have an allergic reaction to some protein source in the food and he might be find if we just keep him away from it.

As Min was coming home Oreo started getting a lot worse than he had been. He is regularly doing well in the mornings and not very well in the evenings. Today was really extreme with him being generally good all day and then really deteriorating tonight. He is very clearly in a lot of pain but we are totally at a loss as to what to do about it. He has these “fits” where he staggers around and he spends a lot of time acting like there is someone standing in the corner and he is watching him intently. At points he can barely stand up and when it gets really bad he spins around in circles and runs to me for protection but when I go to comfort him he runs away like it is me that he is afraid of 🙁 We have no idea what could be wrong. To make matters worse he has stopped eating and drinking. I am not sure if he has had any water in the past few days other than what is in his food. He has eaten some but very little and nothing at all today.

He ate ravenously when Dominica fed him the new wet food. She mixed in extra water as well to make sure that he was not getting overly dehydrated. At least he is getting some water. I took him out for a walk and he had a terrible fit as we went out the front door but he eventually recovered, threw up and then led me on a very long walk. We walk all of the way to the intersection of Highland and Center Street which has to be well over a mile away. He did great the entire way there. Not a single problem once we were away from the house. He was so excited to be walking. He was pulling me constantly. He had a great time.

Then we got to Center Street and I decided that we needed to turn back. I didn’t want to stop walking with him because it was the only time that he was feeling okay. When I made him turn around suddenly he had a really bad fit and starting vomiting a lot. He really scared me. After a few minutes he was able to walk again and we started making our way back to the house. On the way back he had three or four fits and threw up seven times! He was really scaring me. Around the time when we got to Woodbine Dominica drove by and picked us up. She was really scared that we had been gone so long and had been driving around looking for us for a while. She was really upset and thought that he must have gotten so sick that I had to get help and had taken him somewhere. He was happy to see her and hopped right into the car.

Unfortunately the walk didn’t really do him all that much good and he was still pretty sick the rest of the night. We pretty much went straight to bed but he was in terrible shape and very restless and didn’t manage to lay down to actually attempt to sleep until after 1:00. I stayed awake making sure that he was okay. I read some and then when he was restless I ran and got a bowl of milk to see if we could get some fluids into him. He wasn’t willing to drink any water at all but he seemed pretty happy with the milk. Whatever works, I guess.

After getting the milk he eventually settled down enough to sleep in short bursts. I was up every hour or so all night checking on him and making sure that he was doing okay. We will be calling the vet back first thing in the morning. There is a different doctor in this week because Oreo’s regular doctor is on vacation or something. So it will be good that at least a second brain will be working on his problem. Maybe the other doctor will have some insight.

I am supposed to be working over at Union Presbyterian in Leicester at 11:00 tomorrow morning but we will see how the dog is doing. Who knows whether or not I will be able to do anything.

Today Dominica had to get up early and I got to sleep in with Oreo. He wasn’t much in the mood for being snuggly, though. As soon as Dominica was out of bed he moved over and slept on her pillow. 🙁 Neither Oreo nor I felt much like sleeping in this morning and we were both up long before Dominica even left the house.

Dominica made me promise that we were not going to do anything for St. Valentine’s Day. She has decided that it is just a commercial holiday without any real meaning and so she thinks that it is okay to ignore the entire thing. Works for me. I have never held much stock in the whole holiday thing anyway. If I didn’t like Christmas songs so much I would completely ignore the entire Christmas season. My biggest complaint today is that Ask A Ninja didn’t do a special Valentine’s Day Special Episode or something. That would have been really cool.

Oreo slept most of the day with me. I just worked around the house. I didn’t even really eat anything until Min got home so that we could go out to get dinner together. She got home at about 4:30 and we ran over to the Omega. That place was dead today. This was our big Valentine’s Day dinner. We came home and watched that new Reese Witherspoon movie. Something like Heaven Can Wait but I have no idea what it is really called. Min watched it and I ended up on the phone working for most of it. I really don’t like Reese Witherspoon anymore. She was great in A Far Off Place and Man in the Moon but she just hasn’t kept up the quality. Now she just does Hollywood fodder. Blah, I say to you. Blah.

Dad wanted to go out to see The Pink Panther this evening so he came over at 6:30 to pick us up. I took Oreo out just before we left and he started limping really badly. I am pretty sure that the problem has been with his rear right hip and not with his stomach at all these last few days. So we called the vet and he said to put him onto aspirin to reduce the inflamation. We didn’t have any aspirin so dad and Dominica drove over to Walmart to pick some up and I stayed home to watch Oreo. He was certainly in a bit of pain. He appears to be able to walk fine after he works out whatever the problem is but when it comes on it is really bad and he almost falls over. When they got back dad decided that it wasn’t a good night for a movie so he went back home.

Dominica and I decided to just stay in and spend some time watching over the dog. So we finally got around to watching Spanglish which ended up being a really good movie. I was really impressed. Adam Sandler needs to do more serious acting like that. He is much better being a light element in a serious film rather than being a silly element in a ridiculous film. I was very happy to have noticed that Paz Vega was not actually Mexican but Spanish. I figured it out from her accent. No small feat for a non-Spanish speaking American – world renowned for our inability to recognize cultural nuances.

After Spanglish we watched Ocean’s Twelve – not particularly because we were in the mood for it but because it was sitting upstairs in the living room and it meant that we didn’t have to go looking for it. It wasn’t a bad movie. Nothing really special. It is unbelievable how many people they get to be in such a middle of the road movie.

Tonight is the night that Microsoft rolls out their security updates and I always end up getting called early on Wednesday mornings because that always causes some disaster to happen so tonight I decided to stay up and deal with the problems myself before anything could go wrong. So at midnight when Dominica went to bed I went into the office and applied the updates and did a full system backup while I was taking everything down. It was a good opportunity to take care of a few things at once. While I was doing the system backup Oreo decided to get back out of bed and make me take him for a walk. I was quite happy that he was feeling good enough to want to walk but wasn’t too pleased with his timing. We ended up walking for about half an hour or so. He was plenty tired, as was I, by the time that we returned. I am very thankful that tonight is not one of the bitter cold New York nights. There is hardly any snow or ice on the ground and it is only mildly windy – mildly windy in Western New York is like saying blustery anywhere else. Unfortunately he caught be off guard as we went out so I was not wearing walking shoes and was only wearing a light fleece and not a jacket at all. And I didn’t take my mp3 player. But I needed the excercise so I shouldn’t complain.

It was just a little before 2:00 in the morning before I had a chance to get to bed.

After all these years Andy decided to really post For Me to Poop On someplace where it is likely to actually get some traffic. If you have never heard it before, be sure to check it out. Even if you have heard it before, go ahead and download it and listen again. Let’s get the traffic numbers up on this little number.

Andy wrote this song back in February of 2000. February 19th, to be exact. He debuted the song out my “moving out” party at Josh and my apartment in Greenleaf Meadows in Greece, New York (a suburb of Rochester.) I was moving out of the apartment to move to Ithaca. Josh was moving out and moving directly next door to a smaller apartment. Andy had no idea what he was going to be doing at all. He had been living with us for the last several months and he had no plans whatsoever. He didn’t actually have to be out of the apartment for about a week so he wasn’t worrying about it yet!

On February 20th we through the moving out party in the empty apartment. This is the party where Andy’s sister Dana West brought their cousin Amanda West who met Eric Millen and they are now The Millens. And to think, it was “For Me To Poop On” that brought them together. Josh had all ready pretty much moved completely out of the house. I moved out the next day. The 19th had been my last day of work at the Wellesley in Brighton and I was free and clear from there on in. Andy was scheduled to be in to work the following day.

On February 21, 2000, I loaded up the moving van that I had rented and prepared for my move down to Ithaca to move in with Nate Parker at his Gaslight Village Apartment just off of Triphammer. Just before I was ready to leave Andy decided that he was going to take the job with the company that I had offered to him a month before and he threw his few possessions into the moving truck and we took off for Ithaca. He used my cell phone to call into work and to tell Esther, who was working the evening shift on the desk, that he was moving out of Rochester and that he wasn’t going to be making his shift that night… or ever. They were all pretty surprised. I was pretty surprised. I think that Andy was pretty surprised.

So that is how Andy and I ended up moving into Nate’s apartment in Ithaca. Bob Winans ended up moving in to that same apartment later that summer when his lease was up in Oneonta. Andy and I were out of Ithaca by March 20th when we went down to Pittsburgh to start our first big project. But I was there a bit over the summer before moving down to Alexandria to move onto another stage of the project. It was a crazy year. I have to say that from the January of 2000 to July of 2001 had to be the craziest time of my life. Everything was changing at such an unbelievable pace. I went through so many jobs, apartments, cities, cars, careers, etc. And by June 9, 2000, I had met my future wife (and had all ready had her mistaken for my wife!)

That was an awful lot of stuff before even starting my day today. It is Monday and that means helping out with dad teaching down in Castile. I got down there about 9:10 just in time for the first class of the day to come in. It was a really good day down at the school. The new lab is really working out. We decided to switch from trying to teach the kids Perl right away and are instead working with almost all of the students getting them to learn LOGO using KTurtle which comes with SUSE Linux. The kids seem to really enjoy using KTurtle. They get quick results and it is interesting to see something graphical happening.

I spent most of the day working on a project at the school to get a working search engine that the school can use because, due to their “white listed” Internet access, using other search engines like Yahoo! or Google are out of the question. So I think that I have come up with a working solution but I have yet to implement it. There is a lot to go wrong yet.

Dad and I got our regular country fried fish sandwich lunch at Lorraine’s. We got take away so that we could eat our lunches in the computer lab. That way we don’t miss an opportunity to have a class come in. We have been very fortunate recently that the kids have been pushing to get into the lab and we have had most of the computers in use all of the time. At least on the days when we are there. It is very encouraging. We have been really concerned that we were going to get the lab up and running and that there wouldn’t be any students coming in to use it at all but that isn’t happening. In fact we are starting to get students looking to do some research on current events. Very nice.

I came home after school and Dominica was out shopping with Oreo. When she got home she said that Oreo was feeling much better than he was yesterday and that, so far, he seemed mostly normal. So we are relived that it is probably nothing more than a very upset tummy. It is tough being a little puppy and wanting to tell your family that something is wrong but having any way to communicate with them. It is very upsetting.

Dominica and I went over to the Omega for dinner. Then we came back home and watched more of the first season of Remington Steele. We went to bed fairly early so that Dominica could get up and get in to class first thing. She and dad are teaching tomorrow and I am staying home with Oreo. We thought that it would be best if we didn’t leave him alone while he wasn’t feeling well because we need to monitor him and make sure that we are missing any symptoms.

Back in 1994 my friend, Steve Baumbach (from Syracuse who attended GMI with me), managed to get a VHS copy of this really cool video of a guy racing his Ferrari across Paris to meet his wife who was waiting for him by the river. The video was shot by a camera strapped to the front bumper of the car. If I remember correctly the whole thing was done as a bet. Something about this guy with a Ferrari being at a dinner party with a movie producer – you can imagine how it went from there. Anyway the movie was called Rendes-vous and I finally managed to find a copy of it posted on Google Videos. The quality of Google Videos isn’t that hot but at least everyone can now see the video.

We managed to make it to Sunday School again today. That is three weeks in a row. Quite an accomplishment for us. But we have only been travelling about one third the distance that we used to try to go so that helps quite a bit. We went to Sunday School but did not stay for church. Dominica’s back hasn’t been good and she took some ibuprofin before we left the house to try to keep the swelling down but by the end of Sunday School her back was all ready hurting enough that we didn’t feel that we could stay any longer.

So we came home for a little while and snuggled with Oreo. He is still a little sick today. Not has bad as the last two days but you can tell that he is not his usual, fun-loving self.

We had lunch with dad at the Omega. After lunch dad and Dominica did a little shopping at Walmart but I came home and spent some more time with Oreo. Then Dominica went up to Henrietta to do some much needed shopping for a while. I was going to go with her originally but with Oreo not feeling very well we decided that it would be better if I stayed home with him so that he would relax and get some sleep instead of being nervous and making himself worse.

Dominica got back from her shopping and we decided to continue watching Remington Steele. We ordered dinner from the Shang Hai over in the old Ames Plaza (I am sure the plaza has a new name like The Livingston Plaza or something but I have no idea what it is.)

Oreo was definitely not feeling well this evening and we got kind of worried. Throughout the evening he appeared to get worse, not better. By 10:00 we were pretty worried as he paced all over the house wimpering. We decided that we needed to wake up the vet and see if he could see Oreo. We went into the clinic and met with Oreo’s doctor at 10:15. We were there for over an hour. The vet is pretty sure that Oreo just had really bad indigestion and he gave him some medicine and put him on a really strict diet for the next week to see if that makes any difference. We were really relived to find out that that was all that it was. Too bad we had to wake up the vet. He went into the office in his pajamas. But at least we weren’t the only ones – he got another emergency call while we were in the office. They were probably pretty surprised to find him still there.