Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up just as Dominica was leaving for work. It is tough to pull yourself out of bed when the puppy is being really snuggly and he does that a lot. Today he decided to take over Dominica’s portion of the bed and was sleeping right in the spot that was still warm from her sleeping there and he even put his head on her pillow. It was really adorable.

It was a very uneventful day. I worked from home all day long. John Nicklin flew into town today but he is busy all day so I won’t get a chance to talk to him until tomorrow.

I called dad this afternoon and we decided to get some dinner together. It wasn’t until minutes before he was supposed to be arriving here that he realized that his car was in the shop. So I drove over there and picked him up for a change. The weather turned really bad on the way over and we decided just to drive down to Cooks down the hill and get subs down there. Oreo rode along and slept in the car while we were there. The roads were pretty bad so we decided not to drive anywhere extra.

Dominica came home and we just watched some Keeping Up Appearances before going to bed.

I had to get up this morning and take Min’s car into Jiffy Lube to get an oil change and a radiator coolent change.

Our Jiffy Lube isn’t able to get Mobil ONE regularly anymore. What a pain that is likely to turn out to be. We loved being able to go right over there and getting our Mobil ONE without having to make an appointment or anything. Now we are, most likely, going to have to switch to a normal garage for our oil changes which will be a lot more of a hassle. JL is going to try to get us the oil but apparently the local store is not allowed to do their own ordering and their corporate bosses are not willing to let them know whether or not they can have the oil that their customers want. So we will have to start calling down there and seeing if they have gotten it yet or we will just have to go elsewhere. I can’t believe that it is worth losing their highest paying customers over corporate versus store internal political issues.

There is snow on the ground and Oreo’s skin problems are going away again. We are totally convinced that he has a grass allergy and that that is what makes him itch so badly. He is going to really enjoy winter, I think.

I finally wrapped up getting all of the old SGL Podcast shows uploaded to the Internet Archive this morning and was able to clear the old ones off of Min’s desktop. That will help a lot. Her machine was filling up so quickly. It was out of control. Now I am working on backing up our one Linux desktop that we have in the basement so that I can get it removed from service and moved on to other things. Always some project or other going on.

Dominica went to class this morning and was very happy to be able to drive on her new Nokian tires. She is very relieved to have her car safe to drive again.

Dad came over around 4:00 and we took our Christmas pictures with the puppy. It was kind of sad because originally we had been hoping to have figured out a way that we could have had Mr. Humphries in the picture but he was gone by the time we actually got around to taking the picture. Overall, though, we think that the pictures turned out pretty well. I will post the ones that didn’t make the cut to Flickr once I get a chance.

After taking care of the pictures dad looked at what could be done to fix the dryer that has never really worked. We were all sitting around in the living room talking about problems with the dryer when Dominica decided that it was finally time, after over two years of having the dryer not work, to admit that when she hooked up the dryer that she had put an old pair of pantyhose over the vent thinking that it would keep lint out of the duct work because someone had told her that. Dad and my eyes got really big as we realized how blessed we had been to not have had the house burn down. We knew right away why the dryer wasn’t working properly. We decided to deal with it later but boy did we all have a laugh when we realized that all of this time, over two years in fact, that that was all that the problem was. Dominica was under the impression that I had been around when the dryer was hooked up but I wasn’t. Unfortunately it was hooked up right around the time of our wedding and SGL was a little lean at the time because of everything going on so we know when the units were delivered but we don’t know exactly when they were hooked up or who was with Dominica when she did it.

Everyone but me was tired of the Omega so we went down to the “Ames” plaza and got the buffet at the Shanghai. They really do have a great buffet. Nothing to blow your socks off but all of the food is good, the price is right, the service is really friendly and there is a decent selection. I have a hard time believing that they are making a profit down there. It is never crowded. Maybe I just always go at the wrong time.

We came home and Dominica and I set to taking the dryer out and seeing what the situation was like behind it. I have never been back there before so it was all new to me. Sure enough, the pantyhose that had been stretched over the dryer exhaust was completely filled with lint and had been forced about four or five inches down into the next pipe all packed full of lint. Then I had to pull out about eighteen more inches of lint that had built up in the pipe in front of it. There sure wasn’t any air at all getting down to the actual exhaust pipe. The pressure had built up behind the dryer enough to cause it to separate the duct that went into the wall so the dryer was venting, as much as it could, all over the floor. The floor was covered in a layer of lint that had obviously been in water as well. So we cleaned everything up and removed the pantyhose. It was all very funny since the house hadn’t actually burned down. We put the dryer back in place and decided to give it a test run.

The first load of laundry that Dominica did in the dryer took only fifty minutes to dry on the medium heat setting. Previously a load of laundry would take approximatly four hours on high heat to be able to get it dry. Yes, four hours. Boy is that going to make a difference in our house. I can’t believe that no one mentioned the pantyhose in the last two years. Dominica kept telling me that she was sure that she had hooked up the dryer incorrectly but I couldn’t figure out what could possibly have been done wrong as long as the dryer was connected to the pipe going out of the house.

Dad is still planning on working on the dryer venting system either Friday or Saturday. The plan is to take the vent from the dryer and instead of having it snake downward through the basement, across over half the length of the basement and then back up to go outside, we are going to have it go up from the dryer (hot air rises you know, as does water vapor) and go just a few feet forward and vent into the garage. It will make the garage a little dustier but that isn’t too big of a deal. One of the benefits is, though, that we will heat the garage a little bit which will help to reduce our heating costs in the tiniest way during the winter months by warming that one wall. Since that one wall is a major cold wall in the house it might actually help a little. During the warm months we keep the window in the garage open so it is no big deal because the air changes out in there pretty rapidly. We will never notice a difference.

I can’t decide what is wrong with our Chia herb garden. The marjoram is growing great and the chives seem to be okay. But the cilantro and the dill are just about dead. They have all been treated the same. Maybe they are more susceptilble to the cold.

After we took care of all of that we decided to go down to the theatre for a change and watch Bring It On which I haven’t seen in almost three years now. That used to be one of the most popular movies when we lived in Ithaca but I have never owned a copy of it until this week. We then watched an episode of Dark Angel Season One. That show is okay. Nothing special. It definitely has the feel of being a super low budget Canadian show made in Vancouver. There is just a feel you get from low budget shows from that town. I would put money on it being from there. It totally looks like a show from the 80’s or early 90’s like Silk Stalkings. And the credits are supoer low budget too like they were from a college student’s film project. The whole show is just cheap. But it isn’t bad. The storyline is marginally interesting. Min was really tired and has to work tomorrow so she went to bed after one episode. She has all ready watched them all so they don’t hold her interest that much. I haven’t seen them yet so it isn’t so bad for me. I stayed up and watched one more episode before going upstairs to work on the podcasts for the evening.

I had to get up this morning to meet dad at 8:45 so that we could take Dominica’s car over to Livonia to get her new snow tires put on. Dominica was going to go with us but she barely slept at all last night. She didn’t even try coming to bed until after three in the morning. She is taking Mr. Humphries’ passing quite hard. I took it hard but I have lost a lot of pets over the years. This is the first loss of a pet for her where the pet actually knew her (as opposed to say, fish, which only know that food falls from the sky.) So she and Oreo stayed in bed for a long time today. Dad and I went to the Omega and got breakfast. I am doing a lot better today. I am still very sad that my little friend is gone. The house seems a lot more empty now. There is no one waiting on my desk to say good morning to me. No one to check on at night when we turn in. Mr. Humphries was my pet when my mom died. He and I spent long hours sitting together in the dining room just being sad together. The Lord provided him to me when I really needed a little a pet to comfort me.

Eric finally got a laptop today. But it is totally useless. They got him a really overpriced laptop and took all of the features off of it. He isn’t allowed to use the Internet. They only allow him to use dial-up. He is not allowed to install a printer. He is not even allowed to have a current and supported Microsoft operating system. They took the Windows XP that came on his laptop off and installed old, outdated Windows 2000 instead. He only has Office 2000. Two versions old and just about to be another. They claim that they lock him out of the machine for his own protection. But they don’t allow him to patch his machines, to have a client side firewall or to run anything current and safe. The machine is both useless and dangerous. He doesn’t even have a way to backup his machine.

I almost forgot to renew my car insurance. What a week this has been. That would have been really bad. I am switching from Progressive to Traveller’s. I was really happy with the service from Progressive but Traveller’s is lowering my insurance by over $1,200 a year and that is just too much to pass up.

Min’s car was ready around 1:00 and she was up and out of the shower by 2:00. So I called dad and he came right over so that we could take care of all of the things that needed to be taken care of today. Today is a miscellaneous stuff kind of day.

We got the car and had lunch/dinner at the Omega Grill, as always. We didn’t end up taking the Christmas picture that dad had come over to take because Dominica was still so upset from losing Mr. Humphries that she didn’t feel that she would be able to smile for the picture. So we made it an early evening.

Dominica knit and I worked on the computer for a little while before we decided to move into the living room and watch Keeping Up Appearances which is light and funny and helped to take our minds off of things.

Today was a horribly sad day. When we returned home from church early this afternoon Dominica discovered that Mr. Humphries, our beloved hamster, had passed away. I had moved him into the dining room last night before we went to bed so that he would be warmer than he was in the office and so that it would be easier for us to check on him. When we had left for church he was still breathing but his breathing had become really shallow. He hadn’t moved since around 10:00 last night. I was afraid when I had carried him from the office into the dining room and he didn’t stir at all that he had slipped into a coma and I am pretty sure that he had. The good thing is that he slipped away in his sleep. He spent almost the last twenty four hours sleeping comfortably, as far as we could tell, and didn’t appear to be in any pain. We had been really hoping that he was going to recover but we knew that there wasn’t very much chance of that. Dad, at lunch, said that he thought that Mr. Humphries may have had a stroke while Dominica and I were vacationing in Florida but that he had recovered well enough that we could barely tell a difference in him other than the fact that he had stopped using his wheel almost completely.

We have had Mr. Humphries since September 17, 2003. When went to PetsMart in Greece. The thing that really made him stand out from the other hamsters that they had there was that he decided to pick us out. He climbed up onto a half tube and came up to see us when all of the other hamsters there were afraid of us. We couldn’t resist such a sweet and cute butterscotch and vanilla hamster. We took him home and totally fell in love with him and, after not too long, he fell in love with us too. Until the day he died he never bit a single person with the unfair exception of Katy Case who put her finger up to his mouth right after eating and without washing her hands so that he had no idea that she was a person and not food. He was the best hamster that I have ever heard of anyone having. He never tried to escape the entire time that we had him. A few times he got loose but only because we left his cage open by mistake. Actually I only ever did it once in all of the time that we had him, I think. Twice at most. That one time he ripped up the carpeting in front of our bedroom door during the night trying to get to us because he knew that we were in there. It was so sad that it really affected me. I was so shocked that he was trying so hard to get to me. Hamsters are always trying to get away. Not get to you. It was really touching.

Dominica and I spent a long time this afternoon crying and remembering our hamster. We have so many fond memories of him. He has been such an important part of our family. We are incredibly sad. He has been an integral part of our lives since before we were married. It is just really hard to believe that he is gone. But he went in his sleep and didn’t suffer and there isn’t much more than that that we could have asked for. We know that he was happy being our hamster and really loved us and he knew that we really loved him. He definitely isn’t in pain now. Now we just have to learn to deal with that empty place in our home and in our hearts.

I always have a really hard time dealing with pets dying. I didn’t realize this until today but Mr. Humphries was Dominica’s first ever pet, other than fish, to die. She has never had to deal with losing an animal like that so she is taking it really hard.

We put Mr. Humphries into a plastic bag to keep animals from trying to get to him, put that into a bag that Dominica had knit (it was originally going to be a purse but she hadn’t finished it – she had always wanted to knit him a little vest but she was afraid that he would try to eat it so she never did but at least now he will be buried in something that she knit) and we placed the knit pouch into a tin container that she had been keeping. We wrote an epitaph and placed it into the tin with him so that if anyone ever finds him they will know that he was a very special friend to someone and not just a rodent that died in a field. I plan to seal the tin with was and we are going to bury him out on the farm near the other two hamsters who died and were buried there in the 1980’s – Spunky (my first hamster) and Spinky. We put his name and our names into the box so that, if someone ever does find him, that they could potentially look him up online since the names in a search could lead them back to SGL and this information.

One of the great dangers of maintaining a journal, such as this, is that its pages are replete with memories of deal friends who are no longer with us. Memories that are not written as someone looking back on fond times but memories of events as they happened – with friends still near and dear to us. All of us oblivious to the future.

This is the epitaph that we included in his burial box:

Here lies Wilberforce Clayborn Humphries Miller. Beloved family member and faithful companion. Your time with us was much too short, but your memory will be with us always. Mr. Humphries you will be missed until we meet again. Thank you for choosing us.

Butterscotch and Vanilla Syrian Hamster: June 2003 – December 4, 2005

Child and Pet of Scott Alan and Dominica Anne Miller

I did a quick search for him online to see if he was easy to find. The third thing to come up from seaching for ‘Mr. Humphries hamster’ was the video of Dominica and Mr. Humphries our hamster that I took just two weeks ago. It is only sixteen seconds long because the batteries in the camera died and we didn’t have any more. This is the last time that Dominica played with him and one of the last days that he was really feeling good. We are so blessed that that video was taken then. It is one of our best memories of him. It really shows how active he was when hanging out with us. We are really going to cherish that memory.

We went to Walmart this afternoon in an attempt to take our minds off of our baby. I cleaned up all of his cage and stuff that was left so that we wouldn’t have to deal with it later. Fortunately we have friends who just got hamsters so that we know someone who will be able to put his stuff to good use. I feel really sad giving it away because of all of the memories connected with it but I know that it will just be painful memories in a box of wasted hamster stuff if we don’t let another hamster use it. That wouldn’t be wise.

While we were at Walmart we picked up Empire Earth II because I wanted to play something in the hope that it would take my mind off of the hamster. We also ended up getting Bring It On because it is finally not very expensive and we also got the new Harry Connick Christmas CD/DVD (Dualdisk) album. On our way out of the store we ran into Heather Schaeffer and her dad. We talked for a few minutes. Heather is moving up to Avon now and is working up there.

Min sat in the office and did some knitting for Oreo while I tried playing EE2. That game is really hard. I don’t have the hang of it at all yet. The computer was whoppin’ on me hard, even on the easiest level. We did that for a little while and then decided to go into the living room and watch some television. Basically we are just trying to get through the day. I started moving books up to the office. I have a lot of spare desk space now and we are totally out of space down in the basement. We are thinking that we want some shelves in the office because it is going to be an office to some extent for quite some time. We would like it to serve as a guest bedroom once I don’t need it to be the main office in the house. But it will be a while before we start getting my basement office really put together. And eventually we hope that we will have to use the upstairs office as a nursery and then eventually a second bedroom. But that is a long way off and we definitely shouldn’t be making long term plans for that yet. The good thing is that if we were to get the basement finished that the house really would have a lot of space. It is a small house but if we utilize it all wisely we could have at least one child in the house without a problem. Having two would not be feasible without getting a bigger house.

Without the hamster we are able to turn down the temperature in the house significantly. We used to have the house at 66F-67F but towards the end we had to turn it up to 69F in an attempt to keep the baby comfortable. Now it is down to 65F and we will probably turn it down even more. No reason to pay for all of that natural gas. Especially considering how expensive it is this year. We also closed the office heater vent and are keeping the office door closed when we are not using the room. That is a whole chunk of the house that we no longer have to pay to heat. That will help a ton with the heating cost since that room is one of only two rooms in the entire house that has two exposed walls. We are thinking about putting up a curtain in the hallway by the kitchen in an attempt to keep the cold air from the front of the house from getting easily into the rest of the house. That part of the house does not need to be heated either and it is relatively exposed as well and costs us a bit unnecessarily. It will be kind of weird to have a curtain there but if we put something up that can easily be taken down I think that we can make it very cost effective and be able to take it down when people come to visit so that they don’t think that we are freaks. Of course, I just told the entire world that we are so maybe it doesn’t really matter.

Dominica put the finishing touches on her Christmas tree tonight. I had to go to Walmart the other day and get more garland because she didn’t have enough but she didn’t put it on until now. Now everything is done. Dad is coming over tomorrow morning to take our Christmas picture for our Christmas card. We are going to have the three of us, Dominica, Oreo and I, on the card. We had been trying to figure out how to get Mr. Humphries into the picture because we were determined not to leave him out but I guess that we don’t have to worry about that now. We are having breakfast with dad at 8:45 tomorrow morning and then dad and I are taking Dominica’s car over to Livonia so that she can get her new Nokian snow tires put onto the car. She is very relived that there was no significant amount of snow on the roads any day that she had to drive to work before she was able to get real snow tires. The Lord was really watching over us there.

Dad found mom’s Bible cover, it is a Thomas Kinkade one, and brought it to church this morning so that Dominica can use it to cover and protect her new TNIV study Bible that she bought last week.

I continued working on making archival copies of all of the SGL Podcasts tonight. The show is actually getting listened too decently often in its higher quality form on the Internet Archive. I don’t know who is checking it out but that is pretty cool. Too bad all of those people weren’t checking out the original feed on podOmatic or we would skyrocket to the top of the charts.

I didn’t feel like I was being very productive tonight and I always feel better when I have been productive so I decided to do some vacuuming and dishes. Dominica spent a lot of the evening on the telephone with her parents and her sister. It helped take her mind off of the hamster. I got a bit of cleaning done today and that will help a bit. There is always plenty of cleaning to be done around here.

Before going to bed I posted the Bible reading for the day and recorded a very sad SGL Podcast, Episode 32 for our little boy. Talking about him in the podcast was all that I could handle. I only managed to go for about one minute. If anyone wants to know what naked podcasting sounds like, listen to that. The past two years have been really hard for Dominica and I. Thank you everyone for all of the love and support.