Sheep Guarding Llama

It is a bright and sunny day and so far we still have a hamster. I have been doing some reading online and, as far as I can determine, we are pretty sure that he has had a stroke. His left side is almost completely useless. There is some hope that might be able to recover yet. It is going to be a long, hard road but he might be able to come back from this. But he will definitely never be the same hamster again if he does. I took away his wheel and his “big house” and all his now is the small, warmer apartment piece where he moved to a few days ago. There is nothing in that section for him to climb onto and I think that that is critical in keeping him from hurting himself. It is weird having him in just this tiny little cage. His big cage has been a mainstay in our house ever since we first moved in. Now it is so small and he is just huddled in the corner. It is going to be weird not having him around. We have never really lived in this house without having him there. At the beginning he used to sleep right at the side of the bed next to me. That way he would always know that I was close even when I was just sleeping. For the past few months he has been next to me on the desk and we have spent tons of time together.

I was up at 7:00 this morning and was able to get a lot of work done before my client came over at 9:00. We wrapped up by 11:30 and Andy came over just minutes later. We went to lunch at, you guessed it, the Omega Grill. The waitress said that she hadn’t seen dad yet today. Must be his day off.

Andy didn’t hang out for very long. His parents were expecting him to go up there as well and he had some errands to run too so he had a busy day. So I was back home around 2:00 and had the afternoon to myself.

I called Nate this afternoon and he said that Tammy wasn’t feeling well and he wasn’t sure whether or not he was going to be able to make it out to see the musical tonight. While I was on the phone with him Jocelyn called and said that she wanted to go to the show. So one way or another I am going to the show with somebody, I guess. I told Andy to ask Tony if he would like to go to the show. He sometimes goes to musicals at other schools but he is probably busy. Too busy to hang out with us here in Geneseo. See how he is?

Nate called me back at 5:00 and said that Tammy was too sick for him to come up and leave her home with the kids. Fortunately Jocelyn wanted to go so that we can make use of the ticket that I have being held down at the school.

The was over two hours long. The performance was good but the show itself was awful. First of all I am not a fan of Dr. Seuss in the least. But to make matters worse the show was just a random assortment of Dr. Seuss inside jokes mashed together into one incoherrent jumble with bad musical numbers constantly interrupting any semblance of a plot.

Mary and Jocelyn came over and hung out after the show. I ran over to the hotel and picked Mary up from work when she got off at 11:00. We all hung out until about 2:00 in the morning. We all needed some sleep at that point.

I spent six hours last night compressing the first thirty episodes of the SGL Podcast in the hopes of being able to fit them onto a DVD for a backup. No luck. They are so huge that they don’t fit. That is the original files, the Audacity files. The are gigantic. So I have given up on attempting to store the original files and am just going to make do with having some high quality MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files that I can work from it I ever need to. So I began converting everything to those formats and am making an online copy of them at the Internet Archive so everyone is welcome to get super high quality copies of them there. I am starting with the oldest shows because those are the ones that had to be dropped from podOmatic when my account filled up. That is too bad that they have to made to delete your old stuff but the service is free and storage is expensive. Espeically when most of that old stuff will never be heard ever again.

Dad found his VHS copy of “The King’s Special Christmas” which is a short puppet video that we have from when I was younger. It is a hilarious Christian video that almost no one knows. In fact, I did a Google search on the title and there wasn’t a single hit. I couldn’t believe it. So I mentioned here first I guess and in a few weeks you will be able to do a search for it and find SGL. I am having dad convert the aging VHS to a digital format so that we won’t lose the video. I want to track down the company that actually holds the copyright on that but I have no idea who they are since the name of the video doesn’t even appear online. It is a really funny video. Everyone should check it out.

UPS came by this morning and dropped off my new book “How-To Hydroponics Fourth Edition” by Keith Roberto that I have been waiting for for several weeks. This is the book that I had ordered from Amazon but they forgot to ship. This is the one that I had actually placed the order for. The other books were just filler.

Dad’s old friend Mohawk who worked at Kodak with him came by to visit him today. They haven’t seen each other in fourteen years! Just popped in and surprised him.

Dad was hungry for lunch and probably for a fish fry so he came over to pick me up to go over to the Omega at 1:00. He had breakfast there just a few hours ago. Same waitress. It is becoming a joke how often we are there.

You know that you are getting old when you no longer even expect to have plans on a Friday night. I can’t remember the last time that we actually had regular plans on a Friday night. Now Saturdays are a completely different story. Sort of.

Dominica and I are very sad because Mr. Humphries is sick. He is quite old. Not exceptionally old for a hamster but we had felt that he had been doing so well that he was probably going to make it for quite a while but now it is looking like we might lose him any day. He is very weak and definitely losing weight. It is very hard to tell whem a hamster is sick. He does so many weird things all of the time and so often acts sick and is actually just tired that we never know for sure what is going on. But I have had suspicions for weeks that he seemed to be aging rapidly and not feeling up to his old self. We were hoping to have him for at least another year if not two. He is such a wonderful hamster. A bit of a character and very high maintenance but so incredibly sweet and wonderful. We are so blessed to have gotten him. He really loved us and just liked to spend time with us. We have had him since before we were married. He is the first pet that Dominica and I have had together. I have him some treats and some lettuce. I wanted to make sure that he was eating and that at least he was eating things that he liked. We will just have to wait and see what happens.

Those who miss Anne’s updates that we used to have you can find out more on her blog which you can get via RSS or just check out the web version.

I have spent a bit of time the last two days uploading audio files to the Internet Archive. My account at podOmatic is completely full and cannot hold any more podcast audio. Which is, obviously, a problem. So I have been converting everything that I can into higher quality versions in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats and uploading them. So the first six episodes of the SGL Podcast are all ready no longer available on the podOmatic page but they are available from the Internet Archive. Now you just download them one at a time instead of getting them through an RSS feed. I am going to have to figure out how I want to deal with that in the future. But most archived content isn’t done through a feed anyway. So that seems to work decently well the way that it is for the time being. You can get to my Internet Archive stuff by clicking on the Our Media button to the right.

Here is some exciting news: We have health insurance again! Whoo-hoo. It is amazing how exciting that can be but when you have been going for half a year without any you really begin to wish that you had some.

I took a couple of quick pictures tonight because we have more or less devoid of new pictures on the Flicrcast for weeks now and I know that everyone wants something new to see.

Mr. Humphries is definitely declining. He has not opened his eyes all day. At 10:00 tonight he came out to get a drink of water and just fell right over. He hasn’t slept in days either as far as I can tell. He lays there like he is sleeping but doesn’t actually ever stop figiting. I really expect that we will lose him in the next 48 hours. I turned up the temperature in the house in the hope of making it more comfortable for him. But I doubt that he will notice at this point. I gave him some more Romaine lettuce. He ate all that I had given him before. He seems to really appreciate that so I will keep giving him as much as he wants to eat.

It is so windy tonight that they lost power up at Dominica’s office and they don’t have any backup systems so they just let them go home. So Dominica was able to leave work twenty minutes early tonight. That was a pleasant surprise.

So here is something funny: If you go onto Flickr and do a search on the tag Scott you end up getting nothing but pictures of or by me! How cool is that.

I did some cleaning and organizing in the office. That is what you have to do when you have a client coming down and working at your house. I have a client that is going to be working here at the house with me for about three hours tomorrow morning and I suppose that I need to have the office clean before he comes. I also took the opportunity to do some bill paying while I was sitting at the desk going through papers in the office. Best to get that stuff out of the way when you are thinking about it.

It took Dominica an hour to get home tonight. That is almost twice as long as it normally takes her. The wind is really awful. That is one thing that I really just can’t stand about Upstate New York is the unbelievable amount of wind that never stops. For several months of the year the wind just blows and blows. Even when the temperatures are nice, which is rare enough, it makes the outdoors relatively unusable because of how windy it always is. Our tiki torches on the deck are practically useless all year round.

When Min got home she spent some time with Mr. Humphries. He let her pet him for a little bit. He is not improving any. It is not happy day here.

I discovered tonight that I had accidentally let my car’s registration expire. Oops. I hate dealing with that kind of stuff. Luckily New York allows you to do your registration online now so I was able to get it taken care of really quickly. Pheww.

Before going to bed we watched a few episodes of The Family Guy but we were both pretty tired and headed for bed before 1:00. I have to be up pretty early in the morning to get everything ready so I want to be able to get some sleep. Hopefully we will still have a hamster in the morning. If anyone needs me tomorrow I am going to be pretty busy so try the cell.

No more silly day colour names. It is very cold again today. The heater is running in ernest for the first time, that I have notice, this season. The thaw of the past few days has made Oreo’s skin get really bad again. We are totally convinced that it is a grass allergy that he has. As long as there was snow on the ground he was fine. He was doing so well and then the snow melted and we were right back to where we were. We are hoping that an entire winter of no grass being exposed might really help his body to repair itself. His skin gets so bad. And we have to have him on this medicine all of the time which makes him drowsy. That is kind of handy for us but it would be nice if he felt at his peak all of the time. He hardly plays anymore because of the medicine. He sleeps all day long. It really took the “puppy” out of him. I can’t believe that we have had him for over half of a year now. He is totally a member of our family.

Eric was supposed to come down today and get some work done in the office here but, once again, he is short people at work and has to fill in. So he is stuck in the city all day.

My quest for the day is to find snow tires for Dominica’s car. We have been trying to get them online and have finally given up on that process. Apparently Dominica has a really unpopular tire size or else there just isn’t a good selection with those online places. But I am kind of relieved that we are not going to get them online because I am so happy with my winter Nokian tires. So I am shopping around today trying to find someplace nearby that can sell us some of those.

I spent a good chunk of the morning today listening to The Jedi Council Speaks which released last night (or actually this morning at midnight but podOmatic is on Pacific time so they list it as last night.) Bob’s latest show is really long so it took me a while to get through it.

I did finally manage to find the tires that we wanted from Brigg’s Tire in Livonia. How handy that I managed to get them so close. We are getting the Nokians that I want and it wasn’t too expensive. We are having them mounted and balanced there on Monday morning. Dominica is really relieved to know that we have the tires and that that has been taken care of. Her current tires are quite scary to drive on when it snows. Now we are planning on driving her car down to Maryland next weekend when we go down there so that we are able to pick up my bicycle which has been rusting down there for several years now. I bought a nice, new bicycle while living in Ithaca and ended up only ever taking it to North Carolina one time and then dropping it off in Maryland it has been just sitting in John’s garage ever since. And now they have moved. Who knows where the bike is now. I am sure that John will be very happy to have the bike out of there.

Nate called to have me get tickets from Geneseo High School for Seussical the Musical that is being put on there this weekend. We are going on Saturday night. It should be fun. Show starts at 7:30. You can reserve tickets online by calling the Geneseo High School Media Center at (585) 243-3450 ext. 3013. Maybe we will see you there. Here is the show link but it probably won’t be a good link for very long.

The SGL Podcast went over its storage limit today on podOmatic so I had to start removing some of the old shows so that we could keep making new ones. That is really sad. I guess that the time has come for me to begin looking for an alternative hosting service to handle the show. Apparently we are a larger show than they were prepared to accommodate.

Here is a cool little secret XML RSS feed link, you can get a direct feed of all music destined to be played on the SGL Podcast. These are the same songs that we are choosing from. The feed is generated by me when I select songs to be put into our future playlist for the podcast. By subscribing to this link you have an opportunity to hear the music first and to be able to automatically download all of the music, even the stuff that never ends up getting played, at a higher quality than we play on the show.

I did some more hunting on the Podsafe Music Network today and found a number of good tunes to play on the show. That is such a great idea. An entire network of artist making their music available for use on podcasts. There is quite a bit of really good music up there.

When Min got home from work we went out to Walmart and did some grocery shopping. I was only planning on getting a few thing but we ended up doing an entire shopping trip and stocking the house with stuff. At least we got a lot out of the trip. While we were there we saw that season four (that is volume three) of The Family Guy was out. We have a love/hate relationship with that show. The first three seasons were awesome and only so inappropriate but the fourth season is far less entertaining and much more inappropriate but we still really enjoy the style of humour. So we are caught between wanting to continue to watch the show that we are all ready attached to and being mortified by the stuff that they do. Definitely not a show to allow children to watch. Ever. But every once in a while they do something that is so hilariously funny. On the way out of Walmart we ran into Mary. We talked for a minute and she and Jocelyn are planning on coming over on Saturday night after Mary’s shift at the hotel to hang out. Saturday is going to be a really busy day. I have a meeting first thing in the morning and then hanging with Andy at noon. Nate and I are going to the show that evening and then Mary and Jocelyn are coming over late.

Wil Wheaton has a new podcast up now. Check it out at Radio Free Burrito. He used to have a really short podcast that he did from his car on his cell phone but he seems to have given that up a long time ago. So I will be interested to see how this new one goes with a long format. Should be good. I hope.

We watched a little television and then it was off to bed. I really wanted to do a podcast tonight but my eyes were killing me and I could barely look at the monitor to wrap up this segment on SGL so I am calling it a night.