Category Archives: Home

A dog with cancer

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13°C, lighter winds, some sun. CK:29 miles

She’s been ill for a week or so now. A second vet can’t now find a lump, the first thought it quite large. Maybe now she is getting some treatment, her belly is fuller  that lump is obscured when feeling by hand. I haven’t done any such probing. she has (sorry for the grisly details) black diarrhoea which sounds like there’s blood in it. I hope that this hasn’t been triggered by us feeding her sausages, minced-meat and such. Dog food is quite bland, but the change could be the problem.

I have to face the fact that this may be her last winter. She is 13 years 11 months at the time of writing.


Four Gigs

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15°C, clear sun.

Nerdity– fitted new RAM to my main computer, doubling it up to 4GB. Windows XP only recognises 3.66GB, but that’s still a huge increase on 2GB. There are some technical reasons why you don’t get to use all 4GB, but upgrading to Windows 7 should reveal it all.

The first two runs crashed out with a blue screen, but I’ve changed settings in the BIOS, and the last run worked without a hitch. Microsoft FSX seems to run a little faster now, but I didn’t test it very rigorously. It has a latency of 5-5-5-18, but I don’t really know what that means right now. I have a little book though.

Nerdlessly: the pond has built up edges on the lower side, it now has a water butt full of water more than this morning. A good few hours effort, it’s great to work outside on a clear sunny day. I need to plant some grasses round the rim to stabilise the bricks + mud around the shore.

vestibular syndrome

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17°C, sunny with building wind.

Bessie has been diagnosed with vestibular disease. It’s her inner ear that is at fault and it makes her feel vertigo, hence the nausea and poor balance. Some cure can occur after the injections that she’s had- antibiotics, anti-nausea & something else. If it’s part of a more general condition the outcome could be grim. We’ll know by tomorrow.

Ol’ Bessie

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18°C, strong W, thick cloud.

Old Bessie is not well. She’s curled up now and relaxed but is very unsteady on her feet this evening. She had a bit of a turn earlier, she staggered into the living room and could barely stand. Her head seems tilted to one side slightly. Thinking back, she wasn’t too agile this morning on her early walk either. I don’t know whether she’ll get through this winter. The vet says she is 13 years & 11 months. She has an appointment in the morning to keep.  An old dog that has me worried.

Sunday morning rain.

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14°C, rain. CR:?

rain & laundry

It would be dry if I'd left it in the house

Sunday is cyclingday, so I wake to rain and a washingline full of wet clothes. I face a grim choice: finish the last bit of painting in the attic, or attack the pile of marking while I wait for the clouds to lift. It’s a tough life.

mortgage

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10°C, and rising

That cold never did materialise, I felt fine the next day. I’m off soon to switch mortgage, my fixed term runs out next month and it reverts to a tracker, but interest rates are so low I should get a new fixed rate term to hold it low for years.

It’s a strange thing to shop for- nothing like choosing a TV or Hifi. There is none of the materialistic glee from a new feature in your home. A re-mortgage will give you a huge saving in about 18 years. Nothing you can reach out and touch then. It’s even worse than paying out for a big repair. The car is the worst for this, you have your card swiped for £300 and drive the car home, feeling the same as before. It’s no wonder that few shoppers jump ship to another energy provider/mortgage/phone company. The root of the problem is that it’s all so boring.

Anyway, no decisions yet, but the main contenders are fixed rate for 5 years, tracker for 2 then onto fixed, or variations on those (18 or 15 years). I’m playing with a spreadsheet to find the one. Open Office Calc works well.
It’s warm enough for shorts now.

The heat(ing) is on

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17°C, Dry, light cloud

The innocent fan. Blame the circuit board!

He’s done it, the water boiler works now. The fan was not guilty all along, it was the circuit board causing trouble. By the look of it, the board is just a set of relays & an IC chip to control the front LEDs. Perhaps a relay failed, it does tend to be a mechanical failure more often, relays physically throw a switch rather than some transistor method. You can hear them click inside.

M101 blows

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Light cloud in complex layers. 19°C & less wind. CR:35 miles after school.

The brightest Type-A supernova is at it’s peak tonight. It’s hidden under some thin high stratus cloud right now, which is a bit of a problem. The object is faint anyway, you’d need binoculars at least, so the slightest cloud renders it invisible. I’d really like to see a supernova sometime in my life, even if it’s faint & non-descript; it’s the thought, that’s all.

Supernova type 1a

Rode after school tonight. The shower is still out of action so I left promptly and hit the road on two wheels at 5pm. I got two hours in and still arrived home ½hr. before sunset. Feel-good.