Quick Lemon Fudge recipe

One of the women in the Babe's bowling league brought in a pan of lemon fudge. Oh, it's all sugar, and really bad for me, but I loved it. We got the recipe:

Quick Lemon Fudge

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
3-3/4 cups powder sugar
1 tsp lemon extract
minced zest of 1 lemon
1 4.3 oz package lemon Cool & Serve pudding

1. Mix ingredients and cook over med heat until very thick.
2. Pour into glass tray.
3. Refrigerate until very firm.
   

Quick Lemon Fudge recipe

Are you going to Hell?

If you read this headline and laugh out loud, you’re going to hell:

From MSNBC:

"Cops: Priest runs over Good Friday churchgoers"

Are you going to Hell?

Blow job of the day?

This is a camera showing Mt. Redoubt in Alaska. (Why, what did you think I meant?)

A different view of Mt. Redoubt can be found here.

Blow job of the day?

A cat haiku for Friday

I was looking up Ernest Borgnine on IMDB.com to see how old he is (92!) and saw a lovely haiku by a user named Crazykaese.

Small brave carnivores
Kill pine cones and mosquitoes,
Fear vacuum cleaner

A cat haiku for Friday

"Wipeout" on the banjo

I was in the middle of working on receipts for expenses and so on, when I got pinged by a cousin with this little nugget.

I think we've seen it demonstrated that you can play just about anything on a banjo. But it's not the banjo that's really unusual in this; it's the washboard.

Oy.

Redneck Wipeout @ Yahoo! Video

"Wipeout" on the banjo

Bill Murray and being rich and famous

Was talking to Brenda on AIM this evening and it occurred to me that I'd not added this story about being rich and famous to my blog.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaany years and a couple dozen books ago, I was in the middle of my 2nd & 3rd books (it was a simultaneous thing--hint: don't do this). I remember coming home and walking in the front door and saying to Patricia something completely fatuous about being rich and famous. She looked thoughtful and said "You know, Bill Murray was being interviewed on TV today and the interviewer started flipping him a little shit and said, 'Well, you haven't handled fame very well.' And Bill Murray got really bristly and looked right into the camera and said 'All you boys and girls out there in Televisionland who think you want to grow up to be rich and famous, let me give you a piece of advice: try "rich" first and see if that doesn't do it for yuh!'"

I found that to be an excellent piece of advice and I've tried to practice this to a large extent: given a choice between "rich" and "famous," I've gone for "rich" whenever possible. And you should, too.

Bill Murray and being rich and famous

Twitter--oh, dear God....

So, despite a distinct feeling that I had Plenty Of Other Things To Do, I signed up on Twitter yesterday. This was largely in response to Brenda Huettner's noodging to do so, but I did sign up of my own free will. So, I encourage you to follow my tweetstream on Twitter if you're there, but it's going to be more of a tweetpuddle this month. I've got plenty to do work-wise this month and there's not going to be a lot of Twitter movement on my part.

Oh, and congratulations to Phylise Banner on her engagement!

Twitter--oh, dear God....

Two websites you should try out

I wanted to take a moment amidst my suddenly hurly-burly schedule and let you know about two really cool websites.

The first is SpaceWeather.com. SpaceWeather is a website that tells you all sorts of interesting things about what's going on in the sky. The neatest part may be their satellite tracker: you enter your zip code, postal code, or country, then it shows you where and when to look in the sky for interesting manmade objects that are visible to the naked eye: the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Discovery, several large satellites, and things like that. Very cool stuff! The whole site is worth romping around for all sorts of interesting astronomical happenings.

The second site is Wordle.com, a juicy little nugget for the literarily inclined. Wordle generates word clouds from text that you provide it by analyzing the frequency of words in the text and then assigning a greater prominence to the words that appear more frequently. You can then change the cloud by changing the colors, fonts, and layouts. It's really quite fun! Feed Wordle the text of your latest article, or a manual draft, or that novel you've been working on. Or go to, say, Project Gutenberg, and grab something and try that out. It's a great time-waster, as if I had time to waste these days. (One of the joys of working on database engines is that you've always got something interesting to work on at any hour of the day or night.)

Try both of them out sometime. They're a lot of fun!

Two websites you should try out

Happy it's Friday

Last Tuesday, I got a phone call in the evening from Susan the Wonderchild, who said, perkily "I'm at Urgent Care because I broke my elbow." Well, I'm glad she was happy about it, but it did give me pause. Turns out that she was trying out for the Roller Derby and fell and her elbow hyperextended and blip! she cracked off the end of her radius. Everybody's gotta have a hobby, I suppose.


Now, something interesting about all this: when the doctor said to Susan "Would you like a prescription for pain meds," Susan said "No, I'm fine, I don't need them." I explained to her later that this was not the right answer; that, in fact, when the doctor asks you if you want pain meds, that you say "Why, yes, thank you, that'd be very helpful," and you give this answer if you're feeling better than you ever have in your life at that moment. You never know when you're going to need something powerfully narcotic and opiated that will help you deal with life's little exigencies, like when you've just dropped something very heavy on your foot. Susan has gotten this principle down, although it was certainly reinforced by the pain level when the natural endorphins wore off and her arm started throbbing. When the orthopedist looked at her arm two days later and he offered her 40 Vicodin, she said "Why, yes, thank you!"


She decided that she wanted a second opinion and liked the second orthopedist much better, so this afternoon, she had surgery with him. He replaced the bone chip and did a thing or two else. She's at home now and will be recovering. The nerve block they gave her has made her arm completely numb, which is very strange for her. Her friend Von, who the Babe and I both like very much, brought her home from the day surgery (although the Babe was able to be there when Susan woke up). Von's been playing cards with Susan this evening.


Speaking of 'home', I wanted to mention something else: Susan has moved back in with us. She'd been planning on doing this anyway, but this was planned for May or June. With the need to be taken care of and a few other things, she's moved back in today. We now have 4 cats again, too. We'll be getting a couple guys to schlep her stuff from her house to here and set it up again.

Happy it's Friday

Boy howdy, it's a busy day today!

So, let's see: we stayed up late last night practicing a duet and working out some harmonies for "I Remember You" for the Springfield Jazz Singers and a musical evening we're emceeing next week. We're singing at the Unitarian Church this morning, followed by a break, followed by an appearance at the Springfield Arts Center with the Springfield Jazz Singers. After this, we come home and the Babe has to go into the office to get some work done and do a final review of cases for tomorrow and I've got an Excel spreadsheet to work on for my day job. Busy weekend!

Boy howdy, it's a busy day today!

Bernie the cat :(

Bernie the cat died today. I'm very, very sad.

About a week ago, we noticed that he was beginning to act a little puley. He wasn't moving as much and he seemed off his feed. Nothing too bad, really, but he clearly wasn't a happy boy.

As the days wore on, though, he wasn't getting better. He was losing weight and looking really peaked. His membranes were up slightly, so I figured it was a bad case of parasites, even though we'd dosed him with a vermifuge recently. Time to take him in to the vet. The Babe volunteered to take him in Thursday morning (they didn't have anything Wed afternoon) because she didn't have cases until the afternoon.

It wasn't parasites. The vet said that he was an extremely sick cat, far sicker than we'd realized. He was very jaundiced: the insides of his ears were bright yellow. They weren't sure what was causing it, but all the possibilities were really bad. They ran a bunch of tests and came up with a probable answer: FIP, feline infectious peritonitis, a disease that tends to attack kittens of precisely his age. Worse, this was the "wet" kind, which generates a lot of fluids.

The disease is a really nasty virus that attacks whatever the hell it feels like. It's different from cat to cat, so in one cat it might attack the heart, in another the lungs, and so on. In Bernie's case, it got to his kidneys and they were badly swollen, over twice their normal size (which is about the size of a marble) and surrounded by fluid. They had gotten so large that they were pressing into his intestines and causing enough discomfort that he didn't feel like eating or drinking.

FIP is hard to diagnose: you can say with certainty when it's not a factor, but the corona virus that's the root of the problem can appear without mutating into FIP (which is part of the evil). Even worse, there's no effective vaccine: the one that's on the market is of dubious effectiveness and it has to be given to kittens around 4 weeks. But the worst part is that there's no cure for it. There's minor symptomatic relief, but a cat with wet FIP has at best 2 months to live.

The vet rehydrated Bernie so he'd feel better, but she held out very little hope for him. She said if his appetite returned, he might last as much as 2 more weeks, but if it didn't--and this was far more likely--then it wouldn't be much longer at all. She made it very clear that I should bring him home to say goodbye.

We kept a close eye on Bernie that evening. He was fairly droopy, but the rehydration made him livelier than he'd been for a while. But by Friday afternoon, he was fading fast. He spent all his time curled up in one place or another. I noticed that his abdomen was getting distended from fluid build-up, which must've been very uncomfortable. In fact, several times I saw him curled up with one paw under him to lift up his tummy slightly so it didn't press on anything.

I figured if he made it through Friday night, it was Time, and I was going to bring him in to the vet to have him put down Saturday. He was still alive, but clearly in much worse shape, on Saturday morning, so made an appt. for the afternoon.

Bernie was so sick when I got ready to pack him up for the ride that he didn't even run away when I set the cat carrier next to him. He just looked at it and made this pitiful mewing sound. I scooped him up as gently as I could so I didn't press his abdomen and put him in the carrier and drove him to the vet.

I was about to ask about paying the bill in advance because I didn't want to stick around afterwards, but the person behind the desk knew what I was there for and said that they could mail me the bill and I could pay it when I felt ready to do so. That was incredibly thoughtful of them and very gracious as well: it's normally a pay-as-you-go deal.

One of the vet techs got me in the room and helped me get Bernie out the carrier. He was pretty pathetic at this point. I asked about his abdomen and she palpated and then said "Oh, yeah, feel this." I put my fingers where hers were and she said "Those are his kidneys." From something the size of marbles, his kidneys had swollen to the size of small hen's eggs. Bernie must've been miserable. It was good to feel that, because I knew I was doing the right thing.

She left me there and I talked to Bernie and cried for a while. He managed to move around some and snuggle. He even walked up on my shoulders and sat down for a while and would occasionally purr. His breath was really bad, which I attributed (correctly) to toxicity.

The vet came in and we got set up. Bernie still had a catheter port in his arm from his IVs on Thursday, so they didn't have to poke him for the shots. I was pleased. The vet first gave him a tranquilizer, which just relaxed him. (He looked far more relaxed than I'd seen him in the last few days, in fact.) Then she asked if I was ready for her to proceed. I said yes. She then gave Bernie an anesthetic that completely knocked him out so that he wouldn't be conscious for any of the rest of it. Bernie was draped over my forearm and he sorta drooped to one side. She waited a moment, but when it was clear that he was unconscious, she gave him the overdose of barbiturates. She checked his heart with the stethoscope and said "He's gone."

I cried through most of this. The vet (who was also very sniffly) asked if I wanted time alone with him. No, I'd done all that I needed to before she came in and he was gone now. I had found a couple of the paper balls that I'd through to Bernie and he'd play fetch with yesterday under the couch in my office, and I asked her to make sure that these went with him when he was cremated. (I had decided not to bury him at the house.)

I know I did the right thing for him, because my little guy was in a lot of pain, but damnit, I really hate it when my cats get sick and die. :(

Bernie the cat :(

The Failure Blog

I was told about the Failure Blog today and it's pretty darned good. (It's from the same folks who brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, Engrish, and other great sites.)


Anyway, Failure Blog has lots of really great photos and a number of videos (although many of those tend to get removed for TOS violations--probably copyright issues).

Here are a few examples of failures. (FWIW, there is also a win every once in a while to offset the failures.)

The Failure Blog