Domestic Geek

So, after a week of diarrhea and scaring the shit out of me because he wouldn't eat or drink, my old dog seems to be making a recovery. Don't count that 14½ year old dog out yet! No poo on the carpet in two days and he's eating soft food (and boiled hamburger per the vet's advice) and I found him drinking out of the toilet yesterday. He was actually bounding about when I got home from work. Whew.

I got picked for jury duty. I have to report tomorrow. Boooooo. It wouldn't be so bad except that I have to dress nice and I have to go downtown. Downtown Denver sucks. Parking is a nightmare down there. So, I have to get up extra early so I can get pizza work done and come home to make myself presentable to report at 8 am.

Guess I'll watch a little television and make it an early night (if the screaming children next door will stuff a sock in it).

I'm back. I had planned to return in a couple of weeks, but cut my hiatus short because I just had to share this little bit of news:

I got the following in my inbox early Tuesday morning and didn't think much of it. The art director was working on his resume on Monday and I chuckled to myself that maybe he was planning on leaving and I was going to get a promotion.



Well, guess what happened at work yesterday? I was given my two weeks notice that my job at the screenprinter is being eliminated. Sales are THAT BAD. When the art director broke the news, he informed me that he was looking for other work as well. I wonder if the company is finally going under. Anyway, as of November 1st, I am again underemployed. So much for leaving on my terms, eh? Oh, well. At least I got some art production experience under my belt. Like the horoscope said, I'll probably be better off because of it. We'll see.

Even though I was expecting something like this eventually, the shock didn't hit me until I was standing in the aisle at King Soopers. I suddenly went numb and would've started bawling had I not been in public. I had to fight the urge to buy every comfort food within the place. I had to remind myself that I had I finally fit into my smaller pants last week. I've been bike riding with Marcus every weekend since my birthday and I'm finally firming up. Did I really want to sabotage that? No. So, everything went back on the shelves except one bag of M&Ms. Yay, me! Besides, if I don't find other work soon, money will be really tight and I would have felt really shitty about blowing money on junk.

In other news, my poor old dog has had explosive diarrhea for the last three days. Even though I had planned on milking the screenprinter out of every dollar possible the next two weeks, I took today off to tend to him (and me since he's kept me up the last two nights). I'm not sure if the Immodium I gave him is working or not as I don't want to follow him outside in the rain to see if his poo is runny. The poor guy is exhausted, though. I feel so bad for him. I also hate cleaning up poop out of the carpet. How do you moms do it? I don't think I could deal with so much poop on a daily basis. You women are saints.

Well, other than that, my life has been the same the last few weeks. I've still been slowly going through my junk and throwing stuff out. Why do I own so much freakin' junk?

I was playing with the Google Maps API last week at work. I had planned on implementing it into the company website before I got the news I was canned. That thing is really cool. It's too bad there's no reason to put that on any of my personal sites, but it's still a cool thing to know. I wish my javascript skills were better. I'm sure I'd pick the scripting of it up a lot quicker if they were.

I'm also trying out a new font manager. I haven't had one since my free trial of Suitcase and Font Reserve ran out a looooong time ago. I found a post about it over at Mezzoblue. It's put out by the folks over at Linotype and it's called Font Explorer X. Supposedly a Windows version is in the works, as well. It's very iTunes-ish. I haven't had much time to mess with it, but I like what I see so far. I hate Suitcase with a passion and swore never to waste my money on it. Speaking of fonts, I wish foundries would lower the price for their fonts. Offer fonts for $.99 like the Apple store does music and see how many people would actually buy legal copies of fonts instead of pirating them. I bet the foundries would make more money. I know I would have less of a problem buying a font for a couple of bucks as opposed to $25 or more. It's working for iStockPhoto. Just a thought.

Speaking of iStockPhoto, I'm seriously considering getting myself on there as a contributor. I can do vector illustration just as well as anybody on there. It would never make me rich, but hey, everybody could use a little residual income here and there, eh?

Well, guess that's about it. I'm sure I'll have a lot of posts coming in the next two weeks because the screenprinter probably won't get a lot of work out of me. My motivation is totally shot. That's why I'm all for severence packages and being let go on the spot. Let's hope the next company that hires me can actually afford to provide the benefits that I was promised after 3 months.

I forgot to mention that poor Skippy got himself in a bind yesterday, literally. As I was getting ready to go to work, I heard a thud come from the bedroom. I knew he had been sleeping on the bed and thought he had rolled off in his sleep. I went in to check on him and found him all tangled up in the old, shredded-up comforter we keep on top of the bed to protect the good comforter from the dog. I tried to untangle him and he panicked. He started flailing around screaming in pain. I finally had to just scoop him up and put him back on the bed to get him calm enough to get him untangled. I was afraid he had broken or strained something, but he was fine. Goofy mutt!

Now I remember why I used to prefer making dough in the middle of the night--I was oblivious to the crap that goes on in the store between the people that work there. I've found out so much stuff this last week that I really wish I was still clueless about (all of a sudden I'm everyone's confidante). It makes my head hurt thinking about it all. Some of it also pisses me off, but there's nothing I can do about any of it. As long as the players are the same, the same dance will go on. I can honestly say that I'm lost any inkling of respect for anyone there. No wonder I've lost all motivation to do a good job. I must do well in school so that I can get away from all of those nut jobs.

I didn't get my project done before the deadline today in class, though. I guess that's what I get for blowing school off on Monday. I need to get a small portable hard drive so that I can bring my projects home to work on them. That so sucks that there is no way to do that now. I could've finished if I'd been able to work on it here. Oh, well. I'm doing so well otherwise that the points I'm going to lose won't kill my grade that much. The worst part was I found typos after I turned it in. There's no way to get an "A" with misspellings. Shit happens. I guess I've got a major case of spring fever or something, because I so just don't care about stuff right now that I should be caring about. I hate it when I get like that.

When I came home tonight (after work), I sat down here to read my email on the new ViewSonic monitor that I purchased this afternoon. Skippy was in my dark craft room whining. When I went in there, he started running back and forth between me and the front window. I looked and listened and couldn't find anything odd, so I chased him out and figured while I was up I'd go into the other room and check on the bunnies. Lo and behold, the door is open and one of the rabbits is missing. Guess where? You got it. She was in the farthest corner behind all the cabinets I've yet to get put back. What a pain it was to get her out of there. Of course, she didn't cooperate, either. I guess Marcus left one of the doors open last night when he cleaned their cage. Yay Skippy for alerting me to the problem!

Well, my body hurts, so I'm going to go to bed. I might read for a bit, though. That reminds me: We got our mid-terms back today, and my teacher marked a question wrong that said (true/false) "A bit is the same as a byte." I put false. I said, "Aren't there 8 bits in a byte? (There are.) So, they're not the same thing." He jokingly (I hope) says that I fail for showing up the teacher. Ha! He also didn't seem to find my comment amusing that I wrote in the margin about another question. It was a multiple choice that asked who provided the hardware for Apple computers. The three choices were a) Motorola, b) Dell, or c) Apple. Well, obviously it was c, but I noted that a was also partially correct as Motorola provides the processor. When I queried him later as to whether he found my comment humorous, he said the question asked about the hardware. Well, the last time I checked, a processor was hardware. It certainly isn't software. *sigh*

Thanks to everyone for the kind words and support during the last week. Ursa was more than a dog. She was a best friend, confidante, teddy bear, security blanket, and more than anything, she was family. Even though cancer was wasting away her body and her liver was failing, she never complained. Even though she was miserable, she could still manage a tail wag and a kiss. The decision to have her put to sleep was heartbreaking for us, but it was the only fair thing to do for a dog that had given us so much. I don't think that even now it has sunk in that she is gone. She spent 9 of her 12 years with us. I sure hope she's in a better place. I'm picturing her running through a field chasing bunnies. I'm going to miss her so dang much.

BTW, Marcus made a cool tribute picture for Ursa on his site. Check it out here.