revchris

Jackie says that being up on the dryer while I'm folding clothes is good, because then she gets big piles of warm clothes to sit on and try and squash the lumps out of, but it becomes less fun when I then fill the dryer with wet pillows and tennis balls.

They finished paving our neighborhood today. Base coat asphalt on Northland, Fulton, and Nancy, and topcoat on all three plus School. The roads really needed it, but it's also nice for them to be done. I'd guess that all the cones and barricades will go away either tonight or tomorrow. One of the neighbors said they were pushing hard to get it done so they didn't have to wait for things to dry out after tonight's predicted rain.

I'm over the swelling and most of the itching from the allergic reaction, now I'm waiting for everything to finish peeling and for the last of the red to go away. We're fairly sure that it was a reaction to something on the celery we bought for the potato soup. I was talking with John at Jim's Meat Market (where we got the Italian sausage), and he says they stopped using celery in everything a while ago. They used to fail a health inspection every year or two, and their health inspector suggested they cut out the celery, as it's apparently a common source of pollutants, including dirt and agricultural chemicals. John says they haven't failed an inspection since (he said it's been 10 years).

The cats spent the day at the vet for teeth cleaning. Jackie had one tooth removed, Marley had one canine and three other teeth pulled. The vet's pretty sure that Marley's weight loss is related to the dental problems. teeka got home with the cats shortly after I got home, and we shouldn't laugh, but Marley was frantically throwing food around because her mouth was still numb while she was trying to eat something (anything? everything? whatever a starving kitty needs!).

Yesterday I rebuilt my mother-in-law's computer. Her old one stopped working while they were trying to figure out what she'd need to do to run Adobe CS3, so they decided that it was time to upgrade. I picked a kit from Tiger Direct, and they went from a 3GHz Celeron with 512MB or RAM to a 2.2GHz Dual Core with 2GB. I built the new machine a couple weeks ago and swapped all the drives from the old one to the new one and traded video cards with her (I had a PCI-E/16 card and both AGP and PCI-E/16 slots, she had an AGP card in the old machine and a PCI-E/16 slot in the new machine, and both cards were similar quality), booted it up, and then went away while it figured out what drivers needed to be installed. Told it to cancel all it's install attempts, ran the driver disk, downloaded the video card drivers, a couple passes through Windows Update, and then boxed the new machine up to go back home.

I'm probably going to use the old machine and some of the accumulated other parts from home to upgrade Teeka's desktop the same way. She'll go from a pIII-900 to the celeron, which should make it a little less frustrating to use.

Anyone want to buy a camper? We've decided that we should try to sell the camper because we really only ever use it one weekend per year, and with ongoing maintenance and what we went through this time to get it hooked up to the truck, it's really not worth it.

Maggs left last night to spend a few days at her folks'. I've got work stuff that has to be done tomorrow, so I stayed home.

Today, I slept late, had a light breakfast, and then took a nap with the cats. I finally got up around noon, ate brunch, and then did some housework.

So far, I've done three loads of laundry, two loads through dishwasher, ripped the door frame out of the computer room and am currently baking cookies.

I should plan dinner soon, but other than it will probably contain pulled pork from the batch we made yesterday, I'm not sure. Maybe herbed popovers, if I can find where I put the recipe.

I got the longer half of the pipe run finished and duct-taped closed the pipe ends to make sure that nothing can crawl into the house via the open pipes. By that time, Teeka had dinner ready, and the mosquitos were starting to become a nuisance. After dinner I went to Menards for more pipe (I think 20' will be about 1' short, so I got a third length of each size).

While I was working on pipe, Teeka went to the vet for more pain meds for Marley. She came through declawing really well, no bleeding or other problems, but today we noticed that when she was sitting down she'd keep one foot in the air. Teeka called the vet, and they said that that was normal, but they could give her extra meds to help with the pain for a few days. We're also going to keep her out of the computer room (where we think most of the jumping occurs) and restrict her to the guest room overnight and when no one is home for at least a day or two to let her heal a bit more.