Eighty Years (or so) To The Big Zero

So things did not go so well that weekend.

I didn’t make it to the hike because of my cat. I saw my cat Vayne on Friday night and he had this huge swelling on his shoulder. There was no fur and some discharge and it was like a small bubble on the side of his shoulder. A friend of mine who recently lost one of his long time dogs had similar bulges and it turned out to be cancer. So I got up real early (6:45 am) in the morning on Saturday and started calling the vet.

I called, and called, and called. No answer. At 9 am a friend called and asked about Vayne. I said I couldn’t get a hold of the vet. “You calling the right number?” “Well yeah, it’s …… that’s the number.”

“They have two numbers.”

Silence. “Really?” He tells me the number he calls, and I check my print out for the Vet and there it is, the second number is the number he calls. I hang up and call and someone immediately picks up. They make room and I take Vayne into the Vet. He’s not happy. He’s crying the entire time even though I have my hand inside the cage petting him and calling his name. He’s still “meow”, “meow”, “meeooow”, “meh”, “MEOOOOOOWW”, “eow” for the entire 11 mile drive.

Doc sees him and says, yeah we’ll need to keep him overnight because we can’t get to him today. But clearly something is wrong. Could be infected but we’ll see. You can pick him up on Monday.

Sunday. Monday. Monday evening I call. “Hello. I’m on my way to pick up Vayne.”

“Oh that’s great. He’s fine. There was nothing wrong with him. Just a bruise on his shoulder. He would have been fine in a couple days. But at least we know.” (And indeed he is fine, not even a limp.)

$180 for the knowledge that my cat ran into something and spranged his shoulder.

I had to put it on my new Motiva Discover card. My first credit card purchase of the year and a blow toward Reset.

So I missed the hike. I was really looking forward to it.

Oh and I figured out how to get my SATA drives working but that’s another post on how Awesome it is to be a Geek.

Right now I’m just glad to be back up and running (not in RL) but on the computer.

I’m on vacation for the next two weeks so will be updating the various pages and stats for the Six Months to Reset experiment in the coming days. Have to plan out exactly what is a priority. Today I intend to do some burning of a huge pile of debris from some land clearing a while back with new material from the Tornado.

 Just beyond the bird house is a pile of trees. This was done during the winter. And just over the trunk of my new Toyota Corrola LE is the oak that was knocked over by the tornado. It’s in the last picture also. The second shot is a close up of the trees at the end of my driveway that blocked it and the easement that connects the road to my house and my neighbors home further back. We were cutting those trees up that morning just to get out of the driveways.

Hey, here is a picture of a tree that fell on the same day as the Tornado but was 7 miles away at a friend’s house. We had some very strong winds that morning all over the area. He was going to have to pay someone to cut it down but now that’s not a problem.

 (That’s not me. Just a friend who has helped me work on my yard and taught me a lot about living in the country. He’s gonna help get my garden going for next year. The spot I’m burning today is where I’ll be putting the garden.)

Until later.

The Credit Trap, This Land

Yesterday two good things occurred. One was planned and the other was not.

First the planned one: I got my refund check from the IRS last week. I put most of it down on my one remaining credit card and reduced the balance by a little over 55 percent. I’ll have some very comfortable payments for the next couple months and it should be completely paid off by July. This is important for many reasons. The primary one being I now have a car payment (plus insurance for a new car) so my budget has been squeezed a bit.

The second thing that happened was at work. I was coming out of the staff lounge and heading down the hallway when a fellow worker who was further down the hall was headed toward me. When we met in the hall he said “Hey have you lost weight? I didn’t recognize you when I first saw you coming out of the door.”

I was like - “Really? Thanks. Yes I’ve been working out.” And he replied. “Well it’s surely working. I hadn’t seen you in a while and I wasn’t sure it was you for a moment there until I got closer.”

Now that’s cool!

As you can tell from my Road to Mt. Olympus tracking I haven’t really lost a whole lot - about 3-5 pounds on any given week - but I’m definitely slimming down.

Then that same day I had just gotten home and was about to go on my walk when I head some birds in the back yard. I looked out back and there were dozens of vultures sitting in the trees and even walking around the ground. I went out and they were cawing and fluttering their wings and just hanging out in my back yard.

I went toward the trees they had roosted in and was walking underneath them but they didn’t move. I looked into the sky and more vultures were overhead. I was sniffing the air for death, and looking at the grounds for some dead animal. I was out there about five minutes when suddenly they all started to move on. Some took off and flew into the sky while others simply moved to jump from tree to tree.

Circling off in the distance I saw a few more vultures and the ones from my yard started to join them. Then a hawk started to screech in a tall tree nearby.  I’m not sure if it was the hawk or they were simply resting but almost all at once they were gone and large cyclon funnels of birds were springing up in different areas of the sky. It was like out of a King novel or something.

I hope they had just needed a place to relax after a hard journey of eating the dead. I still have all my cats so I know it wasn’t that.

A Whole New You, The Credit Trap, Thinking out loud

I quick note - I added the cookie jar graphic to the website.

The Credit Trap, Thinking out loud