Categories
Cobar Other

Heart Attack and Hard Times

On February 24th, 2017 I went into the ER because I thought I had really bad heart burn and ended up going down right in front of the ER doctor. I had a heart attack.  Chest compression and defibrillator brought me back to life.  Within minutes I was rushed into emergency catheter surgery to unblock my heart.  Spent five nights in the hospital and have been on the road to recovery.

Needless to say the stump digging project has been on hold for the past two months. I will be restarting that project this month and the goal is to have it out by the end of this month. Not sure how realistic that goal is. There’s a lot more to just the stump itself with this project. There’s a buried wire fence that’s a major issue. I’ll figure it out.

Cobar did exceptionally well during my hospital stay. He managed much better than I have ever expected. Especially with the recent separation which hasn’t been all that good for him. He is managing very good but at times he’s still expecting her to show up.  Unfortunately in mid April he injured his right shoulder again which was an issue last year for several months. He’s healing and on track to be better. I now have a better idea of how and what is causing the injury so that I can avoid it in the future.

There wasn’t any pain from the heart attack or surgery itself, but the chest compression and defibrillator was where most of the pain came from. It took a good month and a half for the pain to go away and feel normal. Started back on my exercise routine in April as I couldn’t wait for the cardio rehab which took way too long to start up. I think this ended up being a good thing as the rehab isn’t as much of a chore than it would be if I hadn’t.

This has made my current life a lot more difficult than I had planned for this year. I just am trying to keep positive and continue to move forward.

 

 

Categories
Cobar Hemophilia Other

Happy Valentines Day

I haven’t posted much about Cobar for a very long time. He has been by my side almost every day since about 2011.  He is now 9 years old. Much older than I had ever expected him to live. It has been a long emotional roller coaster. One where I am now suffering from Major Depression. He has been doing very good for the past year or so, but for the latter part of 2016 he injured his front right shoulder that took 4 months to heal.  We have now both suffered the loss of our partner in life after she no longer wanted to be in our world and moved out.  She had apathy for him and didn’t even say goodbye.  So I am now responsible for him.

His leg has healed and I am in the process of healing myself and keeping Cobar safe and happy.  I’ve created a new routine of walking him every morning on the weekdays and Saturdays are going to a park day. Which eventually will turn into Saturday Adventure Time when I can afford to drive farther out and go on trail hikes and camping adventures with him.

I will be posting more often on our adventures and what we are doing.

Happy Valentines Day Cobar!

Cobar with his Slobber Owl.
Categories
Cobar Other

Divorced

I lost my best friend of 18 years over the past 4 weeks.

Don’t worry, I kept Cobar. He is doing better than I expected with Beckys absence. It was rough for him in the fall of 2016, but he’s healed and we are walking every day. It’s just him and I now and he is my responsibility and I am his world.

Categories
Other

Will technology keep our past in the present?

There soon will be an entire generation that grew up in the age of online.  Everything they did in the past will still be with them in the present and into their future.  Middle aged people are now facing their children becoming adults, but what did all the middle aged people and their parents do to preserve the past?

Previously people have used photography as a means to preserve the past.  You would take yearly Christmas photos, the classic photo op on summer vacations.  For many years it was film based photography, which had it’s limits in the cost of the film and then developing the exposed film. This created an artificial scarcity due to the cost. You would treasure those moments and make them special by taking a photograph. Film wasn’t as popular, but it was readily available.  They were available for film but it was cumbersome, not very good, no sound, and expensive.  This limited the use and created an even greater scarcity of home movies.  The first great leap forward for this type of past preservation was the release of video tape recorders and home market cameras.  These bulky devices were still in the realm of hobbyist type usage.  Then the home market video camera is unleashed. There is now an unprecedented amount of our past preserved on video tape.  Most of it was all ignored, pushed off into the closet, collecting dust or forgotten about.  Some, or perhaps a lot was over written or stored improperly to be forever in the past.

Is this what we really wanted when preserving the past?  To shove it off into a box to be forgotten?  People seem to have a tendency to create their own narrative of their life, whether it reflects reality or not. It’s just part of how we work. When we relive the past and then see what we were, that may change or bend the narrative we’ve created for ourselves.  How our reaction to it will be different for everyone’s experience and how their experience put them on their path.  It’s those gaps of time from the past to the present that gives us this reflection. Now can you imagine, no gap from the past to the present?

There is an emerging generation that has grown up entirely with the Internet and it’s massive ability to preserve, everything.  How will this and the preceding generations deal with this shift in how our past is preserved?

Categories
Other

I don’t have time for your bullshit

I was talking with a friend today about how we are at an age where there is nothing that she wants to buy that she finds interesting or cool anymore.  As we were bantering back and forth with our nonsense, that idea kept creeping in my old and busted mind.  I had been encoding 20 year old VHS and 8mm video tapes onto my computer and uploading them to YouTube for the past couple of days.  I had begin to notice how I was first and foremost an asshole when I was younger. But, another aspect of the idea that, I didn’t know any better then.

Hindsight sure is 20/20, maybe even more clearer as you age.  My friend and I couldn’t really figure out what new and cool gadget would actually be useful.  When we were younger, we would spend inordinate amounts of money on complete nonsensical bullshit.  Were all these new gadgets and stuff we spent time and money on training us to finally come to the realization that it’s just all a bunch of crap?  Was it’s some sort of panacea for us? Or was it to pacify ourselves into self assuredness?  Now that we are 20 years older we see the man behind the curtains and all the crap for what it really is; It’s crap.

I feel weary about so much push to consume, consume and consume some more.  The new promising technology of 3D object printers sounds like a great idea. But what do I need a 3D Printer for? To print out more plastic trinkets? I already have so much plastic useless trinkets already, do I need more?  This is where my age is either against me, or as I said earlier, the curtain has been revealed and I see it for what it really is. Bullshit.

Welcome to Costco. I love you.  

Categories
Other

Cat Shit Rolled In Skunk Juice

Ah, the great glorious smell. You know what I am talking about.  Another year down this road.  I have just updated BlogEngine to a more recent version, with the intention of updating it to the latest version soon. I haven’t been messing with my websites much as this whole world has felt as if it’s a burden to me more than any sort of enjoyment anymore.  These small glimpses of success encourage me though.

I guess it’s time to ramble on about the previous year and reflect.  Two of my friends decided to ramp up their crazy. One managed to land himself a nice long prison sentence and the other one ended up dead.  Since you are here, you might be already familiar with UFO Jeff. If not, be sure to check out the Karvanek Conspiracy pages on the site.  Well, yep, he landed himself a nice vacation in prison for awhile.  Handy Internet tip from Captain Obvious; Don’t make death threats to government employees.  My other friend decided to activate his Oxycontin powers and it didn’t quite work out for him.  Of course, a requirement of friends with me, is being an asshole.  He decided that Thanksgiving, my wife’s birthday, would be the day to go out.

My dog is still alive and I have health care insurance now, so I got that going for me.

Categories
Cobar Dogs Hemophilia

Update On Cobar – My Haemophilac Australian Cattle Dog

I had posted a lot about my dog and the perils of his disease and a lot of dispair. I am glad to report that he is doing well, has been doing very good for the past 8 months or so.  He’s not cured or anything, I’ve just paid a lot of attention to him to make sure he’s safe and not in posistions to hurt himself.  He did get a blood transfusion in April or May of 2012. Most likely this was his last blood transfusion.  With his disease he can go at anytime and it’s not easy feeling to know that. It’s been a mild winter for us which I believe has helped a lot. And just attention to what he’s doing.

I kind of got to a point with his website that I got a bit overwhelmed and then realized the template was just stupid. I did learn how to template BlogEngine.NET pretty good in doing so, but then just got discouraged with any sort of direction and where I wanted to go with his website.  I’m not making very specific blog sites so no one is really interested in reading online diaries of boring people with fucked up animals.

Categories
Other

Fun Times With Northbridge Heat Sinks Exploding

I just realized I never made a post in 2012. It was that exciting of a year. NOT!

I’m here just tesitng my blog application after having to re-install everything on some different hardware.  The IBM server I am hosting my sites on decided to melt down on me. It was one of those slow melt downs. At first I thought it was the CPU Fan failing as it was quite old and sounded like a tractor. It’s possible I was too late in replacing it.  Of course, it’s an IBM server and the mount was non-standard so I had to raid an old motherboard for the standard P4 fan mount. Everything was fine for about two weeks and my wife and I were sitting in the office room and we heard a tink, click noise coming from the server. Naturallly I thought my wife bumped the server and knocked the front off of it. Nope. So I immedately logged into it and shut it down. The noise we hear was the Northbridge chip popping off. The mounts to it actually came out of the motherboard. And of course, the holes for these chipsets are not standard so it was time to ditch the IBM for some different hardware. It’s not the greatest hardware but it’s working so far.  Hopefully I can get some newer hardware specific for server roles.  I don’t forsee that happening anytime soon though.

I think I will try to post more to my blog, but it’s fairly boring and uninteresting. Not that anyone reads this. The most busy part of the site is my Baseall Card collect pages. Go figure.  I did update the Karvanek Conspiracy pages and I’m adding videos onto YouTube. It’s much easier to host videos on YouTube than on the server. Don’t have to backup gigabytes of video files. Makes it much easier.

 

Categories
Dogs Hemophilia

Haemophilia and my dog

Unfortunately, my dog suffers from Haemophilia.  He’s an Australian Cattle Dog/Red Heeler we named Cobar, from Australian Aboriginal of Red/Burned Earth.  Of the worst kind of course.  Haemophilia is a genetic disease which slows down the process significantly the ability for blood to clot and coagulate.  This is an insidious disease that, if you do not have it or have to deal with, you just never think about.  You cut yourself, put a band aid (if that) and go on your way.  You never think about how or why your blood doesn’t just continue to run out and you bleed to death.

And then, I got a dog that suffers from this.  We found out from getting him neutered which he barely survived.  It took 3 months to recover from it with the incision growing to near softball size lump. You could see tendons and muscle tissue.  I honestly thought that he would not survive this.  With my wifes perseverance, using (Believe it or not) corn starch to thicken his hemorrhaging blood and pure Honey as an anti-biotic coating, it worked very well.  Of course he was on heavy anti-biotic and sedation during this time.  It was fortunate that we crate trained him earlier so he was at home in the crate for this time.  He survived.

He is now 3 years old. He has only had a handful of other bad bleeding events so far. The worst was when he cut one of his paw pads.  Again, you never think about bleeding, and within minutes there was blood everywhere.  Quick thinking and our veterinarian is nearby that helped make that episode less that what we originally though.  And yes, we all thought that this injury may have been permanent and a potential for limiting his mobility.  At the time it appeared that he sliced one of his pads nearly in half.  It took about a month and a half to heal.

We are now in an episode where he ate something he shouldn’t have and it’s been a pretty bad couple of days with vomiting.  I think he is pulling through, but with this disease things can go bad very quickly.  I suspect that the neutering wound may cause some issues with his bowel movements and if he isn’t hydrated or eats too much, this system stops working properly.

When we have all these episodes, especially the bleeding ones, people always try to help us. We appreciate it greatly, they are trying to help. But, again, I go back to. You never think about how blood clots and coagulates, so what works wonderful for the normal animals of the world doesn’t work for Haemophilia.  One of the most common things that people suggest when he gets cut is to tape or seal the wound with New Skin or glue.  They don’t think this thought out (and trust me I would think the same thing).  The problem with this method is that. This doesn’t stop the bleeding, it just covers the wound for the blood to then pool beneath the wound and continue to bleed.  We associate covering the wound with the blood clotting and coagulating and hence stopping.  But we don’t think the why and how.  And we don’t think how many times we have some minor scratch, or maybe a zit we pop that bleeds. Yet, we didn’t cover the wound then and it as usual stopped bleeding and we go on.  I don’t want to get into the why and how our blood clots and coagulates, but it is an amazing process when you think about how and why it works.  And it’s horrible when that process breaks down or doesn’t work at all.

It’s was a tough choice to keep our dog and not put him down during that first time.  This is the usual choice, and I can completely understand it.  He is definitely a one of a kind dog that I’ve never had before.  It’s doubtful I will have a dog like this again too.  I am sure that any pets that I get in the future will be just as unique though, but Cobar is definitely special.  We let him be as much as a dog as we can let him, but attempt to protect him as much as possible.  We’ve learned a lot.  I’ve researched many things. From Kevlar vests to other ways to protect him.  The vests ended up just a bad idea, mainly they are just for show for police dogs and have no applicable use.  One of the best things we’ve found are the Rough Wear dog boots.  Those are great things, but you’ll need to get your dog used to them early on.  I would imagine it difficult to train an older dog to wear them.  The company now even has winter boots for dogs which we will get eventually.  It’s then just thinking ahead of where you are going with him and what you’ll be doing or expecting him to do.  From how the ground is, how he will move around.  You have to also keep in mind that, dogs aren’t aware of diseases like this.  Clearly he has some confused idea that he gets sick. Obviously not the why.  So, he will try to do what any normal dog would do and in turn he could severely injure himself.  Even normal healthy dogs would do this.  It’s in their nature it seems.  Dogs take direction from humans and they want to please us so much that our own actions may put them in danger or hurt them.  It’s trying to prevent ourselves for whatever reason to not lead him down a path that may be detrimental to him.  It’s tough and a constant battle with ourselves.  It brings out your own inner discipline for the better of the dog or animal.  There also comes a time as I said, to let him be a dog.  My wife works at a dog daycare, so he gets to play with other dogs.  This is a good and bad thing. What about fights and such, and you have to just let the “what ifs” go.  Otherwise you will be consumed.  We also have to be prepared for him to die quickly.  This is tough to deal with but it’s something that you have to come to.  It will happen, it’s inevitable as much as we don’t like it.

Well, I’ve rambled on enough about my dog.  I’ll eventually post some photos to the blog of him. We have a domain that I will eventually setup as well and probably use this blog software to create a blog more specific about him and his disease.   

Categories
Other

Will Technology Doom Us?

I think a lot, have lots of opinions and such but I never really form it much. I haven’t written much at all since college days, which I really enjoyed.  I miss writing reports or just papers on certain subjects, even if I didn’t really care for them. The Internet and Technology, I guess, has replaced much of any sort of deep thought for me.  For the most part I just give people the answers they don’t want to hear in the chat.  My writings might not have the standard beginning, middle and end, mainly because I’ve learned that in the social networking scene, you have to give your answers with the quickness. That means thinking out things quickly, which I’ve never been very good at. So this brings me to this entry of which I will ramble on about the question. Will Technology Doom Us?

I ask this question in the idea that, there are masses of people whom technology is greatly benefiting us in our daily lives. It certainly makes our lives easier than ever before, but at what point will that hinder our own development? Or, as I am seeing it, will it divide us even further, not into race, religion of region, but by the ability to use and control technology over those who can’t or are not interested. Will these latter people have to sucumb to the ones who embrace technology?  Kind of like the idea of Big Brother, in that, if Big Brother is watching us, who is watching Big Brother. Who of if we will maintain some sort of technological equalibrium.  And as I write this perhaps I am bluring the lines of technology and information, as it does seem, perhaps feel, that the time is coming again where there is this squeeze to control information from the haves to the have nots.

Well, I ask questions but again, as I said earlier, I am going to finish up this post. I think I will attempt to write more formal articles, perhaps attempt to stick to a topic and not just free flow. And yeah, the comments are disabled because of the mountain of spam they would generate since no one is really paying attention to what I am saying anyways.