Unsolicited Advice

Took Plugh in. He quit moving too much on Wednesday and wouldn't really eat anything I didn't feed him on a spoon. He took possession of chocolates if I handed him one -- priorities, man -- but he just sort of held onto them instead of nomming. Plugh was a good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He was also one badass motherfucker. He refused to quit until he literally couldn't walk anymore. Today, like two hours before his appointment, was the first time he let me help him climb something without resentfully shaking me off. His back end had gone cool and his feet weren't listening to him anymore -- something was pressing on his spine, I suspect. He was finally tired of things not working right. Dinner last night was Nutella and ramen. Whatever he'd eat. Today he got strained peas and vanilla Ensure (BREKFISS OF CHAMPEENS) delivered directly to him in his squishy paper-towel-filled hammock along with his morning Tylenol and Benadryl. I tucked his ba...

The single biggest reason I have never gone over to the Mac side is that Apple has a policy of discouraging you, at every possible turn, from noodling around with your devices. It's great for people who just want their doodads to work the way they worked when they left the factory -- and would rather gnaw their own mouse hand off than dig around in the guts to change anything themselves -- but I much prefer to own computers I can get into without three security Torx drivers and a hand grenade. It's mine now, I'll break it if I want to. The IdeaPad has an interesting hardware configuration. It first came out after solid state hard drives were made available to the public, but before the prices had come down to any reasonable level. They shipped from Lenovo with Windows installed on an eensy little 24 GB SSD for booting (just a chip smacked directly on the motherboard, so far as I can tell; Linux views it as /dev/sda1), and a secondary 500 GB platter drive for file storage....

I've spent the past week trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong with the ballroom thing. Ye Ballroom Instructor is busy producing a show and the Eccentric is on vacation, so this has consisted mainly of googling variations of "TF am I missing here?" Whether this is helpful is kind of a crapshoot. Sometimes I just get a page full of eHow articles that all say the same useless thing seventeen slightly different ways. In this case, it kind of was. I've only been to casual events so far, and they attract a mix of the usual people you find in low-impact physical activities -- young people looking for cheap entertainment, middle-aged people trying to get out of the house more, little old ladies coming to socialize with their friends, and the small but annoying contingent who pretend they're trying to pick up a new hobby while actually trying to pick up a date. But if you get into the blogs of serious social dancers, they start talking about something they just ...

I'm setting this to post while I'm at the vet with Grue. I scheduled the appointment a week ago. I seem to have timed it pretty well; he's not been eating anything I haven't been feeding him with an eye dropper or my hands, and as of this morning he's refusing even that. He made a half-hearted attempt to eat some of my seafood salad last night, but today I can't even get him to lick Ensure off my fingers. He's gotten as much Tylenol as he wants. Acetaminophen poisoning takes 2-3 days to kick in, and by that time it won't really be his problem anymore. I hope it helped. Grue was a very good rat. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He even knew his name, and occasionally came out for pets when I said it. He was scared of everything when I brought him home, and he was probably scared of everything until the very last, but somewhere in there he decided it was more important to be brave enough to come out and cuddle. He spent most of his last days ...

I now know two of the dancers in this sequence , not that you can pick either of them out in the background of the potato-quality YouTube video. (You can spot one of them in the B-roll/outtakes if you're quick.) One of them was the choreographer, who happened to be a part of one of the collaborations in the most recent show I've worked. He is a very nice man. He has decided we are going to be friends! I begin to wonder if all of the ballroom dancers are secretly Labrador retrievers. This is becoming something of a pattern. I'm not displeased, just bewildered. I have no idea why people with arts grants and IMDb credits continually talk to me like I'm a part of their community in any but the most hopeful amateur capacity, but they are clearly going to keep doing it. I make it a policy, when I work front of house for performances, to not bother the dancers. Everyone in the performing arts has their own personal rituals to prepare for going out on stage, and it's c...

I am emotionally exhausted. I just lost one rat, and now Plugh -- the lumpy rat -- is starting to behave oddly. He's not gone yet; he did hip check his brother off a box last night for some peanut butter. But he's getting thinner and thinner, and is on his way out. I've asked him to please hold off dying until I have more than forty cents in my bank account. I went into the studio Monday and danced until I hurt myself. Both in the sense that parts of me ache right now, and in the sense that I somehow managed to stab myself on some part of a smoothly-polished hardwood ballet floor, and didn't notice until I'd smeared blood all over my arm. Normally I'm better at pacing than that, but I am too tired to care about pretty much anything less immediate than dying pets right now. I am so ground down that someone handed me an $800 laptop last night, free of charge, and I couldn't even be excited. I don't know that he paid $800 for it, and it would have bee...

The remaining rats are doing better. I'm starting to get 'wher brekfiss' interspersed with 'wher bruvver'. I'm sure they would all love having Flathead back, but if he doesn't arrive fast enough to eat his own breakfast, that is his own problem. Priorities, man. Grue, as predicted, took it especially hard. Grue is the omega rat, to the point where he won't even take food off my fingers. Forks are fine, but if it's on your hand, it's yours. He figures that whoever you are, you probably outrank him, and he shouldn't touch your food unless he wants to get nommed right in the middle of his hard little head. His only ambition in life is to be someone's big dopey BES FREN, and his BES FREN rat is the one who went away and didn't come back. Rats can learn anything you'd expect out of a 1/100 scale Labrador retriever, and I know for a fact that dogs get sad and anxious when their friends go missing, so it's no surprise that Grue sor...