The Pit Bull and the Water Heater

Back on April 8, our water heater busted and was leaking. The landlords had just driven off to the airport for a short trip (great timing!) , so we had to wait until we could call them when they arrived at their destination and let them know. The landlord made some calls and the next day the plumber came out and installed a new water heater. I noticed a DOG was seated in the truck (if you look closely, you can see her through the windshield).

I kept an eye on the dog from my balcony,


but then I went down to the truck to get a closer look.



The lady took pictures of me snooping around the truck, but for some weird reason, none of them are in the camera! But, here is a photo of the dog looking at me. I guess it was a girl dog. Her name was Pixie, or Dixie, or something like that. Something with an "ixie" in it. She is a pit bull. She seemed nice enough. She didn't bark or growl or anything. I really checked out the truck and even crawled up and sat on the axle. The lady kept shooing me away. Before he left, the plumber- man let the "ixie" dog pee on a shrub, but I stayed away.


Elvis says hi. I don't have a recent photo of him. He went to the vet on May 7 and got his ears cleaned, toenails clipped, blood drawn for thyroid level check (to make sure his medicine is still the right dose), had an exam, general health profile, and urinalysis. He had an ear infection and the lady put drops in his ears once a day. Then, a few days after he got home, he showed signs of an upper respiratory infection, so he just finished 7 days of Clavamox, twice a day. He wasn't too happy about it, but the lady gives him treats after he takes him medicine, so he doesn't fight her too much. He mostly tries to wiggle away. He seems to be doing just fine.

We're Fine

Elvis Pussley and I are fine, and hope to post something soon. The lady hasn't been feeling up to par the past month. Nothing serious. Just "not herself." I'm not sure who she is, but as long as she feeds us, whatever.

Thanks to our friends for their good wishes.

Wordless Wednesday

Best Friends

We saw a photo of Franklin and Dobby over at Mishkat's today and it reminded the lady of her first cat, Smokey (1986-2001), and her favorite cat of all time, Addie (1993-2007), and how they were best of friends. So, she dug through some photos and found some prints which she scanned so that she could share them with you.







The lady likes it when cats have buddies. Addie lived with Elvis for three years before she died, but, she was not too fond of him. She was always growling when he got too close, and she slapped him across the face a few times. But, something connected between Addie and Smokey, and they were inseparable.

Easy Like Sunday + Bonus Yellow Photo Hunt

Last night was very stormy with lots of wind and rain. Today is cool and sunny. I lounged around a bit in my "secondary" bed on top of the car. Obviously, the lady removes this bed before driving down the road.



Also, here is my yellow food bowl (yesterday was a Photo Hunt: Yellow).

I like the size and shape of this "Active Longevity" Science Diet because it is the original SD shape. The lady tried an Indoor (hmph!) Cat Science Diet (you can see one of the morsels in the bowl--it is a large, triangle shape), but both Elvis and I thought the kibbles were too big. The other day, the lady noticed a bunch of bags of SD emblazoned with the words, "New Shape!" so she thinks maybe they have gotten the message and that the "new shape" is the old, traditional SD shape, 'cause this Active Longevity said "New Shape!" and it is the old, familiar SD shape.

As far as wet food, I like Fancy Feast Salmon Feast, and FF Chicken Feast. The lady is always trying to slip me something new, like some organic food, or things like "stew". Yech. I am a creature of routine and I don't like changes in my wet food. Now, Elvis will eat almost any type of wet food and he seems to like trying new stuff. Today he had something called, "Spot's Stew", and he really liked it. I'm not so sure that his intestinal tract likes sudden changes. He did a major stinky poop.

The lady keeps his litter box in the room she calls her office. It is a really big "Booda" and has a charcoal filter. Well, I guess that didn't help much, because she had to resort to another Buddha:




Elvis was banished to another room to do his loud butt-licking.

As an aside, have you noticed that we like to give you a big kiss after we're done "bathing"? Heh, heh.



P.S. Thanks to all our friends for their suggestions and comments about our internet problems. We do have an excellent virus program that scans for spyware, grayware, malware, etc., and we're going to start running a check every day. We also uninstalled a 'web accelerator' that was acting kinda loopy. So, hopefully, things are on the right track!

Something's Chewing on My Internet Connection

The lady informs me that it looks like we won't be able to comment on the blogs we usually visit. We might be able to comment on a few. Something has happened to our internet connection.

It is slow to begin with. A dial-up connection that averages 26.4 kbps. For the past few days, it is taking forever to load a page (the "Blogs I'm Following" with all your updates took 15 minutes to load yesterday, and even then, it didn't load completely). The connection speed is the same as always and the speed of 'send' and 'receive' bytes looks no different than usual (although we sure seem to be "sending" a lot more bytes...millions more). Today, things loaded a bit faster, but when I try to visit your blogs, all the pages are loading very, very slowly. Then, at the bottom of the comments box on some of your blogs, it doesn't say "posting as Mr. Black" anymore. It has a drop-down box and asks me who I want to comment as, and it doesn't even list me! One of the choices is "Google Account", but when I choose that, it doesn't post my comment, it just reloads the page with a blank comment form!

The lady has "cleared the cache" and logged out and logged back in. Refreshed pages. Nothing seems to be working. She was able to comment over at Tristan and Crikey's page, but at both Mishkat's and Dash Mouth's pages (both have the blog format with the comment box at the bottom of the comments), the above problem happens. The lady didn't try any other blogs because everything is taking so long to load.

Now, the lady hopes this doesn't have anything to do with Photoshop Elements. She knows that Adobe has its software "phone home" to (ostensibly) check for updates (and I guess, to make sure you have legal copies of their software), but for a week after installing it, she did not notice any decrease in internet speed (and she was looking for it because she knew that Adobe would use Photoshop Elements to 'call their server'). The lady has up to date (updated daily) virus protection and ran a scan the other day. Some 'grayware' (not quite malware, I guess) was found. Something called addynamix (AdDynamix) was on her computer (I guess it follows her around to see what websites she visits). She deleted it, but has since found out (via some research) that it can insinuate itself into your hard drive, so even if you 'delete' it, it is still there, following you around the internet and, I assume, using some of your internet connection to send information to whoever it sends info to. This is probably not even noticed on a high-speed connection, but on a very slow one like ours, it makes doing anything on the web excruciatingly slow. If this addynamix is the culprit, she is stuck with it (at least for a while). This nice, new Dell laptop that she is using belongs to an organization that she does some desktop publishing for. She doesn't want to start messing around with it to try and get rid of something on the hard drive. This organization is 2 hours away and I guess she'll have to make a trip in the near future to see if their computer guy can make sure this addynamix is not the thing causing problems (and where it might be hiding on her hard drive). Her computer works fine and at the same speed as it always did. It is just the internet connection that has slowed down to a crawl. It does not appear to be the ISP, as the connection speed is the same as always.

She is giving Adobe the benefit of the doubt that this is not some third-party 'spyware' that Photoshop Elements loaded onto her computer. She has temporarily 'uninstalled' Elements to see if the internet speed is improved. It improved slightly. She is going to reinstall and see what happens.

Anyway, she did delete her browsing history and cookies and maybe that is why she is having the problems with blogs not recognizing me (Mr. Black!). She is not sure why clearing the cache, logging off Blogger and signing in again won't fix that. She didn't see anything in 'known issues' for Blogger.

Well, hopefully she'll be able to fix this. Even though we have rambled on in this post, we really just wanted our blogging friends to know why we are not commenting on their blogs. We miss visiting our friends!!

We'll see if we can do posting. At least that is something.

Thanks for listening, and if anyone has any advice to offer, it would be appreciated!

Wordless Wednesday