Check out this graph which depicts the average cost of a home, adjusted for inflation, since 1890. Buying a home right now would be equivalent to paying $100 for a pair of pants — spending way more than something could possibly be worth. While I aspire to own my own home, I’m suddenly less frustrated by the fact that I will have to wait awhile. Hopefully prices will be more reasonable by the time Ethan and I have enough stocked up for a down payment.
Studies show poor diet linked to Asthma/Allergies. I can’t say I’m surprised that a diet of unnatural and highly processed foods is to blame for more and more health problems. I just hope that enough people will wake up to the consequences of what they are putting into their bodies.
My current goal is to consume more fruit every day. I usually have some 100% juice, but I’m sad to say I sometimes go days without any fruit at all in my diet. I eat plenty of grains and veggies, but rarely fruit.
Ethan and I took Rooster to a vet this morning and they agreed that yes, his foot/leg looks infected and yes, he should be on antibiotics. I was thinking they would give him a shot and then he would recover over the next few days. Now that I think about it, it does seem like it would be downright impossible to give a shot to a fully conscious chinchilla. After all, it’s not as though they have a lot of muscle mass.
So instead of a shot, he has oral medication. How do you administer oral antibiotics to a chinchilla you ask? Well, apparently it comes in a fruity syrup, and you measure out the dose in a syringe, then you just feed it to them… and (get this) Rooster totally enjoys his fruity antibiotics and eats/drinks it readily.
On Friday night I noticed that Rooster’s foot looked kind of red… upon closer inspection I noticed that he’s missing some fur and has some abrasions all over his rear right leg. Since he’s missing his front left foot, this is especially distressing. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, but I don’t want to mess with him too much and either cause an infection or stress him out so much he can’t heal properly.
I have been keeping an eye on it though, and since it doesn’t appear to be getting significantly better, I made an appointment to take him in to the vet on Tuesday so they can look at it and maybe give him some antibiotics or something. I don’t know if they can clean up the scrape or something without him wigging out. It’s really dangerous to sedate tiny little critters so hopefully it will turn out to be nothing.
I am pretty sure he doesn’t have any broken bones, because he still can jump around his cage. His usual hobble is quite a bit more pronounced than before, but he is putting weight on his foot. I’ll just have to cross my fingers for now.
I decided that I would place some ads on my site… I can’t encourage people to click on them, but there they are, for all it’s worth. We’ll see if they end up generating any revenue or just sort of look ugly. If it turns out to be the latter, I’ll just remove them. I do find the ads that come up highly amusing though. Mostly they’re for tea, but some of them have been for cough remedies, likely because of my previous post.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of some ad I used to see, for a service where your car gets painted as a traveling billboard. You would then get paid for every mile you drive. I mentioned it to my mom, thinking it would be kind of cool to have an advertising car that paid for gas. She suggested that I would end up with an ad for tampons or viagra, and then it wouldn’t seem worth it.
On Monday I noticed that I had a slight sore throat. This has steadily progressed into a stuffy nose, a bad sore throat and sore/swollen lymph nodes. Also, a burning dryness has developed in my eyes, nose and throat to add to the fun. Feeling unsuitable for work today, here I sit at home, hoping that some added rest will have me back in the game tomorrow.
During my period of not having a job, I watched quite a bit of those day time civil suit TV shows. They contain a lot of valuable life lessons. Here is a sum up of what I’ve learned.
Don’t lend your boyfriend/girlfriend/brother/cousin/aunt/sister/co-worker etc. money without collateral and/or a written agreement. There were countless suits over a few hundred dollars that Party A lent to Party B and then Party B failed to pay back in a timely manner. Now Party B claims it was a gift, not a loan. Party A now has to prove that Party B knew it was a loan, and they haven’t paid it back.
Moving in with people you don’t know is a bad idea. This is especially true if you don’t have a written agreement about how rent/bills will be split up and you fail to keep track of how they were paid before one of you got so sick of the other, the one who somehow managed to not get on the lease moves out, leaving the other with 100% of the bills and no legal obligations.
If your (fill in one of the relationships from above here) doesn’t qualify for a cell phone, chances are, there’s a reason. Again, countless cases where someone had pity on someone they knew (often someone they barely knew, and they put a cell phone plan in their own name, but give the phone and responsibility of paying the bills in their buddies hands. If Sprint doesn’t think your friend will pay their bill and fulfill their contract, you should probably take stock in Sprint’s opinion and not put yourself in such a legal bind.
If you don’t have total control over your animal, don’t expect anyone else to pay for anything that happens to it, and I mean anything. If your dog/cat/horse/pet of other species wanders into your neighbor’s yard and someone shoots it, you pretty much have to suck it up. I haven’t seen a single case where a plaintiff got compensation for their animals injuries when they weren’t in full control of said animal. In one case, a man had his dog on a leash, but the leash was long, and he wasn’t paying attention when the small dog wandered into the street at night, and was run over by a car. He was awarded nothing.
Lying to the judge will never help you. Unless you can lie well enough so that s/he never finds out.
Verbal contracts are practically worthless. If you are making a deal with someone, write it all down and get all involved parties to sign in. This is especially important if the deal is very complicated and some confusion may occur. It’s really easy to disagree about what you agreed upon verbally six months ago.
I have to pass along The Government Who Cried Wolf from violent acres. I have to say I have felt the same way about the media for a very long time.
When discussing this essay with Ethan he and I sort of agreed that at this point, the scientists ARE telling us something that most of us don’t believe, and V actually mentions it in her essay — global warming. Pretty much any reliable source with no agenda says that it is a fact. Other sources (people being paid in one way or another by companies opposed to emissions restrictions for financial reasons, for example) are either wishy-washy on the issue, or they deny it outright. Some of them will probably use the recent snow storms in defense. The fact that it rained in Minneapolis in November is unimportant, there was a blizzard in February. Sigh
Just a quick note — If any of you are thinking of seeing The 300, but want to wait until it comes out on DVD, don’t wait. You don’t want to miss it in the theater. It is very spectacular.
This week started out slow. There was a huge snafu Monday morning with the hosting company that my new employers use and the site was down for almost 40 hours. During that whole time, work was brought to a stand still. I was able to figure out a few little things without being able to actually work on the site. We did NOT launch the new search of because of that, and because there was almost a blizzard on Thursday, which cut work short again. Boo. We have virtually everything done now though, so we should be launching early next week. Woot!
Today was kind of interesting. I decided I had put off dying my hair for long enough, and got Ethan to goop my head up. A few hours later, while waiting for my color to set, wearing a shower cap and pajamas the fire alarm went off in the building. I strongly considered just staying in the apartment until it became clear that I should actually leave (our first floor apartment would be very easy to exit out of a window), but the alarm was way too loud and obnoxious to let that happen. Anyway, I ended up outside for awhile, and then someone said that it was officially a false alarm, so I went back in to try and comfort the cats. The alarm shut off shortly afterward. Hopefully false alarms won’t become commonplace around here.
