Whatever You Do, Don't Run

Posted on November 10, 2007 by admin

Now that I’ve finished my studies for the year, I’m looking forward to kicking back with some good books. I’ve bought quite a few recently, planning to read them on my time off from uni or until life takes over. One interesting one that I picked up in Dymocks before my date with the quack and her salad tongs (more to be explained about that later in another post) is Whatever You Do, Don’t Run by Peter Allison. I read the first couple of paragraphs and I was hooked so of course then I had to buy it – “Dymocks is NOT a library” – but don’t we all do a little pre-reading before our purchase?? Anyway, it promises to be a good read….it’s about his adventures in Africa as a safari guide. If you like humorous stories with a real life edge, you might want to check it out. :D

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Itsy bitsy spider…

Posted on November 9, 2007 by admin

itsy bitsy spider

 

 Came across this lovely creepy crawly face to errr….well, face I guess while working on a field project in Dundowran (near Hervey Bay, Qld). The sight of him still gives me shudders, even though I know he can’t crawl out of the photo and get me. Have I got you looking over your shoulder now? :P

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Sunset on the Seaway…

Posted on November 8, 2007 by admin

sunset on the seaway

 

 A beautiful sunset to finish a wonderful day out on the Gold Coast Seaway

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Kids?? No thanks, I'll stick with the cats!

Posted on November 7, 2007 by admin

That horrid word is rearing its ugly head a lot lately. You know the one I’m talking about….when you’re in your late twenties and in a committed relationship. You have a house which you partly own and the bank mostly owns, two cars in a garage and nice albeit mismatched decor. You’ve even thought about moving to a nice secluded piece of acreage far enough away from the city to not be bothered by the constant drone of trucks down the motorway yet close enough that you can easily satisfy your cravings for a Zaraffas coffee or yet another handbag. Apparently all of that means you must be ready to start a family. :o

I really don’t have a huge interest in little children or babies. They are cute enough I guess and they do funny stuff from time to time but by and large, I’m not really sure I like them. Mind you, my only experience in looking after children is with my nieces and nephew and that was enough to put me off for a life time. It prompted me to start the “perfectly acceptable reasons NOT to have babies” list. Every so often I find an interesting tidbit from other people’s experiences with the whole package from start to finish. To list a few:

  • Sticky fingers, even after they have been washed copious times, even by adults. They are STILL sticky
  • You have to lock up anything and everything of value or sentiment that is breakable
  • People think bad of you when you rouse on them for doing something naughty
  • Oh and the whole wiping noses on parent’s or guardian’s clothing – that is just SO GROSS I can’t even think about it!
  • They make a mess everywhere on a daily basis – even if you are fortunate to have a cleaner, your house still looks like a bomb hit it
  • You start to resent your childless friends and family for being able to go on frequent trips away at the drop of the hat and whinge behind their backs how you never ever get a holiday

When you think about it like that, why do women choose to have children? Does a switch in your brain suddenly get flipped over which makes all that stuff okay?

Now I’m not saying that the cats are hassle free furry kids. They make their presence well known by leaving little tufts of fur everywhere like tumble weed. They puke occasionally, generally two centimetres away from the nearest piece of easy clean floor surface. They do break stuff and you have to be aware that nowhere is safe from a cat unless you shut the door. BUT….

  • They toilet train easily and from a very early age
  • They look after themselves, you don’t need to hold their hand
  • Even the annoying things they do are very cute, as opposed to just plain annoying
  • You can leave them at home alone for the day from a young age and no one reports you to DOCs
  • They don’t care if you get upset with them, they will just do whatever they want anyway
  • You can yell at them when they do something naughty and no one screams child abuse
  • They are easy to look after when you go on holidays – the care taker need only provide their favourite food, water and the occasional cuddle if the cats deem it appropriate and most cats will be quite happy with that
  • Oh and while we’re on the travel theme, friends and family will happily look after your cats for a few days or a few weeks while you’re on holidays and you don’t even have to bribe them

I think it’s a clear win for the cats :D

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The trouble with having too much stuff…

Posted on November 6, 2007 by admin

…is that you can never find anything at the exact time that you need it. I have two fairly new scientific calculators around this house somewhere. Do you think I can find one?? No.

It ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem but I happen to have a big exam tomorrow morning and I do need one for it because I have no idea how to do a logarithmic calculation without the Log function on it. ARGH!! I remember this happened to me a couple of years ago during my undergrad….I ended up going out and buying one right before the exam because I couldn’t find the one I already had. The very next day, I was cleaning up my study and tossing out all the papers I no longer needed and lo and behold, there it is at the bottom of the pile.

I do know that I have an incredibly old dodgy one with no batteries in the box full of my old school stuff and worse comes to worse, I will just go out and get new batteries for it. It just annoys me that I can’t find at least one of the new ones. :x

I think the time has finally come for me to start getting organised. I wish I was like Laura…she has a natural obsession for things being neat and tidy and everything in its place. She actually ENJOYS sifting through piles of clutter….fancy that! Don’t get me wrong….I would love my house to be organised and everything in its place but I just want someone to do it for me.

And leave me a set of clear instructions as to where everything belongs. :P

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Cat lax anyone??

Posted on November 5, 2007 by admin

Rosie just isn’t having a good time of it lately. Not only has the warmer weather brought with it a reoccurrence of her dermatitis/hot spot problem but she is shedding like you wouldn’t believe. There are bits of her fur flying around the house….kind of like tumble weed really. I keep brushing her as much as she will tolerate but it keeps coming off and although she is an obliging sort, I’m not quite game enough to get near her with the vaccuum cleaner. I had a bad experience with Mojo trying to vacuum excess fur off him once….let’s just say I still have visible scars from the experience. :P

Unfortunately she must be ingesting a lot of her fur as well during grooming and since she’s not much of a yakker (like Mojo), it tends to get swallowed along with everything else. So off to the pet shop, after a little bit of investigating online, to get a tube of Cat Lax “a palatable formula for use as a feline laxative to aid in hairball removal”.

I’m always a little bit dubious when I read that something is “palatable” when I have to use it on the pets. After all, the “meaty flavoured” chewable Drontal tabs for Mischa would only be swallowed with numerous liver treats and plenty of encouragement. The “palatable” antibiotic paste I had to give Mojo after his dental treatment, resulted in much hissing, spitting and biting. In the end I had to wrap him right up in a blanket, restrain him between my knees and force the stuff down his throat and pray to god that he didn’t try to kill me in my sleep.

So I give the Cat Lax a little sniff…..smells a lot like that syrupy stuff you make home brew beer from. I look at the ingredients…..malt, cod liver oil, beeswax, parrafin and a few other bits and pieces. Honestly, all it needs is a fair whack of salt and you could almost think it was Vegemite. Surprisingly, the palatable formula of Cat Lax went down a treat with Rosie. She sat there licking it off her face and then came back for more!! Hoorah, finally a “palatable taste” that cats actually find palatable as well!

Now if they can start making that flavour in worming tablets I will be very much appreciative. :D

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It pays to shop around

Posted on November 4, 2007 by admin

I’m sure that we all know the old adage and we often do shop around to get the best prices, particularly on large ticket items. But how often do you do it for those veterinary products, like wormers, flea treatments and regular medications? I was astonished to find out that many people are still just getting them from their vet and paying full retail price! :o

I don’t believe in paying full retail price for anything so I usually do most of my veterinary product shopping online and you can save big bucks by doing so, even taking into account the price of postage and handling. There are literally dozens of places offering veterinary products at cheaper prices so you still need to shop around to find the best total price. For example, one place might have Revolution cheap as chips but charge significantly more for their wormer products. I’ve found in some instances that it’s even cheaper still if I buy my flea products one place and wormers in another, despite the double charge for postage. :)

So for the Australian consumers out there, I would recommend the following places for online shopping:

  • Aussie Pet Direct is owned and operated by a friend of a friend. Not that I get mate’s rates or anything but he provides a quick and reliable service and I get to support his business as well. He has all the usual range of flea products – Revolution, Frontline Plus, Advocate and Advantage – as well as intestinal wormers and other supplements for your cats health, like Cat Lax, medicated shampoos and dental products. Paying is easy – just use your credit card, money order, cheque or direct debit.
  • Priceless Pets has great prices on most veterinary products and have reasonably quick service. I have only one issue with this website and that is that you cannot submit your order and payment directly through their site. Basically you choose your items, it generates a form for you to print out and sign, then you have to scan it in to the computer to email or alternatively you can fax it through to them or send by normal post. Emailing the order form and faxing provide the quickest delivery time of course. It’s a little fiddly, but like I said, great prices so if you are saving a lot of money, then it’s worth the extra bit of fiddling to get your order into them :D
  • Vet Products Direct is not always the cheapest place online to buy but they do offer a loyalty scheme. So if you’re buying lots of product and regularly, the points scheme may help you attract a discount in the long run. Quick and speedy service.
  • Vet Pet Supplies Online is an online shop that was referred to me by a friend. Their prices for the products that I use regularly on the cats are quite competitive but as yet I have not ordered from there so I can’t comment on their service.
  • Petwise is the pet shop I buy from locally when I’ve left it too late to buy online and I need stuff now. They aren’t as cheap as the other online stores for flea products and the like but they do offer a loyalty scheme as well.

Just as an aside, if you happen to use Hills specialty cat foods, you can get a free dry food cannister with your purchase until stocks run out. They have also started a new loyalty scheme where if you purchase Hills foods from the one pet store all the time, they will send you out a gift voucher after you have paid for $200 of product. Essentially you get one bag of food free for every 10 that you purchase within a six month period.

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Who's a bright spark then huh??

Posted on November 3, 2007 by admin

Definitely not me! So I’ve been posting about my difficulties migrating my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I have told you all how I had to manually and painstakingly transfer all my posts by cut and paste to WordPress. Only to find that my Wysiwig editor was not working and could not insert images to save myself. What I probably didn’t mention last time was that I took all my photos out of my old blog to see if that would fix the import problem (it didn’t by the way) without backing up my Blogger first. Yes that’s right, deleted merrily all those photos thinking I would just manually put them back in.

Now here comes my not so bright spark of genius. I figured that since the import feature didn’t work, I’d just put them back in using Flickr. So I did all that…..ON MY OLD BLOG! That’s right, the one that I’m not longer going to be using – that’s where I put all my photos back in. OMG what an idiot! So I started putting in the photos into WordPress (i.e. here) this morning using Flickr Photo Gallery plugin which is a gem, even if it does slow you down a little in the process. :D

Then the light dawned on me….my photos were all inserted into Blogger using HTML code from Flickr….so it made sense that if I just copied the HTML code from each post on Blogger, the photos would appear and I wouldn’t have to painstakingly insert them all. Why the hell didn’t I think of that last time when the import didn’t work BEFORE I deleted all the images?? Why? Because I am a non techno savvy blogging amateur that’s why….not to mention I like being able to provide my far more techno savvy friends and family with a good old giggle at my expense. LOL

Well if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? :P

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Moving from Blogger to WordPress….more painful than it is worth?

Posted on November 2, 2007 by admin

Well I have finally moved all my text content from Blogger to WordPress, in the most painful manner possible. That’s right, cut and paste, alter time stamp to reflect the date of the original post and publish. OMG what a painful exercise! And before a lot of hip blogging techno nazis get on my case, yes I’m aware there is an easier way of doing it – if that is the import process would like to co-operate! After many hours of trying to get the Import from Blogger feature to work, I then tried importing using RSS. No love there either I might add! Tried removing video plugins, sidebar widgets and then even photos and hey presto, I get a message that it has been successful and hoorah I can start blogging in my new blog!

Not so.

When I go to look at my newly imported posts, guess what?? They aren’t there!! So after a few more minutes of mucking around trying to get it to work, I just went for the good old cut and paste method. GRR! I still have to put in all my photos and fix up all the old links but at least the main part is here.

I apologise to those of you who have come for a visit expecting some degree of cohesion and funny photos of my cats. You won’t find that here just yet. I have a big week coming up ahead – my final exam for my post-graduate qualification is on Wednesday, then I have a delightful date with my quack, followed by four days of respite in the lovely Barrington Tops region of NSW. After that, I will see about gradually fixing up my blog. :D

But the best part of moving to WordPress? I can now take part in NaBloPoMo. I’m sure Leigh will be thrilled about it after all the effort she has gone to in order to get me into my new home here. Thanks again Leigh, and you’re quite right – Blogger is evil! *hehe*

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NaBloPoMo?

Posted on November 1, 2007 by admin

Well October is over so I’m getting rid of the pink. I will go pink for a cause but as a general rule, I really don’t like the colour at all so I am more than happy to go back to my favourite blue.

November apparently is National Blog Posting Month and I would be more than happy to be in it. But the long weekend away next week is going to interfere with that unfortunately – and yes Leigh I am gloating about that aren’t I? But if I can’t be in this year’s NaBloPoMo then I will definitely be in it next year.

It can’t be that hard to write a post a day. Can it?

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