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Musings on Pets

I think pets are on my mind because I had dead pet dreams last night (horrible ones about Missy) and I worked on the Friends of Dekalb Animals website this morning. I’ve bitched about this issue before, but it bears repeating. And this is about NO ONE in particular. I’ve had this exact convo with MANY crazy cat ladies and/or pet hoarders. True facts.

It disturbs me when people who can’t take care of themselves have pets. Typically, not one or two, but a HERD of pets. They take in every stray. They foster. They have so many pets that it’s borderline hoarding. I assume they do this because they have a shitty life and pets make them feel better or something. I don’t know. All I know is: if you can’t take care of yourself, then why would you even entertain the notion of taking care of pets? Pets are expensive! It’s also relevant to note that people who do this type of thing typically do NOT take care of the pets in even the most basic ways (spay/neuter for instance) and the problem becomes exponential.

A conversation with one of these people (it’s women, always women) usually goes like this:

Me: How many pets do you have?
Hoarder: Well, I only have 3 cats and a dog, but I foster 25 cats and 10 dogs. ::happily::
Me: How do you afford to take care of all those pets? (Knowing that this person is broke as shit.)
Hoarder: It’s hard! I barely have money to feed myself, but I manage. A few of the cats are pregnant and several dogs need heartworm meds, but they are all doing OK, well, except for Fred, who really needs to see the vet. And Olly, who stopped eating a week ago. Oh and I think Shadrick has worms again…
Me: Really? Aren’t your pets fixed? Don’t you get them vaccinated?
Hoarder: Uh, no, I can’t afford to get them fixed or go to the vet. If I only had the money to… ::drifts off into a wistful haze of IF ONLY::
Me: Well, don’t you see that having unfixed pets will just make this issue worse? And don’t you think you should help the sick ones?
Hoarder: Ummm, well, yeah, I guess so… ::now looking uncomfortable:: But I have to HELP ALL OF THE POOR HOMELESS PETS! ::getting indignant::
Me: Hmm. Well, I appreciate your generous heart, but you really need to get these animals fixed, medicated and adopted out.
Hoarder: ::goes into a long explanation of why that can’t happen:: Blah, blah, animal control is evil, blah, it’s better than the shelter, blah, blah, blah.
Me: Oh! Look at the time! I really need to get going! Nice talking to you! ::runs away before I start expressing my real opinion and/or punch the crazy person in the face::

This has happened to me SO MANY times!! And every single time I’ve met someone like this, they also admit to dumping pets at shelters when their roommates/parents/big foot tells them that they can’t have pets. Probably because people who can’t afford to take care of themselves are also moving a lot and having to depend on others for shelter since they are broke motherfuckers.

Look, it’s simple. If you can’t feed/clothe/shelter YOURSELF, then it’s a pretty good bet that you can’t take care of a pet. ANY pet. Well, maybe a betta fish. And it’s also a pretty good bet that you will do more harm than good by taking on tons of pets and then not caring for them properly and dumping them when you can’t take them to your next couch surf location.

A simple guide to deciding whether you should have a dog or cat:
– Are you so broke you can’t buy food at times?
– Are you dependent on other people for shelter? (ie: Are you NOT on the lease? Are you living with your parents? Can someone tell you to dump your pets and you must comply?)
If you answered YES to either or both of these, then NO YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE A PET! AT ALL. NOT ONE.

It’s that simple. Having a herd of unfixed cats and dogs that you “rescued” from the street is no better than leaving them on the street. That is a fact. It is also a fact that you can’t save them all. Another fact is that by “fostering” a herd of unfixed, unvaccinated, neglected animals is actually making a bad situation worse. For every unwanted kitten YOU allow to be born, there are 100 being euthanised.

If these people (women, let’s just say women) really loved animals as much as they claim to, then they’d stop compounding the problem of unfixed pets breeding continuously, which is the DIRECT CAUSE of millions of pets being destroyed in this country every year. They’d FIND a no kill shelter to come get the animals. They’d FIND a way to actually help the animals rather than perpetuate the problem.

And it goes without saying that homeless people with pets make me apoplectic with rage. You’re HOMELESS? Why, YES, by all means drag a dog or cat around with you. Seems legit.

Really, this is just another BE RESPONSIBLE post. I have lots of them. It’s a shame that this theme keeps coming up so often, isn’t it?

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Old Lady Supplements

I’ve suffered insomnia for over a decade and now I get to add hot flashes to it. Yay. I’ve tried many supplements without success (SEE note at the end!!), but I have finally dialed in a good combo of supplements to beat back the evil hot flashes. The supplements I take specific to hot flashes have an * next to them:

DAILY
1 multi vitamin (Vitacost brand)
1 B complex (you need LOTS of B as you age!)
*1 Selenium 200mcg (hot flash relief)
2 Turmeric 450mg (for inflammation of joints and carpal tunnel, I’ve had very good results!)
*1 E 100mg – 400mg (finishing the 100 then going to 400; works with selenium)
OR 1 evening primrose oil cap ~500mg (for inflammation and arthritis) it also has E in it

*Plus these tinctures for old lady crap:
1 dropper 2x/day chasteberry (aka vitex)
.5 dropper 2x/day black cohosh (full dropper if you’re not on hormones)
I only take motherwort now for insomnia, not daily.
.5 dropper 2-4x/day motherwort (also helps with insomnia)

I’ve recently come across L Theanine (200mg), which was indicated for anxiety and calming. Nick takes it for anxiety and I found that it knocks me right out, so I use it for insomnia. It is an amino acid with no known drug interactions.

Yes, I take about 8-10 pills a day. Yes, it is a PITA. But it is working! Get a big ass 2wk pill thingie and put all the various things in it for 2 wks then you just grab and go in the morning!
IMG_1343

My insomnia solution that mostly works is the following: one naproxen, one OTC sleep aid (doxylamine succinate, NOT diphenhydramine, which revs me up) and one valerian cap. I’ve also used Sleep Assure (Nature’s Plus) but the melatonin can often backfire and I’ve used Deep Sleep (Herbs Etc.). Here is a Slate article about various sleep aids.

Speaking of melatonin, I’ve preached about this, but no one listens: DO NOT USE LARGE DOSES OF MELATONIN FOR INSOMNIA. Anything more than 3mg is a HIGH dose and will likely backfire on you. Melatonin is a sleep regulator, NOT a sleep aid. Read this article and stop using melatonin the wrong way!

Warning about Dong Quai for Old Lady issues: I got a supplement that had dong quai in it and it turned ON the hot flashes, like ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT hot flashes. After doing some research, I found out that in some women, dong quai is very bad for hot flashes. YUP, I can confirm this. Not everyone, mind you, just some. So be careful about taking that if you’re old.

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Avoid Zweeko, mates! (They are GONE anyway!)

Zweeko does not exist any more. Good thing we ditched their sorry asses. I’ll bet they fucked over all their clients, too. They were far more interested in MONEY than SERVICE. Good riddance!

TWO UPDATES at end of this post. Our opinion of Zweeko has declined precipitously. :(

We are done with WiredTree. You are reading this from our new server at zweeko.com in the UK!

I’m really shocked at the behaviour of WiredTree, our host for about four years. When our sites (this one in particular) started getting hammered by ddos and wp attacks, they did LITERALLY NOTHING about it. They blamed us for the constant outages and basically had the attitude of “it sucks to be you”.

All they could recommend was that we buy more RAM or upgrade our plan: WHICH WE DID. We moved to a more robust SSD plan that cost $15 more than the other plan we were on ($40 -> $55). Today I wake up to a notice about the sites being down (third time THIS WEEK) and they jacked the billing up to $59 without notice.

Really, WiredTree? REALLY? Wow. It’s become a clear pattern that hosting companies are great for about four years, then they get too big to care. I’ve consistently had to find a new host every 4-5 years for this exact reason: support goes to shit. I expect the same from Zweeko and that is OK. I just have to deal with moving every 4-5 years. Whatever.

So a coupla weeks ago I was kvetching on Twitter about the shitty service we were getting from WiredTree, when I got a message from Sal at Zweeko.com. He enquired about what was going on and offered to bail us out of WiredTree. After much discussion, we decided that we’d give them a go. Sal even called me from London to chat about what they could offer us and that they’d do all the grunt work of moving the sites. As we were chatting, he told me that he and his staff were “having a laugh” about how shitty WiredTree is being to us and that sealed the deal for me. You know what? WiredTree IS being shitty to us. They offer no protection from ddos or wp attacks. There are plenty of server side firewalls available, but they can’t be bothered. Sal uses CloudFlare to protect the servers from attacks and doesn’t even charge extra for it – it’s included in the $70/mo hosting package. WiredTree did suggest that maybe WE should look into CloudFlare for our server, but they can’t be bothered. Assholes.

So the upshot is that we are in the process of moving to Zweeko and WiredTree can suck it. I doubt they’ll even refund the jacked up fee they just charged me and I don’t really give a shit. KEEP IT. Clearly you need it worse than I do (maybe use it for some better support people?). Assholes. [They did not refund anything. Assholes.]

We’ll have plenty of protection from various attacks and we’re adding SSL for $18/yr for further protection. WiredTree wanted $60 for an SSL certificate. Assholes.

UPDATE Feb 2016:

While Zweeko has been better than Wiredtree, we have had plenty of issues. We had several hours of downtime over the end of 2015 – mostly due to growing pains for Zweeko. They had hardware issues and support issues. Sal was a champ through my endless grousing and bitching. Once they got moved to their new data center, however, the problems seem to have planed out. Overall, we are happy with Zweeko after six months. Cloudflare has stopped all the attacks on our sites and buying the certificate has turned out to be a great thing since Google has decreed that all sites must have a certificate or be labeled “unsafe”.

UPDATE #2 June 2016:
Sadly, Zweeko has gone to shit VERY quickly. Less than a year. :( It’s mainly due to the owner abandoning the business to the support team, who are simply not that capable. They are fine with written instructions (the manual), but they cannot THINK outside that and actually FIX issues. All they know how to do is reboot the server, blame us or delete an error log. That’s it. Our sites were down for NINE HOURS Sunday June 4 to Monday June 5 and they didn’t even bother to fix the server until Monday morning. So I guess 24/7 support has been discontinued. The night shift had no idea what the issue was, so they just left it for the day shift. NICE. All the day person did was reboot the server and call it a success.

There is only so much bullshit “Well, so what, it was down for 9 hours! But now it’s UP! Yay! No worries!” attitude I can take. They really DGAF if our sites are down. I reamed them on their fucking FB site and Twitter and we are looking for a new host. Fortunately, I have a buddy who used to work for Zweeko, who can still access my server (hey-o zweeko has shitty security too!) and he went in and fixed a few of the server side problems that the Zweeko staff simply could not figure out. This guy also recommends a host called Kualo, which is at the top of our potential relocation list.

UPDATED
We are culling our sites – taking down the defunct comic sites and making them redirect to indigodragon.net – and we’ll be moving probably before the end of the year. Make that immediately. The absent owner of Zweeko, the one who always says “no worries!!” when something goes wrong, booted us off the server. He threatened to delete all our sites if we were not gone in 48 hours. (Which is why they no longer exist, no doubt. What an ASSHOLE.)

OVERALL REC:
DO NOT USE ZWEEKO. The owner is crazy and very, very unconcerned about the business and clients. He is retaliatory and will screw you over. We are on SITEGROUND now, which has been a big improvement. Our sites are still fucked up with bot attacks, but we are getting them under control. When we are attacked, the server is typically down for only a few minutes rather than HOURS.

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Better than the alternative

I was just reading some older posts and came across this one from 2013 about long term disappointment. TRIGGER WARNING!!

It’s two years later and although there is still disappointment, we did manage to change up a few things:

– We moved into a nice, large house in the ‘burbs ($1300/mo rent hurts, tho!).
– Maplehurst was finally foreclosed and there was NO impact on our credit. Mine is currently 718.
– We tried (and failed) to start up a restaurant and an arcade company (too bad, so sad).
– We are selling LOTS of things to beef up savings and get ready for whatever is next.

We don’t know what is next other than NuVision shutting down. I guess once that happens we’ll decide what to do. MY vote is to sell most of our crap, put the rest in storage, buy a truck and RV trailer and hit the road for a year. Nick, of course, is not into it. He is never into my ideas. I think our age difference is starting to show. The other day, he actually said “Well, an RV and travel may be fine for you old motherfuckers, but I’m still in my 40s!” Soooo, I guess that’s his position. :(

I feel old – because I am!! 50 will be here shortly and I really don’t know how I feel about it. Menopause sucks – just like everything else having to do with being female – and I just want it to be over. I don’t care about my looks any more, why should I? I’m old and out of the game. I know Nick loves me, it’s not that, it’s just BLEH. I don’t know. I’m over it.

When I complain about middle age, the usual response is “It’s better than the alternative!”, but really? I’m not so sure. I’m more of the “die young and leave a nice looking corpse” group. But it’s too late for that. I’m not young. I’m middle aged. That is a fact. ARGH.

I hope I can get something put together for my birthday, but I’m so not motivated. And I am a little resentful that I have to do all the arrangements for my own birthday. Nick is absolutely useless at planning trips, parties, whatever. Ugh. He doesn’t even try. At this moment, it looks like I’ll be doing nothing for my 50th. Which is so sad and pathetic that I can’t even think about it.

And with that, I’m done with the whining. I’ve got hausfrau things to do: shopping, running Vakoom, etc. The excitement is palpable. :P

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On the Radio

I am a child of the 70s. I went to first grade in 1972 and graduated in 1984. Those were the heydays of radio and changing ways to listen to music. I’ve seen AM radio go to FM, 8 track tapes go to cassettes and vinyl go to CDs (and BACK again!!). I’ve also been a part of the digital age, but that’s not within the scope of this post. I want to tell you about my history with music – radio in particular.

The first song I remember hearing on the radio was “Angie” by the Rolling Stones. It’s my name, of course, so I thought it was pretty cool to have a song about me. It was playing on Bus 93 that I took to and from school every day in first grade – perhaps longer, I am not certain. We had music on school buses back then, imagine!

I had two tiny AM radios that I’d set up in my room, on either end of my dresser to listen to the radio. I was creating stereo sound! I loved the American Top 40 show with Casey Kasem and listened every week.

We also had radios for our bikes from Radio Shack. They were sort of like this one, but not exactly:
bikeradio

I remember hearing “Take it to the Limit” by the Eagles on that radio, as we rode up and down the hill from my Granny’s house to our own. I REALLY wish I kept that radio!!

In the mid 70s, family groups were all the rage: The Osmond Family, The Jackson 5, The DiFranco Family. I remember Donny Osmond singing “Puppy Love” and “Want You Back” by the Jacksons and “Heartbeat, it’s a Lovebeat” by the DiFrancos. I had the Osmonds and DiFrancos on 8 tracks.

Also in the early to mid 70s, the variety show was at an all time high. I watched Sonny and Cher religiously. I LOVED Cher! Her long hair and those crazy outfits. I’ve got some Cher vinyl that is probably collectable. This was also the time of KTel records. These were like mix tapes on vinyl. I only liked the ones with the real artists, not the cover band ones. Of these, I had a KTel with “Beth” by KISS that I loved.

Things go fuzzy as far as what songs I remember from the mid 70s until the late 70s when disco hit. There was a local program on TV that was broadcast from a disco in Knoxville and I remember watching it to try and learn the various dances. I remember doing the Bus Stop. We had sock hops in middle school and I remember disco and the beginnings of New Wave. I clearly remember dancing to “Pop Muzik” by M.

Then the 80s hit, in all its glory and I was awash in SO MUCH MUSIC. I used to listen to King Biscuit Flower Hour and one of my clearest memories of that was when Pat Benatar was on. It was the best thing I’d ever heard! I never got to see Pat in concert in the 80s because I lived in buttfuck Knoxville TN, which didn’t get tons of shows. While I was researching KBFH, I came across something that will make ANY music buff SQUEE: the KBFH Concert Vault. This is a comprehensive list of all the performers that ever did a show or spot or interview on King Biscuit AND you can listen on the site (IF you subscribe!) or download some things for $5. SO, I can now download that Benatar show I heard in 81!! OMG is that not INCREDIBLE??!!

ALL HAIL THE INTERNET!

All my high school friends thought I was going into music for sure…and I did, kind of. I went off to Atlanta to get an Associate of Arts in Music Business from the Art Institute with the intention of going into music promotion. I realised quickly that I really did not fit into the sexist jackassery that was the radio/music business. My parents – who never supported any education I got – were making bets about how long I’d last before I dropped out. So I completed the program to spite them. The Art Institute was (and might still be) a rip off and that whole thing cost me about $10k. Since I realised that the AA in Music Business was useless to me, I immediately enrolled at Georgia State University to get my BA in something. Since I was naturally good at languages, I chose to get my BA in French and Spanish.

The weird thing is that when I moved back to Knoxville after I graduated Georgia State, I ended up selling radio! Crazy! I worked for U102/Star94 for a short time. Sadly, the industry was still sexist and pretty shitty and I DETEST outside sales. I made some money, but I didn’t like the job.

I’ve already written about my stint in rock n roll in another post (Sold My Soul To Rock n Roll), so this is where I’ll end my reminiscing about RADIO and songs On The Radio. Another song that I loved back in the day! :)