All Better!

So here's an update on Buster:

Scott took him to the regular vet Monday afternoon. They did blood tests, urine tests, poo tests, and poor Buster was poked, prodded and generally violated in every way possible (but it was for the best, no?).

All tests came back totally normal except his electrolytes, which were through the floor, and I guess that means he's severely dehydrated. So we're to continue the antibiotics and pain meds just in case, and give him as much chicken broth and Pedialite as we can get him to eat. So we were worried that he wouldn't like it, but as soon as we poured some broth he soaked it up. In order to get him to drink the Pedialite, we mixed it with canned dog food (instead of his usual dry food) until it was like dog food soup, and apparently he likes that, too. Lucky us!

So we've been watching him, and he seems to be back to his old self. We have no idea why he was dehydrated in the first place, so we're going to make it a habit of giving him chicken broth now and then. But he's prancing around and getting excited and just loving life again, and he hasn't acted like he's in pain at all anymore. AWESOME.

Also, it's snowing again. Apparently the weather didn't get my letter.

Oh No You Didn't

Dear Weather,

I am writing to voice some concerns I have regarding your recent behavior. You have been rather inconsistent lately and I worry that you might have lost sight of who you are and what your goals should be.

We spent some time in your lovely sunshine a few days ago, and then we had a little bit of rain, which is understandable given that we are in April. I was so excited to wash my winter coat and hang it up until next winter, and the next thing I know it's a bit too cold for my jacket again. I also must tell you that I put away my mittens as well, and my hands have been a bit cold.

All of this, my dear Weather, pales in comparison to the tantrum you threw last night. I don't know why you were so upset, but was this
really necessary? That was eight or nine inches of horrible nasty stuff, all over the state. I'm very disappointed in you, as you were headed strongly in the right direction, the direction that would lead you to meet your goals, namely, getting warm and acting your age.

You are lucky that my wonderful husband shoveled this nasty stuff away from my car so I could back out of the driveway this morning.

Otherwise, I may have felt a little less charitable. I'm not sure yet how to punish you for this; I will inform you as soon as I make a good decision.

Regards,

Anna Walker

P.S. Don't do it again. Don't even.

I'm Heartbroken

I'm heartbroken because poor Buster is sick.

We're not sure what's going on. He's just acting so strangely. He's fidgety, and restless, and is whining like he's in pain, and his stomach looks and feels swollen, and he's eating much faster than usual, and it's just sad because we can tell he's miserable. We went to the Animal ER in Sunset today and the vet thought it might be colitis, which is (I think) an infection in the bowels. So we have antibiotics and painkillers for him, but they will take some time to help, and in the meantime Scott and I are just looking on helpless to make him feel any better. We're supposed to feed him rice and chicken and give him the pills twice a day and of course he won't take them so we have to basically shove them down his throat and it hurts me just to think about it.

I'm worried there's something more serious going on because he's on the painkillers but he's still acting like he's in a lot of pain. He's breathing really fast like he's stressed and he's cowering and hiding from us which is absolutely bizarre, and I just want to make it better and I can't.

So we have to wait. Tomorrow I'm going to get an appointment set up with a regular, non-ER vet and see if they can do more tests.

My baby is hurting. I'm heartbroken.

Things

Scott is almost finished sanding, bondo-ing, and priming the 'Stang so soon he will be able to paint it. He doesn't think it's going fast enough, but I think we should take our time and get it done very well the first time. We're looking to sell this thing for quite a chunk of cash, so it needs to be as authentic and carefully done as possible.

One of my friends' husband is a structural engineer and was kind enough to come over the day before yesterday and take a look at our sub floor and support beams in the basement. It turns out that if we replace one beam with steel and add one more on the longer side of the basement, we might not have to replace the entire sub floor before we can put the wood down.

Dye: An Adventure

So.

I had a birthday this past week. 24!

I got some birthday money from my grandma and grandpa so I decided to treat myself to something fun. I've been wanting to do something cool with my hair for a while but have either been broke or too busy.

Whenever I want to get something done I go to the beauty school. It's cheaper, and the instructors are there every step of the way so you know that even if there's a mistake it will be fixed.

Which I experienced firsthand.

So last time I dyed my hair (September) I had a lighter brown on top and a much darker brown on the underside and I loved it. It was the perfect color combination for my complexion and added depth to my own, boring, mousy brown color.

So this time I decided to do the same colors but add a little zest: hot pink peekaboo panels!

I went in and my stylist's name was Amanda. Let me just say that through this entire thing she was awesome.

So I told her what I wanted and she whipped out the color book and we decided on what colors to do and everything. Then she went to get the supervisor to ok the formulas.

Now, they kept the formulas from last time on file. And they worked perfectly last time. So you would think that they would use them again. But this instructor, RUTH, was being stupid and told them "No, you should use this developer instead of the other one" and when they took the dye off the top my roots were ORANGE. Not like, redhead orange, but orange like orange crayons.

So, at this point they had bleached the panels to put in the pink, so they decided that they would put in the pink and then re-dye the roots with the correct developer this time and fix it. So, they went back to mix the colors and they came back out...they had failed to check to make sure they still had pink. Yep, they didn't.

So, out came the color book again, and we looked at all our options, and I was very disappointed because pink is my favorite color. But, it was already bleached and ready to go, so I just chose to do fire engine red instead. Red tends to fade more quickly than most other colors, so I figured once it faded I could reapply pink and my stylist said she would help me get a hold of the right kind of dye later, and red is fun too.

So they put the red on and then reapplied the new, correct, dye to the roots on top. We let it process and then went to rinse it out. Immediately we could see that the red was PERFECT AND AWESOME AND WOW COOL! However...my roots were still orange. Very very orange.

So, we called yet another instructor over (we'd gone through like three) and they decided on another formula to mix up to try to fix it again. So we applied that and waited...and they were still orange.

So, another instructor came over and pow-wowed with the other one, and came up with another formula, and they put it on, and while we waited for that I put in a formal complaint to the manager that it was, in fact, an instructor that made the wrong formula in the very beginning, and she should have known better. Oh, and she was really rude to me too and that bugged me.

So then we rinsed that off and it was wet but it looked better, so we dried it...and that took a long time because my hair is very thick.

But, once it was dry, the roots were almost exactly the same color as the rest! WIN!

So anyway. That was fun. I got there at 3:45 and was there until 9:45...6 hours. But it was fun, and I was in a good mood.

My attitude was basically this: that's what you risk when you go to the beauty school to get your hair done. Someone is bound to make a mistake somewhere and as long as they are willing to fix it, I'm cool with it. The only reason I was mad was because it was the instructor that messed it all up.

So here's a picture of the back...it's really messy because I slept on it but you can see the red peeking through. It's all around, like a halo, and when I move you can see it peek through and I LOVE IT and it actually looks redder than this:

SO rock and roll.

Anyway. So I got birthday money and I was going to have fun with it and I knew this was going to be expensive. The instructor at the beginning was going to charge me $20 for the base color, and another $6 for adding another color to the underside, and then she wanted to charge $3 per panel, and they ended up putting in 20 panels (there's a lot more red in there than it looks like in that picture) and so it was going to be about $90. And that was fine with me, because it was birthday money. BUT, when the stylist sent me up to the register to pay she wrote down that there were only 5 panels (yay! saving money!) so that was going to be only about $40. AWESOME. So I brought the formula slip up to the register and they were like "$14 please" and I was like, "Um, you didn't look at the slip, I had panels and everything" and they were like "Yeah (sneaky looks on their faces) we're having a special". The instructor that had priced it out earlier was gone so they were able to fudge it and I had like $100 worth of work done for $14.

And that's the story about my birthday hair dye.

Shrimp Are Tasty

So tonight we went for dinner at Red Lobster. This is one of a series of birthday dinners with various members of my family.

We walked in and sat down for a few minutes while they got us a table. While we were sitting there, another man across from us PUT HIS FEET ON THE TABLE. IN A RESTAURANT. Ugh.

So once we were seated and got our food it was wonderful and relaxing and I had three kinds of shrimp.

WHO PUTS THEIR FEET ON THE TABLE AT A RESTAURANT?

It was a grown man, for crying out loud.

Gross.

Phones Galore!

So a while ago Scott wanted a new phone, so he decided to look around in Hong Kong and see what he could find. Electronics are often less expensive over there, so we figured maybe we could get a good deal on a good phone. He looked around though, and they were comparable in price to what they have here, so he decided to look on the internet and see if he could get a good deal.

eBay is a beautiful thing.

Most of the time.

Scott found a decent deal on a G1. It was used, and the ad said it had a little cosmetic damage but that it worked perfectly, so we bought it for $130.

It arrived in the mail and it was WAY scratched up. This was not "a little" bit of cosmetic damage; this thing was thrashed. Scott put him SIM card in anyway, to see if it worked all right. The speakers didn't work at all, and the whole time he was using it (two or three days) he received no calls...which was a little suspect. It turns out people were trying to get ahold of him all weekend and no calls were going through, but he was able to place calls just fine.

Obviously this was not acceptable, so Scott tried to contact the seller to send it back and get a refund. Several times. The seller never responded, so he had to open up a case with eBay to get a refund through them. This took another week or two, but in the end eBay decided to refund Scott's money and told him to ship the phone back to the seller.

Scott sent it out, but when it got back to the seller, she never claimed it, so the post office just sent it back to Scott. When he asked eBay about it, they said just to keep the phone.

So, we ended up with a free phone...that didn't really work.

Scott put his SIM card back into his old phone and we waited for a while. Soon, Scott's contract with the phone people was up, so he could get an upgrade for a reduced price. He decided he wanted to get a new G1, and try to sell the old one (with a posted ad that said it didn't work well, because, well, we're honest).

All was well. We got the new phone, and Scott loves it!

However.

The phone comes with the original version of the software, and then in a few days after activating it it is supposed to (all by itself) update to the latest version. We waited...and waited...and then we went in to the store where we bought the phone to find out what was going on. The people in the store said it might take up to a month to get the update, which we thought was ridiculous, but what were we supposed to do?

So we waited.

A month.

No update.

So, Scott called tech support, and they were all like "Um, the store lied, you were supposed to get it already, I will open a ticket and make sure you get the update soon!" We were very happy that someone in the company was actually helping, and sure enough, in a day, the update came.

Which would have been awesome, if it hadn't FROZEN Scott's phone. It was stuck on the startup screen. Scott called tech support again and they tried everything, and apparently it was hopeless so they shipped a new phone. So while we waited for that phone to arrive, Scott put his SIM card back in his old phone.

But, in a couple of days, the new phone came and everything is working fine now.

So, before Scott sent the frozen phone back, we took a picture, so we could remember this moment forever.