Doggie is an old dog. She has been coughing and hacking a lot lately, and her stamina is down. Her appetite has gone south, and she's been losing weight. She can't hardly hear anything, and her eyesight is going. Karen & I have been worried about her lately, so I took her to see Mike Esau, DVM, to see if anything could be done. Frankly, I was worried that there was nothing to be done but wait until she got bad enough to be put to sleep. Mike examined her and pronounced her basically sound for a 14-year-old dog. He checked her for heartworm, and she came out clean. Her problem seems to be a chronic tracheitis and bronchitis. He could produce the cough readily by pressing her trachea, establishing that part of the diagnosis, and he said that her lungs had a dry wheeze, indicating bronchitis. I was very relieved, to say the least! So she got a shot and we will be giving her antibiotics for two weeks. Hopefully, this will do the trick. I've had bronchitis many times, and I know how much it can knock you down!

I did get my housework done today. I'm constantly amazed at how much hair doggie sheds. We could easily make a new dog every month from the hair, assuming that we wanted another dog. That reminds me of a joke. The vet is also a taxidermist. The sign on his door says "Either way, you get your cat back".

That sounds like a good one for Nilky. Oh, yeah, there's a new Nilky today. People who like Bob Dole shouldn't look.

It's still pretty early, and I plan on staying up all night tonight since I start back to work on Wednesday, I'll need a good day's sleep for that sixteen-hour day. I will be writing more later.

Later...

Been web surfing all evening. It's now about midnight. Trying to stay awake, but none of the pages I've hit on tonight can get me interested. Plus the server I use stopped connecting me to anywhere, they must be having a maintenance break. At least, I hope that's what it is. I still want to get this up tonight.

Sage, at the Coffee Shakes wrote today about a light fixture in her house that would sometimes go off, an indication of a faulty wire and a possible fire hazard. I e-mailed her several times, but the server said that the complete message didn't get there, so now I have to worry about her and her husband burning up before they get the message and get it fixed.

Life is so fraught with arcane responsibilities...

Nilky is a problem. He's pretty lame, and the more I look at him the less I like him. Plus, drawing with a trackball is really difficult, especially for one who's used to using pens and isn't that good of an artist anyway. Nilky's future, at least on the web, is not assured. Did I mention that Nilky was a heathen? More so even than me, he's not just an atheist, but an anti-Xian. He's also anti-other-religions, but that doesn't matter much here in the states.

Actually, he'd be a pretty good spokesman for the atheist movement, if there were one. One main problem with atheists is that they don't have a church or any other means of solidarity. Actually, there are many kinds of atheists, and to get them to agree on anything aside from the basic premise would be impossible.

If the truth were to be known(and I'm telling you now) I don't know a single person aside from myself who considers themselves an atheist. Personally, I mean. There are a few on the web, but that's not quite the same thing as knowing someone in RT. Even my brother, who thinks a lot like me about most things, waffled on the question last time I asked him.

I think that's enough rambling for today...