Life and Times of Dana

Whar a Thanksgiving weekend! Friday my baby sister had to go into the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, so she didn't get to go to the family dinner on Saturday.

On top of my sister being in the hospital I have been working 12 hours a day on computers. This time of year always brings a lot of work. Mostly it's people getting ready for Christmas, but this year it's also cleaning up computers that have a lot of malware installed. I might as well get all the work that I can right now because after Christmas my workload will fall off to practically nothing.

My sister came home yesterday and seems to be doing better. On Sunday she began running a temperature and had to be given large doses of antibiotics. It's a good thing she was still in the hospital when that happenned. I'll check in on her today while I'm up in the city doing some computer work.

The family dinner didn't go so well this year. With one sister in the hospital and the other one took off for Texas with her husband to visit his relatives. I DID get to see a cousin that I haven't seen in 38 years and my great uncle that I haven't seen in about 7 years and it was nice to sit down and talk with them.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Well so far I have trapped 2 cats and had to keep pulling the tom cats out of the trap. This lady that wants the cats only wants females but they don't seem to be co-operating very well. They have been wild for so long that they are very wary of anything new near their food dishes.

One of the females that I caught yesterday took four tries to keep her in the cage. Everytime I even got close to the cage door she bolted. I finally got her though and she was one mad kitty. It's a good thing this was one of those heavy duty cages because she just went wild when I closed the door and locked it.

I'm not going anywhere today, even though it is Thanksgiving. My dog and I will be staying home and just be lazy today. Saturday the family is getting together for our dinner.

Have a happy holiday and I'll talk more later.

What a weekend! I have never seen so many computers with spyware and browser hijackers in all my days fixing computers as I saw on Saturday. Although I like getting paid to remove this stuff I wish that more people would watch what they are doing and also learn how to remove it themselves. It seems that removing this crap is all that I am doing lately. There is a tutorial on how to remove that crap on my other website, just in case any of you are having problems with it too. You'll find the tutorials under the beginner section.

Well, today I get to trap some of these feral cats around here. My sister has a friend that wants them for barn cats. If they stay in the barn area of hers they should make for some very good mousers. They have done an excellent job of keeping the mice out of here. I don't get mice staying around here for very long. If one shows up, it's only here for a day or so then it just suddenly disappears and the cats are fat.

So far, this week has been fairly quiet and I'm getting to do more work on the other website. That's something that I truly love doing.

This has been one long week.

My mother got back from her trip on Tuesday, while she was gone I had to take care of her cats and do some work on her computer and build a shelf onto her computer desk. No sooner did she get back when my sister and her husband decided to leave town for a few days and now I'm taking care of their cat and parrot.

They have one nasty parrot. He bites anyone who tries to stick their hand into the cage and he drew blood on me twice today. I figured out how to get my hand into and out of the cage without being bitten again but not before the afforementioned bites.

This has also been my week for cleaning spyware and adware off of other people's computers. I have cleaned so much crap off of some of these computers that I wrote a short tutorial on how to do it yourself on my other website. When you spend 8 to 12 hours a day dealing with all of this stuff you get tired of it. I figure it'll not only save them the money for hiring me to come out but, will also let them find out for themselves what doing that kind of work is like and they will be much more careful about the sites that they visit and the software that they download.

Well CJ's nose is doing much better (he's my ex-fiance's middle boy) and the dog is in the happy hunting grounds. She took the dog to the SPCA and gave him up voluntarily. I don't blame her one bit for that. I would not tolerate any dog that would bite a child in my home either. The SPCA is doing the blood work and rabies testing just to make sure that CJ doesn't have to undergo any rabies shots or other kinds of medical attention. He still has to see the surgeon once a week for a while until his nose is healed and even then he has to go back for check ups for the next year or so just in case he needs follow-up surgery.

If the stuff with CJ wasn't enough, her mother tripped and fell this week and tore a hernia that she has even more. She was in the hospital for a couple of days and is now at my ex's home recuperating some. This has not been her year I guess. First me, then moving twice, then this stuff, right after moving into a new town.

Oh well, this year is almost over then a new one begins.

I haven't had too much time to be writing here lately. Most of my time has been taken up with adding some more pages to my other website.

My sister and a couple of cousins are all working on the family trees and I have been collecting links to websites for them for a couple of years now. I decided that they may be of some use to others that are doing the same thing so I put up a few pages with the links on that site. If anybody is interested they are at www.megz-bytes.net and are under the family section.

Mom is off on another one of her trips and I have been taking care of her cats and getting her mail. I don't know if that lady will ever slow down. 77 years old and still travelling. I hope that I'll still be that active at her age.

The computer business has slowed down again for a while. It still pays the bills but now I have the time to do what I really enjoy and that is HTML. I have even been taking a few classes online for XML, XSLT and OPML in the hopes of making more dynamic sites. I use a great deal of javascript as it is but I want something different since I use very little java or flash.

I had my annual physical yesterday and the Doctor wasn't too happy with me. Although my blood pressure and cholesteral are both in the acceptable range, my lungs have taken a slight dive. I have emphysema and I can't seem to quit smoking, although I haven't really tried over the last few months. My lung capacity is now down to 76% from 90%.

Man! What a couple of busy yet boring days. I finally finished up that piece of crap computer that has been giving me problems for the last 3 weeks, today.

I got some work done on the other website. I added a couple more pages and have been writing some tutorials for beginners. I have a few more to write but, at least, I won't have to write them while working on a computer at the same time. There is only one more computer on the bench and it's a Mac. All I have to do to that one is re-install OS 9.2.

I just got a phone call from my ex-fiance and the middle boy had to be rushed to the hospital. It seems he was trying to stare down the dog and the dog bit the end of his nose off. I hope he will be all right. I really love that little kid and I wish that I could have been there for him.

I sure wish this weather would make up it's mind. Either get cold or warm up. I don't care which. Yesterday it was 61F and today it's 33F. It's been doing this kind of stuff for a couple of weeks now. They're also calling for rain this afternoon changing to flurries and more of the same for tomorrow. Well that's Ohio for you. If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes it'll change.

Blogger has been a pain in the ass lately. This is the first time in 4 days that I have been able to login and post anything.

The weekend was fairly uneventful. My ex-wife was supposed to come over so that I could fix her car. It has a broken motor mount. She never showed up Saturday like she said nor did she call, so I sat around most of the day waiting for her. When I tried to call her, her phone was turned off. Finally on Sunday she called and came over and I worked on the car for a couple of hours only to discover that it was the rubber portion of the motor mount that was bad and all the junk yards were closed by that time. So now she's going to have to wait for another two weeks before I'll have the time to fix it.

I spent most of Saturday working on my other website and burning DVDs. I DID get a phone call from my ex-fiance (you know, Canada?) and it was a pleasant addition to the day. We talked for a couple of hours about what is going on with her up there right now. She has just moved into a new place and a new town.

Well the elections are over and the worst man won. The ultra conservatives also got their wishes. Now it's up to the rest of us to live with it.

I'm getting a little more computer work in lately and have been doing a lot of running to get it al done. I cover all of northwestern Ohio and southeastern Michigan in my rounds. So far I'm scheduled for work for the next week and a half including weekends and I'm getting calls daily to come and work.

This morning is going to be busy just running around picking up computer parts and dropping off software. Then, around noon I drive 35 miles to a customer and fix their computer.

We had a terrific storm run through here this morning and my dog got scared and hid under my desk while I was trying to work on my websites. There's nothing like trying to work at a keyboard with a 95 pound rottweiller under your feet.

Today is voting day here in the U.S. and I'm definitely getting out to vote. While I prefer to vote for the best person for the job, he isn't running in the election so I'll vote against the worst person for the job.

This is going to be one interesting vote. Everything is neck and neck going into the polls. I just hope that things change here in this country.

I know that I'll be glad when it's all over just so that I can get back to some semblance of normality. My mail box has been inundated for over a month now with political crap and I have stopped answering the phone because of all the political phone calls (Upwards of 15 per day).

There are also some things that need to be voted down statewide and locally. These right wing people are just going to have to be stopped and I hope it is today that some of that will happen. I haven't seen an election year quite like this one in some time. Everybody seems to have a very strong opinion about just about everything this year.