Loosing a four legged friend, literally

Many of you know I have two cats, Oreo and Mindy. Both missions of mercy. Oreo peeing all over his owners apartment after she got married and Mindy the casualty of her owner moving to a place that wouldn't take pets.

Oreo the first cat I took in. I always liked him when I came to visit his owner and he seemed to like me as well. I think he's beautiful, with his black fur and little white mustache. Hence the name his original owner gave him. He's also a big cat weighing in at around 12 lbs or so. When I first brought him home and he hid behind the furnace and wouldn't come out for 3 days I started to wonder if I had made a mistake. The evening of the 3rd day I went downstairs and sat on the basement floor for about 15 minutes and he finally came out. I carried him upstairs and we've gotten along great ever since.

About a year later another friend quite desperate to find a new home for his girl cat Mindy. The only thing in his life remaining from a very bitter divorce. Oreo didn't take well to Mindy's arrival, they pretty much fought every day, especially over who would get to hop up on the bed with me at night. Over time I came to like Mindy a lot as well. She a very affectionate cat, purred if you just looked at her and much more impulsive than Oreo who thinks everything through almost to a fault.

So every day for the past year or so when I came home from work both cats waiting by the door at the top of the steps for me, that is until about two months ago. On this day only Oreo waiting. After an hour or so went by and no sign of Mindy I searched the house. No sign of her anywhere. To this day I have no idea what happened. I didn't see her run out, and she never showed any signs of wanting to go out, yet no trace of her inside and no smell to date.

Oreo seems very happy with the new order of things and has gone back to his relaxed self. He always seemed on edge when I had the two of them. Still, I miss Mindy and cried when I came across a picture of her while going through some pictures I had taken with my new camera ... oh ya, note to self, you never did a post about the camera, gotta work on that.

So if you're out there somewhere Mindy I hope you found yourself a good home and you enjoyed your time with me and Oreo while it lasted. I miss you and I think on some level Oreo misses you too.

Persuing Ghosts and Viruses

On the day after Thanksgiving I wondered if I should try to hit the stores to pick up a couple things. The day before while at a family gathering I saw everyone looking through the ad inserts in the local paper. They all especially interested in what the big electronics stores had to offer. Curious to see what tactics they using this year to lure folks into the stores at the wee hours of the morning I took a peek myself.

To my surprise I saw something that interested me. Best Buy offering Photoshop Elements 5.0 for $50. No rebates, not some stripped down version, the real thing for $50. Yet I wondered, and noted the fine print under the price, I read the following "Minimum of 10 items per store". 10 items per store!!! Hmmmm.

The next day I got up around 9A and wondered if I should go see if they still had any left. After eating breakfast it occurred to me to check the Best Buy website. Sure enough they had it for sale there as well, and only $4 shipping, so I snagged a copy. Never even had to leave the house!

Later in the day it hit me I should check for any deals on the new Norton AntiVirus as my subscription about ready to expire and it often cheaper to buy the new version than pay for a subscription renewal. After looking around I found CompUSA offering NAV 2007 and Ghost 10.0 in a bundle for 1 cent. That's right, 1 cent, AFTER rebates. Hmmm, don't much care for rebates, but for 1 cent ... I looked at the rebate forms and they seemed straight forward. Still I wondered, I ate lunch and went back to the site. Yup, everything looked on the up and up, so I proceeded to place the order. When I got to the end I noticed the ship date had changed from 1-2 days to 3-4 weeks. What's this? The rebate only good for one month, what if it really does take 3-4 weeks for it to come or this just a glitch in CompUSA's software as the site running very slow due to the rush in traffic. I decided to go ahead with order and clicked the complete button.

15 minutes later I checked again and saw the bundle listed as Sold Out. Oh boy, what did I do? Perhaps I shouldn't have eaten lunch first?? I decided they would more than likely send out all the bundles as one big group, so I should see it within a week. Thankfully, that exactly what happened and I soon had the bundle sitting on my living room couch ready for installation.

I've heard all the horror stories of Norton product installations going bad, but have never experienced any personally. This all about to change. To make a long story short, installing the two products ended up taking over 6 hours to complete, but thankfully they work very well once properly installed. No damage to my computer for the experience either, just a protracted installation process do to Symantec failing to mention the new NAV2007 incompatible with several popular pieces of software which I happen to use. Turns out after poking around several forums on the web for a while, this not totally true, so I continued with the installation despite dire warnings to the contrary from the NAV2007 installer. Also I wound up having go through the entire installation process twice because Ghost didn't get registered properly the first time around, turns out you should install Ghost first, but they fail to mention this in the installation instructions supplied with the products.

As an aside, this bundle takes the prize for strangest product packing of the year. Each product comes in it's normal box, with the bundle shrink wrapped together, or so it seems. Once you pull off the shrink wrap you discover the two boxes attached to each other with double sided foam tape and simply will not come apart. Not handy for storing the boxes away if you need the Proof of Purchase down the road.

Want an excuse to stay up late some night this week? Go pick up for yourself the NAV2007/Ghost 10.0 bundle and start the install around 10P.

Coming up for air

After a posting dry spell as long as the one I've just had what does one say? Kind of like when you suddenly stop doing things with a friend you saw all the time and bump into them at the store months later. The unspoken questions linger around the ensuing conversation, but rarely get asked outright, "Did I do something?", "You don't like me anymore?", "What really happened?". I suppose we really don't want to know as honest answers could potentially speak volumes about the core of our being which hurt too much or on the other hand we might find out their kid joined a traveling hockey team and they spend 3 days a week on the road plus weekends. The risk of the former happening enough to keep us from going down this road in the first place, so we end up talking about, work, the weather, ... and go back to shopping.

In this case I've gone through a period where life's events swept over me and engulfed me in the stream. No, I didn't wind up in the hospital or anything like that, but a lot of stuff happened all at once. I haven't spent much time at home over the past few months, something my cat reminds me of frequently. Blogging an intense activity for me as I'm a slow writer so a post of any length takes hours to create. Over the past few months I've generated lots of e-mails/newsletters of sorts which have taken away the time I normally would use to write up posts.

I often wonder when I look at folks like Noel who I suspect packs much into a day than I do, yet puts up a good 2 or 3 posts a day if I'm not pushing myself hard enough. Yet, it's where I find myself. I imagine if I got a closer look at Noel's, Dan's, ... lives in detail I'd see they have areas they struggle in that aren't an issue for me. It just happens that regular blogging something I struggle to do, but something they evidently find no problem to work into their lives.

Hopefully those who do follow my blog will forgive me for not being more like them in this area.