Family stories.
The veternarian who single-handedly squeezed Fuzzy to death decided to milk more money out of us by sending us a reminder that Fuzzy is due for a “wellness exam” a year after he passed away. Apparently they didn’t realize Fuzzy didn’t make it through his last visit. This is the Bellevue Center of Veterinary Medicine, which I would recommend that you stay away at all costs unless you’re looking for a Euthanizing Institution.
WARNING: The following story contains graphic images and can be upsetting. Parental discretion is advised.
When we came home today after running some errands, we unloaded Lia along with the groceries. Next to the garage door, some carpenter ants were crawling. “They’re back?!” I thought to myself. I followed the carpenter ant out of the garage when, to my horror, I saw four corpses sitting in my driveway. These were no ordinary corpses–they were babies! What happened? Did some cruel parent threw their babies out of the window, or did these babies get so hot they lept to their death in the 92 degree heat of the day? Forensic evidence were lacking, as the parents were nowhere to be found and it was difficult contacting any family members.
Here was an picture taken of the crime scene:
Currently the case is still open, and we hope someday to unravel this mystery.
Karen asked Lia if she’s hungry, and this was her response…
Apparently it is illegal to be driving in the fast lane at speed limit if you’re not passing in Washington, and the troopers are now giving out tickets for this.
http://www.komonews.com/news/20656789.html
What prompted for recent ticketing is to reduce road rage, and slow drivers have caused accidents recently. Might want to be careful the next time you’re driving in the fast lane at 60 with 10 cars tailgating behind ya. You might be getting a ticket for being a slow poke!
For a while, I enjoyed the company of my laptop, the Sony S360. It was a great laptop with a slim profile, light weight, great 13.3 screen, and powerful ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card. Unfortunately one day it took a head-dive down the stairs and was never the same. Occasionally it would throw a fit and completely freeze up. Well, recently it has been throwing these tantrums more frequently, as any slight movement to the laptop would render it useless.
However, as I looked into a placement laptop, I’m looking for:
In the end, I found two laptops that fit my bill, the Dell XPS M1330 and Sony SZ750. I looked at the M1330, which is cheaper, and even though it is LED, seems to have poor viewing angle. There have also been many complaints about build quality. The Sony, on the other hand, has dual graphics card switch uses one to save power but the other one for serious gaming, but it does not have a built-in HDMI port. It does have a docking station with a DVI port, so I was almost about to pull the trigger on it when it became discontinued! What?!
Apparently the new Intel processor and chipset, Montevina, is coming out this summer, and everyone’s saying to wait for it. So what do I do in the mean time? Well, the laptop is pretty useless at the current moment, so I decided to do a little handiwork…
And transform it into a “desktop”… without the expandability and possibly dangerous to the touch, but this will have to do until the new laptops come out.
And yes, I did write this blog on that thing. 
Okay, so Odelia was two months a few days ago, but today was Odelia’s 2 month checkup! The good news is that she has been doing very well up to this point, but the bad news is that she’s due for her vaccinations–not one, not two, but four shots!
Here’s how Odelia took the whole thing…
At least it wasn’t as bad as the Heel Poke!
With Odelia in her first two months of life, her immune system is still weak. Not long ago, many of our small group got struck by a stomach virus, so there’s reason to be cautious about where I bring Odelia and what she gets exposed to, at least until she reaches her second month, when she’ll be getting at least 4 immunization shots. I avoid bringing Odelia to social function where lots of people carrying germs are roaming about. I wash my hands almost all the time. I avoid public bathroom handles, where people who don’t wash their hands after doing their thing deposit their germs.
I thought I was cautious, but today I read this article on MSNBC about places that you don’t think of where you can get germs. In summary:
1. Vacuum Cleaners – 50 percent of the vacuum brushes they tested contained fecal bacteria, including 13 percent with E. coli, and all were packing mold.
Hmm, time to give my iRobot a cleaning!
2. Your weight-lifting gloves – A 2004 Japanese study found that staph bacteria bind strongly to polyester, which is used in many gloves.
Haven’t lifted weights other than Odelia for a while, so I’m ok here.
3. The grocery cart – The handles of almost two-thirds of shopping carts tested in a 2007 University of Arizona study were contaminated with fecal bacteria. The carts had even more of these bacteria than the average public bathroom has.
I definitely didn’t think about this one, as we just took Odelia to Fred Meyer, with me holding Odelia in one hand and the shopping cart in the other.
4. Gym equipment – A 2006 study in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine found rhinoviruses (instigators of the common cold) on 63 percent of the gym equipment at the fitness centers they tested.
I get all my workout through holding and calming Odelia, so I’m ok here.
5. The restaurant menu – recent study in the Journal of Medical Virology reports that cold and flu viruses can survive for 18 hours on hard surfaces.
Haven’t been to a restaurant for a while either, so we’re okay for now. Definitely something to watch out for when Karen and I have a life again.
6. The flight attendant – Flight attendants are exposed to dozens of sniffling and coughing passengers and the surfaces they touch.
Don’t think Karen and I will be flying for a while.
7. Your bed – More than 84 percent of beds in U.S. homes host dust mites. These microscopic critters live in your sheets and feed on your dead skin, and their fecal matter and corpses contribute to asthma and allergies.
This explains why I never make the bed–because of fear of allergies… Yeah… That’s it. Time to make that case with Karen.
8. The lemon wedge in your drink – In a 2007 study from the Journal of Environmental Health, nearly 70 percent of the lemon wedges smashed onto restaurant glasses contained disease-causing microbes, including E. coli and other fecal bacteria.
No trips to restaurants, no worries.
9. Your contact-lens case – In a 2007 Chinese study, 34 percent of contact-lens cases tested were found to be crawling with germs like Serratia and Staphylococcus aureus. These microorganisms can cause keratitis, an inflammatory eye disease that can damage the cornea and lead to blindness.
Time to chuck that lens case I’ve been using since 1995…
10. Your shower curtain – The soap scum hanging out on your curtain is more than just unsightly. A study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology found that vinyl shower curtains are microbe meccas, breeding potential pathogens, such as infection-causing Sphingomonas and Methylobacterium. Plus, the force of the shower spray will make germs take flight.
And I thought that making the shower glass window look fogged just changes style of the window. TIme to bust out Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser.
Looks like I will need to make a few adjustments in my life… just so that little Lia can stay safe and sound!
With me back to work and my parents in town last week, things have been increasingly hectic. Hopefully I can find some time here and there to post some interesting things.
Now, take a look at this picture and see if you can detect anything wrong with what we’re doing with the baby…
Can you find them all? A point per answer goes to whoever gets that answer first! I will not be posting any followup, so if no one answers, then you will all be kept hanging! 
There are at least four “taboos” according to modern science and the SIDS foundation.
Here’s perhaps the best baby calming strategy I have to date!
A while back I shared about my backup solution, where I use a DLink DNS-323 to make backups from one drive to another, once per night. This prevents me from accidentally deleting a file and loosing it forever. Unfortunately, the safety net is only for one day, because if you need to recover it the next day, the data from the day before is overwritten and the data is gone forever.
However, Mac has the concept of Time Machine, where you can go back to any point in time and recover any of the old versions of files that you’ve ever had. It’s an interesting concept, but making a full copy everyday will run out of storage after 2-3 backups! Fortunately, I have learned that using rsync, which is how I’ve been backing up from one drive to another, you can actually make a full backup every day, without wasting space for files that haven’t changed.
So with a full backup everyday, I don’t have to worry about overwriting a file and not being able to recover it, because I can go to any version of any file on any day. Now that’s a backup solution!