Sadness For All
by PolarBear on December 24th, 2007
filed under Heartache
We are all very upset today. Our wonderful budgie friend, Sunbeam, died. He was the tamest I have ever been able to get a budgie. We actually got him as a family Solstice gift in 2004. Now, barely over 3 years old, he is gone.
For the last year he and his partner Raindrop have been my constant companions in our bedroom. I had stopped closing their cage door unless we had to have the house doors open. Sunbeam would sometimes wake me when I was napping or even in the morning by hopping out of his cage and landing on my head and lightly pulling on my hair. I was never able to teach him to talk, but he was an astonishing mimic, often playing games with us by imitating the sounds of the phone or the microwave and seeming to chuckle when someone came running to find out what was happening.
Looking back on the last few days, I think he was trying to tell us he was not feeling well even though he showed no serious signs until just yesterday. He had been extra affectionate a couple of days last week, and would not leave my shoulder. One morning he kept coming out of his cage and sitting on my leg while I was sleeping. I was worried I would roll over on him so after putting him back 3 or 4 times I closed his cage door until I was ready to get up for the day. It seems like he was trying to tell me something was wrong.
We tried so hard to save him. There is no vet that we could take him to anywhere here, and we wouldn’t have had the money anyway, so I had kept him warm and hand fed him mashed-up seeds and tried to get him to drink juice and water. At first he would take a little and seemed to be getting stronger, but finally he just refused.
I sat beside him all day long, watching him in his cage. Finally he got too weak to hold on to the perch and I caught him before he fell. I held him close for another hour until he finally breathed his last in my hand. When he died, we all cried, but me and the girl cried the most. The boy didn’t entirely understand and thought we could put new batteries in him.
Up at the top is a picture I made of him when he was a few months old. I took a photo and processed it digitally to look like a painting.
We’re really going to miss him.
Computer Crazy
by PolarBear on December 20th, 2007
filed under Neato
I was thinking about something interesting/unusual/different this week (I just realized I never posted this due to the site being down). We USED to be a very computer-oriented family. I guess we still are, but not as much now as we were back in the apartment we lived in 2 years ago.
Back then, I had my PC, Mama had hers, then we had the laptop which I used in bed since my PC was in the Living Room and was partially acting as an entertainment centre for playing back movies (we had no DVD player except in the computer) and games and such. In our bedroom we had an older, slower computer that was for the girl to play her kid games on. In addition, I had a computer I used as a sort of server: it gathered our email from the net, took care of any file downloading jobs, and stored all our music in one place so any computer could access it. Finally, I had a Linux PC that I only used for tinkering around with and was kept in our bedroom just sitting around waiting to be used when I got it in my head to do something with that OS. Oh yeah, and we had one other laptop that is a 486 machine with no battery and no network capabilities but that worked OK plugged in for doing very basic stuff like playing old kids games.
How’d we get so many computers with so little money? Well, I scavenged. My computer is the one we usually buy upgrades for because it is the one that is used for gaming and video editing and the like. When I upgraded mine, I put the parts aside. When other people want to do upgrades, if they don’t want or can’t use the old parts I ask for them. We’ve picked up numerous monitors, keyboards and parts that people are just throwing out – some right off the side of the road. The Linux machine was straight off the side of the road in a garbage pile one night when we were out for a drive in a snowstorm – I cleaned up the motherboard, properly seated the processor, and booted it up. The server was 80% from a roadside scoop and 20% from parts of my old PC from 2000. The kids computer was also some leftover parts from an upgrade combined with a cheap $30 ATX case I bought in Toronto. Mama’s is simply my old computer when I built a new one. The 486 laptop was a Freecycle job that turned out to be useless since it could not be connected to anything else and has no floppy drive. The only computer in the house that we bought, intact as a complete computer, is the laptop I used in bed at the apartment on days I had no strength to get up.
When we moved, something happened to some of the computers. For some reason the power supply went completely hinky in the server, and because it was a server tower with an AT power supply, I had to do some soldering and reconfiguring to put in an ATX power supply that could be purchased since an AT on could not be had. The girl’s computer was utterly DOA, I am still not sure what went wrong. The Linux machine got put in a closet until we had a place to put it. 2 months after we moved, our SillyGirl had a tantrum and banged her hand on the 486 laptop causing it to quit booting.
So, we were down to Mama’s PC, my PC, and the laptop. This past spring (2007), we tried to buy some parts or an older system to get the kids back into a computer, but nothing was available for a reasonable price. We took the money and bought a new motherboard, processor, video card and memory for my system, which I installed, and then put aside the old motherboard and parts to upgrade Mama, then use the old parts from Mama’s to build a kids system. Then, of course, I ended up not having any place to work and no energy, and then it was summer, and fall, and everything just sat in a box…
I had fixed the power supply in the server in 2005 but had not had the energy left after that to get it working and then Mama started working on her home business plan and took up the space I needed to work, so the server waited.
Well, things recently got worse: the laptop’s power supply completely quit, out of the blue. So now we are down to two computers: mine which is a relatively powerful machine in the bedroom where I can get to it easily from bed to do all the things I do, like video and photo editing and gaming and so on, and Mama’s which is carrying a substantial load – serving as not only her computer for surfing, email and so on, but also as the file-downloading peer-to-peer machine and the file storage machine and the central point for virtually everyone when they are downstairs. The one thing we had added this summer was an external networked hard drive that was on for $99 at Futureshop because we were just flat running out of space and we needed SOMETHING to store our mp3s and photos to take the place of that server computer that was dead.
Recently we decided we needed to deal with this, especially with the laptop offline. Since we had the upgrade parts for her PC, it was time to get the server going so that when we upgraded her system it would no longer have to do the multiple jobs it is doing now. She finally cleared out a space and I went to get the server going. Power supply works perfectly. The motherboard? Dead. I can’t get it to work. So, I pulled out the Linux machine which uses a similar processor. I test it, it works fine. I pull the processor from the server, put it in the Linux machine. Dead. I think, hmm, well that sucks. I put the Linux machine’s processor back in. Dead. I try another processor I had in the same configuration – also dead! I root through everything we have – all of it is too old to have compatible parts.
So, here we are again – back at square one. Mama has a PC that is working its butt off just trying to keep up. Mine ends up being used for everything that needs significant processing power like video production. I no longer have the luxury of being able to lay in bed and go online here and there because the laptop is dead, but at least my PC is not far away.
Our family is computer crazy. The boy, at 2, wants to use his Mom’s PC all the time. The girl goes to TVO Kids and sites like that on her Mom’s computer to play games and check out sites for TV shows and stuff she likes. That means Mama gets pushed out and usually ends up on my computer up here. I have to constantly burn stuff to DVD even though it is just a missed TV show that we will watch once and never again, because we are so low on space to store stuff.
We REALLY need to do something about this – SOON.