It’s Been A While…
by PolarBear on April 1st, 2009
We haven’t been blogging much of anything for a while… between the house purchase/moving and lack of our own internet (we have to use the library to get online but it can be a bit unreliable)…
I updated the last of the family blogs today to the latest wordpress, applied some new themes, activated some new features (with hopefully more to sort out in the days to come when I am less brain fogged) and here we are.
Not sure if this Violin theme will stay permanently but it is a lot easier to tolerate than the green one. Hopefully, we’ll both be more regular updating, now that things are more-or-less working right.
TTFN!
Forever I’ll be a Mama of Two
by Mamaoftwo on February 7th, 2008
filed under Updates
Well, after three years of thinking about it, and then making a final decision, and then waiting on getting an appointment for the procedure, we had decided to make being a mama of two a permanent thing. We decided that I’d get my tubes tied. Hubby has CFS and heals very slowly even from minor cuts and scratches, so we decided it was best that I “get the snip”.
Today was the day….I was up early this AM had to shovel 25 cm of snow out of driveway to be able to get to the hospital 
Got everybody ready and drove to to the city (an hour way)…got to hospital for 12:30…checked in, waited until 2:30… they had a decent private waiting room for people with kids that Hubby and the kids got to use alone for the whole duration of the hospital stay, had loads of toys and videos to watch so they watched a few movies and played…we got a free parking spot right by the front doors so we didn’t want to give it up, so that all worked out well that he didn’t need to take them anywhere to occupy them for 5 hours… got in the OR and was put under at 3pm….did the thing…woke up at 10 after 4… in recovery until 5, the crappy part was it happened during shift change, so hubby was beside himself with worry because no one gave him updates cause I think he got lost in the shuffle and the family room door was closed and “out of sight, out of mind” happened…he was getting nervous after 2 hours of no news.
They took me to the out patient post op admit and recovery area where they were in the family room and before they even went in to get him from the family room, he knew I was there and came out (energy is an amazing thing and we’ve always had that sense about each other’s presence)…
The kids were happy to see me! 
Bupba yelled “Mommy you home!!!” all excited, to which I replied.. “Yes I am bud, cause I’m here with you guys!” The nurses thought that was sweet LOL…got my vitals checked and the kids got stickers for being so good
Then I got up almost right away and dressed asap ( going slow), Anjohli wheeled me to front door of hospital LOL… then we went to Swiss Chalet for supper on gift cards from family (went there ’cause they have soup)…felt fine no sick feeling from the anesthesia or anything or shoulder pain so far… just been peeing like crazy from the IV fluids.
I was STARVING by 5 with no food since midnight the night before!….had the soup and half a sandwich and is was good!
I feel ok when I’m sitting or lying still, hurts a bit when pain meds wear off…stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home to pick up pain meds, thought I would walk slow and be ok, but thought better of that after a few minutes in the door and the pharmacy being at the opposite end of the store…so I got a powered cart to sit on… so with that felt good enough while sitting to pick up a few other things we needed and had been going without (stayed for about 45 minutes.. a short visit for us to a Wal-Mart…got out of Wal-Mart to meet the weather really coming in…second band of the storm started when we were eating dinner…
Hubby drove home in the heart of the storm, could hardly see in front of the van all the way, but no one else was on the road either, so that was good. He’s a good driver, was a taxi driver at one point in his life and has driven in every kind of weather going. But still, I was very alert while he was driving worried about his pain and exhaustion level, so I couldn’t rest in the car much. He doesn’t drive ever.. that’s the first time he’s driven that distance in like 4 years due to the extreme cramps he gets in his arms and legs and ribs from holding himself in that driving position for too long.
We got home at about 10:30 pm, from needing to drive slow… and we missed the ferry by 3 seconds and had to wait a half hour for the next one to get back onto the island that is the county… I coached the kids to put themselves to bed (WOOHOO) and laid down from 11 to now…hubby changed my dressings, and now I’m down stairs thawing soup for him cause he’s just exhausted.
Will be going back to bed as soon as the soup is finished…I feel ok…just slow response time from the anesthesia still. Going slow from sore stomach muscles and taking just Tylenol and or ibuprofen for pain as needed.
The Hospital seems like a great hospital…one of Canada’s top teaching hospitals. I told them that I was most nervous about the moments of going under the general…everyone was great… bedside manner was outstanding. The team all introduced themselves prior to going in the OR, and even the doctors used first names, not ” Hi I’m doctor so and so…” it was ” Hi I’m Peter…I’m the OBGYN we met a few weeks ago…good to see you again…” and ” hi I’m Joan, I’m your anesthesiologist…” they were all comforting and kind, they obliged answering my silly questions about them feeling on their game and had all had a decent lunch and good sleep the night before etc they were aware of my general anxiety issues…and the male nurse was great , he was from Cape Breton and when he asked me to visualize my vacation I wanted to go off to I picked to go visit Cape Breton, and he was really cool telling me to visualize CB on the map, and then to see the Cabot Trail, and that when I got there he’d meet me at the Red Shoe pub for a pint LOL… he did this while I was breathing in the mask to go to sleep, I felt the coolness of the anesthesia go in my IV in my hand and tasted it a bit in my mouth (kinda weird… I can still taste it a bit) and closed my eyes listening to him tell me this stuff, so he took away all my anxiety with his visualizations guidance, and I just let it come over me, and the next thing I new I was awake in the recovery.
Bupba thinks my belly button has a booboo and needed to be “sixed by de doctor office.”
I’m resting for the next few days for sure.. and I don’t care about the 40 cm (literally, it’s drifting) of snow in my driveway right now, I’m not going anywhere for a while. It can stay there. Or perhaps the wind will stay around after the snow stops falling and it will drift right back out.. one can always hope
Quite a Week
by PolarBear on January 15th, 2008
filed under Updates
Wow. Have I ever had a hectic week.
Last Tuesday we had to go to Kingston. Mama actually had doctors appointments Tues AND Wed and we could not get them changed to the same day… so rather than go twice with the whole gang (it takes about an hour to get there so we usually try and combine ALL of our tasks like grocery shopping and so on into one day when one of us has to go to the Dr. there), we took everyone Tuesday. I was able to find some younger budgies at a pet store there, so although it was not my first choice, we decided to pick one up as a new friend for our girl budgie. We picked up a few other things but the trip wiped me out. Wednesday she went back on her own (all of this of course costing a fortune in gas and leaving us very short this month) while I set about trying to tame/train this essentially wild budgie.
What an interesting personality this one has – I have had him now almost a full week, and I can’t get him to actually sit and perch on my finger. He will sit in my hand and eat, and he will take seeds from between my fingers but he won’t perch. Just trying to settle him down is tiring. I am also trying to teach him to talk, I hope it works.
Anyway, I spent Wed and Thu wiped out but did something stupid on Thursday when I was not up to it and went to the playgroup that our son goes to while the girl has Brownies. I ended up zonking out at home a couple of times after that, before going to bed for the night.
But then I got it into my stupid head that I needed to get Mama’s computer upgraded and the kids’ computer fixed on Friday when I woke up. Since we had to make room for a desk for the kid computer this also meant the living room had to be rearranged, something we had been putting off for 2 months.
At that point was when it seemed like everything started to go sideways. Nothing went simply and directly at all, but I can’t say it all went terribly wrong either because some of the hiccups were actually good things.
Instead of ripping Mama’s computer apart right away, I decided I better make sure I have all of the software and drivers I’d need to get it going again. Because we changed our bedroom around when I got a newer corner-unit desk last November, that meant sorting through the chaotic mess of piled up optical discs and such that had just been stuffed in my computer wall unit/digital darkroom area. So, I began at around 1 and pulled out stuff and began sorting into piles: Games, Windows/Linux installers, Drivers/Support software for hardware, Backups, Movies, TV Shows and so on… what a disaster.
By 9pm, I had most of what I needed and was just waiting for the little ones to get out of my hair while I backed up and stored away all of Mama’s files and settings for her computer when Mama saw a Freecycle message about someone giving away some computers. Now this was one of those rare Freecycle things: it was someone close by, and what they had was actually the exact sort of thing we needed. Before I explain, I need to fill you in in case you didn’t already know this: we used to have a good network of interoperating systems in our old apartment… you can learn about all of that by clicking here.
Since moving, we have had failure after failure and have not been able to replace the failed machines for both financial and health reasons. Things got very antsy when I discovered almost all of our systems had some kind of hardware issue that could not be solved, the laptop’s power supply cut out, and we found ourselves pretty much broke in the middle of the time of year when we are the most broke with only 2 operating computers.
The Freecycle offerings were a P3 era machine, a P2 era machine, and a bunch of miscellaneous other parts. Mama asked for just the P3 because it would be the same vintage as the server PC that was dead, exactly what we need right now. It didn’t have a hard drive or memory, but the hard drive from the server PC was the one thing I knew was still working fine and I still had some old memory around. Perfect! We had been trying to figure out how to take $100 from our very tight budget at the end of this week to buy an almost identically equipped machine, and I was agonizing about how I would be able to make it work. Problem solved – the person Freecycling it wrote back and said she could have it. By now it was 10:30pm on Friday night, but she decided to go right away to pick it up to make sure we would have it, since the Freecycle person was agreeable. She came home with not only the P3, but the P2, a bunch of various parts and smaller hard drives, and a 17 inch monitor.
So, now suddenly things look a little better, because we have a system that we can handled all the stuff that was running on Mama’s PC, and I don’t have to reinstall twice. So, I store away her backed up system, pull apart her computer (oooh the DUST!), put the new motherboard/processor/video card in and reassemble everything. Time to reinstall Windows! Well, that’s where things get stupid for the first time. I started the installation and walked away knowing it would not need anything from me for awhile. When I came back, all appeared good except – wait a second, it seems to be trying to install AGAIN. I watched it this time and the computer was locking up, rebooting and starting the same thing over and over again. After almost an hour of farting around I finally tracked the problem to the video card – my GOOD, high-powered Nvidia video card, that had been twitchy in the past but never had trouble with running Windows. Yanked it, put in the card she had on her old motherboard, and everything is perfect: except now we are down a video card for the kids PC.
Next up was to get started on the kids PC and to configure the P3 to take over the serving duties. The old kids PC had a video card so I figured I would just use that. Ha! Of COURSE it is the OLD format of AGP Pro which will not go into the slot on the newer AGP 8x board that came out of Mama’s PC. I’m screwed again. But, wait – Aha! The P3 we just got from Freecycle has a newer card (virtually identical to the one that was in Mama’s machine before), and the board has an AGP Pro slot! I can swap – and I did. So, now I have posting a kids computer AND a server computer! I installed Windoze on both and lo and behold – I made 3 functional systems in one day (it didn’t quite go as completely smoothly as I summarized, as I had to do some memory testing and swapping to get things going finally but it didn’t take too long).
Saturday I was pretty wiped out but we got things arranged so there were places for all the computers. By Saturday night we had the kids’ desk set up, Mama’s computer running, the kids computer installing updates, and the server PC doing all the work that Mama’s had been doing before. I plugged away as best I could, and on Sunday made sure everything was working and started installing missing applications software to the systems – something which is still going on now. Mama is 85% back up (she is missing certain apps she needs), the kids computer is going along fine, and the server is – well, doing what it is supposed to do.
Sunday night someone posts another Freecycle offer for something I have been desperate for: they have a recliner and a couch. They agree to us taking just the recliner and we make arrangements to get it in the morning, so now I should have a comfortable place to sit in the living room. I was too tired to get much else done but realised I had made an error in judgement: I had put a large HD in Mama’s PC that would NEVER get filled and put a smaller one on the server, which is already nearly full. I decided to swap the drives on Monday.
Monday arrives and Mama heads out to pick up the recliner, which is sitting out in the snowstorm that is going on. She brings it home and it is very damp. I do the Mull River Shuffle with the hard drive partitions, resizing and transferring Mama’s to the server after copying the server data to Mama’s. And in the middle of this?
- A 20 GB hard drive I was using as an intermediary self-destructed so I had to start the process all over
- The kids PC keyboard just up and quits – I suspect a surge of some kind as Mama had forgotten to put things on the surge protector
- I discover there is a missing bolt in the back of the new recliner causing it to cant precipitously to the left while reclining
- We ran out of milk
- The new budgie got out of his cage and hid under my desk, refusing to come out
Well, it’s now Tuesday again. The budgie? He’s slowly getting tamer, it seems, but I wish he’d calm down faster. I am going to remember to close his door until he comes when he is called like Sunbeam used to. All computers are up and running and progress is being made to making everyone happy with the software they have, and the files we have 3 and 4 copies of due to the computer failures are being pared down and centralized on the server. Last night I unstapled the back of the recliner and managed to find a bolt to temporarily hold the back straight until I can get one that is an exact fit, and today the recliner is dry(ish). The kids have a keyboard that works for now until we can get them something better and permanent when we have a little extra money (the SillyGirl wants to put SpongeBob stickers on the keyboard and I refuse to let her put them on my backup USB “emergency” keyboard).
But we’re still out of milk.
New Family Member
by PolarBear on January 8th, 2008
Since we lost Sunbeam on December 24th, things have been a little sad around here. Almost daily the girl has reminded us one way or another about our missing friend.
A few days after he died, we began looking into getting a new boy budgie. We were trying to get one from our local pet store, who brings them in quite young from a breeder, but she was not able to get in touch with him. Missing Sunbeam was making the girl AND her Dad pretty sad, especially when the boy calls every bird he sees “Sunbeam”.
We had to make an unexpected trip to Kingston today, so we decided to take a look around the pet stores. We’d looked before and they hadn’t had any young birds that looked healthy enough to me, and the healthy birds were too old to start taming with much hope of anything other than a “might sit close to you” bird. But today, I think we got lucky.
At the same pet store where we got Raindrop, our female budgie (who is notoriously cranky and not very tame), they had a mixture of birds that looked anywhere from 8-9 weeks to 6 months old. One of them was an alert, curious little Yellowface blue that appears to be male to me (only time will confirm this but I hope he is). Now, I wanted a white bird that was very different from Sunbeam but Mama really liked this one and thought he was “friendly”, and since she had been the person who had called my attention to Sunbeam a few years ago, I went along with it. He’s not especially fancy and he isn’t going to produce interesting hybrids if he and Raindrop breed, but although he is one of those “Bin-O-Budgies” parent-raised never-tamed birds who chomped down on the clerk when she took him out of the cage, it looks like he might work out OK. We got him around 1pm, and by the time we were home at 6:30pm, he was taking seeds from my fingers – not from the palm of my hand, but right from between my fingers. Assuming it is not because he is ill (which is a slight possibility in my budgie experience), he is a very personable bird.
I only hope that we can have him as tame and friendly a companion as Sunbeam. An added bonus would be if I could finally teach a budgie to say more than one word. After watching some Youtube videos of some very well-trained and talented budgies, I have some hope!
So here’s a pic of the new boy – his name is Horizon. Yeah, I know, I am never going to be able to get him to say his own name…
Fun Stuff
by PolarBear on June 10th, 2007
We’ve been doing a lot of work making a garden, including one for the kids. Using the “Square Foot Garden” technique there is a 3×3 foot section of garden especially for them, growing cherry tomatoes, little cucumbers and all sorts of stuff.
It has been a lot of work but is educational for everyone… this is an all new technique, but it has been very exhausting since I can only put in an hour or two a day so it has taken what seems like forever.
Now, because we’ve been working on the garden something else got neglected – the front porch. It didn’t get any attention so some stuff just sat there, including a box with some pieces of rag and the silly girl’s purse.
Tonight, MamaRil finally started tidying it up since the garden is almost “done” (it will never be “done”, but almost all set up). When she picked up the box with the purse she heard noises inside… and buzzing. She got a little nervous, worried it was wasps and dumped it out on the front lawn.
It wasn’t wasps – it was a nest of bumble bees! Just a tiny little nest with a little queen and a whole bunch of the tiniest bumble bees you could ever see. Well, all I knew about bumble bees is that they don’t make honey and they pollinate EVERYTHING. So I checked things out online (the internet is great!) and we all learned a lot.
Tomorrow, we are building a new home for our bumble bees (hopefully they will stay around). We’ll put it in the back yard near the garden and hopefully they’ll help pollinate all our plants. Cross your fingers that the bees stay!