It was raining and cold today. Isn’t it supposed to be spring?

There was a flipped-over FedEx truck on exit to I90 from southbound I5. I guess it flipped over around 4am, but it did not get cleared until maybe 10 or 11am, and it was blocking all the exit lanes. It basically caused gridlock in the entire greater Seattle area. I think I5 south was backed up over seven miles from downtown. That accidents caused other accidents, and I believe there were at least four other accidents in close proximity to the flipped truck.

Not only that, there were a raft of other accidents: stalled cars in the middle of lanes, cars on fire, cars sliding off the road. It was nuts out there.

I know all of this because I follow WSDOT’s twitter feed. The morning guy or girl is hilarious.

Amanda had an evening event; her final Family Medicine Interest Group meeting. I think they had a dinner and all of that. She took the Kai with her, while I continued watching Baby Jae.

Fortunately, the rain stopped (although it was still cold), so I walked down to the Columbia City Farmer’s Market. I always feel bad for the vendors when the weather sucks outside. There were still a goodly amount of people there though; good thing the rain stopped. I ran into a lot of people: our neighbor NS on the way home from the train station; AC and MC and kiddies; our former townhouse neighbors IJ and JB and their kiddie (who now goes to Seed of Life like LK did).

I thought about getting dinner at the Market, but the weather was unfavorable, so I walked over to the bakery and got a couple of tofu and mushroom bành mí. They were delicious as usual. As usual, I fed Baby Jae some of my dinner, and although I thought I avoided anything near the jalapeño peppers, some slipped through and the baby was not pleased and confused with why her mouth hurt. She kept drooling and sucking on her hand. I felt bad, but solved the problem by giving her some string cheese.

I still haven’t found my keys. I was thinking they might have gotten tossed out in the recycling bin. I hope not, as I do not want to look through it. The recycling is supposed to get picked up tomorrow, but I did not put it out in case I need to check through it all.

I have not seen the mason bees in quite a while. I believe I hatched seven females from the tubes my neighbor had given me. Basically, the tubes in the high rise were covered in groups of seven, and now there are twenty-one covered cells. The blocks in the high rise are in various colors, and the bees clearly favor the darker colors, with black the most popular. There are some aqua-ish colored cells, and none were used. I think I am supposed to leave them be (heh) until late fall when I can remove the cocoons. Or technically, I can just leave them as they are, but then I would not have the opportunity to clean out all the cell blocks.

Oh, and we got our 1000th egg today. Woot

I spent three hours last night (1:00am – 3:00am) with the Bonasaurus, and she still did not stay asleep when I put her down in the crib. Wonderful. As a result I was pretty tired all day.

I met with an arborist today to show him all the tree-things (removals and pruning) that I wanted done. He definitely agreed that the large tree on the side of the house that whips around precariously in the wind and rain should come down before something really bad happens. He agreed with everything, pretty much, although he thought we should leave the black walnut which is by our back door. I wanted to get rid of it because it seemed like a silly place to put such a tree and the limbs and leaves directly affect the neighbors roof. He though that we could prune it better and see how things worked out rather than axing it. I see his point, since it is a nice tree otherwise, but I think I will just get rid of it and stick another japanese maple there.

Speaking of japanese maples, the arborist saw the one I bought for Haley’s memorial, a “spring delight lace leaf” acer palmatum dissectum, and said “that is awesome”.

He emailed a quote for ~$950 which is in the range thought it would be.

I searched for my car keys for a while, but I did not find them, although I was not searching in a optimal manner. I did find maybe other things like watercolor tubes that had been obviously delibrately put in mysterious places. The Bonasaurus searched with me at times and managed to find all sorts of fosilized food bits.

I did some yard stuff before Amanda got home with LK while the Bonasaurus rampaged in the backyard. I removed all the remaining wall-of-waters from the tomatoes, put up the cages, and staked the cages. Also did some pruning of the tomatoes. And weeding in general. The morning glory is still freaking everywhere and will undoubtedly take years to get rid of.

We had leftovers for dinner. The kiddies are now asleep. Amanda went up to read in bed, but I imagine she feel asleep instataneously (hmm, spellcheck is not croaking on that word).

There was the usual amount of moaning and screaming from the Bonasarus last night. I ended up sleeping in a bit while Amanda got up with the kiddies. Sleeping in in this case means waking up at 8 or so. Amanda made pancakes for breakfast and left a couple for me.

It is Memorial Day today, but the weather sucked. It basically rained rather continuously all day. I already do not remember what happened in the morning, but I do know that the Bonasaurus refused to take her morning nap until way way way late. Amanda took Lonan Kai for lunch with his grandmother (whose vacation is over and was working at Virginia Mason). I believe they went to Subway. She went shopping at Trader Joes where the traffic in and out of the parking garage was crazy, judging from the text message that she had time to send me while trapped in parking purgatory.

After finally getting the baby to sleep, I idly cleaned up and looked into integrating Flickr with Facebook. I also experimented with Flickr’s new interface and capabilities as I had not really used it since 2005. When I also was merely checking it out but I had decided to not used it since their “free” version was not worth it to me… I had decided to host my own picture gallery. Nowadays, I took the gallery down for various reasons and may use Flickr again since they have revamped their free services. I do still use a Digital Asset Management product personally (ResourseSpace), but that is more for my personal use and not to show pictures to other people.

As it turned out, Flickr’s Facebook integration simply does not work for me. Or at least I should not get it to work. This is their “official” thing that apparently updates Facebook with all of your activity on Flickr automagically. Or not, in my case. However, one can still “share” pictures and sets and collections manually, which is fine for my purposes.

Upon waking, Bonasaurus had a lunch of peas and tofu khan. She was also very pleased that we had gotten string cheese from Costco the previous day and gobbled a piece down.

Amanda had invited JH/DH over for dinner, so she returned with suitable supplies (in addition to or usual grocery items). She was going to make fresh spinach linguini with fresh herbs and wilted spinach salad. Spinach and herbs from our garden! I was assigned a fish dish, and I made roasted alaskan cod and steelhead trout with roasted peppers, pine nuts, orange zest, and craisins. OK it was an experiment. Basically, I sort of marinated the fish in olive oil and orange zest. I sliced the peppers and roasted them in a roasting/serving dish. While the peppers were roasting I also toasted the pine nuts. Once the peppers were almost done, I added the fish (cut into finger size pieces) to the pan along with the pine nuts and craisins (while were soaking in the orange juice from the zested orange).

I guess it turned out alright. JH/DH seemed pleased with the fish and the entire dinner.

I had not decided on a fish recipe, so I had to go to the fruit stand to get additional ingredients before dinner… mainly the peppers. It was at this point I discovered I had no idea where my keys were. I suspect the Bonasaurus had done something with them. I am 99% sure they are still in the house as I must have taken them inside after coming home from City Peoples the previous afternoon. I still have not found them.

Our guests had a crazy public transit travelling day as they went to the Folklife Festival to see some friends perform. Apparently even though it was raining raither heavily for most of the day, the Seattle Center was completely packed.

Anyways, it was a fun dinner. Bon and Kai got to stay up much later than normal, but they are now asleep. Amanda is on the couch, and I am trying to finish writing my 750 words for the day. After which I supposed I will keep looking for my keys. Maybe the Bon threw them under something.

(extracted from a 750 Words entry)

A couple of weeks ago, I had taken in Haley for her annual checkup, and a few week beforehand I had noticed that she had not been eating as much as she had normally. She usually would devour half or all of a three ounce can of fFancy Feast, but a started to only licking up the liquid and a cursory amount of solid food.

Armando had been a few months late for his annual appointment, and he was due for shots, so I had taken him in at the same time. As expected, he was quite a healthy cat, although the vet noted that his teeth were much worse than Haley’s, even though he was a decade younger.

Haley unfortunately had lost almost a pound-and-a-half since her last checkup a year-and-a-half ago. She did not exhibit any physically symptons, but that level of weight loss was definitely concerning. He reccomended a full blood panel to eliminate metabolic causes such as diabetes or thyroid problems.

The blood panel was normal, although it had shown signs of early kidney disease. However, the vet did not think mild kidney disease would cause such weight loss. He reccomended xrays to search for other causes.

I did not have a car available for the second visit, but AC has Thursdays off now, so she came by in the morning after dropping her kids off at day care. We spent quite a bit of time talking before we drove to the vet and dropped Piglet off for her xrays.

AC offered to drive me to pick her up when she was done in the afternoon, but I wanted to try out car2go’s shared car service and I did not want to bother her later. I picked up a shared car near the Columbia City light rail station to retrieve Ate Piglet.

The xray results were not encouraging. She had a lot of issues, which is not surprising for a cat of her age (approximately fifteen years). She had evidence of arthritis in the spine and other areas. She had “thickening” of the intestines which could indicate intestinal problems like a tumor or inflammatory bowerl disease. There was also an area in the lungs which seemed concerning.

The vet the said that I could start emprical treatment for possible inflammatory bowel disease and consider getting an ulatrasound to check out the intestines and chest area. They did not have a radiologist in house, but they did have someone who comes in for them. I could also find someone else to do the ultrasound myself.

I did not know the best time to schedule the ultrasound, so I decided to go ahead an treat the possible bowel symptoms while I worked on getting the ultrasound done. Treating the bowel issues basically consisted of a special cat food plus pills (I think an antibiotic in this case). Changes in medicinal regimen could them be altered as conditions warrented.

All of these vet visits and getting back of results and whatnot did take time, and poor piglet was clearly not herself.

Amanda went ahead and contacted our friends JI and SP who are both vets. Steve also happens to be a veterinary radiologist. Normally, I would not talk to my friends about “work” related issues, except in the abstract, but this was a serious situation which Amanda and I had little experience.

As fortune woud have it, SP apparently had just bought a portable ultrasound machine. He has been working for a company that just reads films and whatnot, so he has been working from home analyzing xrays and ultrasounds and whatever. He apparently bought the ultrasound machine so that he could do mercenary radiologist work (similar to whomever my vet has coming in to do their ultrasounds). He still have some sort of noncompete agreement with his previous employer, so he cannot do competing radiologist work in the Seattle area, so I think he has been going up to Everett every now and then. I guess his noncompete runs out sometime this year.

As an aside: JI is apparently annoyed that the ultrasound machine cost more than their new car, but SP insisted that it will “pay for itself”. Which I personally believe.

SP said just bring Haley to their house sometime, and he would do the ultrasound, so Amanda took her in before going to work one day.

To be continued…