and today i have mostly been...

[steve_earwig]

Cheers for that gem, I didn't realise so I just looked it up on Wiki

I remember liking Silver Machine when it was playing on the radio all the time. I would've been 7. My cousin was therefore very cool for actually having the single. It took me bloody years to realise whose voice I was hearing

[steve_earwig]

I completely forgot why I came in here We just paid the vet's bill, we hadn't paid a bean since before Vicky died back in June, there's x-rays for George, all Teatime's eye problems, Srećko's infected paw, various pills, potions and procedures. 965Kn, that's about 95 quid.

Teatime had his stitches out this morning so he's running in and out the catflap celebrating his liberation. I had to starve him from 5pm yesterday in case he needed a general anaesthetic but he was good as gold and didn't object at all.

[highlander]

How's he coping with the loss of his depth perception? I'm figuring if he's not walking into stuff or failing to catch things thrown in his direction, then his eye was as in as bad shape as it looked and he'd already learned to adapt to life without it working properly.

At least it's out now and he's still deciding your place is his home.

[OllieNZ]

Embarked on a fairly ambitious arduino (micro controller) based project today...... This coding stuff has left me feeling pretty dumb but I have achieved the ability to control a fans speed depending on temperature and cause a warning if the temperature goes too high.

Happy New year peeps time for a beer.

[Doggy]

Sounds interesting.
I'd love to try something like that, but I just know I would persevere until I get over whatever I think the main technical challenge is, then never finish it.
I embarked instead on a huge pot of beef goulash for new years day lunch / bro's birthday bash. Did go down well.

[steve_earwig]

How's he coping with the loss of his depth perception? I'm figuring if he's not walking into stuff or failing to catch things thrown in his direction, then his eye was as in as bad shape as it looked and he'd already learned to adapt to life without it working properly.

At least it's out now and he's still deciding your place is his home.

Sorry G, I missed this (I'm sure this board etc.). He's been blind in that eye for about a year, so he's pretty much used to not being able to use it. He comes, he goes, worryingly I keep seeing him out by the road but if I call him he comes a-running ("oooh, more food!"). Speaking of which, I'm sure if he puts on any more weight he'll get stuck half way through the catflap and we'll come home one day to see his legs a-wiggling.

I keep seeing this Arduino things, very versatile no doubt, but the only application I can think of is a better controller for the 406 recirc flap. In fact I've been scouring servo motors on banggood to see if there's anything that could be used in place of the fragile motor but they all seem to be for rc stuff and only go up to 6 volts.

[OllieNZ]

Sounds interesting.
I'd love to try something like that, but I just know I would persevere until I get over whatever I think the main technical challenge is, then never finish it.
I embarked instead on a huge pot of beef goulash for new years day lunch / bro's birthday bash. Did go down well.

Nowt wrong with a big bowl of goulash
I'm building an aquarium controller for my first foray into reef keeping so not finishing it is not really an option but how much I utilise it for......

I keep seeing this Arduino things, very versatile no doubt, but the only application I can think of is a better controller for the 406 recirc flap. In fact I've been scouring servo motors on banggood to see if there's anything that could be used in place of the fragile motor but they all seem to be for rc stuff and only go up to 6 volts.

The arduino is a very clever bit of kit and really it's only limit is your imagination and figuring out how to make the blasted thing do what you want.
It is fairly easy to step 12v down to what you need there's plenty of off the shelf converters and they are fairly cheap.

[OllieNZ]

Just got off skype with my dad, he got adopted by a pygmy goat while out walking his dogs today. It followed him home and has been following him round all day and it cries if it can't find him. It's just too cute and I can't stop laughing.....

[Welly]

We had one of our Cats castrated on 30 Dec, he put up a serious fight to get to the Vets and came back to us in a right two-and-eight when I saw him stumbling around the kitchen and falling over I felt a right git for putting him through it, we stayed near him the first night and he pissed the bed (which he now won't go near) but by the following day he was back to normal....until he had a bust up with a Ginger Tom outside, disappeared for 2 days and came back with a wounded leg which has now settled down.

Castration and 4 x injections = £42.50

Whilst paying the bill there was an upside down sheet of payment entries on the counter and being good at quickly totting up figures I totaled their income for the first 4 HOURS of the day..........£1,000.00

[steve_earwig]

That doesn't seem that expensive (for the UK), although the operation for a tom is quite a straight forward one. They do tend to leak a bit while they're still recovering from the anaesthetic but maybe that was a mistake and now he feels guilty. It's the responsible thing to do, if he impregnated someone else's queen it wouldn't be your fault but it does tend to cut down on the aggression. It'll take a while for the hormones to dissipate and then he should be less inclined to have ding dongs with the ginger tom.

I should really have Teatime done but at his age it probably wouldn't make much difference to his behaviour, so it's really just the impregnation thing but there are plenty of undoctored toms here abouts (a litter of kittens can have several fathers). He'll also eventually shag Camilla if we've not had her done by then, at least we'll then know we've left her as long as possible.

My dad tells me about the vets he goes to, shiny new cars and 3 or 4 holidays a year. That's the greedy buggers that run the place, employed vets don't earn that much sadly.

[Doggy]

The problem is the widespread use of pet insurance in the UK allowing them to virtually print money. Our poor old Charlie got referred to a cardiac specialist despite everyone knowing he was terminally ill with mitral valve disease. Nett result? 3 weeks of attempting to drain the fluid from his lungs and destroying his kidneys in the process. This 'only' cost just over £2k, which we only had to find something like 15% of. If the poor sod had lasted a few weeks longer till his 8th birthday we would have been able to pay nearly all of it.

I only went to one of these consultations 50-odd miles away, where almost in the same breath the guy confirmed he was dying, but would still be a suitable candidate for open heart surgery if we could get his lung function improved enough for the anaesthetic. Mercifully, he took a downturn over the weekend, (when mega-wallet was unavailable), so we had to let him go.....

Contrast this with the treatment he received in France - 3 visits to the vet's for pet-passport return to UK inoculations and one time he had to knocked out to get a grass seed out of his ear canal - the most we were ever charged was 30 Euros, usually for two dogs. Not much pet insurance in rural France!

[Welly]

Friends* of ours had their little pocket pooch condemned because they didn't have enough insurance to cover the cost* to extract the sock it ate from its intestines so it died instead

[steve_earwig]

And if the government succeeds in killing off the NHS these problems will also apply to our relatives (apart from the eating socks bit)

[OllieNZ]

And if the government succeeds in killing off the NHS these problems will also apply to our relatives (apart from the eating socks bit)

That's exactly what it's like in the USA. People may slag off the nhs but imagine having to pay a £1500 excess and still be treated exactly the same way

[steve_earwig]

I've recently discovered "videos for cats and dogs to watch" on Youtube. It works ok on the older cats (e.g. Billie circling the monitor trying to get at 'em) but I think the kitten's attention span is too short ("Birdy hop; birdy gone; umm, is there any food in the kitchen?") but I also found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAj4uvuITe0 which is so full of frantic flitting they're glued to it:


It snowed last Saturday night/Sunday morning (with more flurries since) so I wanted to see the kitten's reactions as it's their first snow.


"Why for you do this?"


"'milla's tooties cold now!"


!That's better!" (seems to be her favourite place these days, I have the clawmarks to prove it...)


Charlie investigates here.


Charlie investigates there.


Charlie takes a dump under next door's trailer.


Charlie plays with snowballs.


Charlie buggers off indoors.


Mostlly these days they seem to want to beat the hell out of each other.






The problem is Charlie is now quite a bit bigger than Camilla so she generally comes off worse. I try to stop it getting too violent by defending her but most of the time it's her that starts it!


Back to the ENT docs next week. They've told me to lay off all things pickled or vaguely acidic, onions and other alliums, anything like that. Oh great, should I stop breathing too? Thing is, I have all this Sarson's pickling vinagar which I brought back with me last year, also about 10 litres of malt vinegar. So anyway, I walked into Lidl here just before Christmas and they were selling big bags of small onions cheap as nobody wanted them. Well, nobody except...





Lastly, recently I seem to have given up on the BBC and watching old horror films, instead for the last couple of months I've been watching people doing stuff on Youtube. Colin Furze of course, but people making stuff on lathes etc. This guy does some interesting stuff https://www.youtube.com/user/ksruckerowwm mostly with lathes, good tool reviews with humour and swearing - https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil. I have loads more lined up (folks like photonicinduction, myfordboy and abom79 spring to mind but there 100's more) but it strikes me that I can go on watching this sort of stuff, er, forever, and stuff the BBC.