And it's not me. It's Smudge. I was sitting on the couch and looked over at him and he's neck fluff was all wet and he had made three wet spots on the cushions from his drool.
Now, I've had cats drool before. When Freesia goes for long car trips she drools the whole time and comes out of the carrier soaking wet. But Smudge hasn't gone anywhere. We haven't had new/different/unsual cleaning supplies out. I haven't seen him eat anything (though of course that certainly doesn't mean he didn't).
So, I called the 24-hour vet. The gentleman was very friendly and helpful. Basically, we should do watchful waiting. If he's still drooling a lot; if he's lethargic, not acting like he normally does, then we bring him in.
He was walking around me and playing with a piece of paper on the floor while I was talking to the vet. So, I'm hoping that it's a passing phase. The house has been stricken with hairballs lately (one was so kindly placed on the windowsill in the living room). Maybe it's just related to that.
In any case, I'll be watching him. Poor little guy.
I finally posted the photos I took from E's birthday trip to the New York Botenical Gardens. We went on his birthday, back in July.
I've been shooting RAW for awhile now. I definitely like what controls it offers me in PhotoShop. But it means that I have to process the images in PhotoShop. Which greatly increases the chance that the RAW files will just sit on my hard drive instead of make their way to Flickr.
I've also noticed that I've reached the ends of my PhotoShop skills. I feel confident in adjusting the exposure and highlights and lowlights in the RAW plug-in. But for some of the photos, they had a very slight pink on the tips of petals or subtle shading to the clouds. When I brighted up the exposure I lost those details. I know that it should be possible to bring those back - but how? How do I color balance again? How can I make one part of the photo lighter while the other darker? I don't have those chops (yet).
And, I know that I could learn. I could read one of E's books. I could take another class at UC Extension. But, the problem is, I have so many things that I want to do:
The list just goes on and on. *sigh* I get overwhelmed by the options of my hobbies. There's so much I want to do. And not enough time to do it.
Egads I hate Windows. And I don't just mean that in the typical Mac-zealot type way.
I finally came clean and got (well, AP got me) a copy of Visio, which I run via Virtual PC. It's not the best set up in the world (especially after seeing Todd run Windows on one monitor and OSX on another yesterday), but it does let me work with client files, and files from my PeopleSoft days.
So, this morning, without really thinking, I popped the new CD into the drive, booted up Vitural PC and started the install process. Once it was going, I realized that I was installing Visio 2003, the same version that I already had installed. I tried I don't know how many times to cancel the installation (it never told me 'hey bone head, you already have this installed') thinking that it would be easier to stop it and just enter my product ID into the current version.
Well, by the time I got the installer to stop, it had deleted the current version from my computer. So now I had no choice but to install again from the CD. The problem was, it no longer automatically detected the CD and I futzed with it to try to get it to install again. Only to have it tell me that it was already installing (really? where? I see no running program) and I had to quit. I ended up shutting down Windows and restarting it. It now seems to be installing correctly now, though I'm a bit wary of saying that for fear of jinxing it.
Meanwhile, while all this Visio drama is going on, I open iTunes. It tells me that there is a new version available. With one click I go to the Apple site, start the download. With a double-click and a few selections later the new iTunes is installed and up and running. So effortless!
*sigh* Thank goodness I work in a Mac shop. I don't think that I could go back to Windows on a regular basis if I had to. It just seems so... painful and pointless.
This afternoon E and I watched Red Planet. At some point I decided that it would be a good idea to add this to my Netflix queue. I really don't see why I did.
E and I did have fun poking fun at the movie the whole way through. At one point I turned to him and said "this has all the trite sci-fi plot situations: mechanical failure, mutiny, death of (at least one) teammate, and we haven't seen aliens yet." A few mintues later, he says "we forgot BATSHIT CRAZY!" And the aliens did appear in the last 1/3 of the movie.
The movie was so bad, on so many levels. But it did make us giggle, as we made snarky comments about it. So I guess it wasn't all bad.