Catwoman's Weblog What part of MEOW don't you understand :)

We lost our beloved "dog"

In memory of Ashes
11-Apr-1993 to 17-Dec-2008

Back in 1993, I was getting my haircut and my hairdresser told me that her sister's kitty had just had a litter of kittens. Like we needed another kitty but I persuaded Patrick to let me check them out and we ended up bringing home the only male kitty of the Tan Household. His fur was the color of charcoal when it burns down to just ashes so that's what we ended up calling him, the only kitty without a name that came from a movie.

This was before we brought our dog Lycos into our home and Patrick really wanted a dog so he took it upon himself to train Ashes to think he was some kind of dog in a kitty body. Unlike most kitties, he would come when you called him and would stand up on his hind legs and beg for treats.

As he was getting up in age, we watched him carefully, just like we did with Scarlett and Peyton who went before him. On the 17th of December, we could see he was at the point where we knew it was time to give him that gift and to help ease him over the Rainbow Bridge. We were ready to take him to the vet but before we got him there, while he was in Patrick's arms being brushed, he just stretched out and peacefully passed on. At least his last days and last memories were being with his family and being at his home. Old age just caught up to him but just like our other furkids, he lived a long and spoiled life and he was a joy for us to own.

It makes sense to have lost our pets in groups of two, especially as we did with Peyton and Ashes, since we got all of the kitties around the same time and they were all over the age of 15 years old but it doesn't get any easier, does it?

( Jan 14 2009, 03:22:06 PM PST ) Permalink

Doing good on a dreaded birthday...

This year, back on the 26th of November, I turned the big 4-0. I'd been dreading this birthday for a very long time. I mean, c'mon, I can't be 40. Seems like only yesterday I turned 21...sigh!

Oh well, since I could do nothing to stop the march of time, I decided to make lemons into lemonade so to speak. Ever since my trip back from Namibia where I worked with the Cheetah Conservation Fund, I've tried to get folks to think of giving to charities instead of gifting. I asked for charitable donations for last year's birthday and I was able to get my immediate family to donate to the Lupus Foundation last year for Christmas instead of buying gifts for everyone.

So I did the same for this year's birthday. I made it very clear on the evite to my party "NO GIFTS" and instead, if you feel like you need to do something, I would prefer donations be made to the Cheetah Consrvation Fund, the American Cancer Society and Rocketship Education.

Because of the economy, I wasn't expecting a huge amount of donations but my friends all came through and pleasantly surprised me in that I was able to raise about $200 for each of the charities. WOW!! As I finished counting up the donations, I was feeling really good....figure if you have to get older and hit those milestone birthdays, you might as well do it for good. Wouldn't you agree?

( Dec 11 2008, 12:33:42 PM PST ) Permalink

A bittersweet victory....

As a lifelong Democrat, I'm very glad that Obama won the US Presidency but I'm extremely upset and sad to be resident of California today in that we have become the one of the first states (this horrid thing also passed in Arizona and Florida) in the nation to write legalized discrimination into our constitution.

Prop 8, the ban on same-sex marriages, won...

Where do I send my donations to overturn this horrid constitutional amendment?

( Nov 05 2008, 10:40:27 AM PST ) Permalink

When did I lose my right to free speech?

Last Friday, as a resident of California, I had the honor and privilege to stand up with two of our closest friends, Josh & Dean, and witness their marriage.

If you haven't heard, IMHO, there is a Proposition on the California ballot which is basically what I consider to be a form of "legalized discrimination" in that it is attempting to modify the California state constitution so that gay and lesbian couples cannot legally marry. That's just wrong in the opinion of the Tan Household!

We unfortunately live in a part of California where there seems to be alot of support for Prop 8, lots of "Yes on Prop 8" yard signs. While I've been tempted to remove the signs every time I see one, I haven't because just like I do, those folks have a right to their opinions even if it differs from mine.

But I guess someone out there doesn't believe that I should have that same right to free speech in that I woke up this morning and found that my "No on Prop 8" yard sign had been stolen.

I haven't found a replacement sign yet but hope to have a couple of more of them soon and in time for the Nov 4th election. They messed with the wrong person!!

VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 8!!!!!!!!!! ( Oct 22 2008, 01:36:26 PM PDT ) Permalink

We lost another precious kitty....

In memory of Peyton
15-May-1992 to 29-Jul-08

Way back in 1992, we decided to make a trip down to the Gilroy Outlets, our very first time since moving to the Bay Area, for some shopping. Needless to say, that day, we never got to do any shoppping as we came across a family with a box of 8 week old kittens outside of one of the stores. They were looking for good homes for them and of course, I fell in love with them and persuaded Patrick to let us take one home with us. Good thing because the family planned to take the kittens to the local animal shelter if they didn't find homes for them. I settled on the runt of the litter, a tiny little black female kitten with bright golden eyes. She cuddled with me all the way home. We ended up naming her after the evil nanny character in the movie "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle"...anyone notice a movie theme there in naming our pets :)

Last Tuesday was a day that I was so very glad to be a WFH employee, otherwise I probably would have come home to a very terrible situation with our little one. I know in my heart that it would have been so much more devastating to come home to find her gone than to be able to make sure that she didn't suffer any needless pain and discomfort at the end.

Peyton had made it to her 16th birthday and we had prepared ourselves for the fact that we probably wouldn't have her through the end of the year. So we just kept monitoring her, making sure she was eating and drinking and at the first sign of any trouble, we had already decided that we would give her that final gift and let her go to join Lycos and Scarlett, her fur siblings.

In the morning, I noticed that she was lying on the living room floor very still like. When I picked her up, she went limp in my arms. When I put her back down on the floor, she tried to walk but only made it a few steps before she laid her little body down again. It was time, she was telling me so...

I called Patrick and told him it was time, she wasn't doing well at all. I called our vet and they immediately double booked us for an afternoon appointment. By the time the appointment rolled around, her breathing was very labored and she was extremely lethargic. Our vet allowed us to stay with her at the end and that was tough for us and for our vet because her blood pressure had dropped so low that her veins wouldn't stay open so it wasn't an easy euthanasia but DrB did what he could to keep her comfortable. We stayed with her for a little while after it was over and I whispered to her, go find Lycos and Scarlett, I am sure that they were waiting to greet her with open paws.

Just like with Lycos and Scarlett, we chose a private cremation. I've also had a memorial river rock made for her that we will put in our backyard with the ones we had made for Lycos and Scarlett. Her ashes came home today and I've put them in our home office behind her picture, next to her sister Scarlett.

Now with our two pups, the Tan home is down to only two kitties, Ashes and Arwen.

I miss our dear precious little Peyton but I know in my heart that she is in a better place and will be watching over our home as one of our guardian furangels. Some may not understand those kind of beliefs and may even think that I'm a bit crazy and that's okay. I take comfort from those beliefs...

( Aug 06 2008, 03:59:29 PM PDT ) Permalink

Did we train them to be SGR Fanatics? Sure hope so...

Two weeks ago, my Solaris RPE CritSit colleague, PeterB and I, spent a week in San Diego teaching another 18 Sun employees about Sun Global Resolution aka SGR.

During two sessions of 2 days each, we focused on Situation Appraisal and Problem Analysis, the two processes that would be most useful to them as Sun employees. We can only hope that they saw the value of SGR at the end of their two days of training and that they use it as one of their tools for working through the complex issues they may come across here at Sun.

I also hope that they end up being SGR Fanatics because we've lost so many good SGR evangelists at Sun to the point of only having one Program Manager worldwide in the SGR Program office. IMHO, the more folks at Sun who are trained in SGR and who use it actively, the better our chances of not having such valuable troubleshooting processess "wither and die on the vine".

So without further adieu, thanks to the following folks who gave PeterB and I two days of their time to learn about SGR (last names have been excluded to protect the innocent!):

Vijay
Mary
Daniel
Justin
Ben
Bill
Asim
Ken
Grant
Chris
Jake
Kelly
Mike
Karl
Ron
MF
David
Cornelia

( Jun 16 2008, 11:02:26 AM PDT ) Permalink

My thoughts on the economy and charitable giving...

As you may or may not know, in memory of my mother who lost her battle to lung cancer, in honor of my aunt who is now a cancer survivor and for my pups, one who lost his battle and one who is now a survivor, I participate in the local Livermore Relay for Life for the American Cancer Society.

My fundraising goal this year was $3K without Sun's matching funds. I can only guess that the downturn in the economy has folks tightening up their belts because as of now, I've just hit the $1K mark. By this time last year, I was already beyond the $2K mark.

While I understand having to tighten your belt, heck, I'm doing it at my house too, IMHO, charitable giving shouldn't be the first to be cut from your budgets. Cut out that grande latte you have on the way to work, ca-ching, money saved. Get your mani-pedis once a month instead of twice a month, ca-ching, more money saved. Downgrade your cable choices, ca-ching, you get my point. There are lots of things that folks can do to save their pennies without, and again, this is only my opinion, having to resort to pulling their support from the many charitable causes out there that need us.

That said, maybe you can only afford to make a small donation to benefit the American Cancer Society at this time, but I am a firm believer that no donation is too small. Won't you consider making a secure donation at my RFL website?.

Sun will match a donation as small as $5.00. I am ready to take care of all the paperwork in order to get your donation matched by Sun! Once you've made your donation, just drop me an email with your employee ID, mailstop, email address, dept number, date of hire and the amount of your donation.

Thank you for your support.

( May 16 2008, 11:29:58 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Kudos to Apple for their customer support...

I've been an official WFH employee at Sun since Dec07. I usually set up my "office" at home at my kitchen table with my comfy office chair and my Sun supplied Mac PowerBookG4 which has been trucking along since 2005

Last Friday I spent the day over in Mtn View with my colleague upgrading the OS on the laptop to Leopard. All was going well until....

We finished the install and successfully migrated the backup data from my portable HD (just to ensure we didn't lose any data in the upgrade). But what's this, we see that one of my memory slots that has a DIMM in it is showing a "failed" message. Uh-Oh! We install a new memory dimm as a test to see if we are dealing with a dimm failure or a memory slot failure. We reboot and the laptop temporarily recognizes the dimm and then, poof, it's gone again. Failure again! Dead(??) memory dimm (or at least we think it's dead)!! We put the old one back in, reboot the computer and while the system is slower, we see an error message indicating that we have to restart the computer. Double Uh-Oh! We try to restart and keep hitting that same error message. One time we even saw a grey bar going across the grey apple that shows up upon boot up.

It's sick, and wouldn't you know this, the AppleCare protection plan on in expired on 03-Mar-08. Upon recommendation from my manager (okay, he has some good ideas!), I took it into my nearest Apple store for a look over. Given the symptoms I was seeing, they think my logic board may be the problem. When I asked about how much it would cost to repair so I could give my manager the estimate, they said it wouldn't cost anything and they were willing to stretch out the AppleCare coverage.

YAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!! Thanks Apple!!! They won't cover the memory if it ended up getting fried in this episode but heck, memory is much cheaper than a brand new Mac laptop!

( Apr 03 2008, 01:50:44 PM PDT ) Permalink

Is it my lot in life to have dogs that need some medical intervention?

When we brought Rosalynn home almost two years ago, I decided that I would put her into agility training since I didn't get around to it for our other pup, Lycos.

Back in mid Jan, we were at her agility lesson when she came off the A-Frame obstacle and started limping. I brought her home and decided then that if she was still limping the next day, I'd be taking her to the vet.

That was our first vet appointment....they couldn't pinpoint where the injury was so they sent us home with anti-inflammatories and recommended that I bring her back three days later if she still was limping.

On to the second vet appointment...this time they were able to localize it to her right front elbow, which is never an easy injury to treat in dogs. Sent home this time with crate confinement orders for the next 10 days. Now, if she was a really lazy dog, that probably wouldn't be an issue but we are dealing with a very young border collie pup who is rambunctious and always full of energy. I'm sure that this was driving her nuts!!

At the end of Jan, we went on vacation to Las Vegas (our yearly trip!) and when we came back, she was still limping, even after the crate confinement. I made yet another vet appointment. This time, the vet wanted to have X-Rays done which we did. He found a bone chip in the elbow and what looked to be the beginning of arthritis in a 2 year old dog. He decided that it would be best to send them out to a radiologist for a complete review and then we'd see what we were dealing with. Back home, this time with 3X a day painkillers and more crate confinement.

The radiologist reviewed her X-Rays and determined that my girl had torn the tendon away from her elbow joint which led to the bone chip we saw in them. The two vets then decided we needed to have a surgical consult to see what our options were.

We had the surgical consult today and she's going to have to stay on crate confinement for quite a while. Our best option is elbow surgery to stabilize the elbow joint which should slow down the traumatic arthritis (inflammation) that is already showing in that joint after only one month. If we leave it, she will continue to limp, the arthritis will get only get worse faster to the point where she may go completely lame in that front paw and not ever put any weight on it. And the third option I don't even want to think about....

So now, not even two months after our other dog had surgery for cancer, we will get her in sometime next week for the surgery (it costs a pretty $$). After that, it will be complete crate confinement for 6-8 weeks. She won't even be able to sleep on her bed at night upstairs outside of the crate and I will have to walk up her up the stairs and outside for her potty breaks because all it needs is one wrong movement or jump or something to derail what the surgery was done to correct. Even with the surgery, that elbow won't be 100% perfect and it won't be the same as the left elbow but it will help in terms of the rest of her life with regards to slowing down the degeneration in that elbow and with pain management etc. Needless to say, agility is definitely out of her future now, she's going to have to be retired now.

Please keep my girl in your prayers....

( Feb 22 2008, 03:58:43 PM PST ) Permalink

Glory & Roz's Visit to Santa Paws

This year I was able to bring both Glory and Roz to get their picture taken with Santa Paws benefiting the local animal shelter.

Just like last year, Roz looks like she is trying to figure out if she should be biting Mom or this Santa character. But you gotta love Miss Glory sticking her tongue out at everyone....

Happy Holidays from the Tan Pups to everyone out there in Blog Land and beyond....

( Dec 17 2007, 10:59:02 AM PST ) Permalink

Glory girl is having surgery today...

For folks like me who have pets instead of children, when something comes up with them and you have to take them to the vet, it can be a very stressful occasion. I'd guess it is probably the same with folks who have kids but since I don't have any myself, I'm just guessing. This Saturday, we took Glory (my 10 year old Harrier) to the vet to have a recently discovered mass on her back right leg examined. The vet was definitely worried about it and suggested that we have it removed immediately. So my girl is there today, having that mass removed + a small cyst under her front left paw pit (which we know is benign already) + a small cyst that Dr. B found next to her canine tooth during that Saturday exam.

Please say a little prayer for my girl and ask that she comes through with flying colors and has as little pain as possible during her recovery period.

UPDATE: 12:30 pm PT. Dr. B just called me, Glory is under anasthesia now and is doing fine. He's working on her teeth now and then will start removal of the leg mass and the cyst under her front left paw pit. Her lung X-Rays were clean so that's a very good sign that the mass on her leg hasn't gone beyond that location. Of course we won't know if it's cancerous or not until the pathology report comes back sometime next week.

UPDATE: 5:30 pm PT. Glory is back home very, very groggy. Dr. B is much more optimistic about the mass on her back leg than he was this weekend when he first saw it. The mass was between two muscles on her back leg and was completely encapsulated, meaning that it hadn't fingered into the muscle tissue. We'll know more next week when we get the biopsy reports back. Thank you very much for all of your prayers and good thoughts for our girl....

UPDATE: My girl did have cancer but now she's a survivor! She made it with flying colors through the surgery and now it's like we have a brand new dog. She's lost the extra pounds she was carrying and often acts like she's about 5 years younger than her actual age!! ( Nov 19 2007, 11:33:55 AM PST ) Permalink

More Cheetah Details...

I'll be doing a "Cheetah Brown Bag" tomorrow at lunch (12 noon PT, Broadway CR, MPK17) for the Solaris RPE MPK folks about my photos from my Cheetah Adventure. For those folks who aren't in MPK or who won't be able to attend, I've added a PDF document to the Tan Website with more details about the pictures I just posted from Namibia and the CCF.

Feel free to read it at your own leisure...

Enjoy!

( Oct 25 2007, 12:51:49 PM PDT ) Permalink

Photos from my CHEETAH adventure....

I've finally whittled down over 400+ pictures to a set of 75 for the Tan website....if you are interested, here's the link. Enjoy! And feel free to ask me any questions about them or the CCF, just drop me a comment and I'll answer them as I feel I've become quite a CCF Evangelist since I made it back home.

( Oct 23 2007, 05:08:51 PM PDT ) Permalink

I'm back from my CHEETAH adventure...

I'm back from Namibia, Africa with all of my fingers and toes intact...if you are interested, read on for the highlights of my trip, otherwise, get back to work :)

It was a long two days to get from NYC to Namibia Africa but I stayed overnight in Windhoek at a wonderful hotel called the Hotel Heinitzburg. It's basically a castle which was commissioned back in 1914 overlooking the city of Windhoek. They treated me very nicely there which was important given that I'd be staying in a thatched hut like place when we got to the Cheetah Conservation Fund on Sunday the 9th of Sept with shared bathrooms that we had to walk to as needed. Talk about being scary at night and making you thankful that your bathroom at home is just down the hall!

Our first weekday was basically ORIENTATION day....learned the rules for working so closely with the cheetahs, learned what to watch out for in the field (namely, big nasty poisonous snakes!!) etc.

And from that day, we worked from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays and 8 - 1 on Saturday (we visited Etosha National Wildlife Refuge and the local town on the Sundays we had off). We had to make our own breakfasts but they fed us very well for lunch (1 pm) and dinner (7 pm). Since the CCF runs on generator power, we would lose our lights around 10:45 pm every night and wouldn't get them back until about 7:15 in the morning. I ended up showering every night instead of in the mornings so that I'd go to bed fairly clean. And what I mean about this is that you really could never get fully clean due to the red dust and dirt of Namibia. Oh well, I knew going into it that it wouldn't be like a country club :)

We cleaned cheetah and dog pens (the CCF raises Anatolian Shepherd Guard Dogs, a turkish breed of guard dogs, that they give out for free to the local farmers to guard their herds in the hopes of keeping the farmers from killing cheetahs). We fed the 40+ captive cheetahs that the CCF houses on the ranch. These are all cheetahs that either lost their mothers before they learned to hunt on their own or were abandoned as cubs. We would help with crowd control when they would do the morning Cheetah Runs to exercise some of the cheetahs. They basically set up a system like they use with greyhounds...the cats chase a lure (which is just a torn up t-shirt with no scent or blood on it) around a set squared course. To see those cheetahs run was just breathtaking...and these ones weren't even going at their top speeds! For the cheetahs that were farther out on the ranch property, we'd also feed and exercise them but to exercise them, we'd drive a pickup truck and they would have to chase it before they got their big chunk of "meat" as their reward. There's nothing like having 7 or so cheetahs running in a pack behind you as you throw meat out of the back of a pickup truck to them.

Highlights of the trip:

Meeting Chewbaaka (the 12 year old CCF ambassador cheetah who was handraised by Dr. Laurie Marker, the CCF's Executive Director, from about 3 weeks old) and getting to pet him and have our picture taken with him.

Meeting "Little C" (a three month old cub whose mom and sibling was killed by dogs) and watching him play.

Meeting "Kanini" (who came to the CCF in Feb2006)....her name means "Little One" and in my opinion, she was one of the most beautiful cheetahs at the CCF.

Watching a litter of Anatolian puppies being born (but sadly, they lost the runt of the litter one night later).

Being able to watch as the CCF did a scientific workup on a HUGE (150 lbs +) male adult leopard they caught in one of their traps.

Going out in the field tracking animal prints...we found leopard, cheetah, porcuipine and baboon tracks.

Doing game counts...they use this data to estimate how the big cat population could be doing in the wild.

Visiting the Etosha National Wildlife Preserve and seeing elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and jackals out in the wild at the local watering hole.

Shopping at the CCF Gift Shop for gifts to take home with me....

Low lights of the trip:

Getting sick for 3 1/2 days....Cipro was my friend :)

Finding out that there was a spitting cobra in a tree near my little thatched hut (and let's not forget about the 6 foot Black Mamba, the most deadly snake in Africa, that a CCF employee ran over on the ranch).

Having tree rats in the kitchen and peeping tom geckos and large spiders in the bathrooms.

Having my "Amarula" (a South African liquor made from the Marula tree, a favorite of African elephants) confiscated at the Paris airport!!

Having to sit in the plane at the Paris airport for three hours while they tracked down a part for the engine....

I'm still working on the pictures to get the right set (I took well over 400 pictures while I was there) for the Tan website. When I get them all set, I'll post here with the URL.

( Oct 01 2007, 11:28:31 AM PDT ) Permalink

It's ALIVE.......

If you read my last post, you could probably tell that I was this close to either letting my pup Rosalynn use my new IPhone as a chew toy or throwing it in the swimming pool.

Today, I went over to the Stoneridge Mall Apple store over in Pleasanton for a couple of their free IPhone workshops. For the first one, there were just two of us and both of us were sbcglobal email users...the stars must have been lined up for that one. We both went through the steps of setting up our sbcglobal email accounts with our Mac instructor (Anny). She got hers up and running, no problems and went on her merry way. I of course kept seeing the same problems over and over again...multiple copies of emails (at the time I had 18 emails in the INBOX but the phone said I had over 100!), unable to send emails, password problems associated with both the incoming and outgoing mail servers and of course, my favorite problem, being unable to access my account online while it was set up on the iphone.

Anny kept at it and voila, after changing some settings on my sbcglobal account online regarding spam, finding the right combination of incoming & outgoing mail settings and a hard reset of the IPhone for good measure, all is working and right in the world now.

So, for the benefit of any sbcglobal users out there who may have IPhones and are having trouble, try this. It worked for me, it may work for you. I can send emails, I can receive emails via the mail feature on the IPhone (I can't see my folders from the account but I'd rather be able to send & receive emails than worry about seeing folders!!!)

1) On your sbcglobal account online via your desktop/laptop, from your mail page, click on "Options"
2) Then click on "POP Access and Forwarding"
3) On the next page, make sure that you check "Web and POP Access"
4) Then check "I don't want to receive any messages that SpamGuard thinks are spam"
5) On your IPhone, use the following settings:
Incoming Mail Server pop.sbcglobal.yahoo.com (I was told by AT&T to use pop.att.yahoo.com)
Outgoing Mail Server stmp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com (again, I was told to use pop.att.yahoo.com)
Make sure you enter your username and password for both server settings, even though the outgoing one says "optional"
Once the account is verified, then go to ADVANCED and set Incoming SSL to "ON" and Outgoing SSL to "Off"

This, and I say this in the nicest possible way, lowly retail clerk was able to do for me what at least 10 Apple technicians couldn't (and probably about the same number of AT&T technicians). I made a point to track down Anny's manager and tell her that she had solved my problem. Cross your fingers that everything stays good in the world!

Three CHEERS to ANNY! THANKS AGAIN for your help!! I'm rethinking having to throw the phone into the pool or letting Rosalynn chew on it.

( Aug 22 2007, 05:25:44 PM PDT ) Permalink