Enjoying the weather…

Char-siu enjoyed the gorgeous weekend weather as much as I did.

Add comment March 23rd, 2008

Isis and I

This is the last photo I took of us together, and was taken the night before she passed. She was always such a fidgety dog and would hardly ever sit still for a photo, let alone look directly at the camera. I took about 180 photos of her that night and the next morning, of which a few turned out well. This one required about 45 minutes of Photoshop to touch up and get it looking good.

2 comments March 21st, 2008

Can a dog achieve enlightenment?

Isis passed peacefully this morning. I was up all night with her.. we video-conferenced with Wendy (who is still in Taiwan) and I’ll admit to shedding quite a few tears.

Isis has always hated going to the vet’s office, so we had our vet do a house-call. Isis went peacefully and comfortably in her own bed with her favourite sweater, with Char-siu sitting sad and confused nearby while I held her head.

She was 10 years old, and we only had her for 3 years - but she taught me a lifetime of lessons. The most important? One only needs the simple basics to lead a happy life: love, loyalty, friends, a warm bed, water, and some good beef jerky.

I’ll miss her immensely.

5 comments March 17th, 2008

3 years and 2 days.

That’s how long we’ve had Isis. She won us over within 5 minutes of meeting her. I remember when we went to go meet her and we swore we wouldn’t make any snap judgements and that we’d think about it for 24 hours before we decided to adopt a dog. As planned, we went to meet her, and walked away to think things over seriously. Half an hour later we found ourselves at a Petco buying a crate so we could go back and pick her up.

Anyone who’s met her over the years can hopefully attest to what a wonderful dog she’s been. She won the hearts of many a neighbour and coworker at Sun. I remember last June when we found out she had bladder cancer. The vet placed her at about 3-4 months to live. Instead, she’s hung in there for 9 months. I’m thankful for all the time we’ve had… I’ve had plenty of time to say goodbye.

I’m writing this on the plane as I cut my vacation short to come home to put Isis to sleep. I don’t know how to feel to be honest. When I got the email from my sister that Isis had taken a bad turn, it had a sense of inevitability. Wendy and I have been telling ourselves “any day now” for the past 6 months. Anyone who’s met Isis knows that she does anything for food (like most beagles), and we always told ourselves “when she stops eating”, that’s her time to go. She’s barely eating, barely drinking, and it seems she’s decided that now is her time to go. I’m gutted she’s finally leaving us now, but I’m bittersweetly happy that I’ll be able to hold her one last time and that I can be with her when she passes.

3 comments March 16th, 2008

off-kilter beagle

i dunno why. the camera shot is clearly off. but i love this photo. it’s classic Isis. she just can’t sit still for a photo, and needs to climb all over me instead.

Add comment March 3rd, 2008

catchup rambling

i propose starting a new trend in web 2.0. first there was blogging. then there was microblogging (aka twitter’ing). i propose to start time-batch concatenating micro-blogging, or twitter with a touch of both diarrhea and constipation if you will.

so here’s my spew of random micro-blogging-type thoughts, concatenated into one post.

• psyched to be going to London for a week. looking forward to hopefully dropping by the LOSUG meeting while i’m there. would give my left nut to get tickets to the Arsenal/AC Milan Champions League game.

• super-psyched about FOSDEM. little bit nervous to be presenting my first conference preso about Songbird. looking forward to moules et frites with timf, catching up with other various OpenSolaris folk, and meeting more of the Mozilla Community.

• steak and bj day. seriously. i’m so in.

• i’m so desperate to go up to the sierras. i haven’t gone snowboarding at all this winter, and its been dumping lately. sigh. brand new snowboard and everything.

• work is keeping me so busy. feel like every day i finish 5 tasks only to add 7 more to the plate. i was expecting as much when i left Sun… and i love the work and my coworkers, but wow i could use a few days off.

• had a shite day at the gym yesterday, couldn’t get up the V2 & V3 routes i was able to do two weeks ago. ugh. starting to get really psyched about climbing Cathedral Peak with jesse in june though. i think my strength is there, but i could definitely do with some sustained route-climbing to build up the endurance. should probably go out somewhere (diablo maybe?) to practice some trad placements in case my rusty.

• isis is definitely getting worse. we’re taking her to the vet on saturday, but i suspect her time is near. she’s eating slower, and starting to strain so hard her body shakes a lot of the time she’s awake. her 10th birthday is in 10 days. bumming me out.

• great to see benr, tamr, and to finally meet derek c at redmonk’s party a couple of nights ago. cheers to sogrady for a great party and for the beer.

• i feel like i’m spending so much time in front of my computer lately, and not nearly enough time outdoors or with the dogs. gotta figure out this work/life balance thing.

3 comments February 8th, 2008

char-siu is a huntin’

for the past 25 minutes or so, char-siu has been stalking a fly in the living room. it’s hilarious - i’ve never seen him this focused on something for this long. he’s seriously gone into hunting mode. ears cocked, tail straight, the works..

the funny thing is he’s caught it 3 times already. each time he tries to chew it, and it falls out of his mouth and ends up on the floor covered in dog drool. it kind of splats about for a few minutes or so while char-siu stares at it curiously, and then once it dries off enough it starts flying again - and the cycle repeats.

the fly will buzz by over him, char-siu jumps/bounces up and catches him, lather, rinse, repeat.

best 25 minutes of entertainment i’ve had all day.

Add comment August 16th, 2007

Bad news for Isis :(

Those of you who know Wendy and I know that we are crazy about our beagles. We love those stubborn stupid lazy hound dogs even when they’ve cleaned out our fridge, drank my whiskey, and in general done something stupid whenever their noses have led them into trouble.

So we were really bummed today to hear from our vet that Isis’ recent bladder problems are due to a large (2.3cm in diameter) tumour growing just outside her bladder. It looks like she has some sort of bladder cancer.

I picked her up from the vet, took her home, took the rest of the afternoon off and took her out to play and give her treats (to make up for her not getting breakfast this morning)

I have to say I wasn’t prepared for this. I’m not naive, I knew Isis would pass one day, but I expected her to live for at least a few more years (she’s nine). The life expectancy (without surgery) for her is about 200 more days. Given she’s had these symptoms for about a month already, we’re expecting we only have about 5 or 6 more months with our favourite beagle… and whenever I think about that I get choked up a bit.

We’ll be looking into the surgical option, but the vet said the tumour is in a pretty high risk area to operate and it may not extend her life that much. If that’s the case, I think we’ll give her some medicine to ease the pain (the vet said it shouldn’t be bad), and let her live out her remaining days with lots of food and love. (and she will get LOTS of food) We’re officially stopping her training, and she’ll get to lick the ice cream bowl from now on.

I’m pretty bummed out…. I can’t believe how attached I am to that little prima donna. I’m gonna miss her an awful lot.

4 comments June 15th, 2007

nosy beagle

this is hands down my favourite photo of Isis i’ve taken yet:

4 comments April 23rd, 2007

marsh-ed?

i’ve always wondered where the origin of the word swamped came from (as in “i’m so swamped with work”). why not marshed? i notice swamped does share some commonality with bogged, as in “i’m bogged down”.

but anyway, i digress.

i’m swamped, bogged, marshed, whatever…

the SCM Migration Project is predictably going slower than we planned. on the plus side, i’m seeing lots of interest from other engineers - but we haven’t been getting the internal resources we’d hoped for, so for now it’s primarily me, richlowe, and kupfer plowing ahead. we’ve picked up a couple guys from ERI that should help.

of course, the other major thing on my plate at the moment is my very-very-upcoming wedding (18 days!!!), so my days are oft filled with wedding errands and such.

so of course, with all this stuff going on in our lives… wendy and i thought it would be best to …. remodel our kitchen. a combination of a decent tax refund, and the realisation that the one-month estimate to remodel our kitchen (during which our house would be a disaster) coincided nicely with the one month of time we would be taking for our honeymoon and vacation. so now we’re rushing about trying to secure contractors, and get permits in the two weeks before we leave.

i feel like our lives our pure chaos right now. on the one hand, it’s hectic, crazy, and i’m getting crappy anxiety-ridden nights of sleep. but on the other hand, i’m really starting to appreciate the small quiet moments… like the 8 minutes i took after the electrician left today during which i just laid out on the sofa/futon with one beagle slumped across my feet and the other splayed out next to me resting her head on my chest. within 45 seconds, both were snoring. those 7 minutes and 15 seconds of blissful peace (i won’t say quiet, since they were filled with the snores of two hound dogs) and doing nothing but vegging felt great.

2 comments April 17th, 2007