New belly dance class session starts tonight. Been on a couple week hiatus. Summers are more laid back for everyone, apparently. I must say my enthusiasm is a bit down for it right now. I’d rather stay home and play/bond with Hobkin, but it’ll be good for me to get moving and shimmying again, I suppose.
But it’s awfully hard leaving this for several hours:
Cranked out 1000 words on the “new” story. Ratio of caffeine to words: 3 cups of coffee per 1000 words. At this rate, I’ll be hopelessly addicted by the time I finish anything else. I’m beginning to see why so many artists are drug addicts or drunkards.
AT&T finally fixed their FTP server problems and I was able to update my Hobkin pages. Here’s some new pix of him at ten weeks old:
Matthew and Hobkin napping on the couch:
We took Hobkin to his first vet visit yesterday. He got his booster shot, weighed, his temperature taken, and his teeth looked at.
1. The vet’s good, but then we knew he’d be good with skunks. It’s such a relief finding a really good vet when you’ve got a pet that isn’t a cat or a dog. We went through like a dozen vets before finding Dr. Welle for our ferrets, and then of course, we moved three states away from him.
2. We got to see Debbie, who’s a vet assistant there and the owner of Fantasia, the skunk who introduced us to skunks as pets at Fantasm. She rocks. Even if the vet had come in, looked at Hobkin, and said “Hey folks, that’s the funniest lookin’ cat I’ve ever seen” I’d still go to this vet ’cause of the wealth of knowledge and experience Debbie has.
3. Hobkin weighs 830 grams (approx 1.9 lbs, up from 1.4 lbs from a week ago), he’s teething intensely (which would explain why he just wants to sink his teeth into anything that moves when he plays–ouch), and he didn’t have a reaction from the vaccine (hurray).
He was extremely well behaved. I was very proud of him.
I’ve got some adorable pix of Hobkin as a 10-week old, but I can’t upload them! The AT&T broadband FTP server is down and has been all fucking week. I’ve IMed to complain to them twice and the useless support staff haven’t been able to provide me with so much as an ETA for when it’ll get fixed. “The problem ticket’s open and it says they’re working on it, but that’s all the information I’ve got,” they say. Grrr. I pay AT&T major ducets every month to provide me with a full array of ISP services. Ticks me off to no end when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain yet still expect me to pay full price. Bad AT&T. No biscuit.
So today I get to come in late (yay) and work until ten (massive boo!) so that we can stagger the time we’re on the server to maximize our testing window. Stupid environment. Who ever heard of a system where if more than one person runs a job it crashes everyone? Fiasco city!
But I took some cute pictures of Hobkin:
Here’s Hobkin’s tummy, showing off his swirl and chip markings.
Just updated Musta-lay-day Grove to give Hobkin his own area and now I’m jumping on the Southpark cute-icon bandwagon. Heh.
Me as a Southparkian
And here’s Matthew
Rewrite completed and sent off to Leading Edge. Hurray! Now, again, comes the waiting. I hate waiting. I thought I was a patient person, but ever since I really started marketing my writing, I think my rock of patience has been worn to a little granite pebble. Sigh. But still, a sense of achievement. Yay!
It’s always weird coming back after a vacation. My time sense is all screwed up. Isn’t it lunchtime yet?
Last week was event-heavy. Paul, a friend of ours from Illinois, flew down to visit over the Memorial Day weekend. It was a pretty low-key visit as Matthew and I had much prep to do for the new arrival and the road trip to Iowa (gah–twenty hours one way). Paul treated us to a showing of AotC–he’s our resident (or not-so-resident as the case may be) Star Wars fanatic. This was his fourth viewing, only the second for us. And we introduced him to “Sam’s Gourmet Vegetarian Paradise” which specializes in faux meat facsimiles. Yummy.
And then there was the driving. Fortunately, Matthew and I are on different wake/sleep cycles. He drives at night while I nap, and I drive during the day while he naps. But twenty hours in a car is grueling no matter how you look at it. We left on Monday after driving Paul to the airport for his flight back to Illinois.
We arrived at the breeders in Iowa at noonish on Tuesday feeling pretty wiped already. We spent a few hours talking to the breeder and meeting Hobkin’s parents and touring the farm (they also breed foxes and lynxes) and then it’s back on the road for another twenty hours with baby Hobkin. Made it home early Wednesday morning–around 8am. Man, that was rough. There are NO rest stops in Kentucky and precious few in Tennessee. What’s the deal with that? There were some definitely worrisome hours there when I was so zoned I couldn’t keep my eyes open so couldn’t help Matthew stay awake, and Matthew’s hanging on to consciousness-behind-the-wheel by his fingernails, struggling to make it to the next rest stop so we can pull over and nap for a few hours. Yeek.
But it was worth it.
Okay, I haven’t updated my journal in a week and here’s the reason why:
Introducing Hobkin!
Isn’t he the cutest thing?
