Yet Another Day and Another Post

This morning I got up and within no time had a topic for blogging in mind. I set to work writing my brief introduction to the material that I wished to covered when I realized that it would be nice to embed a Google Trends graph into my WordPress Post. It seemed like so trivial to do. After all, Google nicely provided the javascript code to neatly embed it, but it  turned out to be quite a bit of work to discover how to apply it in the context of a WordPress blog.

It wasn’t nearly as easy or convenient as it should be. The WordPress editor appears to not give one the ability to insert just any old HTML and JavaScript into your post – which is inconvenient when one wants to stretch beyond the capabilities of its Visual Editor, but one doesn’t want to fully roll up one’s sleeves and get down to messing directly with the PHP code under the hood.

My first thought was naturally that some plugin had been written that would make this task easy. A customized bit of WordPress shortcode perhaps? Or maybe an editor extension with a popup field editor for receiving JavaScript to embed. But alas I searched through several plugin candidates and didn’t find any of them at all suitable other than one that was a “Lite” version supported for advertising, and I didn’t really wish to embed ads into my post.

By this point, I’d lost the opportunity to get an early start on my blog post, and it was time to get the day going with breakfast for Melinda and me. I made us some oatmeal with cinnamon and brown sugar (for me) and walnuts (for her) with our usual coffee. We then had a short while to get ready for the rest of the day before heading out to have lunch with my mother-in-law and her husband. Then, we returned home and spent over an hour gathering old clothing and unused kitchen appliances for Good Will. Finally, we also cleaned out a ghastly amount of junk and clutter that had been lurking underneath our master bathroom sinks – mostly under mine. It felt good to clear out all the space and put useful things back inside in a nice and organized manner.

Next, we headed out to Good Will, followed by a stop by Whole Foods where we picked up groceries for the week including the stuff necessary to prepare one of our favorite dishes from Alicia Silverstone’s Kind Diet receipe book – Rustic Pasta.

Rustic Pasta!

While Melinda was getting the pasta together, I played DJ via Spotify and Airplay and also tried to find some way around my problem of embedding JavaScript inside a WordPress post. I found some code examples for Google Maps and after several false starts through testing out plugins, I decided to get down in the dirt and write a tiny plugin of my own to accomplish exactly what I needed. In the end, writing a plugin to do it was quite, quite simple. I should have done it from the start, but really it shouldn’t have required me to write any code. Just because I can write code, doesn’t mean I should have to when using blog software.

Although my obstacle was now removed, I didn’t have time to write the post as dinner was about ready. We enjoyed our last bottle of wine that we brought back from our trip to France late last year. It was a 2008 Gevrey-Chambertin, and we both found it quite good – especially with our meal. Afterwards, we decided to get ourselves caught up with Downton Abbey.

We watched the Christmas Episode of Downton Abbey that capped season two and then watched the first episode of season three which aired on PBS just last week. I am pleased to say that we found that the writing has improved immensely and returned to its excellent from from season one. The Christmas Episode was quite wonderful in every way and the season three premier left us eagerly waiting for the new season to unfold.

However, we didn’t realize what we getting ourselves into and found ourselves staring at half past midnight when we finished up! Melinda was rather tired and I found myself once again trying to quickly pound out 500 words on this blog. I decided to hold off on what I had intended to write about because I felt that I could more quickly write something more descriptive and stream of thought than trying to write something more thoughtful as I had originally intended.

Fortunately, it will keep for another day!

Desperate Race Against Midnight

So it seems that I’ve slipped up today. I planned to continue trying to actually write somewhat less than random words today as the  beginning of this week had proven quite fruitful in terms of fodder for this blog. Imagine! I managed to get three days worth of blogging from a late night vet trip and the aftermath the next day. But tonight after dinner and some wine, we retired to the couch to finish up season two of Downton Abbey and as we only had three episodes remaining, we pressed on despite the hour growing late and my blog deadline drawing near.

I’m afraid that I’m rather disappointed with Downton Abbey season two. We thought season one was quite good and that the show was off to such a nice start. However, it’s hard to imagine that the same person wrote both seasons! The second season’s plot lines were often highly unoriginal, sometimes right from the pages of a bad soap opera, and too often drawn out in ways that sucked the drama from them like a hungry vampire sucking the last drops of blood from an anemic victim. There were times when I felt embarrassed for the actors involved in a few of the scenes. Despite it all, the shows still watchable. I just hope that the writer got some fresh ideas and better execution of them for season three otherwise this show is or shouldn’t be long for this world.

It’s sad to see formerly good shows turn into shadows of themselves. For this show, it took but a season (and seems like a sharp change to us as we only just first watched season one over the last two weeks). For others like our once cherished Dexter, the writers managed a good five seasons of high-caliber writing before season six descended into lots of bad writing with season seven resurrecting some good writing while killing off some bad plot points (but doing so in a jarring way that showed that either the writers changed their minds and the writers were changed themselves) and still running up against plotting landmines. I’m glad that poor Dexter will be put out of his quality misery next season although we’ll still be watching it because we want to see how the writers tie things up and the quality was enough to keep us watching the characters and actors that we had come to love watching.

Breaking Bad is one show that I’ve watched where there was no discernible decline over the course of its run. I’m thankful that the show will be coming to what will no doubt be a satisfying end this year because although I will miss such an amazing show, how can it be possible to go on and maintain such stellar quality?

So looking at the time, I appear to have slipped from Friday night to Saturday morning. Ah, but it’s close – so very close. And after all, it’s still January 12th somewhere in the world. So I’ll consider myself as having fulfilled my blog entry for Friday and remain in keeping with my 2013 resolution. Phew!

Fun With Dog Vomit – Part III

I was given the choice of having Perrin undergo surgery to remove the remaining Kong toy pieces from his stomach and intestines or waiting to see if things became more clear about whether or not pieces remained and/or were passing successfully through the gi tract. The trade off was that waiting would cost more money as I would have to leave Perrin there hooked up to an iv and have more X-rays performed – while these hospitalization costs would get rolled into the cost of surgery. In other words, if it turned out that the wait and see approach failed, the overall costs would probably be higher than if I just decided to go ahead with surgery.

I decided though that I wanted to take that chance because it would be overall less risky for Perrin himself if we could avoid surgery.

I left him in the hands of my excellent vet and headed in to the office where I found myself feeling rather frazzled and unfocused as I waited impatiently for four hours to pass by and to hear word about what the next step would need to be. I grew more and more anxious that Perrin would have to undergo surgery and dreaded the two or three day period afterwards where the healing incisions into the intestines might open with failing stitches. I also did not look forward to the prospect of Perrin having to where the cone of shame for ten days.

Finally, after what seemed like all day, I received a call from the vet and she informed me that our fears seemed to have not come to pass. The gas pattern in the stomach that had suggested a foreign body was no longer there and the pattern in the intestines had changed locations and been reduced in size, suggesting that if there was a foreign body behind the gas pattern that it was moving through Perrin’s bowels successfully and that surgery would not be required.

We were able to pick up Perrin that evening and take him home for monitoring. He was on orders to receive bland food instead of his usual dog food, and we had to give him a tablet dissolved in water to line his gi tract and protect it  and aid in the passage of the possible foreign body. Thankfully, he did not throw up again that evening, and we were able to sleep through the entire night without any disturbance.

The next morning we brought Perrin back to the vet for another X-ray to make sure that things still seemed to be progressing. Thankfully, they were. Perrin’s behavior that morning was much better. He cheerfully greeted the vet when I brought him into the room and he seemed full of his normal energy.

It was a close call!

We have since this incident removed all Kong toys from the house and will think twice about picking up another “indestructible” toy. In fairness, the particular Kong toy may not have been for “powerful chewers” like Perrin. There was a classic Kong toy in our house that was made for “powerful chewers” and probably is fine, but it was old and we didn’t want to risk the possibility that it may have begun to wear down.

We really would like to avoid another trip to the vet for foreign body ingestion!