08:07 – Barbara returned mid-afternoon yesterday from the visit to one of the retirement facilities she and her sister had short-listed. The good news is that her parents loved the place and are excited about moving in. This is the facility that has one unit dedicated as guest/trial quarters. The actual unit her parents would be moving into isn’t ready for occupancy yet, so the facility manager suggested that her parents could move temporarily into the guest unit while the unit they’ll actually occupy is being cleaned up and painted. The monthly cost is a bit more than their monthly income, but VA will pay a portion of that cost and they do have savings and other assets, including their house, which will offset the difference. Barbara is going to talk to the VA Monday to find out exactly how much they’ll pay toward the monthly cost, but it looks doable. Now the trick is to get things rolling before Barbara’s parents have second thoughts or another medical emergency occurs.
While we were walking Colin last night, he stood and urinated for about a solid minute. Barbara commented about the strong smell of his urine and wondered if he had a urinary tract infection. He’s been acting a bit strangely for the last week or so, including having accidents (solid, not liquid) in the house. That’s one possible symptom of a UTI. UTIs in dogs can be very subtle, so I decided to start him on amoxicillin immediately. I gave him 1,000 mg as a loading dose last night. When he urinated this morning there was no strong odor, which suggests the amoxicillin has already knocked down the infection. We’ll give him 500 mg tid for the next few days, and then I’ll do a microscopic examination of his urine and an occult blood test. If that’s clear, we’ll assume the amoxicillin is working and continue it 500 mg bid for a couple more weeks. Then I’ll do a urine culture, just to make sure.
We’re making good progress on the first batch of 30 forensic science kits, and should be able to start shipping them by the end of the month.
15:47 – I decided to boost Colin to 750 mg tid. Years ago, I treated another of our dogs for some sort of infection. I followed the canine recommendations of the Merck Veterinary Manual, which IIRC were 5 to 7.5 mg/kg amoxicillin bid. The infection did not clear up, and when we took the dog to see Sue Stephens, our vet, she said that dosage was very low. So I looked elsewhere for the amoxicillin dosage for canine UTIs, and came up with a range of 10 to 25 mg/kg bid. For Colin, at about 32 kilos, that’d be 320 to 800 mg bid. So, although 500 mg is well within that range, I decided to go nearer the upper end. In fact, Colin tolerates a 1,000 mg dose without any problem, so I decided to go with 750 mg tid for the first couple of days and then 750 mg bid for the remainder of the two weeks or so.
I have been stalled in conducting tests of a couple pieces of software using Linux, as the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS would not install the 64-bit version in Virtual Box, even though I could install the 64-bit version of 11.04 and 11.10 using Virtual Box.
So, the maintenance release of 12.04.1 just came out a few days ago, and today I tried installing it. The 64-bit version went into Virtual Box without a hitch. Go figure. Probably something to do with the kernel, because I got a kernel error at the beginning of installation on the original 12.04 release. No changes to Virtual Box in the interim, so it was something to do with the Ubuntu release.
At least I can get back to spending some daily time testing stuff in Linux again.
You are probably correct about the kernel being involved, Chuck; we have to be wicked careful at work about kernel upgrades not screwing up production systems and the existing hw/sw configs all the time. And we have RHEL running in versions from 4.x through 5.8 and all kinds of fun when we do re-installs, upgrades and various patches. But any day that I start to get discouraged and annoyed I think back and remember what dealing with heavy production WinBlows environments was like. With three to four times the staff, too, and everyone on-call 24×7. It is rare for us to have to do hands-and-feet stuff after hours with this gig, thanks be to Linus & Co. And the late Dennis Ritchie. Leagues above the late Jobs character, a guy who screamed at his subordinates and parked his Lamborghini diagonally across two HP spaces at Apple HQ. Good riddance. Whereas Woz is a really great guy, go figure.
Jobs probably didn’t want some jerk bumping the panels of his car. Anyway, it was his company.
Bob, does Colin tolerate pills well? I remember that some of your earlier dogs must have thought they contained poison.
My rottweiler handled pills very well. I’d give her a big spoonful of peanut butter with the pill stuck inside, as recommended by many vets. She’d work her jaw and smack her lips and then spit out the pill. Usually we’d go through that a few times before I got fed up and just stuck the pill down her throat with my big, stinky finger. (Then give the poor, innocent baby a treat to take the taste of my hand out of her mouth. It’s pretty funny, having a dog who licks her own butt looking offended because you stuck your hand in her mouth.)
Yeah, Jobs cared more about his car panels than some poor ‘differently-abled’ human being have a closer hump to the front door to start their day slaving for the Insanely Great Dictator. Fuck him.
And all hail the Great Woz.
And Dennis Ritchie.
And Linus Torvald.
And me, OFD, idiot IT drone of the month, on-call this past weekend and never got called. (well, there is still the rest of tonight…)
And Seymour Cray.
Don’t forget the greatest electrical engineer of the Twentieth Century.
My rottweiler handled pills very well.
We wrap our dogs pills in a small piece of bread. We used to use cheese but the dog figured that out and would spit out the pill. She has yet to figure out the bread as it never touches her teeth. Straight down the throat barely skimming the tongue.
Our BCs have always been very good about taking pills until they get older. Barbara used to give Malcolm his pills just by handing them to him without anything covering the pill. He’d swallow them quickly, knowing that after he’d swallowed all the pills he’d get a piece of meat or cheese. Barbara had originally wrapped each pill for Malcolm in lunch meat, but she soon noticed that if a pill fell out of the lunch meat Malcolm would just pick it up off the floor and eat it.
Most of the others have been about as good with pills, until they get to be eight or nine years old, when they suddenly get suspicious that we’re trying to poison them or something. Then we have to hide the pills.
Border collies and Kelpies are similar. Our Kelpie tends to eat things before even thinking about it. Just for grins, my wife handed him a tomatillo today. This was a giant amongst tomatillos, easily 2 inches in diameter. He wasn’t really sure it was edible, but since my wife handed it to him… It was large enough he thought about biting into it, but decided “naw” and swallowed it whole. That must have hurt going down!
I can clearly recall the time my Golden Retriever grabbed a mushroom that fell off the counter. She looked at me like “WTF? You guys eat shit like this?”