Katie’s Other Knee

Katie has been limping around a lot lately, with some obvious problems in her back right leg. Two years ago she had to have knee surgery on the back left leg, and these symptoms looked very familiar. She doesn’t whine or whimper, but it obviously gives her so much trouble that we’ve essentially stopped taking walks. Because the specialist who treated her last time only works from referrals, I took her to my vet last week and got the referral (this time I made sure they didn’t x-ray her which last time cost me $200 to put her under and have the x-ray taken, only to have the specialist use his own much better x-rays that didn’t require her to be under anethesia).

Before I took her in today they had said that if surgery was required they might do it today. That meant I would get her back tomorrow and I signed leave for that day and Friday to stay home with her and make sure she doesn’t have problems or move around too much.

The doctor examined her and said she did need the surgery and she should be able to recover fully, but he wanted to have blood work done to head off any possible problems with the anesthesia and surgery. Because it takes a day to get those results back they will now be doing the surgery tomorrow.

Keep your fingers crossed for Katie. Even if all goes well, she is under house arrest for the next eight weeks. (See a follow-up after two weeks)

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Amazon Associate

Despite my recent issues with Amazon, I still shop with them and they have some pretty good deals. I was updating my iPod Battery Pack webpage, with some new battery packs and information and noticed I was linking to Amazon a lot for some of the commercial offerings. Why not see if I could get paid for those links? I soon found that Amazon had a referral program and signed up. Now I have links set up for all of the commercial battery packs I had listed that Amazon sells (plus a new one I was going to add anyway), only now if people follow the links and buy anything, I get some kind of commission. I don’t know that it will amount to much, so for now I am asking to be paid in Amazon gift certificates which they will issue when I get to $10 (they issue payments quarterly). I can also get paid in cash, but, like AdSense, only when it reaches $100 (found out later that $100 is for payment by check only and they charge $8 for the check; with direct deposit you can also be paid as little as $10 at the end of the quarter with no fee so I switched to that). We’ll see how this goes.

Unlike AdSense, users not only have to follow the link, they have to actually buy stuff. I think that will be a bigger challenge. Apparently I can get 5% of the cost of items that are ordered and shipped. I wonder if Amazon sells houses?

Mute Your TV

I watch ABC news almost every night. The Winter Olympics are on NBC, so ABC can’t show video from that day’s Olympics, but they can show still pictures and they give updates every night on the news. Because of the time delay they can give results that haven’t been shown on NBC yet. They preface their Olympic updates by saying “If you don’t want to know what happens in tonight’s coverage, you should mute your television.” Then they proceed to show still pictures of jubilant skiers, skaters, etc. holding their gold medals or athletes wiped out on the snow or ice. I don’t think they’re really very serious about not giving away what happens on NBC’s broadcast.

Playgroup

While I’m walking my dogs I see a guy walking his dog a lot of mornings. He had told me that he goes down to the park near the pool and lets his dogs go and other people bring their dogs and do the same. I never had time to go down there when I would see him, but last week I ran into him and had enough time to stop by the park. Katie and Clio weren’t sure what to think, though they always like being off of their leashes. They’re used to going somewhere and now we were just stopped. They played with Lucy (the guy’s dog; no relation to Penny/Lucy) some. She is young so she loves playing with everybody. Then a woman came up with her dog so there was kind of playgroup.

I didn’t go again, plus it’s been so cold lately. But this morning I took the four dogs (Susan’s dogs stayed with me a couple of days) down to the park and right after we got there Lucy and her owner arrived. It’s a good thing we went, because he reported that the two other people who had been bringing their dogs had to change their morning schedules and couldn’t come anymore. So playgroup was five dogs, but I brought four of them. Everybody played more than the first time, so I think I will keep going and maybe we will pick up some more people eventually.

Meanwhile, last week Susan met a former co-worker who she found out is also a nearby neighbor. The co-worker said that they have a dog playgroup at the school in the evenings. So now Beacon and Belle will have a playgroup at their house too!

Brominated Vegetable Oil

I was reading through some ingredients today, this time on a can of Sparkling Black Cherry Fresca. I came across one called “brominated vegetable oil”. Concerned after my last experience, I went to Google to find a Wikipedia article about it. Although it is apparently banned in some countries, it doesn’t seem harmful except in their example where a man drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt (containing “bvo”) a day and came down with a case of bromoderma which turned his skin red. Given that many servings of Squirt, it seems lucky that’s all he came down with.

Fresca is an amazing witch’s brew of other funky ingredients. Sure there are the regulars: potassium citrate, potassium benzoate, and EDTA, but it also has carob bean gum, glycerol ester of wood rosin, and acacia, though I imagine most soft drinks refer to these only as “natural and artificial flavors”.