the trainer leading these wee baby calves around in a wee baby yoke proportionate to their size.

Like Almanzo does in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy! Garth Williams did an adorable illustration of just that.

New dog is cute--yay Truman!!

Speaking of pets, Amarna and I just got back from the vet. Thank God I took her in; she has a fever 2-3 degrees over normal, dehydrated, and with some old hard turds in her system not coming out and lots of backed up food behind it. So, they gave her subcutaneous fluids, antibiotic, x-ray (which is how they know about the backed up food--it looks pretty cool on an X-ray, actually!), blood work (some of which is already back and pretty normal--the elevated stuff can be attributed to her being sick and stressed) and she peed on the table so they were able to send a sample off for urinalysis as well.

I'm going to stay home from the bookstore tomorrow to hear back from the vet on the test results and keep an eye on her. Good thing is that the first thing she did after emerging from her carrier was head straight for her food dish and snarf down about half of her food that she didn't even touch last night. So much for tempting a finicky sick palate! Guess I don't have to pull out the tuna water to drizzle over her kibble.

Oh my goodness. I hope she's on the mend. I know dehydration can be a big deal for cats, so maybe that's the heart of it?

Glad you got that sorted out, Kathy!

I really have no idea on how much furniture should cost in the real world.

Poor, constipated kitteh!

We compost. The wormy ones are a bit of trouble, but the non-wormy (we have both) are a breeze. The only effort is actually getting the compostibles into the compost. (I recommend a kitchen bin.)

The key to a non-smelly compost is, as Steph says, not trying to compost anything that smells bad while it rots. So no meat, fat, beans, or potatoes.

I'm hoping that those fluids did the trick, and that the antibiotic will bring down her temp.

Hey, she just ventured out from under the bed to curl up under the computer desk!! This is the first time she's done that since last night--she must be feeling better!!!

This was her first medical emergency, and I'm hoping her last for some time to come. Good thing was that it happened this today, being an extra payday month as well as that government check--$450 at the vet.

So there is an article about how some experiments from Columbia were salvaged, with a computer guy managing to lift data from hard drives that were found after Columbia broke apart.

And yes, that's good and all, but there is something in the article that made me stop and wonder. Part of the reason they could salvage the data was the OS the hard drive was using stored stuff together rather scattered throughout the drive.

The OS was DOS.

And all I can think was why they hell they were still using DOS as the main OS even on an system, even if it was being just used for experiments, on the shuttle in 2003? I had figured everyone had tossed DOS out the window pre-Y2K

I need to get my hair cut again. I guess I can kill a few minutes looking for my one true bob.

(I will refrain from making a Bob Bryar joke at this juncture. Almost. THAT One True Bob has long ladyhair!)

CaBill, are you sure the OS was DOS? Or was it just the file system?

Often, computers taken into space are very obsolete, as they need special chips that are hardened against stray radiation. (This is why laptops aboard the shuttle and space station often crash, as they're just off-the-shelf models.)

The article I read seemed to imply the filesystem (a DOS-formatted drive, rather than a DOS computer, IOW. Which really should be FAT, but I don't trust the papers to get the fine points in a world where algorithm and logarithm... well, anyway.)