I Won't Say it Stinks, but it Sure Could be Better...

It has not been a good week. And it's only Tuesday.

As I had to boldly proclaim on the www.weos.org website, there was a major power outage in Geneva on Saturday thanks to the ice storm/blizzard. Triggered by that was a rash of major equipment failures: our automation system (Enco), our satellite downlinks (Pacifica demod) and our mix board system (Logitek). The first one seems to be mostly up and running again, the second one is down for the count and we're scrambling to find alternative means of acquiring Democracy Now and Free Speech Radio News. But the last is truly maddening...there's some glitch in the triggers table that crashes the entire Supervisor software (that controls the Audio Engine) whenever the wrong trigger is fired. Plus I'm still finding bizarrely-routed audio and commands everywhere; the system is amazingly intricate and complex...lots of flexibility but lots of places to go wrong.

And of course, this week we were supposed to have two live lectures and three sports games.

Arrrgh.

And to top it all off, our (meaning my wife and my) beloved hamster, Molly, is not doing well. I had to take her to the vet today because she was rapidly getting "fat". It turns out she's not fat at all, she's got tumors/cysts and has protein/fluid leakage...which is probably making it hard for her to breathe and is definitely making it hard for her to move around and also to groom herself properly. No wonder she's been sleeping so much.

I believe she's actually much older than we thought. The MSPCA wasn't sure, but they were told she was maybe 2 months old when she was donated to them, and subsequently we got her. But even then she was much too grown up to be that young...so we thought maybe she was six months old. Given what's happening now, and that we got her last July, I'm thinking she might've been over a year old back then.

But the inescapable fact is that Syrian hamsters only live maybe 2 or 3 years. So the bottom line is that she's dying. And that bites.

The vet didn't expect her to make it much beyond a few weeks, maybe a few months at most, before she got to the point where she'd be in so much pain and discomfort that we'll have to put her to sleep. Best we can do in the interim is some anti-inflammatory meds and to keep her as happy and comfortable as possible.

I haven't had a real pet in well over a decade, and I'd forgotten how much of a part of your life they become. Even little hamsters.

This sucks, man. :-(