mja blog

  • Poor Boss boy

    Our poor shepherd Boss has intermittent bleeding from his penis. We first noticed it a couple of weeks ago, the odd drop of blood on the floor where he’d been. Hubby took him to the vet but she couldn’t spot anything. Then in the last week or so the bleeding has increased. Spots of blood everywhere, I’m constantly mopping around the floors of the house and the veranda. Back to the vet, but still nothing. She took some blood samples though, and gave us some antibiotics for him. She said sometimes it occurs with dogs that have been in a mating, they do themselves some damage – not that Boss has been in this situation recently. He does tend to get a little exuberant sometimes, but it’s difficult to see how it would cause this. So it’s a mystery, and we hope it doesn’t turn out to be something serious.

    Update 3 Aug: touch wood, he seems to have improved the last couple of days, since being on the anti-biotics the bleeding seems to be tapering off. Maybe it was just an infection – fingers crossed it clears right up.

  • No smoking

    I haven’t had a cigarette now for more than two weeks, it feels good. I get the occasional urge, particularly during work periods when smoking has always been a stress reliever, but so far I have been able to resist.

    It had got to the point where I was feeling really unhealthy. Waking up feeling like I had cement in my lungs. I’d light up, and start to feel nauseous. Perhaps that was psychological.

    Anyway, all it took was one smokefree day to get me on the roll I’m on now. That was when I took Jo to the movies to see the latest Harry Potter, I never smoke in her presence and we were together all day.

    Then also, I have just come out of a rather severe bout of depression. That probably took my mind off smoking, ironically.

    It is good to be free of it. I hope I can keep it up, and maybe encourage H to get off it as well.

  • United in Faith

    The Catholic Church embraces with hope the commitment to ecumenism as a duty of the Christian conscience enlightened by faith and guided by love. Here too we can apply the words of Saint Paul to the first Christians of Rome: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit”; thus our “hope does not disappoint us” (Rom 5:5). This is the hope of Christian unity, which has its divine source in the Trinitarian unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

    – John Paul II, Ut Unim Sint, 1995

  • Job applications

    Applied for a couple of “work-at-home” positions which looked more promising than the usual MLM schemes.

    First one, inbound calls verifying sales data – SalesForce@Home. Second one, outbound calls collecting marketing data for a car dealership.

  • Some play, some pay

    I’m no gamer so this seems incredible to me, but there is a demand for people to play multiplayer online role-playing games on behalf of others who don’t have the time. The idea is to build status and “experience points” for their game character without the hard slog, by paying someone else to do it.

    The Gamer Revolution documentary profiles a busy mother who outsourced her game character to a company in Rumania. She chose the level she wanted to be at, paid her money, and the company logged into her account and played the game around the clock to build up her character’s experience level.

    It’s called “power-levelling” and one of the comments from the doco is that it is creating a new time economy for poorer countries to capitalise on the faster-paced lifestyles of Western societies. However it creates certain issues with the gaming companies, who say the practice is a security risk and against their terms of service; and the other players themselves, who view it as a weak move on the part of the player who pays someone else to “level” their character.

    In the end, isn’t playing games all about having fun? these people are taking it wa-aay too seriously.

    External links

  • Food for thought

    Eating your way to smarter thinking in 11 steps to a better brain involves breakfast of beans on wholegrain toast, omelette and salad for lunch, rounded off with a tub of yoghurt. Then a mid-afternoon snack, avoiding junk. For dinner, fish really is “brain food” and finish it off with some strawberries and blueberries (apparently these fruits really make a difference for rats).

    The article mentions that 40 is the age where “honest folks may already admit to noticing changes in their mental abilities” – if this is correct I reckon I’ve had a few years head start! If I stick to a diet like this perhaps it will get me through uni..