Category: Blog

I realized something while responding to something I saw posted that said “Love thy neighbor (without exception)”

I realized that for me.. that’s not true.

My love has conditions.  It has exceptions.  It’s not all encompassing and all tolerant.  It does distinguish between people.  It’s not even free.

That’s how I can tell that it actually means something.

Sage died this morning, suddenly and in great pain.

The only possible mercy was that the end came swiftly.  We were witnesses.

She’d been withdrawn for a few days, and we didn’t investigate.  We’d had a few scares before when she wasn’t feeling well, and in some cases medicine and care were required.

This morning, there wasn’t time for any of that. We gave her a little water, we put her on Christina’s lap.. and I stepped away to use the washroom.

By the time I ran back hearing Christina shout.. it was Sage’s last few moments.  Sprawled out on the floor, arms and legs limp, she had a few final spasms and was finally deathly still. 

I’d put my hand on her as soon as I came in.  I didn’t know if she’d feel it or care, but I couldn’t let her step into the dark afraid and totally alone.

My heart breaks thinking about how much pain she must have felt in those last moments, and how small and helpless she looked lying there.

I couldn’t let it out.  I held Christina until she stopped weeping, and an hour later when the vet finally opened I called them to confirm they’d take her for cremation.  I kept it together as I put her in a small box and closed the lid, then brought her to the car, then from home to the vet, from my car to their hands.

I made it home, even though I was shaking.  I waited for it all to hit me.

It didn’t, and I continued with the day, exercise, work and the like, until finally this evening.

It’s only now that I can finally write this down I feel the tears run down my face.  Sage was our companion for a decade. I’ve had friendships — I’ve had  relationships shorter than that.  

A decade is a long time.  In her case, it was a lifetime, and my world is lessened with her passing.

I know this isn’t the last time this kind of thing will happen.  There are still 3 others in the house who are near the same age. 

In time they’ll all be gone too.

I feel this life will break my heart.

I was listening to a song, and I was really enjoying it.  You know that euphoria you get when you’re really happy?  Songs can take me there.

So I was listening to this song, and I had a moment where I thought “You know, one day it’ll be over, I’ll be gone, and I’ll never hear this song, or feel this way again.  Indeed, it’ll be like I never was.”

A wave of protest, of feeble hope and indignant response to the general unfairness that is the mortal coil.

A little wave, but I’m not gigantic, and for that moment it washed over me and it was all around me.  A breath, and then another.  It passes, and I’m again in control, the monkey is back in his cage, and I’m shouting “Shut up!” as I slam the cage door.

The urge to hang on to life tooth and nail must eventually give way with some grace and dignity, as all things pass.  I keep reminding myself of that.  It must, otherwise my only choice is madness and delusion, clutching at straws that aren’t even there.  I can’t accept that.

I can’t accept it when other people lie to me, I can’t accept lies from myself.  Not even the ones masquerading as mercy.

Average life of a treadmill – 3 to 4 years.

Insurance/service plans for treadmills – worthless, as they don’t answer the phone.

Time to buy a new one. Kind of sad how quickly it goes from ‘that’s a funny noise’ to ‘oh damn, i hope it lasts until the new one comes’.

Ownership costs work out to roughly $2 per day for the expected lifespan of the unit, which is not completely terrible.

From a recent spam message (this is the whole message).

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.

Working on a monitoring system, I was getting a version of check_graphite.rb configured (it’s an upgraded version of the one that’s stock, in that it adds some new features).

Everything was going well.. then I noticed the graphing component wasn’t picking up and .. well, graphing.  The metric name that was being output was ‘true’, vs the value I had set (in this case ‘battles’).

I looked over the code.  Oh, did I ever.  Several hours of looking, testing, adding debug statements… nothing.  I walked away frustrated.

A few hours later I came back to it and went .. huh?  Here’s the code

o.on('-s', '--shortname', 'Metric short identifier (required for performance data)') { |oc| options[:shortname] = oc }

Looks pretty sane… except I realized it was actually supposed to be:

o.on('-s', '--shortname NAME', 'Metric short identifier (required for performance data)') { |oc| options[:shortname] = oc }

If you don’t add NAME (or some keyword).. it ignores any values applied to the flag, and returns true if set.  Ok then, feeling like an idiot (since i wrote this code)… I’d better fix my own copy of this, since i’d written mine first, then made a copy for work.

I open my copy… it’s already fixed. Has been for a long time.  Not only that, a second typo is also fixed.

The moral of this, apply changes uniformly.