While I was away from home today, Brain passed away. It has just been a few weeks since his leg stopped working and the vet detected the tumor. And while Brandy and I have been medicating Brain every day, it didn’t help. The tumor was visibly getting larger and larger each day the last week or two. Brain was getting around, but it was clearly getting more difficult for him. And he really didn’t like his medicine. Spunky little guy resisting the medicine to the end.

Sigh. Poor little guy. :-(

I got Brain a week before Thanksgiving in 2001. Brain was a good bird, and I enjoyed having him around these last two years, and I know his cagemate Nacho did too. Nacho is a hearty old grandmother. She has outlived every cagemate she has had since I got her in 1998, and she was ALREADY a grandmother and two or three years old when I got her. Nacho did now know Kiwi, my second budgie, but shared cages at one time or another with Moira (my first budgie, who I found in the parking lot outside my apartment in February) and Pinky (who came with Brain, but passed in less than a week) and of course Brain. I think Brain was with Nacho longest. At first I’m not sure they liked each other, but after a while they were definately friends. They were a good old funny couple, the old grandmother gracefully putting up with the overactive teenager.

Brain was a good bird.

So goodbye Brain. We’ll all miss you. :-(

I am currently in Delaware, on the way south from my place to DC. Been on the road maybe 90 minutes. Twice in that time I have found myself following obviously drunk drivers. They were weaving dangerously between all three lanes of the highway. They were slowing down and speeding up randomly. They almost ran off the road a few times.

I just stayed back and kept my distance, but several people who passed them were almost hit as they went by and the drunk drivers swerved when they realized someone was near. This is not something you want to see. These people were clearly a menace to themselves, and everyone on the road.

As it was, I just hung back a few miles at a safe distance until these yahoos exited on their own. (One of them quite nearly took out the exit sign as they were leaving the highway.) But the longer they were in front of me the more I was tempted to call the cops on them. I probably should have.

But what is the “proper” course of action in this sort of situation? Call 911 on the cell? Or is in not enough of an emergency to do that? Or just wait for a safe moment and speed by the drunks as fast as possible to get around them and away from them? I guess that is the normal thing that people do. But I can’t help but feel that when people are clearly endangering others, it is almost a duty to report them. Is 911 the way to go?

Anyway, stopping at the Deleware House for a little caffene and rest before continuing on to DC. Hopefully I won’t encounter any more drunks this time around. I do this drive at this time of day and week fairly frequently, and have only seen such obviously impaired drivers a handful of times. But two in one night got my attention. I didn’t call in, but I hope the cops got them. Or at the very least that they got home safely without killing or maiming anyone.

[Note: I originally wrote almost all of this on the Treo, but then hit the wrong button and erased everything I had written… so rather than do that on the thumboard again I hooked up the laptop for a few minutes. Also cool I guess. But not quite as much so as typing the whole post on the phone. :-)]

The external drive arrived FedEx this morning. I am now at work, set up the drive and everything, and fired it up. The scratched Panther disk booted just fine. The install process started up. I had to wait like ten minutes for some reason for it to give me the continue button on the first screen, but then I was able to go through the options for the install and start it.

I picked just a regular “Upgrade”. I know an Archive and Install works better and is “cleaner” but from past experience it is a pain, because there are a handful of things I need which are in the world outside my own user folder, that I have to hunt down and move over one my one. So I’ll do an upgrade install first. If I run into any issues, I’ll go back and do an Archive and install.

I also went into the customize and made sure I was getting ALL the language packs and other such things. I hate it when I go to some foreign website and I don’t see the characters properly, even if I can’t read them anyway. :-)

So, it is chugging along installing right now. This will take awhile I imagine. I’ll go get myself some microwave popcorn or something. It is lunchtime after all.

Noiw I’ll finally get to get going on Panther! Several days later than I should have, but hey, at least it is working!

So, during the day today, Ron took me to a local Best Buy to try to find an external CD-ROM drive. They had bunches. USB 2.0/1.1. No Firewire. My old laptop only has USB 1.1, which is dead slow. But it is what they had. I got one. Had a burner in it too. Cool enough.

Got it back to Rons place. Plugged it in. Put in the OS X Disk 1. It saw it! All the files looked like they were there. Did a disk check on it. It said it was fine! Woo! Hit the install thing, and it rebooted to start the install… and booted normally, not from the CD.

Repeated by choosing the bood drive from the Preference Pane. Same deal. After finding some hints online, repeated by booting with the option key and choosing the external CD. I hit Opt-V to get the verbose listing as it started to boot. It would start… then just keep waiting forever for data from the drive that wouldn’t come.

Read several places online that booting from a USB 1 mounted drive is like booting from floppies in the old days (takes forever) except the OS is now many hundreds of floppies in size. The drive whirred for a while, but then seemed to stop, no data transver lights flickering. The boot process just continued to report “waiting for device” every minute or so.

This was definately a no go.

Now, me by myself would have probably just thrown the drive in the basement and bought a firewire drive when I got the chance, but Ron’s wife Ursula offered to return it for me and so instead I got the full purchace price credited back to me. Thanks Ursula!

I did call the CompUSA in Pittsburgh (the closest big computer store to where Ron lives) to see if they had any firewire CD Drives in stock. They did not. So I just went to the Apple Store online and ordered one to be FedExed to me. Hopefully I’ll have it Monday morning. If not, definately Tuesday.

Now, of course I don’t know for sure if the scratched CD is useable. (Although Ron buffed out a lot of the damage with toothpaste, it is still quite visibly scratched.) When the drive arrives, I’ll find out. If it still doesn’t boot, even with a firewire drive at a decent speed, then I’ll ahve to get the disk replaces. I’ll probably start by asking Jon if I can borrow his. But eventually I will probably buy the one I had intended for my mom… or… Brandy says she will take it back to the store and see if they will replace it. Perhaps that would be more cost effective. :-)

Anyway, I’m quite annoyed at being several days delayed on trying Panther. Sigh. Oh well, guess I’ll have it up and running Monday or Tuesday probably.

Now if only Zeus can remain functional until next year too…

Oh. I also went to the gym with Ron today. Felt great. I really should do that more often. :-)

On Sunday morning when Chris and Rebecca were visiting, Chris saw Brain (the younger of my two parakeets) on one foot. He asked what was up with that. Not thinking or really looking too hard, I just said that’s how they sleep, on one foot and all. At least a bunch of the time. I didn’t think much of it.

Later that evening though, I moved the cage into the other room to get it away from a drafty window, and noticed that Brain was having trouble staying perched. The right foot clearly had something wrong with it. It was stuck out to the side and splayed out, and Brain did not seem to be able to use it at all, and was balancing on one foot, and using his beak to help him climb and move around. It looked broken, and looked aweful. The only thing I could figure is maybe Brain got his foot stuck somewhere on the cage and then struggled and broke his foot trying to escape.

There was no emergency vet that handled birds open, so I had to wait until morning to make an appointment. Plus, I had an appointment I could not break in NYC in the middle of the day. Brandy once again became a life saver, and said she would take Brain to the bird vet she used. She had been planning on taking her bird Nicki in later in the week, but moved it up because of this.

So Brandy took Brain in for the apointment at 2 PM, just after I was finishing up in NYC. So she called me on the cell for updates and decisions as they were needed. After getting my permission, the vet took X-rays.

It was not a broken leg. It was worse. Brain has a large tumor, the vet thinks probably in the kidney. The tumor is so large it is pressing on the psyatic nerve, and causing paralysis in the leg. The tumor is too large to be operable. He gave me some steroid drops that I need to give Brain daily. But basically, it is incurable. The medicine *might* be able to reduce the tumor some, but tends not to be effective indefinately, and often is not effective at all. Sort of a 50/50 chance of it helping at all, and even if it helps, it will not cure, at best it will make Brain more comfortable.

When I got home Brandy showed me how to catch Brain and give him the drops. Doing this stresses both me and Brain out. I hope it will help. I need to learn to do it twice a day going forward. Brain’s prognosis is not good. But I will do everything I can to do whatever I can to help him out.

Sigh! :-(

Not a happy day.