Luna TailAnxiety, Dogs, and Life

I don’t know what it is.. but every now and then I get this irresistible bug to go and spend money. Buy something frivolous and something that I really don’t need. I wonder if this is a touch of what a shopping addiction is like?

So lately I’ve wanted another blue Life Is Good collar for Muffit. The blue is perfect, it’s my flyball team’s colors and looks so good on Chase. So yesterday I actually put Chase’s on Muffit, and I ordered a new one for Chase. =P Yeah, totally pointless and not needed in our house full of collars! Dangit! But I just wanted one so I ordered ack. I’m terrible. But I do have some money, so I guess I can spend it. =P

That link goes to the Life Is Good website but they don’t have the collar I’m getting. They do have, however, this pink tank! It matches Tatum’s collar and leash… oh boy, we’ll be matching!

But you know, this is quite dumb of me… because I just went to lunch at Rumbi. And I just donated $5 for a parting gift for a coworker… and last weekend I spent some money at the Bark in the Park event I went to. And gave $20 to my obedience trainer… so why on earth do I feel the need to spend any more money?

I just pulled out $100 from my checking account for cash for this pay period. Unfortunately, I’m not supposed to pull it out until Friday (on payday) and so it’s now supposed to last me 3 weeks instead of 2. And already $15 of it is gone. GAH!

I had a busy weekend. CRAP! What is the deal with me! I’m too busy. I was at a Bark in the Park all yesterday (Saturday). Our flyball team did a demo, well two, and so we had to hang out all day. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I had any days at home to relax, which are few and far between. I know, I complain, but I do love doing dog things.

This morning I did obedience training. Then I built a couple of jumps (is this my dog blog or my personal blog? LOL). Then I vegged in front of the TV for a couple of hours… watched Monk and Robin Hood, I liked both of them. Monk freaked me out… tearing up that poor house! Ugh! I had to take a break from watching it for a bit as that disturbed me. But then I came back and it was definitely funny.

Now I’m watching TV and blogging a bit. I did, however, get some books from the library. Real Live Books. I hope to actually have time to read them. Usually I get books on CD anymore so I can listen when I drive. But I do miss just sitting down and reading.

Today will be a short work week, thank goodness. I’ll get to work from home on Wednesday for a few hours, in my home office, though I could use a new desk and chair. Oh well… I’m just happy I can work from home!

Okay.. I am still trying to understand and use OpenIDs. At long last, I think I finally understand.

So an OpenID has to be in the form of a URL. Big thing that was tripping me up, lol. And there are places where you can register your OpenID and they kinda are like an OpenID host. You sign up with them and they give you an OpenID that you can use to log into various websites that support OpenID.

I like Beemba so far. I have my own Beemba OpenID. So when I go to various websites, I use my Beemba OpenID to log in (yes, I have to log into Beemba so you can’t, even if you know my Beemba OpenID) and then voila, I’m in via OpenID.

And if you click the link to see my Beemba OpenID, you’ll see various information about me, too. And this is what I’ve been wanting! Instead of clicking my OpenID and seeing just a site, with nothing about me, that’s boring. This lists my FriendFeed info, Twitter, Del.icio.us info, and my website address and my picture of Tatum.

So far, so good!

And now for my relaxing weekend… ha! Well, not so much. Maybe Sunday afternoon. I reserved some books from the library… gonna check out Dennis C Carey too, see what he’s all about. I want some books on CD too to take with me when I got to Laramie the weekend after the 24th of July, so maybe they’ll be some good ones!

Not in my human brain.. fortunately. Well, actually, that’s just about gone and I have a hard time remembering things anyway. But specifically I’m talking about the RAM Memory on my VPS.

Figuring a Bob stroller won’t really help my memory problems, I pulled up Google (Yeah it’s evil, but it’s the best) and started to have a look around.

Looks like Apache is my biggest memory hog. And figuring my VPS is only used for web things, that is understandable. I don’t use the VPS for anything else other than a web server! So it’s time to tune up Apache, and maybe MySQL, to see if that helps my memory issues.

Right now, after a bit of tuning, my WebMin reports:
512 MB total, 348.22 MB used

I’ve been getting up to 500MB used, which is bad. And I’m getting Out Of Memory errors and my blogs are slowing down. So… in order to help this out, I changed some settings in Apache:
StartServers 6
MinSpareServers 3
MaxSpareServers 10

From what I’ve been reading, this should help. Originally it was set ti 8 4 and 20, respectively. I really would like processes killed off (MaxSpreServers) when they are idle. Instead of being held to see if they will be used again. I am not sure how important this is for my blogs, but I guess I’ll find out.

So far, so good… I still am at
512 MB total, 348.55 MB used

So I’ll be watching this for a bit to see how if it helps. I hope so.

Well, I got The Pursuit of Happyness today from Netflix, stuck it in the DVD player this afternoon and watched it. I haven’t watched it until now because I figured it would be a tear jerker and I really, really hate to cry.

Well, it did make me cry, but not as much as I had thought. What an amazing movie. A heart wrenching tale for sure. Will Smith does an fantastic job. Not only is he an amazing action hero, it’s amazing at drama, too. A very talented man, Will Smith, and so hot, too! I loved him in Hancock as well. It got pretty bad reviews, but I enjoyed it a great deal!

It breaks my heart that so many people are homeless. No one should be homeless. It’s a tragedy in our society, in our country, in this day and age. It shouldn’t be… and yet it is. There are very serious things wrong with our country.

It makes me thankful and utterly grateful that my parents gave me the skills I need to support myself and my fur family. I can’t imagine how awful it would be to be homeless. To have no place to go, no friends to help me, no family to give me a hand. I’m so lucky I have a wonderful family and a great support network of friends who would not only take me in, but my husband and my dogs and cats as well, if needed.

Thank you friends and family. I love you all. And I wish with all my heart this country, this world, will change and people, someday, will never be homeless.

So no diet pills for me… just a happy healthy life. Though every day I worry that my life will crumble. I worry that I’ll lose my job and my house. That is why I want to retire from the State and have a pension. That would be security. That is what I dream and pray and hope for every day of my life.

For a long time now I’ve included the www. in my domain name URLs. Recently… probably less than a month ago, I decided that I would get rid of the www and see how I liked it.

I have my server set up so that if you put the www in, it’ll still find my websites. So no one will get lost! But I really, really like having no www on my domain names. The www is just messy, more to type, and takes up too much room in the domain name.

So it’s gone! What do you think? Do you keep the www or do you drop it on your domains?

Now that my blogs are upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress, my emails are cleaned out (I have over 600 in my trash… ugh) and I’ve posted a post or two, time to go watch a movie and wish I had wall mounted home theater speakers to go along with my HDTV!

Two things you might hear a lot about if you are in the dog training world are Frustration Tolerance and Impulse Control. Dogs have to learn these things in order to be trained well, and to function in a human based world. Even wild animals learn both of things at a very young age.

I think both of these things translate well in the human world, too. I’ve been thinking about Impulse Control a lot lately. Mainly in the area of eating. I am pretty sure I’m addicted to sugar. And chocolate. And probably salt. I love them all and can eat them all day long.

I get major cravings in the evenings for sugar and chocolate. And usually I give in. Eating right is not only about choosing the right foods. I think a huge part of it is emotionally based, and not giving in to those cravings, and learning about that impulse control. Just because we feel something, either emotionally or physically, giving into it and doing it is not always the best thing!

Sometimes it is. Sometimes we need to follow our gut. But usually in the area of eating, in our society, in our day and age, it’s not. Following the gut, or filling the gut, isn’t a good thing! Eating less, eating healthier, helps us feel better in the long run, and live longer too! And when we lose weight, we can all win trophies for ourselves!

I now have just about 15.4 Gig of photos on my latop. I’ve been digging up old backups from CD and DVD and from my husband’s computer so that I can arrange them all and organize them all and back them all up together. Then I’ll probably put a copy in a safety deposit box so as to keep them very safe.

I love photos. This is of my husband when we went sailing on the San Francisco Bay back in 1998. I think it was 1998, anyway… the pictures don’t have a date stamp on them and I’m not positive about the year! But I’m pretty sure that’s it. We didn’t stay at any Hilton Head rentals in San Fran… but I’ll tell ya, it was a total riot sailing into Fisherman’s Warf from the ocean side, finding a slip, and staying overnight!

I don’t think I’d ever do it again. We were pretty big dorks and didn’t know what we were doing sailing. And I wouldn’t feel safe now that I’m older and much more mortal. But I’m glad we did it, we got some great memories and pictures!

My sister’s birthday is today! I won’t say how old she is… she is four years older than me. She’s the best sister in the world. I remember when I was a little kid, I’d chase her around trying to kiss her and she hated it! LOL

I love having a great sister. We have a lot more in common now than when we were kids. We are great friends too! Family is awesome. And we’ve both been at our employment for about 20 years now, how scary is that!

Happy Birthday Chris!

I just got done watching What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams. I like Robin Williams, funny guy. My favorite movie of his is The Fisher King. Great show… it really affected me way back in the 80s (or was it 90s?) when it came out.

Anyway… so What Dreams May Come is seems to be based on the idea of the Christian Heaven and Hell. Now first my disclaimer, I really don’t know much about organized religion. So forgive me if I get anything wrong. But I’m not going to go into that, really. I’m just going to state what my feelings of the afterlife are.

I believe in an afterlife. I think there is something else other than this physical reality. I am not religious, though I like to consider myself some form of pagan. I love the earth and I want to be exactly the same as the earth, plants, and all the animals that live here. I also believe in the supernatural… things that can’t really be explained, like ghosts. Also.. I am a scientist. So my belief of the supernatural is pessimistic at best. Which is, I know, contradictory but it makes sense in my disturbed mind.

So anyway… I find the Christian idea of heaven and hell a bit odd. My personal belief is that after we die… first of all, our small human brains are unable to comprehend what it’s really like. Just like a bird sees the world in bugs and other birds and trees and sky. They cannot comprehend the idea of a computer, or a house or a job. That’s how I think we humans are about what is beyond, before, and after, this existence. This reality. Our brains are not physically able to comprehend it.

This is also why I don’t believe in a Rainbow Bridge for dogs. I really hope that Kip and Jackie, my two dogs who have died, are now existing in some sort of energy form that I can’t comprehend. They are exploring and cruising all over the universe in a way I can’t imagine. I do hope they will think of me every now and again… if thinking is what they do.

I don’t believe humans or animals will go to heaven or hell. I really don’t even believe in punishment for those who do evil. I hope there is… in some way. But I kinda think this reality is a learning experience and we each learn what we learn, then we die, we return to the existence we were in before this physical life, and we go on from there.

I’m a bit afraid of dying… I have so much to do with the dogs. Hopefully it won’t happen any time soon. I’d love to live until I’m 100 years old. I love to see how the world is changing, and what will happen. But I also believe that after we die, we know everything about this physical world, and so we’ll know how it all turns out.