Puppy Journal

And in the blink of an eye, they are puppies. :-)

They bark, they bite, they pounce, they wag their tails, and they tumble ass over tea kettle. They make each other cry. They are inquisitive. They are underfoot. They are developing their personalities (though these are subject to major change as the weeks go by).

Pink and Purple Girls are the “Hey, what is that?” puppies. First to do everything.

Blue Boy is the most alert. He shakes and “kills” his toys. He protests when things don’t go his way. Case in point. He wants under the bed. I blocked the way. He wants under the bed. HE WANTS UNDER THE BED.

Green Boy is already marching to the beat of his own drummer. When his brothers and sisters are awake, he is asleep. When he is awake, they are asleep. He explores and plays by himself (or torments sleeping puppies).

White and Yellow Boys are my “good boys”. They are the “What are we doing now?” puppies. They are good to cuddle, game to eat, love to sleep, and willing to do whatever the other puppies are doing.

They are four-weeks old today and I don’t know how much weigh. The pan they sit in on the scale is the perfect size to block the corner of the bed (and foil Blue Boy’s attempts to get under the bed).

Last week I wrote that I would be starting the weaning process. I wasn’t going to waste my time fixing their first meals if they weren’t ready for it. So on Tuesday night I tried them on water. They were all curious about the dish and dipped their noses in it. Good sign. I decided that I would fix them their first meal on Wednesday when they were 3 1/2 weeks old.

Wednesday was the night of the flood. Flood #1 occurred after school when I was putting down a clean bowl of water in the laundry room (dogs come and go in and out of the house through the laundry room - I fix their meals in there - Booster bath is in there) and some blonde CBR head knocked it out of my hand. Much cursing ensued because I cleaned this room when I was home sick. Flood #2 occurred in the puppy room when I was putting Picabo’s dinner down and she jumped up and then down into her water dish sending water everywhere. More cursing (sorry you had to hear that puppies). I started a load of puppy laundry and fixed everyone else their dinner. Trip #1 and I carried the Field Spaniels' dishes into the dog room. Trip #2 and I carried Hope and True’s dishes into the dog room. Trip #3 was to put Mercy’s food down on the laundry room floor (she is 13-years old and eats in there. She eats a little, takes a break by going out into the yard, comes back and eats some more - it takes her about 20 minutes to eat). Trip #3 into the laundry room and splish splash there is water everywhere! The washer filled, overfilled, and overflowed! I rushed over to shut off the machine but the water kept flowing. The main water shut-off valve is right there so I shut water off to the house. I am speechless. No cursing this time. I put Mercy all the way outside to eat and grabbed my mop. You know that dog hair that collects under the washer and dryer? You know that dirt and hair that we never clean up often enough? There was my sparkling clean laundry room floor with all that dirt and hair floating on it. I mopped up enough water to stop the splashing, hauled the Booster Bath into the kitchen, and literally tossed my used-to-be clean but now soggy rugs out the back door (where they still sit in a frozen lump). The rest of the evening was spent cleaning the laundry room (it ain’t easy pulling out the washer and dryer) and puzzling out what was wrong with the machine (cold water valve is stuck open for some reason). I turned off water to just the washer and turned water back on to the house. Oh, to raise a litter without a washer. Not good. But not that bad. The washer works, it just has to be manually filled with water. I can do that with a hose from the laundry tub. Not convenient but workable until the local repairman gets a day off from his regular job. He’s supposed to be here this coming Friday after school. Needless to say, the puppies did not get their first meal on Wednesday.

Sometime during the school day on Thursday, it dawned on me that I wasn’t sick. I felt better than I had in over a month. I went home in good spirits. I opened the front door and a wave of something foul-smelling hit me. My FS were all there fine and well. I went into the puppy room and Picabo was sick. She had thrown up twice and had one bout of diarrhea. More cleaning up but this time without an easy to use washer. Picabo didn’t have a temperature and her gums were nice and pink. She was quite green around the gills and you could tell by looking at her that she didn’t feel well. I shrugged it off to the stress of raising a litter. This same thing happened to her with her first litter at exactly the same time. My plan was to let her fast until morning, put her on a bland diet, and of course, I would feed her puppies. If that didn’t work, I did have the pills the vet gave me when this happened before. Pills are a last resort because of the drug transference through her milk. It is now Sunday and she is bright and perky but not 100%. That little bit of extra weight I have been working so hard to keep on her is gone. She is positively gaunt. She is eating a 1/2 portion of her food with cottage cheese. She isn’t vomiting anymore but her stools are still really loose (but she goes hours and hours between poops). She is drinking water well. She will be fine. She just can’t bounce back as quickly as she could if she wasn’t under this stress.

So the puppies were given their first dog food meal on Thursday night and they think I am one heck of a cook. :-) My weaning formula is:

1. Put the kettle on to boil.

2. Put a small amount of mom’s kibble in a mixing bowl.

3. Cover with boiling water.

4. Let soak until cool.

5. Smash it up with a potato masher.

6. For six puppies, divide it into two shallow dishes. I’ve been using the little dishes that come with frozen entrees.

7. Pour a generous amount of either goat’s milk, buttermilk, or Esbilac on top. I’m using Esbilac Goat’s Milk. It takes one can per day.

8. As days go by, reduce the milk product and add things like yogurt and cottage cheese. Reduce the amount of mashing. If mom is getting puppy food, switch the puppies over to adult food once they get the hang of eating and digesting dog food.

These puppies have taken to food really well. Thursday night they basically lapped up the milk. This morning they actually ate the food. Speaking of mornings, now that they are eating (and pooping real poop), the 30 minutes extra minutes I need in the morning to take care of them is now 45 minutes (and 60 would be better). The puppies are more fun now but they are also a lot more physical work. Karen Miller called me Saturday morning and asked how things were going. I said weakly, “Oh, fine”. LOL I can’t help but think of the song lyric, “So you had a bad day”. :-) Actually, its not so bad. It could be a lot worse. Things just got a little complicated this week. :-)

Sheila Miller

Wolftree Acres

Nevada, USA

sdmiller@the-onramp.net

http://www.wolftreeacres.homestead.com

Wierd Weather

One doesn’t normally think of San Diego as the kind of place where one is likely to run into rain, much less hail and sleet — not to mention sub-freezing temperatures.

Yesterday we had all of that, and in astonishing abundance. Shortly after dawn we noticed the first examples of water falling from the sky and hitting the ground with a “tink” instead of a “splash” — hail. The hail was pea-sized at its largest, so it was far from threatening (thankfully!). But there certainly was a lot of it — all of the “white stuff” you see in these photos is accumulated hail, not snow.

The really intense hail started falling locally at just before noon yesterday; it continued intermittently will into the evening. At one point we had close to an inch of the stuff on the ground, and at the moment I drove down the hill to go rescue my blog server, there was so much ice on our driveway that my pickup actually broke loose on the slope and skidded ten feet or so downhill.

This is a brand-new experience for us in southern California. We’ve seen plenty of this sort of stuff in other places (such as New Jersey and Indiana, where Debbie and I grew up), but here?

What’s up with this global warming stuff, anyway? Sure doesn’t look like it on the evidence of the past few days!

Wrapping Complexity

As I was driving home from repairing my blog’s server, I got to thinking about the complexity of the technology that I’m using as a hobby. The cabinet in my friend’s basement contains two servers (with a few hundred gigabytes of storage between them), three routers, two network switches, and a dedicated “cabinet management” single-board computer. Between all of that gear there are several billion transistors and several trillion bits of stored data. The software I’m using, including the operating system, has something on the order of 100 million lines of source code. There’s also several thousand feet of cable, hundreds of connectors, and on and on. Basically it’s a pretty darned complex piece of equipment, full of very advanced technology (especially the hard disks and the CPU chips).

When I was a kid, I had a not-too-dissimilar hobby, at least at first blush: I was into audio and radio electronics. But the “systems” that I worked with had at most a handful of active devices (tubes, in my case — I couldn’t afford transistors, which were middling exotic at that point), and a few dozen other components in a really complex design. There were, of course, no computers involved, so no software at all.

So today’s hobby involves systems with something like 10 to the 13th “parts” (including software), and in my hobby as a kid something like 10 squared parts. That’s a ratio of 10 to the 11th in numbers of parts — something like the difference between traveling one inch and making 300 round trips to the moon. That’s a huge difference! But the difference in complexity is even larger — much, much larger, in fact, because the more parts you have, the more ways in which they can interact.

In my own life — and it ain’t over yet — the increase in the complexity of the machines that we use every day is so large that its hard to grasp and accept. It’s also amazing to me that all this new stuff, as complex as it is, can be used by ordinary people who understand nothing at all about how it works. You don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy a personal computer, or to use it in your work. You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to drive a modern car, with its thousands of electronic devices. A big part, I think, of the success of modern technology is the way we’ve been able to “wrap” it so that ordinary people can use it…

Something to think about the next time you watch your amazing television — the one with millions of transistors, gobs of software, and in many cases even hard disks for storage (that’s how Tivo works, folks)…

Blog Problems

The gods must be crazy. Or at least all pissed off at me. My evidence for this: my blog’s server had a meltdown around noon on Saturday, and the problem wasn’t the usual kind of thing, where a single failure occurred. No, we couldn’t have a normal kind of problem with our server. Of course not. We had to have a special sort of problem…

The first symptom was easy enough to observe: the blog stopped responding. Disappeared into the proverbial black hole. Some quick testing with the old standby “ping” utility confirmed that the server was definitely not alive, in the sense that the operating system was not booted and operating. At this point I couldn’t tell if the server hardware was operating or not.

If you followed my adventures in remote hosting in December and January, you know that I built a cabinet with remote reset and remote power-cycling capability, specifically to deal with situations like this. So with good cheer, and thanking myself for my foresight, I tried a remote reset of the server.

Nothing happened.

OK. Well, that’s why we also built the remote power cycling, because sometimes hardware gets “hung up” in funny modes that only a power cycling can cure. But that’s rare, so I’m beginning to worry at this point. Tried the power cycling.

Nothing happened.

Oops.

Now this looks bad, and most likely it means an outright hardware failure. Or, just maybe, it means that the remote reset and/or power cycling stuff I built didn’t work. And my server is a 40 minute drive from my house, where all my tools and spare parts are. Sigh. Off I go, “down the hill” as we say, out of Lawson Valley, through Jamul, and off to my remote hosting site (in my friend’s basement). Time to grab the server, take it back home, and hook the sucker up to a test environment.

Absolutely nothing happened. No video, no POST beeps. Something quite fundamental — power supply, CPU, etc. — must be broken. Took all the daughter boards out (except video), disconnected all the drives, etc., and tried booting again. This time I started getting really weird symptoms — I could see it starting to boot, then at random points failing and restarting. If I left it in this mode long enough, eventually the boot sequence would get to the point where it figured out that the drives were missing — but even then, after some random interval it would fail again. Ok. This was looking like either (a) some noise or intermittent failure in the power supply, or (b) a less-likely motherboard or CPU problem. Betting on the power supply, I drove back down the hill to a computer store, picked up a new 350W power supply (for $39!), and drove back home to install it. That took two hours, almost entirely for the driving.

With the new power supply, now the server booted very reliably. Ok, I must have guessed correctly on the power supply! Yippee! I figured I could just put it all back together and everything would be wonderful.

Oops. When I plugged everything back in and rebooted, I got an alarming message from my RAID board during power-up: one of my hard drives was either disconnected or not operable. And it wasn’t disconnected, I quickly figured out — it was really dead. Sheesh! Two problems at the same time!! This is very unlikely to be a random occurrence — much more likely is that either the power supply problem caused the drive to fail, or the drive problem caused the power supply to fail. If it’s the former, then I can most likely look forward to other early failures, as the most likely scenario there is some voltage was out-of-spec high, stressing everything connected to it. Not good. So I’m hoping it’s the latter case — the hard drive failed in some bizarre manner that took out the power supply (though this was a high-end power supply that really should be immune to anything the load might do to it). But, since I had no spare disk drives of the right type lying about, I had to go down the hill again, this time to Fry’s electronics, to pick up a new drive and install it. After I did that, the server booted, rebuilt its RAID array, and started up normally. Hooray! And this morning I reinstalled it, which is how you can read this…

Though this was a real pain in the neck sort of experience, I can’t help but think how amazing it is that in America, even someone like me living “out in the boonies” can get fast and inexpensive access to some of the most advanced technology in the world (hard disks, if you’re not already aware of it, are chock full of things that were in the realm of science fiction just a few years ago). This entire event, from failure to repair, took less than 8 hours (the server was down longer only because I didn’t want to wake my friend late Saturday night or early Sunday morning). In another country, it might take weeks to get such components — and I’d have paid a lot more for them. Here, even late on a Saturday evening, I just walked into a store (have you ever been in Fry’s Electronics? It’s quite an experience if you’re in the least geekly…), pick what I want from a large selection, and drive back home with my purchase. Think of all the things that had to happen for me to be able to do that: the scientists and engineers who invented the technology, the operations folks who took that technology from a lab to high-volume production, the distribution channels that got it to San Diego, etc. All of that so that my silly blog server could be repaired quickly and easily. Pretty close to miraculous, I’d say…