I often get back to my office and find that Dax, one of the four stray cats we’ve adopted, has decided that my desk is now his.

Here is Dax:

I’ll have to find a better picture of him later – but even this picture shows him crawling out from behind the cubby-hole I put all of the switches and routers.

This morning I entered the office and found the laptop lid closed (i’ve been leaving it partially open to prevent him from laying on the keyboard) so I opened it and started the day. About an hour or so into the day I go to click on one of my bookmark toolbar links and find that a new one has appeared and it’s named “ZZZZZZZZZZZ” and points to http://Z/

So, not only did he manage to get on the keyboard, but also to pop up the browser save dialog box *and* save a new bookmark!

After telling that to my SBH she said I should blog about it, so I am :) I’m sure there will be more Dax Diary entries to come.

One of the things that had been holding me back from doing any work on the bearlog is that it was a really custom WordPress Theme that I had hacked together a long time ago – so it was hard to do anything “modern” with it.

Well, okay, that’s just the excuse I kept using. What really was the culprit was the complete mind-numbing experience of being the primary care-giver for an 87 year old with the beginnings of dementia. Now that will keep you busy and suck all your free time away.

Sadly the issue has resolved itself in that he has passed away, this happened three months ago and it’s taken me a lot more time than I thought to work things out. When you have been taking care of someone (his daughter and myself to be clear – we tag-teamed a lot) for over 15 years things don’t change quickly.

I’m not bringing this up to generate sympathy or pities – just noting it as part of the why

So, finally, I just cut-the-cord and upgraded to the default WordPress and brought over bits of the old setup and will be enhancing it over time. There is a lot to talk about in the XMPP, Python and Messaging world and I’ve got a lot to say but need to start saying it!

Taking the first step…

One of my new online friends just posted about his mom’s death today. While I have never met him in person the brief interactions I’ve had with him combined with the still sad feelings from my own mom’s death make for a very sad and quiet evening tonight.

I know from experiance that nothing I say or do will help, heck, I said as much in the blog comments, but I still feel an urge to write something down. I’m so glad he had a chance to be with his mom at the end and say goodbye, that’s something I never had a chance to do and still think about all the things I wanted to tell my mom but now never can.

So before I start another tearing-up session, let me close with the picture he posted: