Phil and Robin both did well today in surgery. Jennifer removed two mammary tumors in Robin and Phil lost around 9 teeth. He had rotten roots and rather inflamed areas. He must have been in some severe pain.

Phil is up and drinking water. He will get liquids and soft foods tonight and for a few days. Robin should be able to eat normally on her own and I just need to keep an eye on her pouch.

Jennifer was able to get a sample from Phil and she did inject into Robin. Would we be so lucky to get something from it. But if not, I now have a method and supplies to try myself.

Phil has been acting different for a few days so I decided to take him to the vet. He has not been eating anything except for his yogurt. He has been still and weak and not his normal hyper self. I also felt what appeared to be a few tick like bumps on him.

I took Robin as well for a basic checkup since I knew my vet would want to see her anyway, but she has been doing great lately.

Turns out that the bumps on Phil were just dirt and stuff that I couldnt easily investigate while holding him still by myself. Inspecting his teeth, Phil appears to have a number of dental issues including his original broken jaw area but also not limited to that. I think Phil has attacked the side of the cage a few times and has probably broken more teeth or hurt his gums or such, so he has a few noticeable issues. I believe the mouth pain has kept him from eating anything and thusly he has been losing strength and appearing sickly. So he'll be in tomorrow for dental surgery and removal of a number of dead teeth and she'll do a more exhaustive inspection on him then as well to look for any other issues.

Robin get a big hello from Jennifer as she inspected the original chest surgery area. I decided to hold Robin upside down for inspection and suddenly out of her pouch popped a large thing I had never seen before. Turns out that she has been hiding a couple of mammary tumors in her pouch, one being rather huge. I had felt something solid in her pouch before but having little experience with these animals I paid no attention to it thinking it was a normal part of something down there. So it is my fault for not catching this issue sooner. Opossums should have nothing hard or bony anywhere in or near their belly or pouch area.

So, she is also going to surgery tomorrow with Phil. Since Jennifer will have both animals sedated, if possible at the time, she may try to collect a sample from Phil and use it to attempt an insemination of Robin for me. That is low priority of course but naturally I hope it happens and that it works.

Hopefully Robin will retain at least 3 of her 5 nipples intact after her surgery tomorrow.

UPDATE:

I wanted to get a photo of Robin's tumor this afternoon so I got her out and immediately found that she has been bleeding. I dont know if she has suddenly decided to groom her tumor or if it has suddenly burst, but this is just super odd timing as I wasnt even taking her to the vet this morning, it was Phil. I guess it will be taken care of in the morning, but I did not expect the thing to be all bloody all of a sudden.

I was up very late this morning. A storm rolled in around 3am and I decided to go to bed. Just as I did, the power went out. Since I host our web site here, I have to be somewhat concerned. So I got up to see what I needed to do. First thing I noticed is that the server room was quickly getting warm without hvac. Data center servers dont like to be in warm environments. Luckily the storm brought with it cool air so I opened the windows and the door to let the breeze keep things cool.

I also manually shut down other servers that were not needed in order to keep the web server going as long as possible and to reduce heat output. I am now looking at a way to do this automatically in any power event. Problem is, once you shut off a server when on battery, the UPS generally needs to finally shut down and then power back up when the power is restored. The power reset generally boots up all of the servers your script turned off. But, if the UPS never power cycles but instead just comes back to line, there is never a power reset event to turn on the other boxes. So one needs to figure a way to script this scenario using wake on lan or some such device.

I have found some software that should be able to handle this but it has to exist on the last remaining server running (my web server) and it needs access to the UPS management cards and server nics (internal network)... So I have a few problems to figure out. I may have to keep an internal server running for this process.

At any rate, I have a battery bank of 48VDC at 170A. It runs things fine for awhile. This outage lasted three hours and the web server remained up and accessible with a small load including itself, the firewall, cisco switch, fiber switch and some other various network things.

08/15/2008 03:19:02 UPS: Switched to battery backup power; utility power failure.
08/15/2008 06:16:54 UPS: Returned from battery backup power; utility power restored.


I went to bed at 6:30am after closing the windows and restoring things.

We used to never ever have power issues here during even the worst storms. The day they were boring underground down the alley to lay the new fiber, the lights were flickering all day. This told me then that they were scraping along the 8000V underground power lines. So now, when we get heavy rain that soaks the ground, power shuts off as the transformers get overloaded due to the bare high voltage copper lines in the ground.

Nobody cares. It's scary and a shame. Anybody wanna donate a natural gas generator? Anything from 8,000 on up to 20,000 watt will do.

SEE ALSO:
http://www.sugarglider.com/glidergossip/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14274&whichpage=1#93076

Janice and Katy came today to pick up a m/f pair and the lone f abandons that I got in earlier. We spoke a bit about care and things and I offered myself as well as our community for continuing questions and answers as usual. I hope they do well and am anxious to hear about things in the future.

I have known for some time that our house is very energy inefficient, or rather, very wasteful. Also, running so many computer systems and support devices and network gear and cooling for those really adds up. Match that with a 30 year old bulletproof Lennox HVAC unit and the fact that I am home all the time and cant really set the temp for away, and you have extremely high energy bills.

Over the recent years I have replaced all light bulbs with CFLs which helps with consumption as well as heat. An average Incandescent bulb draws 60w and it's CFL mate is 13w. So anytime I replace or add lighting or any such endeavor, it is always Fluorescent in nature. I have even converted our security and tree and landscape lighting to fluorescent and I also have not been using most of that as of late in order to curb the scary bill a bit.

So this last week I have been going around the home-office and measuring power consumption on my devices. The workstations werent much of a surprise, but some things were. Did you know that your pc turned off draws around 30va/hr? Multiply that by 24hrs, then by 365days and then by my current power rate and I get $35/yr by just having my one pc plugged in and turned off. That isnt all that much for a year really, but then multiply that by every pc in the house, in my case, alot. Also add in ALL other electronic devices that are slowly draining power. Your vcr that you never use draws 50va turned off. Your gaming console draws 50va turned off. On and on and on. These devices are called vampires as they slowly suck energy which truly adds up over time and more noticeably now that rates are on the rise.

UPS "battery backups" draw a lot of energy just to keep the batteries charged. I have been using two ups's on my server farm knowing that each was lightly loaded. I just measured and found that each unit was drawing 170va with no load. That means that having dual ups's connected has been costing me $1.06 each day just for the privilege.

I have had six dell data center servers racked and plugged in but only 2 in use. The other four have been sitting there turned off waiting for my next project. I only now realized that each server sitting there has been slowly sucking 30va. So I have been wasting around 3kw per day or .40 by having unused servers plugged in.

I have since unplugged things not in use. I migrated all stuff to one UPS. I have made everyone in the house set their desktops to go to standby after 20 min. I have made my internal file server shut the hd's down after 20 min of no use.

I believe that I have at least saved 8kw per day and it took no effort to do, just effort to realize. I am going to attack the general house next. Gaming consoles and other unused devices are going to be unplugged and/or put onto mechanical switches. My large electronic piano that I use maybe once a week is going to be unplugged. Unplugging saves power and also keeps devices from being blown up if there is ever a power surge or lightning strike.

I spent this morning up in the attic working on our air conditioner. Turns out that our plenum was leaking rather badly so we were essentially cooling the attic and not recovering that cool air so the system works harder and cools less. I ripped off all the old dried and dead duct tape, reworked the plenum a bit and then sealed with wide foil tape like it should have been done. I also cleaned the coil and inspected the entire system upstairs like a good geek would do. I wrapped the naked plenum and coil housing in two layers of reflective blanket so all of that should absorb less heat. I have stopped the waterfall of AC to the attic so that should save some kilowatts per day or at least make me more comfy inside.

If I ever build a house, I am making sure there is a facilities closet in the center of it where a vertical HVAC system and the water heater, plumbing and other stuff will reside. It is unbearable working in a hot narrow floorless attic, peered between two beams trying not to fall through the ceiling. It's also just a dumb idea to put anything at all that needs servicing into the attic. Instead, there should be 16" of insulation covering all things and you never ever go up there. I wish we had basements here in Texas.

I am heavily considering having a radiant barrier sprayed onto the bottom of the rooftop decking to keep the attic cooler. When it is 108F outside, the rooftop can easily become 160F+ and the attic can easily become 140F+. That heat transfers to your AC system and through your roof. A radiant barrier will bounce some of that heat back out and can cool the attic by 20 degrees or more. Some updated insulation can also slow heat gain, and we need it all here, badly.

Then finally, I am looking into replacement HVAC systems. The new systems have some very nice features which is about time. Dual stage condensers, variable speed blower fans, humidity sensors, air flow and duct air temp sensors... I am even considering somewhat of an electronically zoned system in order to cool differing areas of the house differently. A heat pump may also be in order for us since Texas has light winters and I hardly ever use the heat then anyway. A cold 60F house beats the heck out of a humid 80F+ house anyday. I like to enjoy our winters since they are so short...

I cleaned out the worm farm last night. I had left it a little longer than usual and come to find that it was easier to clean this way. There were almost no tiny worms to worry about, 99.9% of them came out in one step simply using a plastic mesh strainer. So perhaps I have learned that it is acceptable to allow the larger worms to forage for beetle eggs for a time to allow the worm container to grow large so that they are all easy to migrate out of the frass. The worms climb up and eat eggs as well as the egg laying substrate which is empty egg cartons for me. Guess they like paper.

I have begun tossing all sorts of food items into my worm farm. Looking in there now I have flour tortilla, corn tortilla, corn cob, lettuce, shaved potato skin, apple skin.

I received 5 sugar gliders (3 cages) today from the nearby wildlife shelter. They will accept abandons directly or from the various animal control facilities around the area and then I eventually get hold of many of them for inspection, care and rehoming.

They almost never get the sexes right so I run them through a grueling hand inspection. I had a very hard time with this last batch determining their sexes. Turns out that each pair was m/f but the males had each received the typical "snip" neuter which leaves behind no trace of obvious maleness. The remaining male "area" looks very much like a young female pouch and can be rather misleading. So I say that the only way to truly tell sex these days is to open the pouch. If you cant, then it is prolly a snip neutered male.

So it is a half blessing here. I received neutered males for the very first time ever; YAY! But this time around I was hoping for all females so I could try to build an all female misfit colony to experience what that would be like. I have heard stories... I wont split the m/f pairs, so I guess I'll just have to rehome them as such.

This leaves me with the single female. Shes sweet. I believe I received her at the beginning of HLP syndrome, but shes getting all the nutrients and exercise that she needs now so she's looking better. Id love to keep her for myself but I keep enough cages already and I just dont have one to merge her into.

A Dallas motorcycle cop was killed in action the other day while escorting the Hillary motorcade. The funeral is today in Plano and they are expecting 4000 people including Hillary herself.

Today while on my way to work I was surprisingly pulled over by a motorcycle cop as I was trying to get onto the highway. Turned out that he was stopping all traffic from entering. I rolled down my window and asked who was coming through, assuming that it was political. He said the body of that cop.

A few minutes later off in the distance I saw a motorcade of cycles surrounding a solitary pristine white hearse. As they rolled by, my blocker took off after and we were set free. I resumed my course and ended up following very closely to the white hearse along my route, watching as every onramp was set free as I passed.

I am glad that the city respects officers killed in action like this. I have no problems being late for work today to show a little respect for a fallen protector.

Stuff like this makes you pause to think about things and perhaps at least appreciate the moment. When I heard of the officers death on the news, I never expected it to have any effect on my life. But it now certainly has.

The other day when I had Robin out I noticed that I could not see any remnant of her previous surgery and mean nasty chest infection. Her hair has covered any scar and shes as perky as a possum! It was touch and go there for awhile while she was being nursed back to health and I am simply amazed at the end result.

Below I am posting two photo moments. One is taken today which is all clean and wonderful looking and the second set is one I have never posted before. It is of her open puss filled stinky chest wound. It was really bad for awhile which is why I am amazed that it has healed so well now. We had to leave it open to allow the drugs to heal the infection before closing it up. It got really nasty and scary for a bit but I followed the vets directions, gave her baths, gave her meds and worked with her until we could sew it up.

Kudos to Robin for being a trooper! She's of a healthy disposition and weight now and eating well.

I know that I am crazy because of the things that make me ecstatic and giddy. Today it is realizing that both of my possums are choosing to poo and pee in their litter box instead of the cage floor or elsewhere. Can we say "potty trained!"

It is probably just the fact of having ground below them over an open grate as to why they choose the box, but it is still amazing. I can scoop it out easy and the cage is cleaner for it.

YAY!

   

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kazko
Gender: Male
Occupation:computer geek
Member since: Jan 24, 1997
Posts: 6747 View my pictures!
I'm on the map!
My Bio
NUTHOUSE (3) Pican 4/30/2002, died 6/02/2010 Buddy 5/01/2006 Hazel 2/01/2007, rehomed 11/28/2011 Maya 4/25/2007 Pili 4/25/2007 MISFITS (3) Big Guy 9/23/2003, died 1/29/2014 Lil Guy 9/23/2003, died 5/13/2015 Hunter 4/19/2006, died 3/23/2014 JP 8/12/2006 Shikoni 2004 Kioko 2003 Washi 2003, died 5/27/2014 SUGARSHACK (3) Chico 1/15/2006, died 9/14/2011 Cookie 10/15/2005 Kimmie 10/15/2005 Lucky 5/25/2007 Spritz 8/24/2007, died 7/06/2011 Ginger 8/24/2007, died 12/16/2012 Rock 9/09/2007, died 3/23/2013 Crystal 9/09/2007, died 11/01/2012

   

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