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She's so cute, I just can't help it . . .

Yep, another Kita picture. I've been getting a lot of grief from people lately because I've got all these pictures of my puppy and none of my children! LOL. Well, at least I can say that Ritina took this one. So there!

Kita's first portrait

Today I finally took a bit of time to take more than just some quick snapshots of Kita. Ritina has been after me to get some pictures of Kita among the flowers near our front porch, so that seemed like a good place for a portrait style picture.

As I suspect is the case with most Shiba puppies, sitting still for a portrait doesn't rank real high on Kita's list of things she's interested in doing. So, after taking her for a long walk to expend some of her boundless energy, bribing her with cookies hidden in the plants, and getting help from Ritina to return her to the flower bed over and over and over and---you get the idea---I managed a few decent captures. This is one of my favorites.

Suspect caught on camera!

The boys and I were heading out for a few hours to meet with some other homeschool kids and go to an art class. We were taking Kita with us, but we forgot something and needed to go back to one of their rooms for a moment. We left Kita alone in the living room for maybe sixty seconds. She had no trouble finding a way to amuse herself. Click the thumbnail for some larger shots of the crime scene.

Kita's first week

Well, Kita's been with us for one week as of today. I snapped a few pictures of her yesterday while she was playing with what has become one of her favorite toys: an old racquetball. Click the photo to the left to see the rest of the pictures. So, other than these quick photos of her incredible cuteness, what can I say?

Well, she's smart! That's for certain. And she's definitely got attitude! :) But, she already loves her new home, and she's added a lot of life to this place. Her puppy teeth are incredibly sharp; all our fingers and arms are the proof. And she's amazingly quick and catlike. When she gets a bit bigger, I predict the demise of a few rabbits that presently frequent our backyard. The other night when I took her out in the middle of the night, she saw a cricket on our front porch---she caught it! And she's fearless. That tends to play against her at this age because she doesn't know what can hurt her, but she doesn't seem afraid of much of anything at all, including a neighbor's retriever that's about ten times her own size. She had that poor dog running with it's tail between it's legs! I think life with Kita is going to be fun . . .

Meet Kita

One week from tomorrow we will be welcoming Kita into our home! We still miss Coco and Honey very much, and they will never be forgotten, but we have agreed as a family that we are ready to bring a new love into our lives. Coco and Honey were both rescues, but I was ready to adopt a puppy from a breed that I have long admired: a Shiba Inu. We have settled on the name Kita for this beautiful creature. She is just under seven-weeks-old in the picture here---taken for us by her breeder---and she'll be joining our family next Saturday, September 9. (Click the photo to go to the Flickr set I've created just for Kita.)

Shibas are from the same bloodline as Akitas, and in fact many people think of them as small versions of Akita's but with more than Akita-sized attitudes! To truly appreciate the Shiba, whose puppies the dogs' own national organization refers to as "fiery little furballs from hell", you have to get to know their personality. If you're interested, here's a brief description from the National Shiba Club of America, and here is an amusing tribute from a Shiba owner that is well worth the read! (Note that the latter link contains a small bit of PG and R rated language.)

I will post more pictures and tell more about her when she finally joins us next week. We've been waiting for almost five weeks now, and we are finding it hard to be patient!

PayPal WARNING: SELLER BEWARE!

Like many people, I was naive in my belief that PayPal was a secure service for transacting money. It IS incredibly convenient, but I was the recently the victim of a scam that involves despicable business practices of PayPal itself! And now I have learned that I am not alone. It would appear that tens of thousands of people have, like myself, essentially had our money stolen from us while PayPal turns a blind eye.

Here's how it happened with me. I received a PayPal paymet for a service I had performed. After the service was complete, the buyer apparently reported to PayPal that the payment was an unauthorized transaction on their account. After ten days, after I had responded carefully and clearly to PayPal's questions, PayPal reversed the transaction! Apparently, there is NO PROTECTION TO THE SELLER WHATSOEVER for services and non-tangible goods. And apparently the problems only start there.

In the aftermath, I googled "paypal problems" and learned that I am not alone. Spend ten minutes reading the PayPal Horror Stories on the site that appears at the top of the search results, and I guarantee you'll forever think twice about receiving money via PayPal again from someone you don't know.

My only consolation is that I lost a relatively small amount of money, just over $100, compared to others who've lost thousands to PayPal. Given the large numbers of people who have been defrauded of money because of PayPal and never recovered it, I'm no longer hopeful that I'll ever see my $100 again, but I am fully informed now and am seeking an alternative to PayPal that involves a real merchant account that is subject to the regulations designed to protect consumers and merchants from exactly the fraudulent behavior that PayPal's structure is supporting. The bottom line apparently is that PayPal is not considered a bank and as such is not subject to the laws and regulations that govern banking in this country. Imagine if your bank had the authority to suddenly return money to a payer just because they complained about it! Fraud would be rampant, and so it is with PayPal.

And, before you can say "class action lawsuit", it's already been done. Apparently PayPal avoided the issue by settling for around $10M before it went to trial, and now they happily continue their despicable practices knowing that they've already beat the rap once and could probably do it again by dangling some more dollar signs. It's so obvious when communicating with PayPal that they really have a "could care less" attitude. And why should they care? I mean, they've got their money after all. If a few customers have to suffer, big deal, right? As long as they can turn a profit. Hey---it's the American way!

UPDATE

I've been researching alternatives to PayPal because, frankly, there's just no way that I can trust them for payment processing now. Knowing that a payer can cause the reversal of a transaction up to six months after making the payment just scares the hell out of me now.

I've found about a half-dozen alternatives, but BidPay looks the best. I found it amusing that BidPay's number-one bullet point is protection from chargebacks. Seems I'm not the only soon-to-be-ex-PayPal customer looking for a better company!

If you currently have success with a payment system other than PayPal, that, like PayPal does not require you to maintain your own merchant account, post a comment and let us know what it is.

Stopping Mosquito Bites From Itching

Mosquitoes are the bane of my outdoor existence. When I step outdoors, the beeper of every mosquito within a ten mile radius goes nuts, letting them know that their favorite meal, ME, is now being served. Apparently my particular body chemistry makes me a very tasty treat indeed. I can be outside with Ritina for an hour and she'll have zero bites to my thirty. I'm the guy that gets invited to backyard barbecues to keep the mosquitoes away from the other guests! I get this vision in my head of ten thousand mosquitoes all taking on little tiny cell phones: "Yeah, he's outside man. Let's go!"

Well, it would be tolerable if the bites didn't itch so darned much! Every year it's the same story with me. The first round of bites don't seem to affect me much. But, after about ten to fifteen bites, I start having a huge reaction. For the next month, any bite swells and itches like mad, and then they seem to calm down again for the rest of the year. During that period when they're bad, though, they can be so distracting that I literally cannot focus on anything else. So, I've tried the gamut of solutions. Everything, honestly. If it supposedly stops a mosquito bite from itching, I've probably tried it.

Well, this year, today is the day the bites started going nuts. The last six or seven bites that I received while mowing yesterday are hot and red and were driving me insane. This drove me to try a new solution. A couple years ago, Ritina contracted poison ivy, and the itch remedy that we discovered worked for her was hot water. Piping hot water, as hot as she could stand it. She'd take a steaming hot twenty minute shower, and for the next eight hours, the itch was gone!

I wondered if this would work for a mosquito bite. We have a handheld sprayer on our shower, so I turned the water on as hot as I could stand it, nearly to the point where it burned but not quite, and I sprayed the bites. At first, this made them itch about one hundred times worse! But, after about thirty seconds of treating them this way, the itch started to subside. For good measure, I kept it up for about six or seven minutes until all the bites were thoroughly cooked, and lo and behold, THE ITCHING IS TOTALLY GONE! I don't mean just relieved a bit like most creams and lotions seem to do, but totally, completely, absolutely gone! These are serious bites, and so far I'm itch-free for about four hours. Woo hoo!

Continue reading "Stopping Mosquito Bites From Itching"

Video Tribute to Coco and Honey

It is probably of little consequence to anyone but me and my family, but I made a short video tribute to the two dogs whose love I shared for the past decade and a half. I did this mostly because I don't ever want to forget them.

What Am I?

"What Am I?" is a kid's computer game that Thomas and I created. We got the idea six years ago from a toy, and at that time we did all the artwork and the audio. I'd forgotten about it until I recently started teaching Thomas and Taylor to program, and I ran across all the media files. I decided it was about time to turn it all into a program, and I'm very pleased with the result. My child's voice and original artwork are now immortalized in a pretty cool game!

The requirements are a Windows PC with working sound. Download it here or by clicking the screenshot of the game above. The download is about 3 Meg due to the audio and graphics. (For dialup users this translates to a roughly 10 to 15 minute download time.)

It's two games in one. First, the "What Am I?" game is a reasoning game that little kids just seem to love! I even find it addictive, so much more so because the game uses Thomas's voice and artwork. I won't embarrass my boys by telling you how old they were when we finally ditched the toy this game is based on, but as simple as it is, they'd play the thing a lot. Second, the "Memory" game is a version of concentration. I threw it in because it was so easy to add on, and it gives the program a nice extra touch.

I'd love to hear from anyone whose kids actually play this. Bug reports, feedback, etc., can also be reported by commenting here.

In memory of Coco

Coco had a massive stroke around 3 AM Saturday morning. I held her close until it was over and she survived the event, but it became clear she would not recover this time---she's had maybe a dozen mini-strokes over the past eight months, but it was obvious that this time it was a major event. After consulting with a wonderful local veteranarian, there was really no choice other than ending her suffering peacefully by putting her to sleep. We took Coco to the vet as a family, and even before we left the house we knew that Coco would not be coming home. Our family has faced some really tough challenges, but the difficulty of this caught me off guard. I think it was partly because I'd also promised myself and Coco that I would not end her life unnaturally, that I would care for her to the very end even if it meant carrying her into the yard three times a day. But, she couldn't move, she couldn't eat, she couldn't stand, and the vet pointed out the symptoms that indicated that Coco's brain was swelling and that she was likely in a lot of pain, a diagnosis confirmed by my observation that whenever I moved her head she would tense and sometimes whimper. For all the love this small but marvelous creature had given me for almost fifteen years, I could not allow her to suffer like this for hours or days. Ritina, Thomas, Taylor and I were all with her, and I know she felt our love right to the very end.

I'm sure there are those that probably think I'm just nuts going on about a dog like this as if she were a human child, but I also know there are those of you who truly understand. Coco wasn't just some animal that ran around our house; she was family, giving and receiving as much love as all the rest of us, and her death leaves a tremendous hole in our daily lives. Coco was our first "baby", joining Ritina and I almost three years before Thomas was born. She was an intelligent creature with a playful spirit that thrived even to the very last day of her life. Do you see those two toys with her in the photo? She would play with those things and with us all the time. She'd grab them by a tail or an arm and toss them around the living room in front of us until we'd join her.

I learned a lot from this dog. She lived only a few months shy of fifteen years, a marvelous lifespan for a dog, and I believe the reason was in large part due to her approach to life. She was loving and playful to the very end, and she never forgot what it was like to be a puppy. How many of us would live enriched lives if we only remembered and embraced the joys and wonders of being a child.

Thank you, Coco, for fifteen years of unconditional love and friendship. I promise I will never forget you.