April 4

 Up and down and round and round.

Business as usual.

Yesterday the new laptop arrived. Installing a completely new dev setup is to be honest borderline capable for me these days. A lot of effort and faffing. It has to be a good day for me to tackle that kind of task, and even then, I probably wouldn't. It's not the complexity. It's the stamina required. I still know shit. But my open for business hours are short. Erratic. I will be building no more Great Walls of China.

But I had a plan. Ghetto style upgrade.

First thing I did on breaking out the new laptop, not switch it on, not plug it in. Flip it over and take it apart. Which admittedly probably gives many pause for thought. Here is a brand new just bought laptop and the first thing you do is break it. Uh huh. Pulled the SSD out. And put the other laptops SSD in. Straight like for like swap. Which is dirty.

Fired it up and waited for all the sirens to go off.

Predictably almost every driver had failed to load. Display was cranky. Trackpad didnt work. Audio was kaput. Network was out. A forest of Unknown Devices. Blurp. But I did have all my stuff installed and ready to use.

The network bit was the crucial one. Fix that, and the rest should fix itself by and large. I plugged the brand new never used SSD into a caddy and pulled the drivers from it. Just for the wifi. I couldn't be arsed hand cranking the rest.

After 5 minutes of the wifi coming to life and the internet hosing down the machine, windows had sorted 95% of the remaining borked drivers. A reboot and a forced hand cranked update to the display driver, and everything was perfect.

So ghetto hot swapping of windows is perfectly doable these days. Saves a lot of time. And is pretty straight forward. A little knowledge of what you're looking at is all that's required, but nothing too exotic.

So that was nice. Saved myself a laborious task. Probably the better part of a days worth of labour condensed down to 10 minutes.

Vet appointment yesterday too.

Can't fault the vet again, tip top service. I went there with my plan about altering her meds. Let the vet work through where he was. And we had a discussion. He took on my thoughts and agreed it was a decent plan. We talked about other drug options to cover the weak spots. As it is, we've left it another month - this time her dose has been increased, and, he is going to talk to the pharma company about increasing frequency, whether that's ok and yada. So, I'll keep an eye on Athena this month, see how she does with the increased dosage, and then next month, we will have an update on whether frequency increase is ok, or the increased dosage is fine itself, or supplemental drugs to add on.

At one point we were both reading out of the meds bible the vet had, reading the very small print about librela and whether you could push it or not.

Left very happy. We're doing all we can for Athena. Vet is great. Treats you like an adult. Awesome.

Again, I could only reflect on the enormous difference between that and my GP.

Afterwards I went to pick up Hazel, she wanted to go shopping. 

But by the end of it. It was too much. Way, way too much. A busy day. I flagged. And struggled. I was ok. But. Yeah. Grinding along the bottom. Hunched over the supermarket trolley. Uuuugggghhhhhh.

Got home, crashed, and slept.

Today I have been slow to get going. Not in the mood for work again. At all. Drained. And I was tired. And have felt vaguely ill all day. Just ill enough to wipe out all appetite. No to a coffee.. blerp... no to a sandwich... blurg... everything queasy inducing. Just water.

Uh huh.

Athena is livelier. An almost instant difference. A bit more feisty. But still a very old lady. With a little more boxer bounce. We went for a walk today - probably taking the piss for me. She was very happy. In and out of the water. She even old school picked up a big old branch and wanted a bit of a tug. Cut her mouth open immediately - her mouth is too banged up to put up with that kind of nonsense anymore. She of course paid no mind to the blood. And trotted off happily.

I am happy she is still here. Happy doesn't even begin to cover it. Far more fundamental than that.

She's doing alright for her age. Focus on that.

Don't let the existentialist dread in. Don't let the existentialist dread in. Don't let the existentialist dread in.

Ha.

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