Category: Family

I’m not going to try to be eloquent about this, but I thought I should write something here, just so everyone is on the same page…

Last night, my family went out for supper. When we got home, we found Sunshine, one of our dogs, in severe distress in our front hallway. We rushed her to the emergency veterinary clinic, where we found out that she had had a grand mal seizure. The vet told us that sometimes this can happen only once, sometimes it will happen every few weeks or months, and sometimes it will happen effectively continuously unless it can be managed. They did blood tests, and kept her there. We went home.

This morning the vet called us at 7am and told us that Sunshine had had 2 more seizures during the night. We rapidly dressed and went to see her. When we got there, she was quite doped up, but we did get to pet her and talk to her. The vet told us that the blood tests had all come back negative, and that given her age, it was likely not epilepsy. The doctor felt that whatever was causing the seizures was probably something intrusive, like a brain tumor, and that although it might be possible to control the seizures, her life expectancy was low.

As a family, we decided that we wanted to save Sunshine from the pain and confusion that she would have to go through, just so that we could keep her with us for a few more weeks/months, so we had her put down.

She will be sorely missed by all of us, but we take comfort in knowing that her legacy lives on in the many sons and daughters that she had, and that we gave her a good life despite the very rough times she had before we got her from the humane society. She was a very good dog.

The rest of us in the family (Deb, Dennis, Lucky and I) will be sad for quite a while, but we know that the love we feel for each other will pull us through. If you would like to commemorate Sunshine’s passing, please donate something to the Humane Society; they gave us a good friend for eight good years. Thanks.

Sunshine in her favourite spot

Grandma turned 75 today, so we all got together at Mama Grazzi’s for a celebration.

Best wishes for many more!

Actually, I went to bed early; four days of snowboarding had caught up with me. Deb and Dennis went over to Stacey and Randy’s place for the traditional get together.

Happy New Years everyone.

Dennis is doing snowboarding TA training this week. He was at the top of the hill for his third run of the day, putting on his board, when the binding came apart in his hand. Yikes! Good thing he wasn’t riding at the time.

Then he walks back down the hill with his instructor, and half way down the hill he sees his cousin (Tim) sitting in the snow, holding his hand and crying. It turns out he’s broken his wrist. Double yikes! He’s at CHEO getting it set as I write this.

Let’s hope the rest of the season is less eventful.

Update: Apparently it was a double break. The poor guy :-(. (I’m going to have to apologize to Stacey. Based on Dennis’ description, I downplayed the seriousness of it when I talked to her.)

Deb likes her laptop.

I unfortunately couldn’t convince her to go for a MacBook Pro, so I ended up getting her a Dell: 2GHz Core2Duo, 2Gig RAM, 160Gig drive, ATI X1400 grapics (256Meg), 6 hour battery. It really is a pretty nice machine. My task for the day is to move over everything she cares about from her old one. So far, I’ve moved her favourites, her email and address book, and her iTunes library. Now it gets more subtle…

I got an 80Gig iPod video.

I already had a library of movies that I had ripped — yes, from my own DVDs — to watch on my LifeDrive, so I just dropped them all into VisualHub and told it to convert them for use on the iPod; 12 hours and 20 Gig later, I’m all set. The screen is small, but it’s perfectly acceptable for my use.

Dennis got lots of cool stuff…

… as usual — games for both the PC and 360, a wireless 360 controller, a new snow skate, a marshmallow gun,… — but the gift he liked the best was a $2 rubber tube that you blow into to make farting noise. *sigh*.

We had Christmas day dinner (mid-day meal) at my parents place.

Excellent use of turkey. We got a chance to see Sonny and Edna for the first time in quite a while. They’re both looking well, although Sonny was down with a bit of cold. We spent the rest of the afternoon pigging out [For those that like it, no one does deserts like my family!], opening presents, playing games and chatting. What more could you want?

The best of the season to one and all!

A shot of our tree at night.

As bogus as our old artificial tree is, we’ve had it for longer than we’ve had Dennis, and it has become a tradition unto itself. Like Charlie Brown’s, it still looks pretty good when you get it decorated.