home by the sea

This is one of those things in life I didn't want to think of much the less write about. Aging parents. Both of mine are in their seventies now, and seem to be approaching that point in life where they might need some extra help in doing what used to come easy to them. They're (thankfully) still fully capable of caring for themselves and only need the kind of help that my bi-anual trips seem to satisfy. They always have a honey do list waiting for me when I arrive, but the list has been growing slightly longer with each visit. I managed to get everything done on this trip but spent each day taking care of something else that wasn't on the list. I have a feeling that the list will be longer than the time I have time for on my next visit.

Something happened that really broke my heart. It happened more than once, and I first caught it out of the corner of my eye while we were out shopping. It was ever so slight, but it nonetheless happened. My mommy ... has the old people shakes. Right now it's just her head, and seems to happen only when she's sitting. Mom is a little too proud to admit this kind of stuff is happening to her; I know she'll deny it so there was no point in bringing it up. This was confirmed recently by my sister who told me that both she and my father have already met with resistance when they tried. Other than this everything else is in perfect workling order.

My father is doing very well even though he only recently developed type two diabetes and gout. He's made all the proper adjustments to his life to avoid suffering from these afflictions and leads a pretty active life. Well, active in a stays at home and watches Chinese soap operas on his new HDTV kind of way.

This is a potential game changer to say the least. My sister has a family and occasionally needs help from time to time. Life led me down a different path and I'm in a place now where I have neither. I know that caring for my parents is undeniably in my future. It's now simply a matter of when which possibly makes it the proverbial monkey wrench in my plans. I'm not complaining though. They're my parents and I owe them everything. Not a single qualm will be given if I gotta drop my life to help them live out their's in a comfortable way. It does mean that this journey I've been preparing for will have to be postponed for a bit. I do take a great deal of comfort in knowing that everything I've done these last three years has not been wasted.

Regardless of outcome, the game is still afoot!

come back another day

I've been writing about stuff from my trip but I'm not ready to post it yet. Part of it's because I had stuff I had to do, and the other half was to keep my mind distracted. You'll understand why when I publish later.

I've had quite a few good things happen over this past week 

I've got a new boss at work. Technically this is my second new boss for 2013 too. Towards the end of last year we were told about a reorganization and that we'd be getting a new boss in the new year. We did the usual mini meet and greet where you also get to voice any concerns. Mine was about being able to work from the local office instead of commuting. I've been riding the company shuttle for the last four months and have come to learn the strains of commuting three hours a day, four days a week. My first new boss was about to say yes to my request, but didn't get a chance to because he and my second new boss wound up trading positions in yet another reorg. I still got what I wanted as my second boss approved my request. I'm now back to a local commute, and grateful to have a bit more of the day to do with as I please.

Here's how my recent updates to the blog settings turned out. As I suspected the bot thing I turned on did nothing so I turned it back off. The disabling of anonymous comments turned out to be a success. I'm no longer seeing as many repeat visits from referrer sites as I used to. 

On Saturday I took Bridgie in so she could get her bloodwork done. The results took a few days to get, but the news was good. Her bloodwork results (from June last year) showed elevated enzymes in her liver which were caused by inactivity and being overweight. The vet said that in her recent results, those levels had dropped dramatically and were back to normal now. Good to know everything we've been doing is paying off.

Earlier last week I received a reminder call about my tax appointment with H&R Block. Crap! I scrambled to not only reschedule it, but had to find a closer office since I had moved to a new city. I lucked out though. Not only was the office around the corner from my new place, but were they able to schedule me for last Saturday afternoon. The best part is after we got them done I learned I'm getting back a little more than the year prior on my return. 

One of the best surprises to come out of last week was my sissy informing me that she and the nephew will be arriving tomorrow to spend a few days with me. This is kind of huge thing because no one else, aside from Trevor & Leah whose wedding I was in last year, has been able to visit me since moving out of California. Most of them wanted to come, but the effects of the recession kept them anchored. I'm very excited and can't seem to fall asleep even though I'm way past my bedtime.

private eyes

Ever feel like you're being watched but can't tell if it's in a good or bad way? That's how I've felt over the months of December and January. They were a boom according to the pageview totals, and I would be a lot more excited about that had my followers grown with the traffic. They haven't, at least publicly they haven't. I know a lot of that traffic came from referrer spam sites, bots, and the rest from spam commenters. I'm just not sure how much was real people reading versus spam traffic yet. Before I go on here's my obligatory why I blog declaration. It's done mainly as a means to document my story/progress through this chapter in my life. I chose to share it publicly because perhaps something here may help you at best, or at worst my back road slide into dementia entertains you. Whatever the case, there's a cute beagle in the story and no one can resist a cute beagle.

I did some research and no one has found an effective way of blocking unwanted traffic in any sort of effective way where blogs are concerned. The advice being offered on referrer spam is to simply not click on the links and they'll go away. They, in fact, don't go away. Instead they go out and tell all their friends who tell their friends as is evidenced by all the new links appearing in my blog stats. Still I managed to find a two possible solutions worth trying. Hold my beer and watch this ...

The first was to allow only the google bot to crawl my site while blocking all others. Here's the link on how to set it up if you're feeling up to it (http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html). Unfortunately I also read that this only really works if said bot happens to comply with the command. I'll see what this does over the next week and most likely remove it if it proves to be useless.

The second change was to disable anonymous comments. Sorry I know some of you haven't been able to sort our your blogger account/comment issues but you're going to have to solve them if you wish to comment here. The spam comment filter works great and catches every single one, but I also use "comment moderation" as an added layer of security. I noticed, after about a year of this, that all spam comments were posted anonymously which is the main reason for this change.

I imagine what I've done is the digital version of drinking snake oil, twice. So until google or someone else comes up with an actual solution I think we're all screwed. 

Good luck!