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Category Archives: life in general

In which Yaris continues to show that she’s a princess

I recently had Yaris tested to see if she has any allergies.  She’s consistently had skin issues and we’ve never really been able to figure out what causes them.

I thought maybe it was her shampoo and I switched it.  It seemed to help but didn’t get rid of the reactions.

I put her on flea medication and that helped a tremendous amount.  She apparently is very allergic to fleas.  I mean, everyone is to a point.  Your immune system reacts to the flea saliva and the area of the bite will become inflamed and will itch a little.  But with Yaris one flea bite might make her entire belly red and then she breaks out in hives.  Ugh.  What a princess.

But with this allergy test, which was a mail-in kit where you give the lab a sample of fur and saliva, I found a whole list of things that Yaris reacts to.  Things like…chicken eggs.  But not duck eggs.  No, no.  She needs the more expensive egg.  She also reacts to tuna.  Which makes her kind of sad.  She really likes tuna.  But salmon is really good for her.  Salmon.  Of course.

But the allergen that really stood out to me was…human dander.  Yes.  Yaris is allergic to HUMAN dander.  She’s allergic to humans.  I’ve never met another dog who is allergic to humans.  But Yaris is.  Because she’s a princess.

Incidentally, she isn’t allergic to moose.  Maybe I’m in the clear.

On deep fried hard boiled eggs and phones

SavedPicture-201526112337.pngI don’t know why, but I really like this screenshot of a bunch of fried, hard boiled eggs.

So, as you know, I recently had to acquire a new phone as Peppero went and shattered his face.  I stayed with the same OS with the new phone, but a completely different manufacturer.  I went back to HTC, which I never planned on doing.  I had several bad experiences with HTC.  But Microsoft/Nokia has the weirdest business plan with their phones and they decided not to release the next gen of Peppero, the Lumia 930, in the US.  I…don’t understand this reasoning at all.  That meant, if I wanted to stay with the Lumia line, which I wanted to do, I would have to go down a level on my phone, which I did not want to do.  I would be missing out on storage, possibly processor speed, and built in wireless charging.

Going with HTC, one of the very few other manufacturers releasing phones with the Windows Phone OS for ATT, I could keep my storage and even get expandable storage and gain processor speed…but now I’m missing out on my Lumia specific apps, the really nice camera, and…built in wireless charging.  And it’s not like the HTC One can ever incorporate wireless charging because it has an aluminum housing.  Sugh.  SUGH.

Well, with the wireless charging, I’m getting around that with a wireless charging adapter.  It’s a microfilm with a coil inside that outputs to a micro USB connection which you then plug into the normal charging port of your phone.  So…I can still charge my phone wirelessly but I lose my USB connection.  I don’t often transfer things to/from my phone with my computer, so it’s acceptable.  But it was SO. CONVENIENT. to have inductive charging on my Nokia.

With my Lumia specific apps…I just miss them.  There’s really nothing I can do about that.  One that I hadn’t realized that was Lumia specific was the call block app because they had incorporated that so well into the phone settings I thought it was just included with the OS.  So…now I have to manually screen calls again.  Yay.

I also miss the camera more than I thought I would.  HTC’s and Nokia’s (now Microsoft’s) approach to what makes a good camera has been different.  Nokia tries to jam as many pixels as it can into is sensor (it occurs to me that I don’t know if camera phones use CCDs or CMOS and that I should probably look into this) and give you nice optics and various built in filtering to give you clean shots.  HTC uses “ultrapixels” to help with low light scenarios, which means you can only cram so many pixels onto the sensor, and…a second lens?  I haven’t really figured out this second lens thing.  Something about depth?

Now, it may sound like I am completely dissatisfied with Derrick (as in gallows), but I am not.  It’s a really good phone.  The build quality, which was a huge thing with my previouos HTCs, is really good.  Great.  Wonderful even.  The hardware inside is also wonderful.  And the screen is beautiful.  It’s a really good phone, whether you prefer Android or Windows.  I would definitely recommend the HTC One M8.  But…I do miss the Lumia line.

Anyway, about the egg.  I was playing with the camera, trying to take a photo of this deep fried hard boiled egg I had gotten from a place that claims to be an Irish pub, and I had burst shot on and didn’t realize it.  So I ended up with a lot of photos of this egg.  And I like the result of the tiles of photos of eggs.  Probably more so than the photo of the egg itself.  The end.