TERRIBLE VIOLENCE

Not sure if anyone's still paying attention now that the WSN address is dead, but YEEEAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So...

Or at least it was...

If the missing images on this blogspot page and the fact that websurfnicaragua.com now leads to random advertising haven't tipped you off, strange and terrible things have been afoot with my internet websitery provider. After a couple of attempts to pay for hosting with no "thanks for your payment" or "dude, you haven't paid us" emails, I get an email from the guy that runs the place, telling me that my card (which was full of money at the time) was rejected and that I need to call. So I call like a hundred thousand times and never get through, and the site gets taken down, prompting me to call a few hundred thousand more times, and still just get prompted to leave a message, and I don't, because I'm weird about not just leaving a message in matters of serious bidness. Anyway, I said to hell with it and tried to pay through the company's website again, this time with an actual credit card, as opposed to debit, and a couple weeks later no charges have appeared on there. I guess the next course of action, if I ever manage any sort of contact with these people again (Oddly enough, I'm not sure if they can actually contact me now, because none of the websurfnicaragua.com email addresses seem to work) is to just warp back to 1987 and send a check, and see what happens.


Anyway, I'm going to try to not be a dick about the whole thing, because a lot of this could have been avoided by me actually checking my email more than once a week or sending one from time to time. Then again, ALL of this could have been avoided if my host (who I'm not going to name in a post as bitchy as this one, because I really am trying to not be a dick here) ran things the way every even semi-professional website of any kind has been running since everyone noticed that the internet existed, probably sometime around 1996 or so. So far, only one website I've ever encountered that sold a good or service of any kind has had a payment system set up where not only do credit/debit card payments not go through instantaneously, but they can take weeks or even months to be processed. Hell, in that time, I can actually forget that I made an attempt to pay earlier - Especially because when a card gets rejected, as was apparently the case with me, whatever system may or may not be in place never told me. I didn't know of any card rejections until months and months and months had passed, and the host owner just emailed me himself. (Which was actually kind of cool of him to do, for the record) Seriously. Go to any commercial-type website out there and try to buy something, but intentionally fudge up something like the expiration date or security code and see what happens. Half a second later, (or longer if you're on dial-up, all putting the phone receiver on a cradle, watching some VHS tapes on your black-and-white TV while it connects) you'll get a message telling you that your card won't work. So yeah, the system in place here is not so good. I'd jokingly say that their online credit card payment system is just a regular old email form that someone has to check and then enter manually somewhere else, but I can't do that jokingly, because I'm pretty sure that's how it actually works. Once again, I am trying so hard to not be a dick, because the rare actual contact I've had with company has been pleasant as hell, but Jesus, just go get a PayPal merchant account or something.

If it's on a bus, you know it's secure.

Anyway, I'm going to find some way to actually get these people the $60-something I owe them, but after that, I think I'm going to just wash my hands of the situation and start afresh somewhere else, once situations in real-life world calm down enough for me to type words for the internet on the regular. New place, new time, new host, new address, new everything. This blog is still going to be here in the meantime, and I'll probably throw something up as sporadically as I've been doing, but nothing major, probably for a while. I'll keep you people that I don't know in person who actually remembered to bookmark the Blogspot address updated on any developments, and if you care about freedom and therefore football, it'll mostly still be business as usual over at Armchair Linebacker. (NFL labor dispute aside) But yeah, all good things must come to an end, but unfortunately for Web Surf Nicaragua, that rule also applies to somewhat above-average things. "Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back."

R.I.P. October 27, 1998 - May 19, 2011

2011 Mammal Report

Oh man hamsters.

We got us a dang zoo around here. Seriously. I believe I already mentioned the fish, and it was a long, long time ago, but I think I've only updated once since around mid 2003, so it's probably only a few "older posts" clicks back. There have been may changes in the fish situation, and even changes in the bird situation, but I'm a mammal, and with that bias inside of me, I'll hit those first, and tell you peoples some other day about everybody else, hopefully before the cockatiels all die of old age.

I would have said something about them turning gray, but well...

CATS:

Oh Jesus, the hind feet.

Diabetes didn't kill Dusty Rhodes, and an old priest and a young priest never showed up to kill Crackhouse, so they're still around. Since last we spoke, Dusty has pretty much kicked all his glucose issues in the ass, mainly through the power of Fancy Feast. So the positive is that we no longer have to jab him with needles several times a day, and the negative is that if we ever get raided by the cops, they're going to see a giant box of unused syringes and assume the worst. Dusty is pretty much the snuggliest and best cat ever, which serves as a stark contrast to Cracky, who remains a cat full of hate.

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

She's so cranky and insane and evil that somehow, it made a full loop around back into these being endearing qualities. This cat is so awful that it went beyond awful and did that thing really old video games did where you walk off one side of the screen and end up on the other. and her awfulness somehow became adorable. Also, she lost one of her fangs somehow, (my theory is that it's embedded somewhere in Dusty's flank) so she's all snaggle-toothed and drools in her brief moments of happiness. I love my cat.

Dorp.

Thirdly, there's the newer cat, Panda. One one hand, with her bizarre floppy body, foot pad hair-tufts, and creepily bent tail, she's basically the most physically adorable cat to ever exist. On the other hand, she is dumb - dumb as hell. She leaps into windows face-first, slides around on her big, stupid feet, treats laundry hampers like toilets, terrorizes small animals, and has this stupid, psychotic urge to chew the hell out of any tortillas she can find. Dusty likes her, though.

HAMSTERS:

A rare photo of some of our caged pets that isn't fully just a blurry picture of an animal behind perfectly-focused cage bars.

Also, we have these two Roborovski hamsters here. If you're not the world's last 56K user, you saw them in the video at the head of this post, and that's basically what life is like with two of these, except with slightly less Motorhead. On runs and runs, the other tries to get on the wheel, and eventually someone falls. I think hamsters are one of the rare cases of an animal that's commonly kept as a pet where even people who are overly enthusiastic and make websites about them and suchlike will tell you that they're all basically all a bunch of stupids. But they're like little cotton balls with eyes and Sam Elliot mustaches, so they can get away with it. They don't actually have names, because we gave up on trying to tell them apart maybe five minutes after we got them home.

RATS:

FUCK YEAH WATER

Finally, there are the rats. I had wanted rats for a long, long time, and was seriously getting them sometime around 2004, before I spent all my money paying Hell Roommate's bills and before her cat gave birth to Cracky in my closet. Finally, Sarah got a bigass cage as what I can only assume is a pretty nontraditional Valentine's Day gift, and shortly after came Poppy and Scrambles the Death-Dealer, followed eventually by impulse-rats Punky and Snickers. (I named at least one of these rats. Try and guess which one. Take your time.)

OH MY GOD I LOVE WATER

Poppy was pretty much damaged goods when we got her, missing the ends of a few of her fingers, and she has this weird little crimp in the end of her tail. The end is all loose and floppy, and we figured it would fall off eventually, but it's been over a year, and it's still there. She's normally shy, probably as a result of whatever led to her having mangled fingers and tail, but she's becoming crazy in her middle age, so she might randomly hop around for no reason or try to gnaw off your finger because she thinks it's made of yogurt. Good times.

Basement Rat lurks in the shadows.

Punky is what's known as a Dumbo rat, where someone found a genetic mutation and selectively bred the shit out of it until there were a whole bunch of rats with huge, low-set ears that all looked like Feivel from An American Tail. Being a Dumbo also means that she's bigger than the other rats, (or at least was until recently) and will alpha-rat out on them from time to time. What I'm saying here is that she will try to humble them the way they do in old country and hump them silly, even though she lacks the parts for proper humping. I never thought I'd ever make a post on here that included the phrase "proper humping." I better stop before this gets all lurid. But yeah, aside from the non-consensual lesbianism, she's all sweet and cuddly and loves to ride around in your pocket.

Please excuse the desk.

Snickers is the newest rat, and the only one without the hooded pattern that pretty much every pet store rat has ever had. She's what you apparently call a Berkshire rat, which is a monocle-wearing way of saying solid-colored with a white belly. Aside from that, she's goddamn huge, even bigger than Punky. Seems to be pretty timid so far though, and Punky is improperly humping her as I type this, so I don't think she's going to try and get all dominant any time soon.

Post-op Scrambles on the comeback trail.

Finally - and this is the "current events" part - there's Scrambles. All humping aside, she's more often than not been the alpha female of the group, and is the most outgoing and energetic of the original three. In most ways, she does live up to her name. Well, as in the scrambling part, and not the "giant killer hurricane from a cartoon about death metal" part. And she's the smallest of all of the rats, except that changed for a while in the last month or so. First, she started looking a little chubby, which was adorable, because hell, chubby rat, you know? But then, shit got real.

She kept getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And it became really apparent that something was messed-up inside her, because a fat rat gets fat everywhere, and this looked like she had swallowed a damn baseball. After a lot of freaking out, doing hella Google searches and getting worried that she either had cancer or a condition called megacolon that's not as funny as it sounds, (although it does sound pretty funny, for real) and is just as much as a "time to euthanize this here rat" condition as cancer, we finally lucked out and found a vet in town that handled things other than dogs and cats. And the vet knew her shit to the utmost and was able to tell use within a couple seconds of picking Scrambles up that she was going to need surgery, and that her uterus was full of something and had to come out. So on Monday, they cut my damn rat open.

The surgery didn't make her head all blurry; that was just my camera.

You might not think a rat can handle surgery, but they actually seem to kick ass at it. The wound you see up there, while still pretty gnarly, (And speaking of gnarly, she actually has stainless steel stitches, which I'm totally asking for, next time I butcher myself) is nothing compared to the puffy red thing she had going on about a day earlier. And man, speaking of puffy red things... The problem in her internal baby-making apparatus ended up being what the doctor referred to as "cysts on top of cysts," and was just fucking awful. I declined the offer to look at the actual mass they pulled out of her in person, but the vet's cellphone picture of a passed-out Scrambles next to that thing was fucking gross. It was pretty much as big as she was, and was like this big, gnarled-up, bloody ball of terror. It looked like they had pulled Hitler's soul out of her. Words alone cannot fully describe the picture I saw, but Google Image Search and some artful cutting and pasting I did should give you the general idea:

Basically this, spread out on a towel.

As of right now, she's doing fine, eating, drinking, sleeping, and crapping the same as always, and should be headed back into the big cage with the others sometime in the next day or so, bringing the rat squad back to full strength. As for me, I'm $135 poorer, but I still have my rat, so it's all good.

Awwwwwww.

Now, we just need to figure out a way to get some dogs and Guinea pigs in here somehow...

Hey guys