Sunday morning when I got up and went to feed the cats I saw that one of my cats, Snuggles, was having trouble breathing. So I took her to the vet right away but she soon collapsed, her heart faltered and her lungs began to fill with fluid. The vet tried but couldn’t save her. The vet believed it was heart failure and an informal autopsy confirmed it. Snuggles had a congenital heart defect that caused the left side of her heart to be twice the size of the right, and the chamber walls became so thick that it couldn’t pump blood properly anymore. The vet said that even if we’d known about this condition that there would have been nothing that could have been done to correct it.

She’d shown no signs of this problem though so this took me totally by surprise. She was always very active, had endless energy, didn’t get out of breath, etc. With Mischief being the oldest and diabetic, and BooBear having FLV, I thought that I’d have Snuggles the longest. I have to admit too that she was my favorite of the three, having a very quirky personality and being an extremely inquisitive and playful cat. This sucks major.

http://www.myspace.com/xenotiger

I keep changing my plans for my online stuff due to what I thought would work best ending up not doing so.  This site will be going bye-bye when the hosting is up in about four months because I am not having the time to update it properly.  I had originally planned to let the hosting drop a month or so back, but I was so used to having a site that I renewed it for another six months.  That was an error.  The book I’m writing is taking most of my time and I need to focus on it anyway, so until I finish the book I’m not going to mess with a website.  For keeping online friends updated and for just blogging whenever, it turns out that the myspace will actually be the best thing after all.

This book is going to take most of my free time so I am going around the net finding and deleting old accounts.  The only two I will maintain will be my LiveJournal and Twitter.  I’m also going to be deleting old email accounts so you need to use the GimpyRabbit Gmail from now on if you want to reach me.  If I decide to let this site go in five months when the hosting is up, I’ll put any updates or blog posts on my LiveJournal from that point.  I’m having even less time to fool with online stuff than I thought now that I’m working on the book, and I don’t want anything to compete with my writing time anyway.

For those who keep emailing me about my old Undertaker site DragonReigns, it will NOT be put back up, ever.  I don’t have time for it anymore.  This isn’t going to change to stop inquiring about it please.  For those whining and bitching at me about it, I am sorry that you can’t understand that I have a life and it’s more important to me than any website about a character that a wrestler plays on TV.

After playing with the outline for a couple weeks I finally have the story down the way I want it to go.  This weekend I’ll officially began writing the book.  In fact, I’ll probably do most of my writing on the weekends due to not wanting to get in a groove and having to stop and go to bed because of having to get up early to go to work the next day.  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday will be my primary writing days, though I will write some during the week as well.

Only one person other than myself knows the working title of the book, and I’m sure yall can understand that I don’t want to post what it is nor anything about the plot.  I’ll keep yall updated on my progress, but I can’t say anything about the content.  From now until I finish the book I won’t be online often or for very long at a time.   The exception might be if I get writers block or decide I want a few days break from working on the book, then I might come on a couple days in a row and get on messenger too.

If anyone wants to reach me the best way will be the GimpyRabbit gmail.  I’ll check that one every time I come online.

My computer is acting up so if I don’t post anything or respond to any emails for a while you’ll know it went down. If it goes down, how soon I can get back up and running will depend on WHY it went down.

I found a couple more pieces of art I’d forgotten about due to them being framed and stored apart from the other works. One is mostly a charcoal drawing and has been added to the charcoal post, the other is a pastel drawing and has been added to the pastel post. I’ll be added more along as I do new pieces. All of the ones I have up now are older.

Chinese police were held in a hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber only to find the man was armed with sausages.

Police believed that the straps and bulky items around Sing He’s waist were dynamite and detonators.  Mr He, 23, threatened to blow up a restaurant and its customers in Benxi, northern China, unless the staff handed over the contents of the till.  But a specialist bomb unit called to the scene quickly determined that the device was assembled with pork products.  “When we saw what he had round his waist we couldn’t help laughing. Some of the sausages still had the wrappers on them,” said one bomb squad officer. “It must have been terrifying for the customers but those things would only have gone off if you’d kept them past their sell by date.”

Mr He told police he had planned the raid because he was depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend.  He said: “I needed some excitement in my life and to that extent it was a success.”

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“Excitement”?  Then go skydiving or bungee jumping.  I don’t know about yall, but being in JAIL isn’t something I’d label “exciting”.  Then again, we don’t know what turns this fool on do we LOL!

A DOZY robber was nicked while scoffing a chicken dinner at a restaurant he held up at gunpoint 20 minutes earlier.  The 38-year-old is accused of stealing several hundred pounds after waving an airgun at terrified staff.  But he then sniffed the tasty aromas at the Southern Fried Chicken branch and demanded: “Give me one of those Hunga Busta Meals too.”  He sat down to eat the meal and was still tucking in when armed cops alerted by staff burst into the diner in Colchester, Essex.

An Essex police source said: “We’ve come across some stupid criminals in our time but this beats all.  Normal practice is to grab the cash and run. But this man was obviously controlled by his belly rather than his brain.  “After running in with a hoodie and scarf hiding his face, he took them both off to stuff his face with chicken.  “The staff he’d just waved a gun at were gobsmacked.  “He sat there eating for 20 minutes so they had tons of time to dial 999.

“Staff thought it was a bizarre TV stunt.  It just goes to show, you shouldn’t carry out a heist on an empty stomach.”  The man, a double glazing salesman who cannot be named, is charged with possessing a weapon in a public place, theft and using threatening behaviour in a public place.  He has been bailed to appear at Chelmsford Crown Court on January 4. A CPS spokeswoman yesterday confirmed a man had been charged over the hold-up.

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Seriously??!?!!!!  It never crossed this idiots mind to take the chicken with him?  Wow.  Just… wow.

Ok, reference the post below titled Motorcycle Mishap. I talked to the dealership again, and though they aren’t admitting fault, they are going to make it right and repair the damage at no charge. This is what they should have done from the beginning when they saw the bike and realized that only the lack of a cotterpin could have allowed that to happen. They got the parts in yesterday but didn’t get to the bike, though they did promise to get it out before they shut down for Christmas which will be at noon today.   Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand they just called, the bike will be ready in 30 minutes.  Nice.

DragonReigns was closed for a number of reasons. The main one is I simply won’t have the time to keep it properly updated once I begin writing my book. I was already having problems getting the video up within a few days of Smackdown airing here, and I had long ago stopped capping. I didn’t have time to do things for the site to make it more interactive for yall and it reached the point that the site was feeling like a job instead of being fun. Though I still like The Undertaker and watch his appearances, it was obvious that it was time for me to move on from doing the site.

I have loaded some of the information from DragonReigns on this site, but won’t be updating all of it due to… you guessed it… lack of time. As for the message board, I simply won’t have time to look after a board so I won’t be loading one anytime soon. FallenAngel has loaded a board for you COTN here http://caveofsouls.freeforums.org/index.php to continue to talk on. It was a fun run with DragonReigns, but nothing lasts forever.

If anyone is wondering, I will be keeping the DragonReigns URL and using it as a redirect to this site

For a good while I had planned to start this site where I could post anything about anything and not be limited to one subject matter. Originally I had intended to delay this when I made the decision to take down my Undertaker site to free up the time to work on my book, and because I didn’t have enough artwork to put up to sell which was something I wanted to do with the site. There were also money issues with renewing the hosting, but a nice Christmas bonus at work solved that problem. At the last minute I made the decision to go ahead and put the site up so I could use it to promote my art, my book, and in effect, myself. Of course I’ll be just playing on the site too

After the first of the year I’m going to be real busy working on the book and also doing the paintings I want to try to sell. I really don’t know how much I’ll be online during this time or how often I’ll add to the site. It might be only once a week at best. I will update my progress on the book and also add more art for yall to see as I get it done. When I have enough paintings I’ll add a catalog. Once I add the catalog I will need to start aggressively promoting the site to draw buyers in. Now, if I get really, really lucky and the book gets picked up, this site will become my “official” site. Not that I’m holding my breath on that but you never know.

I haven’t decided what all I’ll be putting up on this site so yall will just have to check from time to time to see if there’s something you find interesting

You will notice the category for Art under Navigation. I have added pictures of some of my artwork, at least the little I still have. Most of what I’ve done over the years was either for gifts or was commission work, therefore I don’t have it anymore. As soon as I can get the paints I need I’ll begin painting once again, and after I get enough pieces I’ll be adding a section here to sell them. The Art category will be added to along as I get pieces done, whether they are for sell or just for fun. At the moment I’m not taking commission work but will be in the near future.

Wednesday the mounting for the rear brake broke loose and the brake assembly spun and wrapped the brake rod around the frame. Fortunately the bike wasn’t out of the parking lot of where I work, because that was an instant stop! The mounting should NEVER come loose like that. There is a cotterpin to prevent the nut from being able to slowly back off the bolt from vibration and neither one was anywhere to be found, though the bolt was laying on the ground where the bike was parked.

Several weeks earlier I had dropped the bike when a stupid kid ran in front of me, but dropping your bike can’t cause a cotterpin to fall out. Cotterpins are bent around the bolt and have a looped head on the other end, they can’t “fall out” at all. You’d have to bend it straight with pliers then pull it out. So how the hell did this happen? Back in June I’d had a flat in the rear tire and the dealership changed it. The most likely scenario is they didn’t put a cotterpin back in. They deny that of course and blame the drop, however they can’t explain just HOW it came out when I dropped the bike. If it were so easy for cotterpins to be jarred loose then riders would be going down left and right from various mounting failures, because riders drop their bikes all the time. The tech at the dealership actually said that someone must have tampered with it then when I pressed him on the matter.

Tampered with it? So someone got out there at my workplace with a pair of pliers and removed the cotterpin, taking it and the nut with them but leaving the bolt on the ground? Sure. WTF ever. I understand that they are just trying to cover their asses but their carelessness in not putting that cotterpin back in could have gotten me killed. Imagine an instant stop at any speed, and especially if I’d been on the highway going over 50mph. That isn’t something I’d have walked away from. Even an instant stop at 30-40mph could have been fatal. Right now they have the bike and are going to repair it.

For anyone who knows bikes well enough, here ya go: