Some Humane Society Info

I had a meeting for the humane society last night. I just wanted to share some interesting info with y'all.

• The Winona Area Humane Society does not euthanize. Neither does the Rochester Humane Society. The LaCrosse Humane Society, on the other hand, does. In fact, the LaCrosse Humane Society has been known to euthanize animals after just 5 days.
• As a result of not euthanizing cats, the Winona Area Humane Society currently has about 160 cats that need permanent homes. If they don't find homes, we may have to stop accepting cats because we are reaching our limit.
  
• In an effort to keep the cat population down in the Winona area, the Humane Society spays and neuters all of the cats (as well as gives them all their necessary shots and medication).
• The cost of running the Winona Area Humane Society has been as high as $7,000 a month.
• The entire staff is comprised entirely of volunteers. If they can find the money, they would like to hire an office worker and a full-time person to supervise the cleaning.
• The humane society is always in need of volunteers, donations, foster owners, and adopters.

I found that info to be interesting, and I thought you might as well. Please share this info with anyone and everyone and tell them we need their help!!

New Photo

Forgot to mention I posted a pic of Sara to make my other blog even more Photogasmic.

A Rare Glimpse Inside

I went to a wedding with my friend Sara this weekend. And as we were driving to the reception, we got to talking about happiness and depression and how sometimes you are depressed when logic would tell you you should be happy and sometimes you are happiest when in situations that seem somewhat depressing. For example, while in college, you are surrounded by opportunities to meet people and have fun, but a lot of times, college is when people feel most depressed. Of course there is stress, which plays a big part, but I think equally big is the fact that we are still trying to figure out who we are and who we want to be, and that sometimes we can't become who we want to be (whether that is being the one to find a cure for cancer, or being the star athlete, or just being popular). I think that a year or two after graduating college, we've finally accepted who we are. We know pretty much what we want from life, and have a general idea of how to get there.

Anyways, this conversation I had with Sara made me think about how I've been feeling the last couple years. I think I've really had 3 stages of happiness. After breaking up with the Ex, I had a period of depression. I then moved into a period of neither happiness, nor depression. I was really just treading water in a sea of indifference (to put it poetically). And now, as of a few months ago, I am actually quite happy. It is a bit of a strange feeling because it had been so long since I actually felt happy for several days at a time. I'm not really sure why I felt it necessary to share this to the world, but I did so there you have it.

And speaking of happiness, I had an excellent weekend. Actually the last several weekends have been excellent. But on this particular weekend I went to a birthday party for my brother, Dan, which was fun. I went to Jennie Hoff's wedding and danced the night away. And I hung out with Coreena on Sunday, which was thoroughly enjoyable. Today I had an important presentation at work that went extremely well, I thought, so that is a relief. Tomorrow I have a Cat Care gathering/meeting for the humane society. I guess there will be food and door prizes, so it should be interesting. Hopefully I'll meet some cool people. That is all for now.

A night of comedy

Last night I went to a comedy show at the Black Horse with Coreena. There were two comedian. The first was ok. He got a few chuckles out of the audience. There weren't too many people there while he was performing, which didn't help much. The second comedian was hilarious, in a real vulgar kind of way. He kept teasing a few people in the audience, which was just hilarious. One of the guys he was teasing (calling him retarded and such) actually got up and walked out. I guess he couldn't handle the jokes. One of his friends got him to come back, but he hid in the upper balcony for the rest of the show. Of course the whole walking out thing only fueled the fire. The whole thing was quite fun. I'd like to go again sometime. Later.

P.S. a note for the bandwidth challenged, I'm going to add a pic of Coreena to Photogasmic in a few minutes, so you won't be wasting your time by going there.

If you are stalking me...

then do I have a feature for you. Or maybe you have no real life and live vicariously through my blog. This feature is for you, too. Recently I made an ATOM feed of my site available. "What does this mean to me?" you may be asking yourself. I'll tell you what it means... It means that if you have an RSS client that supports ATOM feeds, you can have my latest blog entries delivered straight to you and perhaps even notified when I post new entries. "RSS, what the hell is that?!?!?" Well, my poor innocent fools, RSS is a way of sending small bits of info over the internet, such as news or blog posts. If you have an RSS Aggregator, you can receive these bits of info right on your home PC. There are many RSS Aggregators available (both web-based or stand-alone apps), but I personally use SharpReader. You can use any RSS Aggregator that supports ATOM (basically a type of RSS feed although actually a competitor to RSS, but that isn't what's really important). "What is your point about all this ATOM and RSS and Aggregator talk, Jeff?" My point is, if you are tired of checking my blog every day to see if I've posted anything new, you could get an RSS Aggregator, subscribe to my feeds, and the posts will be delivered to you. You could also subscribe to all sorts of news posts and other stuff. That, my friend, is my point. So I suppose I should tell you where to find these ATOM feeds of mine. There are two options: 1) Click on the ATOM Site Feed link at the bottom of the bar on the right (below the Archives and Links and stuff). 2) Just click here for my main Weblog feed and here for the Photogasmic feed.

It's Photogasmic!!!

I just got my precious data cable for my cell phone. In an effort to be sensitive to the bandwidth challenged, I have created a separate blog for my photos. It is Photogasmic!!! So what are you waiting for, check it out. NOW!!!

Bands, Beer, and Kittens

Hello all,
I'll try to quickly fill you in on what's happened in my life since I last checked in. Let's see... on Friday, Coreena and I went to see Matt's band Straight To Your Brain play. Alot of my friends were there (I'm not gonna waste your time listing them all) so it was good to see them all again. I hadn't seen Matt's band play in a while either, so it was good to see that. They are getting pretty good (even though it isn't really my musical preference).
Saturday night I met up with Christine downtown. She had been drinking free beer at a townie bar all night, so she was pretty drunk. She ended up passing out at her friend's place by midnight. All and all, it was an alright night. Not too exciting, but not dull either.
Worked for the second time at the humane society cleaning for the kitties on Monday. I was there for a little over 3 hours, but I think next time won't take as long, since I pretty much had the hang of it by the end of the night. Started sniffling and sneazing a little bit again... that concerns me a little. There are a couple adorable little kittens at the society. So nice too. They pur instantly when you pick them up. It's probably a good thing I can't have pets at the apartment, cause it would just be too tempting to take them home with me. I can see why some of the people working there have like 15 cats. If any of you want a pet, I suggest getting it from the humane society. All the animals have been given their shots and spayed or neutered. The price for adopting is way less than if you paid for the shots and stuff yourself. Plus the society is overrun with cats. :(
One last quick little note... I order a data cable for my cell phone. This should allow me to get the pictures off the phone and on to the computer. Once I can do this, I plan on posting more pics on the blog. I know it's been a while since I've posted a pic, but soon, I promise.
Well that is all for now, I think I'm going to a comedy show at the Black Horse on Friday, so I'll make sure I post about that. Later.

Happy Belated Birthday To Me

Well, my birthday was last Friday. To celebrate, I went out with my friends Christine and Erin on Thursday night. Well, AUCD Thirsty Thursday got the best of me yet again. I ended up getting quite drunk. Needless to say, I didn't feel so hot most of Friday. But I did make it out to buy a birthday present for myself... a cell phone. I splurged and got a camera phone. I figure this will be sufficient and I won't have to get a digital camera. I spent most of Friday day playing with it. Friday night I went out to the bars again to get all my free drinks. Christine, Garrett, and Swan went with me. Erin was supposed to come, but we lost her before we got in to the bars. We met up with Jen at the bars too. I had a blast that night. I didn't pay for a single drink, which is always nice, and got the perfect amount of drunkedness. I have to mention also that Matt gave me an awesome drawing he did and Garrett gave me a Spongebob Snowcone Maker. It is pretty sweet. Saturday, I had to go home and work on the farm doing field work. Luckily, I didn't have a hangover at all from the night before (stuck to the hard stuff only) so working at noon wasn't bad at all. Saturday night I hung out with Dan, Kim, and Sarah (my sis as opposed to the 20 other Sara(h)'s I know). We played games. It was a good time. Sunday I hung out with a new friend, Coreena. We went hiking at Perrot park in Trempealeau and hung out at Riverside Park in LaCrosse. It was a lot of fun (even though she kicked my ass in Mario Cart). Today (Monday) I slept in way too late, ran, then worked at the Humane Society. It was my first time actually working there, and everything went smoothly. I was only there for an hour because the other people working had gotten there before me. I think it should be rewarding. It isn't too hard and the cats are really nice. My only concern is that after an hour, I was beginning to sneaze. Hopefully I'm not developing allergies to cats now too. I guess we'll see next week. Later.
- Jeff

Birthday gift

Phil gave me my birthday present today... a GMail invite. Thanks Phil. I am now part of the elite GMail crowd. Yes I am part of only a few million who have been invited to "test" google's email system. I'm sure I will be given invitations to hand out, so let me know if you are interested. And if you don't know what gmail is... go here http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html