Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I can’t believe this cat refused to eat. She follows me around all day long now, waiting for me to drop food. Someone enters the kitchen and she’s in there too, yowling for sustenance. She used to sit upstairs all day and was completely anti-social. Now I can’t peel her off my lap. That’s twice now that I’ve had cats who encountered near-death experiences who turned into complete and total love sluts after recovering. Apparently the thyroid medication really did a number on her. She’s off it and feeling swell.

Max got out the other night. Around 3 am we were just about to go to sleep and I called the cat. He didn’t come. Couldn’t find him anywhere. I went onto the porch and noticed the screen door was open.

Thus followed 2 hours of intense searching. I went on foot, hub went in the car. We woke up the neighbors across the street. Didn’t break my heart much; they’re the ones who had the dog yap for 5 hours straight one night and ignored the phone and doorbell. They let their dogs out at night and one of them is a biter. He charged me one night when I was about 8 months pregnant and out to check the mail. We ended up calling the police because when hub went to see what was going on, he got charged too. Every time we stepped out the front door we had a large angry barking dog run at us.

So I grabbed a flashlight and started walking around calling the cat. I’m pretty sure one of the neighbors thought I was up to no good, because about 15 minutes after I was back from the dead end down the street, a cop went tearassing down there and was there for about 10 minutes.

Around 5 am I started to think maybe I should get a couple hours of sleep and try again when it got light. I had tried getting Cuervo out to track the cat. Brave and valiant dog tracked the cat a good 15 feet, from the porch to the front steps. Woo. I tried one last time going to the porch and calling, and heard the cat jump onto the steps and brrrrrrrrrt at me. Joyous reunion. I picked him up and he was about 3 pounds heavier than usual. I think he ate all the nice next-door kitty’s food while he was out.

Hub was very nearly in a great deal of trouble for leaving the porch door open, after having accidentally let both Gus (gone for over a week) and Lilly (gone for 48 hours) out in the past. Max saved his bacon by returning.

I thought chilblains were something only damosels in distress in Victorian novels got. Apparently I was wrong.

My feet always get really really cold in the winter. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Cold feet don’t really bother me that much. Hot feet, I can’t stand. When I was smoking, my feet would do this horrible thing, especially at night, where they would get bright red and get really hot to the touch and burn like hell. I used to have to prop them up higher than my head in order to make it stop. Sometimes I’d just go outside and stand on the sidewalk in freezing weather to cool them off a little. Apparently people can get this condition, called erythromelalgia, so badly that they ice down their feet to the point of frostbite and gangrene. Luckily that never happened to me, and it pretty much went away when I quit smoking.

My dad used to have this thing happen to him in winter called Reynaud’s phenomenon. It was bizarre. His fingers would turn paper white, or sometimes blue, when he got cold. That doesn’t happen to my, but my hands and feet turn into utter popsicles in cold weather. I can assure you that this does not please my husband at all, especially when I place said appendage on him at night. It was an accident. I swear.

Anyway, I guess my feet got too cold. Probably around Thanksgiving when we were in the camper and it was 20 degrees out. A few days after that I noticed bumps on my toes that were kinda itchy. I thought it was bug bites, since that happens when you’re camping. They just never went away. I asked my doctor about them and he was perplexed. They were just on the left foot, coincidentally the same side which was closest to the cold outside of the camper. The doc said something like, “Well that’s odd” and went back to looking at my broken finger.

Want something done, you gotta do it yourself. I searched around the internet and found the description of what happened to me (bumps, red spots, turned blue, itchy, burning, painful as hell) because I thought I had some bizarre variation of athlete’s foot and was honestly pretty embarrassed. Luckily I got some nice, respectable Victorian condition.

The bummer is that I have to keep my feet nice and warm, and I hate warm feet. Oh well.

TiVo recorded Sixteen Candles for me. It was on the Womens’ Entertainment network. The classic line was munged so:

“Ahhhhh, no more yankee rum drinkie. The Donger need food!”

Rum drinkie? Are you serious?

On the plus side, I don’t need surgery on my MCL. Just physical therapy. That’s cool, cause I’ve seen orthopedic surgery on TV, and it totally looks like dissecting chickens. Gross.