Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I thought I’d make a bajillion dollars by putting in a Google AdSense toolbar on my site. They won’t take me because it’s a personal site, though. Oh well. Perhaps I’ll put in an Amazon thingie.

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.

This is quite possibly the best timewaster I have ever seen.

Shout outs to the puppet dancer(try settings 16, 10, 2), the sound sequencer, the bug, the letter project, webnoise, how to dance properly, and on and on. Too many good links to catalog them all. Go see!

Amazingly enough, Maddie is looking 100% better. She’s gaining weight and eating on her own again. The vet thinks it might have been a bad reaction to the thyroid medication. I tell you what, that cat was just about to die in my lap last Wednesday. Today she’s eating, purring, talking, bonking me with her head. Outstanding!

You may remember when I talked about my cat Zeke, whom I inherited from my grandmother a few years ago and died from acute kidney failure.

Or when I talked about losing Gus late last January, after a long bout of illness.

Or even back in July when I mentioned losing Lilly, and I mentioned that I was concerned that Maddie wouldn’t get over losing all her friends so close together.

Saturday morning I woke up to see that Maddie was crouched in the meatloaf position. She’s gotten terribly skinny lately, down to 4 pounds from her fighting weight of 8. I’ve been giving her medication for hyperthyroidism for the past few months, but it hasn’t seemed to stop the weight loss.

Blood tests showed kidney failure. Cat number four in the same number of years. She stayed at the vet on an IV until yesterday. She did not eat. They syringe-fed her, and she vomited it back up. She urinated on herself. The vet does not have much hope for her. X-rays show a large amount of kidney stones on both sides, which probably killed the kidneys. She came home yesterday to see if I could get her to eat in a more comfortable environment. I haven’t had much luck. A little chicken broth, some more syringe-fed food. So far she has kept it down, but I’m concerned about prolonging a life that is painful. Max is very upset and can’t understand why his friend won’t play with him anymore. I told the children that Maddie may go to heaven to be with Gus and Lilly and they started crying. “I don’t want Maddie to go. I like Maddie!”

I like her, too.

I am Buba Musa, Account officer of one of the Banks in Lagos. For
reason , which will come to light as you read on. I have a very urgent and
confidential business proposition for you, on December 6th 1999 an oil
consultant with the Nigerian National Corporation, Mr. Ahmed Youseff
Mustapha an Iraqi National, made a numbered time / fixed for 48 Calendar
months, valued US$12,725 in my branch. On maturity, we sent a routine
notification to his forwarding address but got no reply.

Twelve thousand dollars? Tschou.. the last one was for around $20 million.

I had an MRI today for my knee, which has been bugging me since all the walking we did at Disneyworld. That was wild! They asked me what radio station I wanted to listen to and then gave me some of those air-powered headphones like they have on airplanes. Then I had to hold completely still for 20 minutes. Not much of a problem, since I fell asleep. Hope I didn’t snore too loud.

The dogs are driving me insane. Kona is horribly gun shy. She spent the week at the ranch and was totally precious and adorable. When we got home, she and Cuervo started their normal routine of barking at anything that moves within a one mile radius. I went out there yesterday to make them come inside and she refused to come. I spent 15 minutes outside with no shoes on in the cold chasing that frigging dog until she came in. She got kenneled for the rest of the evening. I don’t understand how she can be so good for a week, then so awful when she comes home. She needs to go to boot camp.

Cuervo keeps creeping up the stairs at night and sleeping on our bedroom floor. That’s all very well and good, except the animal snores louder than any normal human. I’ve had to shout at him several times a night to roll over. If I try locking him out with the gate at the top of the stairs, the cats don’t realize it’s closed and they slam into it, so it sounds like a gong going off every hour or so. *BLONG*

We shot a couple of deer and a hog at the ranch over New Year’s. I got one of the deer, but I shot it in the shoulder and the bullet totally pulverized both shoulders and ruined the meat. Hub got the other one in the neck, which was fine and didn’t ruin anything. Upon quartering the 180 lb hog and bringing it home to slice and freeze, we saw that the meat was rife with tumors. Seeing as how we have no desire to be on Fear Factor, we pitched it. What a waste.

If you are a single female in the Bay area and looking for some hot studly action, let me know and I will set you up with my mostly decent-like and very good looking friend who is horny.