The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I have been so productive today, I almost wonder who took over my brain. After coffee this morning, I started a cleaning fit that ended an hour and a half later with me in the (newly cleaned) shower and everything I had been wearing in the washing machine. In an hour and a half, the following got done:

- Dishes done
- Tub, toilet and bathroom sink cleaned
- Stove cleaned
- Kitchen sink cleaned (twice, because I dumped out the pantry-floor-scrubbing bucket in it after the first time)
- Living room rug, cat tree, and office rug and underneath desk vacuumed
- Last week's sheets folded and put away
- One load of laundry washed, dried, folded and put away
- Pantry floor scrubbed
- Litterboxes cleaned
- Four large potatoes diced and parboiled

After that, I dissected two bundles of Swiss chard, and turned that, the potatoes, a can of chickpeas, a block of paneer, and a bottle of TJ's masala sauce into lunch for the coming week.

After that, I spent an hour on the family Zoom for Grammie's 99th birthday.

After THAT, I went out to Trader Joe's and CVS and got all the stuff I didn't get around to buying yesterday.

I think I might be allowed to lounge around all evening. Too bad I finished the latest book I hadn't read yet last night (The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher; supposed to be book 1 of a trilogy, but that was 2015, and book 2 isn't out yet.). I still want to sharpen knives and wash all the blinds and try vinegar on the stains in the shower and try tub cleaner on the refrigerator door, but given what I did get done, I think I can live with the remainder of the list.

I also think I'm going to stop giving Lily the joint supplement she gets every other day. On days when she gets it in the morning, she seems not to want very much dinner, and I want her to eat above all else. I'm not sure the joint supplement is helping any more anyway.

Back to the grind...I was a good kid and didn't even sniff at my work email for the three days I was off. So today I merely had 10 things added to my list from those three days: three meetings requiring invitations with Zoom links; one article to submit to the JDE, one to format for the JDE and one to proofread for the JMDS; one clinical faculty survey to proofread and test for functionality; one request for the current curriculum map; one request to order AV equipment from Amazon; and one request to advertise two seminars coming up at the end of the month. That'll do.

Too bad going through my email pretty much harshed all the mellow I had built up over the three days off. I really needed at least a week and the weekends at both ends of it, in retrospect, but there just isn't a good week for that until after Memorial Day. So at least I got my three days.

I also got my new mattress yesterday. Delivering the new one and removing the old one took about 20 minutes, and I was mightily impressed. Granted the delivery men were both 20 years younger and a foot taller than I am. The new mattress is very flat, compared to the old one that had a trench in the middle, but I slept just fine last night. Quirk is confused, because the old mattress and box spring were up on end in the bedroom to make room for the new ones, and the new ones don't feel like the old ones, so she isn't sleeping on the bed. I'm glad she didn't take advantage of the fact that she had a straight shot outdoors for a couple of minutes. I had shut her in here, but then opened the door to get cash to tip the delivery men, and didn't remember that the apartment door and the building front door were both still open. Fortunately she headed for the kitchen and stayed there.

The vet's office mailed some buprenorphine for Lily, for just in case, on March 31. It sat in the Natick post office for two days and then went to Nashua, NH, and came back to Brighton yesterday. Good thing it's only for just in case, because if I had needed it last week I would have been very upset. I have to go to the actual post office and sign for it. I went yesterday after the mattress delivery, but so did everybody else in Brighton, so I stood in an unmoving (but growing) line for 20 minutes and then decided to come back today instead. Hopefully everybody will have gotten their need for the post office out of their system today.

First Moderna shot: definite sore arm. I can't decide whether the stiff neck was a side effect, me thinking I ought to have a side effect, or merely me having a stiff neck, which has been known to happen. Anyway, this morning all I've got is a sore arm, and it's not sore enough for Advil. If I get distracted, I forget it's sore.

I did find the sequel to Foundryside, but it took me ages because the Harvard Book Store didn't have it and the Coop bookstore is in a different building while its usual one gets renovated. The scifi section is on the third floor of the Palmer St building, and though you can get up to the third floor via escalator, you can't get down except by elevator or stairs. And you have to go all the way back down to the first floor to pay for things. So that was a minor adventure, but I can has new book. And vaccine card, which I used as a bookmark so it wouldn't get mangled.

What I didn't get was a second-shot appointment, but they said they'd call me in about three weeks to set one up. They still don't know that far in advance how much vaccine they're going to have for any given week. I took myself off the state waiting list anyway, though.

I was going to go to H Mart on the way home, but I wasn't in the mood for it. Since I'm taking tomorrow and Friday (and Monday) off, I can go on Friday when it isn't raining, just to go there and not have anything else on the schedule.

Lily has kept eating since the pain shot wore off. She eats a little slower, but she's still a member of the Clean Plate Club. Good cat. She's also teaching Quirk how much enthusiasm is too much when Quirk wants to wrestle.

The vet bill was only $718, which is still a lot, but it was worth it because the ultrasound result is that Lily only has chronic pancreatitis that flared up. She got an antibiotic in case it's bacterial, and the three-day pain injection, but I can't give her NSAID anti-inflammatories due to her kidneys and steroidal anti-inflammatories have their own problems. The combination of gabapentin and buprenorphine made her hind end lurch around like a drunken sailor all evening (I compared her navigational abilities to the Ever Given, stuck in the Suez Canal). As of this morning she's back to being able to walk straight, and put a serious hurting on dinner last night and breakfast today.

She got the same medications Snip got and I keep comparing their reactions. There's a certain amount of staring into space, but it's penetrable, and Lily will get up and come sit on me and purr her fool head off for a while. And she noticed almost instantly that there was leftover ultrasound gel on her undercarriage, and didn't like that. Snip never noticed.

Today being a nice day, and I wanting to be out in the air, I ended up in the bookstore and grocery shopping in that order (which is backward, but nothing else is normal yet either). I bought two books I haven't read yet (Foundryside and A Court of Thorns and Roses), both of which are the first of a series. I didn't know Foundryside was going to be a trilogy, but two chapters in, I'm inclined to buy the next one when I'm done with this one, and the third one when it exists. (Speaking of books that don't exist, Pogo volume 8 comes out this fall. I'm making a note that I pre-ordered it now, so that when it gets postponed in October and I get email in January saying it's been shipped, I don't wonder what the hell that's about. That's what happened with volume 6.)

And then I came home and put the groceries away and put the laundry in the dryer, and crashed the vacuum cleaner into my left big toe while getting the leftover shaved fur from Lily's stomach off the rug. Ow. I didn't think the vacuum cleaner was that heavy. Oh well, that'll learn me.

Today I spent $1329 of the $1400 stimulus check on a new mattress, box spring, mattress cover, and delivery including removal of the old ones. But the new mattress won't have a trench down the middle, and won't be so thick it requires deep pocket sheets. It arrives on Easter Monday.

Meanwhile, test results came back and Quirk has roundworms. Topical worm medicine is a beautiful thing (it was pills last time I had to do it), but it has to go on the back of the neck, and the minute you touch Quirk anywhere aft of her eyebrows, she sticks her chin toward the ceiling in bliss and the back of her neck disappears. But I tried, I really did. The medicine got on her, somewhere, and I hope it hit skin. The vet comes on Tuesday to give Quirk her distemper booster shot and get the blood she didn't get from Lily last time because I was so worried about other things. I suppose I could have admitted defeat and waited for her to hold Quirk while I put the dewormer on, but I feel like I don't deserve to own cats if I can't do things like that myself.

I think Lily's sense of smell is screwed up. She's quite interested in mealtime, but she doesn't acknowledge food unless she's looking at it, and she won't eat much even if she is looking at it. At least she was eating enough for the last three weeks or so to stop looking quite so skinny.

Gods, I need something to do other than work and sitting around obsessing about being a terrible pet parent. It's hard on the brain in several directions. I can't concentrate hard enough to embroider these days.

From 3:00 to 4:30 yesterday, I left my laptop sulking at home and went out. I couldn't waste a 70-degree day in March. So I went to the Computer Loft, and they outright gave me a dead MacBook Air (I offered to buy it) for Lily to sit on. I was there for probably 20 minutes and most of it was trading cat-on-laptop pictures with the tech. His cat has a whole laptop to himself, and the screen works but the keyboard doesn't, so it plays fish videos and occupies the cat while the tech gets things done. Lily was most interested in sniffing her dead laptop, but so far would still rather sit on mine.

But the weather was glorious. I almost didn't want to be wearing a sweatshirt.

This morning Massachusetts rolled out a pre-registration system for mass vaccination sites, and it seems to actually work. Basically it puts you on the list, and then sends you possible appointments when it's your turn. So at least I'm on the list. I hope it sends me to Hynes (it will be Hynes instead of Fenway by the time it gets around to me) rather than to Gillette. But if it's Gillette, that's what personal days are for. I'm really hoping for Thanksgiving in Noank on Memorial Day weekend.

The regiment is considering investing in the second brand-new mattress it's ever bought. The last one was a college-furniture-store double bed mattress, which got upgraded to my sister's queen-size guest bed when she got married. I noticed this past summer when I rotated it that it's developed a bit of a trench in the middle, and Lily has been sharpening her claws on the box spring for years, so it's probably time to replace both. I just wish mattress shopping didn't feel quite so much like used-car shopping. I don't want to spend $2000 on a mattress and I don't want memory foam or cooling gel or any of that jazz. Just sell me what I want and take the old one away when you bring the new one. And no, I don't care if you come over the balcony instead of up the stairs.

I seem to have come out of the depression I was in for most of last weekend, at least in terms of not wanting to do anything, which is good. And I don't hate absolutely everything the way I did on Monday, which is good. Lily has new prescription food, and ate half a can of it this morning, which is good (although she still has time to decide she hates it, so I'm not dancing in the streets yet). She's supposed to eat two teeny cans a day according to the Royal Canin feeding instructions, but she isn't a foie gras goose, and I expect her stomach has shrunk some while she was starving herself, AND I don't want to be either throwing away uneaten food or cleaning up barf if she eats too much.

I'm still annoyed at the ten million projects that keep arriving on my doorstep, because the list never seems to get any shorter. I sent off a massive spreadsheet that took me a week of data entry, and then got handed rearranging the curriculum map again. I arranged the guest lectures for the faculty search, and then got handed a list of files the dean wants for a meeting next week (which I am not the only person with access to, but I'm the one who can find them fast). I sent off the CODA reports to be somebody else's problem for a minute, and got handed an honorarium payment to arrange. I sent off the Visiting Committee report, and got handed a data collection project from five years of graduation surveys. Job security is one thing, but I'd like to stop being in the Other People's Research Data Supply business. It takes a while to compile data in massive spreadsheets on a 16" laptop.

My tax refunds came through this week, and since tax refunds are traditionally mad money, I invested in a somewhat fancy burr coffee grinder. The teeny blade one I have doesn't grind all the beans, and I think I bought it in 2003 or so anyway, so I don't feel too bad about the upgrade. I just hope the new one will fit on the butcher block with the coffee machine. We shall see, I guess. (Update: it does! And so does the coffee can, in case I can't fit an entire can of coffee in the grinder.)

All I can say is, get me through tomorrow and I might survive this week. Tomorrow I have the Curriculum Committee followed by a search committee meeting and I'm tired of all of the above. And the JDE article came back unsubmitted again with another six nitpicking formatting errors they want fixed in both the blinded and unblinded versions. ARGH. Not sure whether I should resubmit them while playing Ghoultown, which is my "I'll do it, but I won't like it" music, or Wardruna, which is my "I'll do it, but you won't like it" music.

BUT, the weekend was pretty good. I went grocery shopping for the first time in two weeks, and now not only is there food in the fridge, but I'm almost spoiled for choice of food in the fridge. And I satisfied the craving for beans and greens by making chickpea, potato, paneer, and Swiss chard tikka masala with a jar of TJ's masala sauce. So it's got beans and greens in it, and I used up the almost-elderly potatoes. And I have lunch for the entire work week if I so desire (or at least I have five pint jars of vegetarian tikka masala, anyway).

Lily scared me, because she didn't particularly want any chicken yesterday. This is after having yarfed up her breakfast (but not her dinner) on Saturday and her breakfast yesterday. But it seems to have been a passing thing, because she's kept her breakfast where it belongs this morning. And she rejoined the Clean Plate Club last night. At least she gets to eat her dinner in however many installments she wants these days, because Quirk either doesn't want it or doesn't know where it is.

I could use some brain candy, preferably of the book variety, and absolutely preferably of the actual physical book variety. I'm sorely tempted to take a personal day sometime soon expressly to go to the bookstore in the middle of the day sometime in the middle of a week.

Thanksgiving was soup (homemade) and pie (chocolate cream, storebought) and a short Zoom with the parental units and my favorite aunt and uncle. Not at all what I wanted, but all I was going to get. And then I got a headache on Thanksgiving night and had it all day yesterday besides.

Today, not much headache, but not much patience either (still no word from the shelter). I cooked the small turkey thigh and got 2.5 cups of cat treats out of it (skin and meat chopped up small). Lily approves quite some, to the point of making a pest of herself about scraps. But at least I know she still likes turkey.

I got my 15-year Harvard anniversary "order yourself a present" packet in the mail yesterday since my 15-year anniversary is December 1, and normally I wouldn't have bothered because I don't need any more junk. But they offered a set of luggage, and I've never particularly liked my last-minute TJ Maxx suitcase. And I'd like to think I'll be able to travel again some year. So I ordered the luggage, which will theoretically arrive in January sometime and hopefully won't fall apart if I look at it sideways.

The luggage may have fended off the Instant Gratification Monster, which is getting rather annoyed about the shelter situation even though it knows that nothing gets done on Thanksgiving week. The MSPCA would be easier, but the Boston location has barn cats and special needs cats at the moment, and I'm not looking for either of those. Well, mostly. I can cope with a missing eye or a missing limb, or even an identified allergy, but not with chronic systemic diseases.

I haven't cried since 10:00 yesterday morning, so I guess that's progress. It's been exactly a week since Snip crashed. Lily is eating like a horse and doesn't seem to mind being an only cat for now. But I did go to petfinder to see what's out there. I can't adopt another cat yet, but the all-white blue-eyed five-month-old kitten is awfully cute. She'll be rehomed by next week, of course.

I am in fact getting a ride to CT for Thanksgiving. I need to go, for my own sanity. It's only a day trip and I need to not sit here alone with a Snip-shaped hole in my heart on Dad's favorite holiday.