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I don't know why I'm bothering to re-reformat this article, because if the JDE and CEDR both didn't want it, no way is BMC Med Ed going to want it either.  And then I'll have to re-re-reformat it and send it somewhere else.

And it's hot, and HUMID, and I would rather be up to the neck in the ocean, where I might as well be anyway, than glued to the computer all day.  And I don't even have any ice cream in the house.  Which is probably good in the long run, but if I'm going to be glued to the computer (which puts off heat) in my uncomfortable chair (which was fine before I sat in it eight hours a day for over a year) while it's 95 and humid, I want some sort of reward for it.  At least the fact that the laptop puts off heat is keeping Lily from wanting to plant herself on it.  Actually, I ended up playing Where the HELL is the CAT, because she was in the back of the closet.  I wish I could let them out in the stairwell, because it's noticeably cooler on the first floor and massively cooler in the basement.  They'd like that. 

Oh yay, on Thursday I can come in through the door closer to my actual office, instead of going into the REB, up half a flight of stairs, through another door, down two flights, through a third door, through the basement, through a fourth door, up three flights, and through a fifth and sixth door.  (Imagine how much fun that is if you're carrying anything heavy, or anything that requires more than one hand.)  Now that the Main lobby entrance is open, it's just up one flight of stairs and through two doors.  Hopefully on Thursday the weather will be a bit less like living in a hot washcloth, too.
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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.
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Lily passed the Chicken Test just now. Last month when I brought home a rotisserie chicken, she wanted to be interested, but her heart (or her pancreas) just wasn't in it and she made a sort of half effort.

Tonight she practically climbed into the grocery bag when I put it down, and then since she knew there was a chicken in the house, she stared at me until I got up and disassembled it. While I was doing that, she was practically crawling up my pant leg until she got the cutting board, and then she cleaned it off thoroughly. That's passing the Chicken Test, all right.
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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.
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I went to H Mart today when it decided to stop actually raining. Apparently I'm still not ready to wait in underground T stations for ten minutes (did that on the way there and found out it wasn't my best thing), so I walked back to Harvard from Central Square to take the bus home. Which was fine; I got exercise and didn't get rained on. And then when I got home I could hang around and read and eat miscellaneous Korean pancakes for late lunch. That was today's definition of unwinding, because I've been a pretty crispy critter ever since the week of March 8, which should have been a vacation week. The routine since about March 1 has been "see new email, shriek 'NO, GO AWAY' either mentally or vocally, get up, walk one lap of apartment, sigh heavily, sit down again, and deal with whatever it is that whoever it is wants THIS time." No email for three work days will be a good start.

Arm was still good and sore all day yesterday, and it happens to be the arm I sleep on top of, so I threw some Advil at it last night at bedtime. It's hardly sore today. Mom and Dad got their second Pfizer shots yesterday, and as of today my grandmother is officially fully vaccinated, because her second shot was two weeks ago.

I moved the pet steps into the living room when Lily had stopped eating much, because it's more important to me that she have easy access to her food on the cat tree than easy access to me in bed in the morning. Apparently it's important to Lily to jump up on the bed, too, since she hasn't stopped. I was considering buying another set of steps until I remembered that the new mattress and box spring, which arrive on Monday, will be at least three inches lower. Which means I won't need deep pocket sheets. Which means I can go buy flannel sheets in the fall if I want to. What an unusual idea.
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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.
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It is really absurdly windy out. Or maybe it's just loud because I opened some storm windows to let some of the semi-springlike air in when we had some, and didn't shut them again. All the windows need washing, but I don't think we have enough ladder to do them from outdoors and I'm not going to start with gymnastics from indoors.

I hope Lily's renewed interest in food persists when the pain shot wears off this afternoon. Yesterday she got interested in Quirk's crunchies at breakfast (so she got some of her own and ate half of them over the course of the day) and raced me down the hall to be waiting on the cat tree for dinner. I forget when she stopped doing that, but it was nice to see her do it again. She does like the Royal Canin food, though.

There is precisely one person who's allowed to make me cross things off their task list for them, and it is not the person who tried to make me do it just now. And the person who's allowed to do it has been doing it a lot lately and I wish she wouldn't. Just as well I'm taking Thursday, Friday, and Monday off.

Speaking of time off, I'm sorely tempted to take tomorrow afternoon off too, since my vaccine appointment is at 2:20 and I have to get to Cambridge and back by bus. And I want to stick my head in the Coop and the Harvard Bookstore and see if I can find the sequel to Foundryside, which I read yesterday and enjoyed. I think Robert Bennett has read Patrick Rothfuss, because the way magic works is pretty derivative, but Bennett put it in a bag with "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and medieval Venice, and shook it up vigorously.

Yesterday was Quirk's third birthday. I hope it was better than the previous two. At least she got a little bit of celebratory sour cream (her favorite human food so far).
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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.
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So, vet day happened on Tuesday, because Quirk needed a booster for her distemper vaccine and we wanted to see if Lily had gained any weight. She had in fact lost some and is back in "cat skeleton with fur on it" territory, and Quirk had gained some (which of course is the exact opposite of what we wanted), and Dr. P was worried enough to draw blood from Lily. I was convinced it was going to say "dying of kidney failure", but it didn't. Her kidney values are fine for being almost 15 years old. She's slightly anemic and rather neutrophilic, which Dr. P says is infection, inflammation, or possible early stage bone marrow cancer. Ultrasound and antibiotic injection tomorrow. There goes another $800. Sigh. But she's started eating a useful amount again, at least. And she's acting more like herself since yesterday than she has since she got goopy eyes last month.

In human medical news, I am getting a Covid vaccine on Tuesday through HSDM. Yes, it's jumping the line, but not badly enough to make me feel horribly guilty and "weight off my mind" doesn't even begin to describe it. All of my planning for anything in the future outside my apartment stopped at "when I'm vaccinated" and now I can put a date to when that actually is.

And now I have to go try to corral my brain into being productive, when all it wants to do is yell "WHEE!" and bounce off the walls.
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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.
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Lily is not eating very much, but she's not ready to let go yet. She has two bad teeth that refuse to give up and fall out, and I wish they would, because I think that's the problem (or at the very least not helping). Having them pulled would mean putting an almost-15-year-old cat with kidney problems under general anesthesia, and Dr. P is good with my not wanting to do that.

Got my $1400 stimulus check, and am taking the BC Easter vacation (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Monday off), so I guess I can go mattress shopping. Hooray? Mattress shopping feels like used-car shopping to me. I think I know what I want, though, and it's a matter of going down to Mattress Firm in Coolidge Corner, which is where they sell what I want, and persuading them that that's all I want. The regiment could probably invest in a new futon mattress someday too, but that's at the end of the "not now" list after new office rug and new quilt. Quirk isn't doing the quilt any favors either.

And I really need a plasterer to fix the office wall, and a plumber and a tile guy to at least replace the tub/shower faucets and replace that square foot of tiles in the middle of the wall, and if I won the lottery I'd have the entire bathroom re-tiled. I'm probably going to have to win the lottery for the plasterer anyway. AND I'm not sure how long it would take to fix the wall, and I don't think it would be a good idea to try to be doing my WFH job while the wall's being fixed. So I'm in about three minds on the subject.
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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.
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I did not take any personal time yesterday, unless you count the 15 minutes or so I spent providing Lily with lap space. I still need a vacation, but I seem to have found enough coping skills somewhere to get through yesterday and today. The next week I could take as vacation without probably getting work-related phone calls is the week of April 12. That's a long way away.

The vet suggested I take about a pound off Quirk and put about a pound on Lily. So far it seems to be working; Quirk looks a bit less like she swallowed a rugby ball, and Lily's spine has padding over it, and when she perched on top of me in bed this morning my first half-awake thought was "Oof, HEAVY!" I think she's got a little more energy lately too. Amazing what eating enough will do, I guess.

Quirk, meanwhile, has come out of whatever shell she had left, and I've figured out some of her various vocalizations. She doesn't squeak these days; she trills, which when she's walking around means "Here's me, where's you?", and she hollers, which means "It was mealtime AGES ago and I'm STARVING!" I haven't figured out why she'll sit there and meow at me when she doesn't seem to want anything.

Yesterday it was almost warm enough for open windows, so I opened the kitchen window farthest from the thermostat. Quirk enjoyed that, and didn't try to fling herself through the screen to get at the bird feeder. I enjoyed the fresh air. It's supposed to be actual open window weather tomorrow.

I still need to go get a dead keyboard for Lily to sit on. Maybe I'll sneak out tomorrow in the open window weather. If I'm really being nice about it, I'd get a beanbag compress to put under the dead keyboard, so she'd have her own warm keyboard to sit on.

The clocks change again on Sunday. It will be light enough for a whole grocery shopping trip after 5:00. If I did that, I might not have to stand in lines outside grocery stores for so long on weekends. I would love for the vaccination rate to catch up with the mask wearing and make "social distancing" completely irrelevant.
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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.)
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My cats are spoiled. Not excessively, because I only buy one rotisserie chicken per month and they only get scraps of it, and I stretch out the scraps over a week. But I went out in the snow after work to buy a can of tuna to hide gabapentin in tomorrow. And Whole Foods is closer to home than the pet store is, so they get human tuna, not cat-food tuna. From Whole Foods. Spoiled, I say.

To be fair, it would have been cat-food tuna, but I didn't know I was going to need to drug them up to the eyebrows tomorrow until lunchtime today. I'm being a bit of a paranoid pet parent, because Lily's eye is getting better and she's not ready to die on me yet. But she should weigh more than she does, given how much she eats, and Dr. P agreed to move the appointment from March to tomorrow for that and the eye. I almost hope the weight problem is recurring hyperthyroid, even though that's not supposed to happen after the Radioactive Cat Saga. But at least I know how to treat that. Sticking her with an insulin needle every day if it's diabetes isn't my favorite idea. I'll do it if I have to, of course.

I'm back to wondering every morning, if I wake up before Lily comes to inquire about breakfast, whether I'm waking up to a dead cat (even though at least half of my brain knows she's not ready yet). I would dearly love to stop that. I used to wonder if I would be coming home to a dead cat, before the Radioactive Cat Saga. Then she got better and I stopped thinking that way, and it was lovely. But now she's skinny again. Not quite as skinny as before the Radioactive Cat Saga, at least. She doesn't have hipbones sticking out this time.

Quirk gets doped up to the eyebrows because she needs a rabies shot and I don't know yet how she acts with vets in her living space. Her previous vet records didn't say anything about how she acted in their various offices. Better safe than sorry. And she needs a manicure anyway, which I can do while she's loopy on happy pill and rabies shot. Why did I want cats, again? (Because, among other reasons, I would be in an absolutely awful mental state after almost a year of living completely alone in a pandemic if I didn't have them.)

I need a new team name. Lily and Snip were the Hairy Beasts, but it doesn't quite fit Lily and Quirk.
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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.
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Still no word from the Gifford, which has no application review timelines published beyond "be patient", so I put in an application through Petfinder for the blue-eyed white kitten at a shelter in JP. They say they'll get back to you within a day. I'll believe that when I see it in my inbox, says I. (If I do end up with this kitten, her name is going to have to be Yeti.) Lily is lonesome for another cat. I don't know how to tell shelters that expediency is kind of important here. Starting to think I need a "catquest" tag for Dreamwidth.

At least now it's December, so the undiluted awful that was the last two thirds of November is over. And I went and jumped through the appropriate hoops with CAGE to make the Registrar happy, so now we can officially modify the MMSc course requirements.
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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.
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Lily needs somebody of the feline persuasion to be in charge of. She keeps being confused when there's nobody to curl up with and wash after dinner, so she comes and gives me a lecture and tries to wash me, and it's not the same thing. She also wants to be glued to my laptop more than usual, and she keeps clicking on things by accident, and I do have to do productive work every so often.

To that end I put in an adoption application with the Gifford Cat Shelter this afternoon, because they have a young dilute tortoiseshell cat who they say likes other cats, and because they're back behind BC so I don't have to drive to get there. They've already contacted K to make sure I'm allowed to have cats in my apartment. I was actually surprised they got as far as checking that I had permission to have cats, because it's Thanksgiving week, so maybe I'll actually hear from them tomorrow. The application is active for three months, so hopefully we'll have a second cat by the middle of February even if it's not the one I originally applied for. It doesn't need to be a tortoiseshell, but it does need to be young enough to stick around for a while after Lily. I don't want to lose three cats in five years.

I had to think about it some while I was filling out the application, and Snip wasn't an easy cat. It would be nice to have an easier one for a while. But I don't blame Snip for being Snip, either. She was who she was. I may never have another cat who washes me as much as Snip did, or has to turn around at least three times before sitting down on me, or picks up her left front foot and limps out of the bathroom and only the bathroom, for no reason whatsoever as far as I could ever tell. But that's OK, because those things were Snip, and every cat has its own quirks.

Yes, I do think about things other than cats. I made some turkey stock on Saturday out of a three-pound thigh (must have been a Very Large Bird), meaning to make turkey soup for Thanksgiving since I'm going to be here by myself. The stock came out pretty well, but I either need another (smaller) thigh to use for the actual soup, or I need to give up and just make vegetable soup with the stock. I haven't decided which yet. But I should decide, and do whatever I'm going to do, tomorrow. I still think one of my great-grandfathers had the right idea; he mostly lived on soup and pie.
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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.
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