The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

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.

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.

Friday night was a disaster. I assumed that Quirk wasn't going to come out of the back of the closet yet for love or money, and didn't make sure the door was shut hard. So naturally Quirk came out at 1:15 in the morning, and I woke up to Lily announcing the imminent start of World War 3. Got out of bed and discovered Quirk on the bookshelf in front of the living room window and Lily on the floor in front of the TV stand. Lily decided that putting me between herself and Quirk was marginally acceptable, so I spent the next three hours lying on the living room floor while Lily repositioned herself in various places around me and growled at Quirk when she tried to come down from the bookshelf. Around 4:00 Lily relaxed just a bit and Quirk came off the bookshelf and went into the kitchen, where she discovered the cookbook shelf under the kitchen window, and nearly got herself stuck in the shelf under the coffee maker. Lily sat in the doorway between my bed and my nightstand and growled. After that Quirk fled back to the office, but then she spent the next hour sitting in the middle of the floor and squeaking. I kept getting up to go see what she wanted, but whatever it was, she didn't want it from me. At 5:00 I decided to leave everyone to their own devices, and read for an hour, and finally fell asleep at 6:00. Lily started inquiring about breakfast at 7:30.

This would have been better if I'd had my lenses in and had been able to see anything, or if I could have picked up either cat (since the Radioactive Cat Saga, Lily doesn't like being picked up, and I can't get that close to Quirk yet, and besides, picking up an already upset cat who doesn't like being picked up anyway is not a good idea) and relocated her. But it was what it was, and it was awful.

Saturday was pretty much a disaster too, because I was working on three hours of sleep and couldn't get mobilized to do errands in the morning before it started raining for the rest of the day. I cried at Lily because she had kept me awake, and cried at Quirk because I really wanted things to work out, and went to bed at about 9:00 and slept straight through to 7:30.

Yesterday was better. Quirk came out and sat in front of the closet while I was reading email in the morning, and I went out and did the errands I needed to do, and it was very nice weather for December. There was an ex-Obies Zoom at 7:30 last night and I did that, during which Quirk came out and ate and used the litterbox and sat in the window behind me, and reduced her required personal space to a two-foot radius.

Today I have a gate up, the door cracked, and the door curtain between the gate and the door. Lily is interested, and Quirk is not. Quirk supposedly likes cats better than people, but since they got off on the wrong foot, we'll see.

Pretty good weekend. I got my watches back, bought three books I haven't read (The World Beneath the Sands, Culture Warlords, and Anansi Boys), went to H Mart on a field trip and got assorted pancakes and soy-marinated eggs and a bibimbap kit and some smoked duck and some more rice cakes and various other happy stuff like that, discovered what happens when Snip encounters a fish cake (has to figure out that it's fish, after which GIMME THAT), put out the last of the scented kitty litter, and gave myself permission to order unscented kitty litter online and get it delivered for once.

I wish I didn't have to have the litter delivered, but my ankle is alternately grumbling and hollering at me, from one of the specific places that hurt (after it healed enough to hurt in specific places) when I sprained it last December. I suspect that adding a half-mile walk with 40 lb of litter won't help it. So, delivery it is, at least this time.

As of yesterday, the hot water in the shower was dripping from the tub spout to an extent that wouldn't be good for the water bill long-term. So today the plumber came and repaired the hot water faucet, and told me that the fixtures are on their last legs on account of being 40 years old or so. (He also said the entire neighborhood has awful water pressure, which I didn't know because it seems fine to me.) I rather like having separate faucets for the hot and cold water, and if the plumber had his way he'd replace it with a single hot/cold/diverter unit. That would require replacing some of the tile, too, though. But at least the drip is down to occasional for now, and the faucet doesn't crank beyond horizontal to turn off, and the plumber doesn't think it's leaking behind the tile, which I worry about occasionally.

This morning a flatbed trailer parked on the street and disgorged a Bobcat, which I saw trundling around, and, apparently, an excavator, which had already gone where it was going by the time I saw the Bobcat. I happened to look out the window after the plumber had left, in time to see the excavator go back on the trailer and pull the ramps up after it, except it was about six inches too far forward, so it backed up and the ramps fell down flat. For no particular reason the whole process amused me.

Thankfully, the meeting I postponed last week went fairly well today. Especially since my boss had already told this person what she wanted to hear in the first place, so I didn't have to say I couldn't tell her that. There might be hope for this week after all.

Maybe I should put red meat back in my diet more than once a month or so, because I had steak for dinner last night and woke up this morning determined to Get Things Done. Which I did, and now I have to take the trash out because it's full of vacuum cleaner canister contents and disgustingly dirty Swiffer cloths and wet paper towels. The litterbox and the pantry floor are clean, the bathroom sink and the tub are clean, I'm clean, the floors on the sunny side of the building are Swiffed (Swiffered?), the rugs are vacuumed, and the laundry is in the dryer. And the rust stain is off the kitchen floor. Mostly. I think I need CLR to really get it off, but baking soda and elbow grease accounted for most of it. (Memo to self, buy more baking soda, because that stuff is ANCIENT and probably not fit for cooking with.)

I don't know that it was because of the steak; maybe it was just getting through the week and getting over the bad mood I was in when I went out to buy steak yesterday after work (I hated my boss for sending me three more requests for letters for scholarships after 3:00, the cats for stomping on the laptop, the idiot pedestrians for wearing masks under their noses, the idiot drivers for blatantly running the light at Comm Ave and Washington, the grocery store for making me stand in line outside, etc.). But I haven't felt like springing out of bed and getting things done for ages. I've been getting work-related things done despite myself. Today is different.

In another 40 minutes when the dryer is done, I can go take the trash out and run errands, thereby also getting vitamin D and exercise. And then I can come home and do whatever I damn well please for the rest of the weekend. So there.

As holiday weekends go, this one was a dud. I just couldn't get interested in doing much of anything after Saturday.

On Saturday I did a lot of embroidering, and rescued the trash can lid from across the street when the can blew over. It was impressively windy and the lid was making a break for New Hampshire. But at least it was warmish while it was windy.

On Sunday I did pretty much nothing except pay the bills and whittle the list of Civilization 5 leaders I haven't won as down to six (Spain, Carthage, Austria, the Maya, the Shoshone, and Venice). And I vacuumed the living room rug and Swiffered most of the bare floors. Everybody's shedding, including me, and there's hair everywhere.

Yesterday I cleaned the litterbox and took the trash out, and did a teeny load of laundry, and called that accomplishing something for the day.

Today Dr. P is coming to get blood out of Lily. Or at least that's the theory, anyway. Last time it was a bit of an ordeal and she got barely enough blood to test. It was easier when Lily was basically a cat skeleton with fur on it, because the vein was right there. But I'd rather not have a cat skeleton with fur on it, all things considered. I'm also slightly less sympathetic than I might be, because Lily decided to wake me up at 2:30 this morning for no discernible reason. Why did I want cats, again? (Because they're cute, that's why. And they don't care how much I get done, or not, on weekends, and they don't care how much weight I put on.)

It was a good weekend in that I managed to go to Target on Friday and get contact lens cleaner and cat food and deodorant, and make a shelf stocker very happy by asking for lens cleaner and not hand sanitizer (she actually said "I'm so glad you didn't say hand sanitizer!"). And I went to the pet store on Saturday and got kitty litter, and Trader Joe's and got lots of stuff including excellent blackberries. So now I feel considerably less like I'm living on odds and ends, and besides that, it was pretty nice out, so I got to be out in the nice weather.

I also finally got zip ties off the list, where they've been since last summer, because I'm slowly putting together a "save a dive" kit. I still need one of each screwdriver and an adjustable wrench and some wetsuit cement, at the very least. So far I've got zip ties and a spare mask strap and an extra BCD-to-regulator hose. But it's a start.

Since it was nice out, and since it's been relatively nice out for most of the winter, I forgot my annual February reading of The Grey Seas Under. Usually I read that in February when I'm sick and tired of standing outdoors in freezing cold waiting for buses, just to remind myself that it could be worse. I read it this weekend instead, and things could definitely be worse.

Responsible Adulthood continues to be a pain in the neck. If I had gotten all the legal documents done in October, I would be done with all the financial stuff now. But the credit union updated all its systems software in November, and now instead of transferring my existing accounts, I have to close them and reopen them as a trust. And I can't do anything with the CDs at all. GRR.

So that was Saturday morning. Then I wandered off to the Coop and bought a couple of books, and then wandered off to Saloniki in the Smith Center and had salad and hummus for lunch, which was nice because I needed some vegetables. Then I went home and figured out how to exchange heavy stuff for other heavy stuff: I went out with an empty kitty litter jug and a full container of change, and turned the change into paper money and subsequently into V8 and seltzer and kitty litter. And a new cat bed, because the cheap ones don't provide any padding between Lily and the floor, and she is an official teenager, and the floor is cold. So, new cat bed has a lot more padding between Lily and the floor. She sleeps in that bed all evening and Snip sleeps in it all day.

Unfortunately I waited for the T for 25 minutes on the way home with the heavy stuff. I hate it when it does that. I really hate it when it's cold and windy and I'm thirsty and it does that. So I came home and drank quite a lot of seltzer and decided to spend most of the rest of the day reading books. The Librarian of Auschwitz wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of character development. I bought it because it's a translation, and I didn't find any blatant translatorese in it, which was a bit of a surprise. The latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book for a couple of months now, and it turned out to be just about exactly what was required. (It occurs to me that one of the things I like about that series is there are absolutely no cell phones in it.)

Yesterday I went out for more (different) seltzer and more vegetables, because I wanted to make Smitten Kitchen's pizza beans yesterday, and LTMB and vegetable soup this week (I made the LTMBs last weekend and froze them). So I came home with a case of seltzer, and a cabbage and some carrots and some tomatoes and a bag of frozen spinach. I made an extremely quick and dirty version of pizza beans, because I used three cans of beans and a jar of marinara sauce, and a pound of thawed drained frozen spinach. If I had made my own sauce, it would have been better, but it worked for hot food last night and it will work for lunch this week.

Unfortunately this week got off on a very cold, soggy and grumpy foot. Missing the 7:50 bus was my fault, because I didn't get out the door until 7:48. But the fact that the 8:00 and 8:10 buses never showed up at all meant the 8:20 was a sardine can, and even though at that point I had been standing in the rain for half an hour, I was absolutely not in the mood for a sardine can. So I went down to the Cambridge St bus stop, because it has a roof over it, and stood there for another ten minutes and got an actual seat on the 8:30. Which was a sardine can by the time it got to Comm Ave. I got to work at 9:00 or so with soaking wet feet and a massive case of Don't Wanna. If I hadn't used up all my personal days for the year already, I would have taken one today. At least the Drama Llama decided to be sick today, so I didn't have to listen to him whine when I finally did get here.

I need to go to REI tonight and invest in some more socks. I cleaned out the sock drawer last spring, and now I get to about Thursday and it looks pathetic in there.

I'm glad the one reasonably nice day this weekend was the one I was out running around in. Saturday was haircut/grocery shopping/more grocery shopping/laundry/more grocery shopping day. I went to three grocery stores because TJs wasn't going to have a dishpan, and it turns out Star Market didn't either. But while I was at Star Market I bought donations for the food drive at work, which turned out to weigh enough that I didn't want to buy seltzer right then. So I went to Whole Foods for seltzer after coming home and running the laundry through the wash. Of course, I also came home from Whole Foods with a rotisserie chicken and a cabbage and some cheese ends and a bag of 10-minute farro and...

Yesterday I took the cabbage, two boxes of sliced mushrooms, two cloves of garlic, two boxes of grape tomatoes, a quart of chicken broth, and a cup of 10-minute farro, and made soup that doesn't know it isn't a grain bowl. Today and Wednesday are dress rehearsals, which means that on Tuesday I need something I can eat for dinner that doesn't involve a lot of thought (dump soup in pan, reheat, dump in bowl, add parmesan) and on Thursday and Friday I need something I can eat for dinner that doesn't involve any thought at all (open container, add parmesan, eat cold). I never have enough working brain cells by the Friday of a dress rehearsal week, because I get home stupid late on Monday and Wednesday and then can't sleep on Thursday because the music is stuck in my head so hard it keeps waking me up.

I also won't sleep all that well this week because Snip has her annual post-vet cold, and is very sneezy. But that doesn't keep her from wanting to curl up right next to me and wake me up when she starts sneezing. And it's very wet sneezing. Fortunately it only lasts about five days or so, but still, it's not convenient for anybody. I wonder if a humidifier would help?

Lily doesn't have a UTI, which we knew anyway, but I had the test done just in case that's why one of her kidney numbers was weird. So she has one weird kidney number, for which the only treatment is a prescription diet. Sigh. At least the vet said it's not imperative that she goes on it now, so I can finish up the current round of expensive but non-prescription food first and try to find something she'll like, that doesn't have corn in it (really, Royal Canin?) in the meantime.

I want to go back and do Saturday over.

On Friday night I observed that my DVD player's power button, which is red when off and blue when on, was purple. Google told me that in 2011, purple power button meant the player is hosed. And the company doesn't make DVD players in 2019. So, new DVD player was in order. So I went and looked up recommendations, and came up with a Sony Blu-ray player that Target had available for pickup at the tiny BU Target outpost on Saturday morning. Sweet, says I, I'll pick it up and come home and set it up and then go to sectional. And then I went to bed.

On Saturday I woke up at 8:30, and fed the cats and took a shower and had an apple for breakfast, and then went off to pick up the DVD player at about 9:15. But I hadn't known that the B line was running buses, and apparently it wasn't running sufficient buses, AND they were charter buses, so when the already-full bus got to Washington St, I got to stand up in it. And then get on the T and wait another ten minutes before it went off to BU. Picking up the actual DVD player was easy (scan bar code in email, sign, walk out again), but then I decided to hell with all this shuttle bus idiocy, and walked back to Harvard Ave, and got on the 66, and went to sectional with the DVD player. I got to Harvard Square at about 11:10, and sectional started at 11:30, so I just had time to go to the Bon Me truck and get an iced coffee and inhale it. At least the sectional went well, and ended at 1:00.

I had meant to go to Trader Joe's in Allston on the way home, but I hadn't eaten anything since the apple, and that meant I was going to buy the entire store if I went. So I went to Our Father's first and had some eggs that would have been lovely if they hadn't been (a) runny, (b) covered with onions, (c) garnished with cilantro, and (d) accompanied by caraway rye toast. But I was starving, so I ate them anyway. The tomatoes and avocado and farmer's cheese parts were quite nice. And then I went to Trader Joe's and didn't quite buy the entire store, and then finally took self, groceries, and DVD player home.

Got home, put away the groceries, unpacked the new DVD player (which is teensy!) and disconnected the old DVD player. The DVD of Avengers Endgame was stuck in it, so I hauled out the screwdriver and disassembled it enough to get the DVD out. The end cap on the screwdriver broke off halfway down the threads, so it wouldn't screw back in, and Snip decided it was a cat toy and swatted it under the bookshelf. GRR. Collected all the screwdriver bits, put tape over the end of the handle, collected all the old DVD player parts (and remote, and instructions) and put them in a trash bag, connected the new DVD player, and determined that it would turn on and the tray would open. The DVD remote also turns the TV on, which is slightly odd, because I didn't tell it to do that. But I think I can live with it.

Then I decided that the last thing on the list of errands, which was "buy gin", could happen even though it was 4:00 and I wanted to be home in an hour. So I hiked off to Winchester St and bought gin, and then hiked off to Coolidge Corner because I was tired and wanted to take the bus up to Harvard Ave to buy tonic at BFresh. Except, the bus app said five minutes, and I could only stand three minutes of paranoid conspiracy theories from a woman waiting for the bus (apparently there are corrupt historians in every library, who are tearing pages out of books to change history so it reads the way they want it to). So I hiked up to BFresh, and bought tonic, and took the goddamn shuttle bus back up the hill, where it sat in traffic because the bus before it wouldn't get out of the way and Comm Ave was down to one lane. I finally got home at 5:30, in a thoroughly rancid mood, and decided to have nothing whatsoever to do with the human race for at least the rest of the weekend.

Yesterday I didn't leave the house, which was just fine because it was windy and pouring rain all day. I did make cretons and do laundry and watch football, though. And I actually watched a DVD just to make sure the new player worked. Hero is still eye candy, even though I had forgotten about half of the plot because I hadn't watched it in years. But it is a gorgeous movie.

And here it is, Monday, and I'm back to being four people until tomorrow when I can go back to being three people. Actually, maybe I can go back to being a mere two people tomorrow. That would be nice.