Bleak February
Squeaky went to the vet yesterday, which was depressing. All three of the boys are due for their annual shots-and-exams in mid-February, but since Lauren borrowed one of the cat carriers and hasn't returned it yet (as is typical whenever she borrows anything), I can't take all three in for a single visit. Also, Squeaky's eyedrops were about to run out, and I didn't want to just pick up a refill if he was about to be seen in a couple of weeks and the vet might decide to try him on a different drug, since what he's on quit working so well a month or so back.
So, Squeaky went to the vet yesterday, and we got the Depressing Vet. I've seen her a time or two before and remembered her as tending to give downer predictions (such as on Blackjack's final illness, when she was incidentally pretty much correct), and with Squeaky she was figuring that the thing in his eye that we haven't been able to get rid of over the course of the past year is probably a tumor, and she thinks he's blind in the good eye as well as the one that looks so awful, and she wants to do bloodwork on him to check on his internal organs between his age and the eye thing and me telling her he's been somewhat listless of late. She said that if his weight hadn't been so good and I hadn't reported that he's got an excellent appetite, then she would have been pushing to do the bloodwork that day and postpone his shots -- and that maybe he's been so apparently inactive because he can't really see where he's going anymore. (She also admitted that her totally scientific test of making poking gestures at his eyes to see if he blinked or flinched might be thrown off by his abject terror at being in the animal clinic being handled by strangers. When she walked into the room he was clinging to me and shivering.) She agreed with me that continuing to dose him with eyedrops to keep the mess in his eye from getting worse was the prudent course of action, though it probably really blew up recently because after a while the steroids just stop working. (In any case, she sent me home with a bottle of the same eyedrops he's been getting.)
I spent much of the rest of the afternoon (and earlier today) trying to test him for any visual function at all. A few times I got him tracking my hand with his eyes, so I'm hoping the good eye is still working. But I wouldn't be surprised if he's lost enough vision in the bad eye to lose depth perception -- it would explain a certain degree of clumsiness we've noticed when he's jumping. (Or, he could just be beginning to get arthritic, which would also make him less interested in running around.) At any rate, that's one cat down, two to go. (And Squeaky's bill yesterday made me wince when I mentally translated it to seven hours of overtime. This is how that credit card balance went up last year...)
Happily, I got the rabbit cage dealt with early, since I had that 2:30pm appointment to keep me within a time frame. And I caught up on sleep Sunday (missed the Super Bowl entirely, zonked in my bedroom) and then last night slept from about 7pm to midnight, pretty much close to my weekday schedule. I'd dearly love to think I could get a tolerable amount of sleep tonight before work, but after I get offline I've still got to take care of the gym trip, the fancy part of my manicure, and the visit to Grandma that I didn't make yesterday...
I've actually taken this on my visit to Grandma once or twice. The foot is the easiest part of this pattern, since it's just a single repeat of the chevron pattern running along the top.. The chevron is a two-row repeat I've memorized (especially since the even rows are just knitting straight across, aside from a couple of purled stitches), and the rest of the round is plain stockinette, so I can sit there and chat with Grandma as I work on it. Once I've done the heel, though (and I'm just a few rows away from it), I'm doing chevrons front and back and columns of hearts up the sides -- and the heart lace pattern has a chart for me to follow. I won't be getting much work done on it anywhere but at home in front of the TV. (Since I'm trying to get it finished by Valentine's, that means it'll probably be the only thing I'll let myself work on while clearing the DVR until it's done.)
Not so much since last week, but I'm nearly to the heel, and I'll be working on it during today's gym session. It's gym and Grandma-visiting knitting, which means if I put in hideous amounts of overtime in the coming week I'm likely to be spending more time working on this than on the other sock.
We escaped the hideous storms to the northeast, but we dropped into the 20s Sunday night, and we're getting wintry temperatures all week. (At least overnight, which means I get to layer up at work. I've been wearing the grey vest rather than the purple coat, though, when it's not near-freezing, because of the bulky-sleeves-under-lab-coat issue. Going to really appreciate having another couple of vests to choose from next winter!) I found signs of carpet beetles in one of my wool blankets a few weeks back, so yesterday morning in the pre-dawn chill I wound up pulling the three wool blankets off my bed and sticking them in the backseat of my car to freeze and thaw and freeze again. (I wound up sleeping on the living room couch yesterday evening -- with Mom in the love seat cheerfully watching TV as I slept -- in large part because my sheets were in the dryer and I was too tired to make my bed without a nap. So the blankets had all of last night to chill.)
That deep blue is China Glaze "Up All Night" and gets mistaken for black very easily. I'm going to have to use it as the backdrop for a galaxy manicure at some point -- or maybe just using the silver star glitter and putting a glowing white moon on one thumbnail. (Maybe actually using glow-in-the-dark polish for a final coat on the moon? Come to think of it, I'm going to have to try doing a galaxy at some point with liberal daubings of glow-in-the-dark for some of the clouds of stars...)
The original plan for today was do so something similar using gold as the base color and plum over the top, but then I noticed on the calendar that Mardi Gras comes right after Valentine's. And that's a manicure for rich jewel tones over a gold background. So instead this week I'm doing shocking pink with black designs over the top. (And some black-lace decals. I might throw in some heart-shaped glitter, too.) This is basically the manicure I was originally planning for the week after Valentine's, only with a bit more added in terms of frilly details.
My sister and her boyfriend got their wedding license a week or two back, so it looks like this time the wedding is actually going to happen. She's just given up on hoping for fancier arrangements than they can afford (which was apparently why the wedding planned for last October was quietly postponed). She posted to Facebook about it being a jeans-and-leather wedding, which is fair enough since I gather there are going to be a lot of bikers there. (No, not the bicycle-riding kind.)
Mom asked me if I'll be able to come to a wedding on a Saturday afternoon (Valentine's, of course), which left me a lot more kindly inclined to the idea than a while back when she had told me Lauren was planning on a Valentine's wedding and happily announced I'd have to take that night off from work. (Saturdays I can't take unless I can personally get someone to agree to fill in for me. On Valentine's? Highly unlikely. And I'd already taken one night off from work in October over Lauren's previously-scheduled wedding that had been cancelled without any notice. I wasn't even going to bother requesting the night this time around.) So having Mom actually acknowledge that I might have a scheduling conflict and not expect me to drop everything else over my sister's wedding was nice. We agreed that I'll presumably try to attend, but in separate vehicles so Mom can stay to enjoy the party and I can go home to sleep before work.
Also there was the matter of neither of us being sure we had anything wedding-appropriate in our closets we could still fit into -- "jeans and leather" lets us off the hook, though Mom is still planning on looking for a dress for herself. I could see if anything left from my previous office job still looks okay on me, though I find myself leaning towards wearing my usual pants and just a nice top and jewelry...
And, okay. Post this, off to the gym and to see Grandma (in whichever order), then home for lunch and to finish off my manicure...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
So, Squeaky went to the vet yesterday, and we got the Depressing Vet. I've seen her a time or two before and remembered her as tending to give downer predictions (such as on Blackjack's final illness, when she was incidentally pretty much correct), and with Squeaky she was figuring that the thing in his eye that we haven't been able to get rid of over the course of the past year is probably a tumor, and she thinks he's blind in the good eye as well as the one that looks so awful, and she wants to do bloodwork on him to check on his internal organs between his age and the eye thing and me telling her he's been somewhat listless of late. She said that if his weight hadn't been so good and I hadn't reported that he's got an excellent appetite, then she would have been pushing to do the bloodwork that day and postpone his shots -- and that maybe he's been so apparently inactive because he can't really see where he's going anymore. (She also admitted that her totally scientific test of making poking gestures at his eyes to see if he blinked or flinched might be thrown off by his abject terror at being in the animal clinic being handled by strangers. When she walked into the room he was clinging to me and shivering.) She agreed with me that continuing to dose him with eyedrops to keep the mess in his eye from getting worse was the prudent course of action, though it probably really blew up recently because after a while the steroids just stop working. (In any case, she sent me home with a bottle of the same eyedrops he's been getting.)
I spent much of the rest of the afternoon (and earlier today) trying to test him for any visual function at all. A few times I got him tracking my hand with his eyes, so I'm hoping the good eye is still working. But I wouldn't be surprised if he's lost enough vision in the bad eye to lose depth perception -- it would explain a certain degree of clumsiness we've noticed when he's jumping. (Or, he could just be beginning to get arthritic, which would also make him less interested in running around.) At any rate, that's one cat down, two to go. (And Squeaky's bill yesterday made me wince when I mentally translated it to seven hours of overtime. This is how that credit card balance went up last year...)
Happily, I got the rabbit cage dealt with early, since I had that 2:30pm appointment to keep me within a time frame. And I caught up on sleep Sunday (missed the Super Bowl entirely, zonked in my bedroom) and then last night slept from about 7pm to midnight, pretty much close to my weekday schedule. I'd dearly love to think I could get a tolerable amount of sleep tonight before work, but after I get offline I've still got to take care of the gym trip, the fancy part of my manicure, and the visit to Grandma that I didn't make yesterday...
I've actually taken this on my visit to Grandma once or twice. The foot is the easiest part of this pattern, since it's just a single repeat of the chevron pattern running along the top.. The chevron is a two-row repeat I've memorized (especially since the even rows are just knitting straight across, aside from a couple of purled stitches), and the rest of the round is plain stockinette, so I can sit there and chat with Grandma as I work on it. Once I've done the heel, though (and I'm just a few rows away from it), I'm doing chevrons front and back and columns of hearts up the sides -- and the heart lace pattern has a chart for me to follow. I won't be getting much work done on it anywhere but at home in front of the TV. (Since I'm trying to get it finished by Valentine's, that means it'll probably be the only thing I'll let myself work on while clearing the DVR until it's done.)
Not so much since last week, but I'm nearly to the heel, and I'll be working on it during today's gym session. It's gym and Grandma-visiting knitting, which means if I put in hideous amounts of overtime in the coming week I'm likely to be spending more time working on this than on the other sock.
We escaped the hideous storms to the northeast, but we dropped into the 20s Sunday night, and we're getting wintry temperatures all week. (At least overnight, which means I get to layer up at work. I've been wearing the grey vest rather than the purple coat, though, when it's not near-freezing, because of the bulky-sleeves-under-lab-coat issue. Going to really appreciate having another couple of vests to choose from next winter!) I found signs of carpet beetles in one of my wool blankets a few weeks back, so yesterday morning in the pre-dawn chill I wound up pulling the three wool blankets off my bed and sticking them in the backseat of my car to freeze and thaw and freeze again. (I wound up sleeping on the living room couch yesterday evening -- with Mom in the love seat cheerfully watching TV as I slept -- in large part because my sheets were in the dryer and I was too tired to make my bed without a nap. So the blankets had all of last night to chill.)
That deep blue is China Glaze "Up All Night" and gets mistaken for black very easily. I'm going to have to use it as the backdrop for a galaxy manicure at some point -- or maybe just using the silver star glitter and putting a glowing white moon on one thumbnail. (Maybe actually using glow-in-the-dark polish for a final coat on the moon? Come to think of it, I'm going to have to try doing a galaxy at some point with liberal daubings of glow-in-the-dark for some of the clouds of stars...)
The original plan for today was do so something similar using gold as the base color and plum over the top, but then I noticed on the calendar that Mardi Gras comes right after Valentine's. And that's a manicure for rich jewel tones over a gold background. So instead this week I'm doing shocking pink with black designs over the top. (And some black-lace decals. I might throw in some heart-shaped glitter, too.) This is basically the manicure I was originally planning for the week after Valentine's, only with a bit more added in terms of frilly details.
My sister and her boyfriend got their wedding license a week or two back, so it looks like this time the wedding is actually going to happen. She's just given up on hoping for fancier arrangements than they can afford (which was apparently why the wedding planned for last October was quietly postponed). She posted to Facebook about it being a jeans-and-leather wedding, which is fair enough since I gather there are going to be a lot of bikers there. (No, not the bicycle-riding kind.)
Mom asked me if I'll be able to come to a wedding on a Saturday afternoon (Valentine's, of course), which left me a lot more kindly inclined to the idea than a while back when she had told me Lauren was planning on a Valentine's wedding and happily announced I'd have to take that night off from work. (Saturdays I can't take unless I can personally get someone to agree to fill in for me. On Valentine's? Highly unlikely. And I'd already taken one night off from work in October over Lauren's previously-scheduled wedding that had been cancelled without any notice. I wasn't even going to bother requesting the night this time around.) So having Mom actually acknowledge that I might have a scheduling conflict and not expect me to drop everything else over my sister's wedding was nice. We agreed that I'll presumably try to attend, but in separate vehicles so Mom can stay to enjoy the party and I can go home to sleep before work.
Also there was the matter of neither of us being sure we had anything wedding-appropriate in our closets we could still fit into -- "jeans and leather" lets us off the hook, though Mom is still planning on looking for a dress for herself. I could see if anything left from my previous office job still looks okay on me, though I find myself leaning towards wearing my usual pants and just a nice top and jewelry...
And, okay. Post this, off to the gym and to see Grandma (in whichever order), then home for lunch and to finish off my manicure...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.