Well-floured week
And here I am with the material for the many journal entries I should have making over the last few weeks, all going into a single post. The keyboard stashed in the coffee table in the living room is helpful, but I still need to take the time to actually use it.
So back in January I made a hummingbird cake, with a small can of pineapple bits and four whole bananas mixed into the batter. And Stilinski came along while I was eating my last slice and I gave him a few bits, so now he has learned sometimes I'm eating really good things. I may give him a few squares of Life cereal that haven't gotten soaked by milk yet if he comes to me while I'm eating a bowl, too, so that just reinforces the idea. He has gotten almost ridiculously eager to get at my meals, and I've gotten used to sometimes eating breakfast with a cat to my left (hoping for some of my omelet) and Stilinski to my right (sticking his head under my arm trying to get his nose into my bowl of cereal). Amelia sometimes comes when I'm eating something good, but she's not as proactive about begging as Mr Bunsen has become. (He even has to come check me out if I'm sitting at the coffee table polishing my nails -- though after I give him a sniff of my nails and assure him I'm not eating anything, he leaves.)
This hasn't been a good week for getting extra hours on the time card. There was work left over last Sunday morning, and I never got a reply from my supervisor when I texted for permission to get in an hour of overtime and get closer to finishing everything. (I think the weekend before that was when I asked for permission to stay and was told no, I'd undoubtedly get plenty of opportunities to make up for it during the week. Which did not happen.) I got a single hour of overtime last week -- and then I overslept Friday night (after staying up most of the day reading a book) and got to work an hour late and couldn't make up the lost hour Saturday morning because we only had enough work to get me to my regular end-of-shift. So my lone hour of overtime evaporated, and last night we had only as much work to do as actually came in that night, and the upshot was I left work two hours early and am starting out my next work week with a deficit to try to make up. (At least I won't have to ask permission to stay late while I'm making up time. But lately we've been having really unpredictable amounts of work and sometimes just having enough to get to the end of my shift is tricky.)
Mind you, on this particular day I welcomed the extra two hours of free time. I have a dentist appointment at 2pm this afternoon, and while the last time I went it didn't take too long, the visit before that ate something like three or four hours out of my afternoon. So basically I have to get as much done as possible this morning and plan for coming home too late in the day to be awake enough to do anything of use, beyond paying a visit to Grandma on my way home from the dentist.
It would have been a very good thing to get my gym session and shower out of the way yesterday -- but what I wound up doing was making my grocery run on the way home, then taking a nap of a few hours and getting up and doing kitchen stuff. Not only did I do the dishes (sparing Mom the task, but also getting the recycling taken care of so I'll have very much less of it to deal with on Tuesday), but I baked a loaf of bread. I've found I can get about two things baked on a Tuesday, usually, before my feet start really hurting from hours standing, but part of that is the amount of time I'm spending dealing with the dishes before I start measuring ingredients out. My plan for this week's baking session is chocolate-Irish-cream cupcakes and a batch of cookies -- or maybe a chocolate-Irish-cream cake and strawberry muffins, though I really feel overdue for cookies. Perhaps having the worst part of the dishes accomplished in advance will leave me enough energy to bake three things on Tuesday morning?
So I took Dizzy to the vet a few weeks ago, and the vet did bloodwork and found a liver issue and prescribed an antibiotic and a liver supplement. And this is three pills a day, which are making Dizzy miserable because he's hating the whole pilling process. But it's also fucking up my sleep schedule, because the antibiotics are supposed to be every twelve hours with food, while the liver pill is supposed to be on an empty stomach at least an hour before eating.
Ideally I'd be giving him the liver pill at 10am, hours after Mom fed him breakfast, and then the antibiotic at 11am with some kibble, and then the second dose at 11pm while I'm getting ready for work. (Again with some kibble for the evening feeding, which all the other cats have grown to eagerly expect. They're going to be crushed when his antibiotic is used up Wednesday day and the evening snack stops happening.) So the first issue is that I'm not always home from work when the 10am reminder on my phone starts dinging, if I got in some overtime or ran some errands on the way home. And the second issue is that Saturday and Sunday mornings Mom's not getting the cats fed at 7am, and I'm having to wait for Dizzy to digest breakfast before getting his first pill. (Last weekend I had to feed the cats myself when I got home, because Mom was still in bed and I couldn't see making them all wait an extra hour when they were already hours late for their meal.)
The main issue is that I'm used to coming in the door, getting a few things taken care of, and crashing on the couch for many hours, before being woken up by Mom getting home from work (or possibly by the cats demanding dinner a bit earlier). But over the last couple of weeks I've been getting home and giving Dizzy his liver pill ASAP -- then frequently falling asleep while waiting to be able to give him the antibiotic and offer kibble to all the cats. I wake up just two or three hours later, nagged awake by the reminder dinging every ten minutes and the vague sense of unmet obligation, and then I spend a few hours trying to get things done or get back to sleep, and then Mom comes home and wakes me up again, and I maybe have one or two things left to deal with or else just get a snack and move to my bedroom to nap until work. This has been fucking up my energy levels, as I'm getting by on a series of short naps and not always hitting a total of even six hours a day.
And he's been missing doses, as I find pills lying on the couch or carpet that were spit out without me noticing. Also he's been looking unhappy, and I can't tell if it's because he's feeling bad or just because he's hating getting grabbed and having his mouth pried open and then held shut several times a day. He's been hiding from me.
And there's been an insane amount of cat vomit we've been having to clean up in recent weeks. The two most obvious suspects are Ju-Ju and Dizzy (both elderly and ailing), but one morning last week I was awakened by the sound and feeling of a cat puking while half-draped over my shins, and it was Miss Spooky. Sick or just overfed? I'm hoping cutting out the evening kibble (and eliminating Dizzy's antibiotics) will help with that. (Just a few hours ago, after giving Dizzy his evening pill and then setting out kibble for all, Dizzy barfed up his snack on the carpet. And probably his pill along with the kibble.)
So I'm not optimistic that the pills will have cured what's ailing Dizzy. And a quick google for "liver problems in cats" suggests that if the antibiotic didn't do the trick, what comes next are biopsies and possible exploratory surgery. There are limits to what I want to put him through, what I can afford to do, and how hard I'm going to fight to stave off the inevitable for a fourteen-year-old cat.
Especially one who was given a ten-year life expectancy many years ago. Though the vets seem to have gotten records confused between the various cats and I keep getting conflicting reports as to which cats were vaccinated for which diseases as opposed to testing positive for them. I have been told on more than one occasion that a cat I specifically remember as having vaccinated for FIV or FeLV is testing positive for it -- so, did you not give my cat the vaccine I brought him to your clinic to receive, or did you put the note about the vaccination on the file of the wrong cat and now are mistaking a post-vaccination immune response for a post-infection immune response? Or did you get the brothers confused and tell me Dizzy had only about a decade to live when it was in fact Squeaky who died from lymphoma brought on by FeLV?
They're either fucking up the records or neglecting vaccinations for major preventable diseases. Neither one is good. I also keep getting automated reminders to bring in cats weeks after I already brought them in for their annual visit, or in one case after the cat in question had already died and the clinic had been notified of his demise. Maybe their shiny new online pet record system (with a mobile app, even!) will help keep things from getting mixed up -- though I've already had the new vet at the practice make a comment about one of the youthful cats being FeLV positive, and I'm going, "No, but seriously, the boys got their first round of shots the day Spooky tested positive, and their neuterings were scheduled specifically to get boosters for that one since Spooky has it." So, again, either a records fuckup, or the clinic neglected to give the boys their booster shots while they were in for surgery.
I need to stop letting them carry the cats into the back room to do everything to them, is what I need. I'm sick and tired of this did-they-get-their-shots-or-not? bullshit, and I want to see them vaccinating my cats right in front of me again so I know they didn't forget to give them their shots while they were taking blood or irrigating wounds or whatever. (Jesus Christ. On Dizzy's last visit I watched the vet push the needle tip completely through the fold of skin she'd pinched out for the injection site and squirt the entire dose down the outside of his leg. Yeah, I want to watch the vaccinations being done so I know they happened.)
The upshot being that this week or next the clinic probably expects me to bring Dizzy in to have his bloodwork redone and then discuss whether the meds worked or if not what needs doing next. And I'm not sure I even want to bother with taking him in for bloodwork, since I very much doubt I'm going to be willing to go along with the suggested plan of treatment if the pills didn't work. They worked and he lives, they didn't and he probably doesn't.
In other news, back when The White Queen miniseries ran on TV, I watched it and also went on a Phillipa Gregory kick, going through all her Plantagenet and Tudor books. (No, I still haven't seen The White Princess.) And a week or two back is when I really noticed a couple more books had been added to the set since I did that, so I read them (and also reread The King's Curse, having been reminded of Margaret Pole's botched execution by a ghost story podcast). A grim portrait of Henry VIII as bloated aging narcissist, burning through a series of wives and mistresses and alternately spoiling and ignoring his children. Demanding absolute loyalty from those surrounding him while giving none in return. Governing based on the whim of a moment and expecting all his underlings to keep up with what he wants now, not what he said this morning. Setting his followers against each other to compete for his favor, turning absolutely against one in a moment for disagreement or criticism.
It made me fairly thankful that there is no Tower of Washington for locking up anyone who aggravates the President in the wrong mood, that we have other bodies of government available with the power to curb the worst excesses of a despot, and that we have a legal right to protest without being executed by the hundreds for demanding redress for our grievances. (And that divorce is a thing that exists and can be used to exit a marriage turned sour without anyone needing to die.)
I... need to be doing more protesting again. For a while there I was making phone calls to representatives (state and federal both), before a sense of futility set in. My senators are Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (the majority whip, which is to say the guy whose job it is to keep Republicans from voting against the conservative policy that's being pushed through the legislature). There's not a lot I can do practically to affect politics in this state, unless it's helping to register voters in underserved areas, or maybe doing some volunteering to work at polls. Or showing up at actual in-person protests, which I haven't been doing because I'm lazy and it seems like it would take up many hours I don't want to spend. (Voting I can do. I even voted in the recent primary. I use early voting and go in the middle of the day on a Monday or a Tuesday when it's my day off anyway and there's hardly any line.)
I have been donating. I'm trying to make a habit of sending a $25 donation from each paycheck to one of a list of causes, and I'm also taking advantage of my company's charity-matching program to double the donation if possible. Doctors Without Borders was on their list, the Southern Poverty Law Center was listed but evidently incompletely entered in their system, and the Hispanic Federation is in their system (though I haven't heard back any response regarding the matching request I put in last week). Not sure who I'm going to pick to get a bit from Friday's paycheck -- maybe LifeAfterHate.org?
And, right. Mom's up and heading for the shower. I need to head on off to the gym. At least with an impending appointment I can keep myself from spending the whole damned day lying around reading instead of showering and doing laundry and cleaning the rabbit cage (as happened last week, when the bunnies were cheated out of a day's playtime on Monday because I kept thinking I was just about to put the Kindle down and take my post-gym shower, and couldn't leave the bunnies in the yard unsupervised while I was doing so. I wound up with a very busy Tuesday.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
So back in January I made a hummingbird cake, with a small can of pineapple bits and four whole bananas mixed into the batter. And Stilinski came along while I was eating my last slice and I gave him a few bits, so now he has learned sometimes I'm eating really good things. I may give him a few squares of Life cereal that haven't gotten soaked by milk yet if he comes to me while I'm eating a bowl, too, so that just reinforces the idea. He has gotten almost ridiculously eager to get at my meals, and I've gotten used to sometimes eating breakfast with a cat to my left (hoping for some of my omelet) and Stilinski to my right (sticking his head under my arm trying to get his nose into my bowl of cereal). Amelia sometimes comes when I'm eating something good, but she's not as proactive about begging as Mr Bunsen has become. (He even has to come check me out if I'm sitting at the coffee table polishing my nails -- though after I give him a sniff of my nails and assure him I'm not eating anything, he leaves.)
This hasn't been a good week for getting extra hours on the time card. There was work left over last Sunday morning, and I never got a reply from my supervisor when I texted for permission to get in an hour of overtime and get closer to finishing everything. (I think the weekend before that was when I asked for permission to stay and was told no, I'd undoubtedly get plenty of opportunities to make up for it during the week. Which did not happen.) I got a single hour of overtime last week -- and then I overslept Friday night (after staying up most of the day reading a book) and got to work an hour late and couldn't make up the lost hour Saturday morning because we only had enough work to get me to my regular end-of-shift. So my lone hour of overtime evaporated, and last night we had only as much work to do as actually came in that night, and the upshot was I left work two hours early and am starting out my next work week with a deficit to try to make up. (At least I won't have to ask permission to stay late while I'm making up time. But lately we've been having really unpredictable amounts of work and sometimes just having enough to get to the end of my shift is tricky.)
Mind you, on this particular day I welcomed the extra two hours of free time. I have a dentist appointment at 2pm this afternoon, and while the last time I went it didn't take too long, the visit before that ate something like three or four hours out of my afternoon. So basically I have to get as much done as possible this morning and plan for coming home too late in the day to be awake enough to do anything of use, beyond paying a visit to Grandma on my way home from the dentist.
It would have been a very good thing to get my gym session and shower out of the way yesterday -- but what I wound up doing was making my grocery run on the way home, then taking a nap of a few hours and getting up and doing kitchen stuff. Not only did I do the dishes (sparing Mom the task, but also getting the recycling taken care of so I'll have very much less of it to deal with on Tuesday), but I baked a loaf of bread. I've found I can get about two things baked on a Tuesday, usually, before my feet start really hurting from hours standing, but part of that is the amount of time I'm spending dealing with the dishes before I start measuring ingredients out. My plan for this week's baking session is chocolate-Irish-cream cupcakes and a batch of cookies -- or maybe a chocolate-Irish-cream cake and strawberry muffins, though I really feel overdue for cookies. Perhaps having the worst part of the dishes accomplished in advance will leave me enough energy to bake three things on Tuesday morning?
So I took Dizzy to the vet a few weeks ago, and the vet did bloodwork and found a liver issue and prescribed an antibiotic and a liver supplement. And this is three pills a day, which are making Dizzy miserable because he's hating the whole pilling process. But it's also fucking up my sleep schedule, because the antibiotics are supposed to be every twelve hours with food, while the liver pill is supposed to be on an empty stomach at least an hour before eating.
Ideally I'd be giving him the liver pill at 10am, hours after Mom fed him breakfast, and then the antibiotic at 11am with some kibble, and then the second dose at 11pm while I'm getting ready for work. (Again with some kibble for the evening feeding, which all the other cats have grown to eagerly expect. They're going to be crushed when his antibiotic is used up Wednesday day and the evening snack stops happening.) So the first issue is that I'm not always home from work when the 10am reminder on my phone starts dinging, if I got in some overtime or ran some errands on the way home. And the second issue is that Saturday and Sunday mornings Mom's not getting the cats fed at 7am, and I'm having to wait for Dizzy to digest breakfast before getting his first pill. (Last weekend I had to feed the cats myself when I got home, because Mom was still in bed and I couldn't see making them all wait an extra hour when they were already hours late for their meal.)
The main issue is that I'm used to coming in the door, getting a few things taken care of, and crashing on the couch for many hours, before being woken up by Mom getting home from work (or possibly by the cats demanding dinner a bit earlier). But over the last couple of weeks I've been getting home and giving Dizzy his liver pill ASAP -- then frequently falling asleep while waiting to be able to give him the antibiotic and offer kibble to all the cats. I wake up just two or three hours later, nagged awake by the reminder dinging every ten minutes and the vague sense of unmet obligation, and then I spend a few hours trying to get things done or get back to sleep, and then Mom comes home and wakes me up again, and I maybe have one or two things left to deal with or else just get a snack and move to my bedroom to nap until work. This has been fucking up my energy levels, as I'm getting by on a series of short naps and not always hitting a total of even six hours a day.
And he's been missing doses, as I find pills lying on the couch or carpet that were spit out without me noticing. Also he's been looking unhappy, and I can't tell if it's because he's feeling bad or just because he's hating getting grabbed and having his mouth pried open and then held shut several times a day. He's been hiding from me.
And there's been an insane amount of cat vomit we've been having to clean up in recent weeks. The two most obvious suspects are Ju-Ju and Dizzy (both elderly and ailing), but one morning last week I was awakened by the sound and feeling of a cat puking while half-draped over my shins, and it was Miss Spooky. Sick or just overfed? I'm hoping cutting out the evening kibble (and eliminating Dizzy's antibiotics) will help with that. (Just a few hours ago, after giving Dizzy his evening pill and then setting out kibble for all, Dizzy barfed up his snack on the carpet. And probably his pill along with the kibble.)
So I'm not optimistic that the pills will have cured what's ailing Dizzy. And a quick google for "liver problems in cats" suggests that if the antibiotic didn't do the trick, what comes next are biopsies and possible exploratory surgery. There are limits to what I want to put him through, what I can afford to do, and how hard I'm going to fight to stave off the inevitable for a fourteen-year-old cat.
Especially one who was given a ten-year life expectancy many years ago. Though the vets seem to have gotten records confused between the various cats and I keep getting conflicting reports as to which cats were vaccinated for which diseases as opposed to testing positive for them. I have been told on more than one occasion that a cat I specifically remember as having vaccinated for FIV or FeLV is testing positive for it -- so, did you not give my cat the vaccine I brought him to your clinic to receive, or did you put the note about the vaccination on the file of the wrong cat and now are mistaking a post-vaccination immune response for a post-infection immune response? Or did you get the brothers confused and tell me Dizzy had only about a decade to live when it was in fact Squeaky who died from lymphoma brought on by FeLV?
They're either fucking up the records or neglecting vaccinations for major preventable diseases. Neither one is good. I also keep getting automated reminders to bring in cats weeks after I already brought them in for their annual visit, or in one case after the cat in question had already died and the clinic had been notified of his demise. Maybe their shiny new online pet record system (with a mobile app, even!) will help keep things from getting mixed up -- though I've already had the new vet at the practice make a comment about one of the youthful cats being FeLV positive, and I'm going, "No, but seriously, the boys got their first round of shots the day Spooky tested positive, and their neuterings were scheduled specifically to get boosters for that one since Spooky has it." So, again, either a records fuckup, or the clinic neglected to give the boys their booster shots while they were in for surgery.
I need to stop letting them carry the cats into the back room to do everything to them, is what I need. I'm sick and tired of this did-they-get-their-shots-or-not? bullshit, and I want to see them vaccinating my cats right in front of me again so I know they didn't forget to give them their shots while they were taking blood or irrigating wounds or whatever. (Jesus Christ. On Dizzy's last visit I watched the vet push the needle tip completely through the fold of skin she'd pinched out for the injection site and squirt the entire dose down the outside of his leg. Yeah, I want to watch the vaccinations being done so I know they happened.)
The upshot being that this week or next the clinic probably expects me to bring Dizzy in to have his bloodwork redone and then discuss whether the meds worked or if not what needs doing next. And I'm not sure I even want to bother with taking him in for bloodwork, since I very much doubt I'm going to be willing to go along with the suggested plan of treatment if the pills didn't work. They worked and he lives, they didn't and he probably doesn't.
In other news, back when The White Queen miniseries ran on TV, I watched it and also went on a Phillipa Gregory kick, going through all her Plantagenet and Tudor books. (No, I still haven't seen The White Princess.) And a week or two back is when I really noticed a couple more books had been added to the set since I did that, so I read them (and also reread The King's Curse, having been reminded of Margaret Pole's botched execution by a ghost story podcast). A grim portrait of Henry VIII as bloated aging narcissist, burning through a series of wives and mistresses and alternately spoiling and ignoring his children. Demanding absolute loyalty from those surrounding him while giving none in return. Governing based on the whim of a moment and expecting all his underlings to keep up with what he wants now, not what he said this morning. Setting his followers against each other to compete for his favor, turning absolutely against one in a moment for disagreement or criticism.
It made me fairly thankful that there is no Tower of Washington for locking up anyone who aggravates the President in the wrong mood, that we have other bodies of government available with the power to curb the worst excesses of a despot, and that we have a legal right to protest without being executed by the hundreds for demanding redress for our grievances. (And that divorce is a thing that exists and can be used to exit a marriage turned sour without anyone needing to die.)
I... need to be doing more protesting again. For a while there I was making phone calls to representatives (state and federal both), before a sense of futility set in. My senators are Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (the majority whip, which is to say the guy whose job it is to keep Republicans from voting against the conservative policy that's being pushed through the legislature). There's not a lot I can do practically to affect politics in this state, unless it's helping to register voters in underserved areas, or maybe doing some volunteering to work at polls. Or showing up at actual in-person protests, which I haven't been doing because I'm lazy and it seems like it would take up many hours I don't want to spend. (Voting I can do. I even voted in the recent primary. I use early voting and go in the middle of the day on a Monday or a Tuesday when it's my day off anyway and there's hardly any line.)
I have been donating. I'm trying to make a habit of sending a $25 donation from each paycheck to one of a list of causes, and I'm also taking advantage of my company's charity-matching program to double the donation if possible. Doctors Without Borders was on their list, the Southern Poverty Law Center was listed but evidently incompletely entered in their system, and the Hispanic Federation is in their system (though I haven't heard back any response regarding the matching request I put in last week). Not sure who I'm going to pick to get a bit from Friday's paycheck -- maybe LifeAfterHate.org?
And, right. Mom's up and heading for the shower. I need to head on off to the gym. At least with an impending appointment I can keep myself from spending the whole damned day lying around reading instead of showering and doing laundry and cleaning the rabbit cage (as happened last week, when the bunnies were cheated out of a day's playtime on Monday because I kept thinking I was just about to put the Kindle down and take my post-gym shower, and couldn't leave the bunnies in the yard unsupervised while I was doing so. I wound up with a very busy Tuesday.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.