Walking Through Fire

More than you wanted to know.

2006-09-28T21:20:00.000-04:00

Ah, where to begin? New Mexico/Arizona? Falling at work, briefly dislocating jaw and bruising shoulder, butt and ego? Getting sick with an intestinal virus the day after the fall (I'm still convinced that's why I fell; I couldn't possibly be so clumsy as to fall sideways off a set of stairs with no provocation whatsoever, could I?)(I'm also convinced that I caught whatever it is I had from my flight home.)(What's the record for most parenthetical statements in a single sentence anyhow?)?

Being sick with fever for a week after falling? Recovering in time to fly to Omaha to spend the better part of four days on the road again? Returning from that trip with a head cold and a vow NEVER to travel on any plane where the median age is less than the number of strips on the American flag?

Decisions, decisions.

Cystitis: In the spirit of "share too much" allow me to note that about four days into our southwestern vacation I came down with a mild but painful case of cystitis. Unless I develop signs other than pain, I now pretty much just try to live through the bouts. Going to the doctor's for help elicits little more than instructions on how to wipe and an admonition to be more careful. Since I already know and practice proper wiping etiquette, since I've never been big on public humiliation, and since I further believe that culturing "free catch" urine is one of the biggest money-wasters in the medical profession, I'm content at this point to treat cystitis by simply leaning back, whimpering as needed, and being alert to any signs that indicate that I may actually have to bite the bullet and listen to yet another personal hygiene lecture in order to get antibiotics.

Carlsbad Caverns: We visited quite a few places in New Mexico (and even dipped into Arizona for a brief bit), but the one I'll wax poetic about here was Carlsbad Caverns. We hit Carlsbad during the height of cystitis season, and I'll admit that I was a little worried that the hour-and-a-half "Big Room" tour might challenge my bladder control a little bit too much. In that spirit, I made it a point to hit the ladies room situated just before the descent down to the cave entrance. As I came out to rejoin the others waiting for the little ranger orientation, the ranger noted that I alone had made an intelligent decision to use the facilities here, noting that it was at least a forty-minute walk until the next opportunity. I didn't bother explaining that I was thinking with my pain-receptors.

As it was, I had little to worry about. The 1.5 mile hike around the eight acre Big Room in 56° F conditions actually had me feeling pretty good. I did take pictures, and I might even try to add them to an update at some point, but for now you'll have to use your imagination when I tell you that some of the formations were incredible. I wish we'd had more time to take the guided tours into some of the less accessible rooms.

Perhaps my biggest surprise came when I encountered the underground cafeteria/souvenir shop/restrooms set tastefully next to the elevators that save tourists the walk back up the trail to the visitor's center. The cafeteria and souvenir shops were both basically set up in stark cave conditions, with raw cave wall, dim lighting and some larger formations simply left as-is.

The bathroom was the real eye-opener though. To get to them, one walks down a hallway that gradually segues from cave to tiled floor and walls. I expected to find some variation of the Porta-Potties that are so popular in National Park settings, but the bathroom itself was brightly illuminated, fully tiled, and complete with flush toilets and hot/cold running water. I actually considered taking a picture, but in retrospect that probably would have been considered tacky by the restroom’s other denizens.

The high point of Carlsbad Caverns for me came in the evening, when we returned to the mouth of the cave for the evening bat flight. The mouth of the cave is set down deep into a crater-like area, and just outside and above the cave is a small amphitheater that takes advantage of the bowl-like landscape and allows good visibility to the cave opening without being too obtrusive. I was anxious that we not miss the Mexican free-tail bats as they left the cave to stretch their wings and catch their evening meals. Six-thirty found Math Man and I in the slowly filling amphitheater, listening to a young and earnest park ranger asking who in the audience had been here to witness the evening bat show before.

The bats left the poor young and earnest park ranger out to dry, failing to show at the estimated 7:00 cave-exit time. Poor young and earnest park ranger had to wring nearly an hour's worth of small talk out of the ever growing audience while we watched dusk descend and waited for bats. During this period of time, the superior top-of-the-theater seats we'd picked out became little more than depreciating property as unattended children began to fidget, squirming behind, in front and over top of us. The formerly cute little Japanese baby in his mom's arms began to writhe and cry. I scanned the theater for any section that seemed to be toddler free.

Math Man and I resumed the bat vigil from a slightly less advantageous but far more civilized vantage point. Finally, as the sky was turning twilight red and orange, the first few bats appeared. The first appeared singly, but then they emerged in small groups, then dozens, then in uncountable crowds. The bowl in the landscape before us swarmed with bats, which spiraled around and around the front of the cave before finally setting off in a cloudy stream towards distant rivers and the promise of buggy food. The clouds of bats became denser and denser, and the periods between groups grew shorter and shorter. Finally, as it was becoming too dark to see, the bats exited in a steady, nonstop flow of motion.

People began to leave. It was getting dark, and they'd seen the bats.
Eventually there were no more than a dozen people in the amphitheater. It was then I became aware of the whisper of thousands of bat wings. Anticipating this event I'd imagined there'd be the sound of wings like hundreds of pigeons taking off from the sidewalk in the city. When the exodus finally began, I thought it was silent. But I'd been wrong twice.

The sound of bat wings is the sound of a distant brook, of a little water running quickly over stones long smoothed from long years of wear. Bat wings speak in whispers, and it was only when the whispers were multiplied by hundreds that they made any sound at all.

In the future, when I think of Carlsbad Caverns, the first thing I'll remember is the whisper of night wings.

Travel in the Age of Security: There was a time, decades ago, when flying was an adventure. I looked forward even to the inconvenience of the airport because it was the easy pain that preceded the payoff of new horizons and novel experiences. Decades ago I was a fool.

Now I'm still a fool, but at least I'm no longer a sucker for airports. Now I am a sucker for TSA. Does anyone really feel safer because they take off their shoes and jackets before passing through a metal detector? Is my nation truly more secure because TSA found a stash of medication in my carry-on luggage?

Mind you, I read up on the dos and don'ts of carry-on luggage before I flew. That's why I knew to bring the actual bottles that had my name and prescription information on them, and not just the loose pills. No, they didn't confiscate my medicine. Poor Math Man can't say the same.

Both MM and I got pulled into separate booths to have our bags searched. My little Medic Alert bracelet was enough for TSA to let me keep my tacrolimus. Math Man's stash of caffeine pills were apparently more dangerous than either of us realized though, because they were confiscated (although the TSA officer did allow MM to swallow two of them before taking them away forever).

On my return business flight from Omaha two weeks later, my checked luggage was "lost" and eventually returned to my doorstep at 3:00 in the morning. When I opened it I found a TSA note inside attesting to the fact that they had raided my dirty undies. Whatever. I also had several severely soiled sets of farm coveralls that I'd double bagged for everyone's protection. Hope they got a good whiff of those too.

After the Fall: So we flew back on a Thursday night, and bright and early Friday I appeared in work. Yeah, I’d had no sleep worth talking about, and yeah, it was stupid to go in for a one-day work week. But I’m flat out of vacation days, and I can’t afford the day-without-pay I’d have experienced by not showing up. Friday I survived. Monday was another matter.

I’d felt “off” all weekend, but put it down to coming back to a time zone two hours different than the one I’d spent the prior week in. “Off” came to a head mid-afternoon, when I was descending a four-step set of stairs in a heavy equipment area of where I work. I felt my left leg shoot out in front of me, but to this day I have no idea if I slipped or if I just missed the stair. What I do know is that without a left leg to support them, people tend to fall to their left.

I further know that if you are two stairs above the concrete floor, you fall further than if you were standing on said concrete floor. A final piece of knowledge, for those of you who can stand it: if you are falling further than usual to the side and your jaw hits a mounted motor, said jaw will tend to pop out of alignment.

Actually, I lied. There’s yet one more piece of wisdom I have to impart. After aforementioned jaw is popped out of alignment, one possible way of getting it quickly back into alignment is to scream in pain. It worked for me, anyhow.

I was lucky. Total damage: bruised shoulder, bruised ass, unhappy jaw hinge (no permanent damage), and shredded ego.

Whether or not it was related, Tuesday I woke up sick. I don’t mean sick as in “I really don’t feel like getting out of bed and going to work.” I mean sick as in “I’ve got a 103.6° fever and the shits and there’s no way I’m doing more than calling into work to let them know what the funeral arrangements are.” I stayed in bed solidly for two days.

On the third day I rose again from the dead, but apparently Sons of God are better at pulling that stuff off than I am. I showed up at work, lasted two hours, and went back home to bed.

Come Friday, I was feeling a bit better, with one exception. All that time in bed had made my old war wound act up. Three decades ago I had a serious disagreement with a horse. The horse won, and I spent a month in bed and six additional months in a special corset because of a severe back sprain. Off and on through the years the back has acted up, but for at least ten years now I’ve heard virtually nothing from the lumbar region. I forgot all about the fact that I had a “bad back”. I was reminded. I don’t know whether it was a delayed reaction from the fall, or simply a protest from the epaxial muscles that I’d been reclining too long. I do know that I spent another week on muscle relaxants trying to undo the damage, though.

The things I do to get attention. It’s really pathetic.

There’s more. But that should be enough of an update to hold anyone but the speediest of speed readers for now.

Off to the desert

2006-08-16T00:15:00.000-04:00

I'm off to the land of sand and cacti.

Business Trip

2006-08-05T18:01:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia to Green Bay via Chicago and then back again the next day makes for too much time in the airport, too much time in the air, and too much time hurrying up so you can wait. This was how I spent Thursday and Friday of this week. I arrived Thursday with two hours to spare before my 3:00 meeting began. I used the time to power nap. Down to the boardroom at 3:00, talk, talk, talk until six, dinner in the boardroom and then talk, talk, talk again. At about 10:00 that night we retired to the large patio out back overlooking the Fox River. It was cool, verdant, and mosquito-ridden. One of the guys produced a decade-old bottle of some spray-on mosquito deterrent that worked a little bit. Another of the guys produced two guitars, and we sang along to Credence Clearwater Revival and Pete Segar and Kenny Rogers and Johnny Cash. I managed to hang in there until 11:00, which was midnight in my own time zone. A hard-core group of singers remained down on the patio for some time after I left, beer in their hands and song on their lips.

There was yet more business the next morning, concluding at noon. My flight was scheduled to leave Green Bay at 5:45. Green Bay has a cute little airport, but I honestly didn’t want to cool my heels there for five hours. I immediately approached the ticketing desk and asked if there was an earlier plane I could switch to. A plane to Chicago was boarding right then, leaving half-an-hour late. She said if I hurried I might make stand-by. I hurried. I was the last one on the plane.

I’m not one for chatting people up on aircrafts. The majority of travelers have shields up against the world: books and magazines and Game Boys acting as brick walls to hold back the outside environment. The ones who do want to converse are usually full of stories about their bunions or their grandkids or their gall bladder surgery, none of which promotes the quick passage of time.

My own chosen shield is a book, and I wielded it to great effect during the trip. I was deeply engrossed in the latest Vernor Vinge when the expected “we are beginning our descent” speech came over the PA. The pilot didn’t stick to the usual script though.

“Uh, folks, I just wanted to remind you that the fasten seat belt sign is lit and that we’re beginning to start our descent into O’Hare International. Our wing flaps aren’t working as well as they should, and I should warn you that we’ll be landing a bit faster than you may be used to. We’ll be circling the airport for a bit to wait for the optimum conditions to land, but should be on the ground shortly. Some of you may notice the fire engines and other emergency equipment that may be following beside us during our landing. This is merely a precaution.”

The stewardess on our flight continued collecting the remaining drink cups and pretzel wrappers as though this were the most routine announcement in the world. The rest of us had put aside our books and MP3 players and were starting to look around the cabin. The two old farts behind me started up a conversation about bizarre landings they’d experienced or heard about during the Vietnam War. Most of the stories seemed to end with a totaled aircraft and a pilot walking away in humiliation.

“What did the pilot say?” asked the guy next to me in the window seat, belated looking up from a magazine.

“Flaps aren’t working, and we’re coming in hot,” said one of the two old farts behind me.

“Hot?” asked the lady across the aisle from me.

“We’ll be coming in pretty fast,” some other voice from somewhere behind me chimed in.

“Wing flaps?” said the lady across the aisle.

“I think they’re called ‘ailerons',’’ I heard slip from my lips. Figures. Even during a crisis I have to be the smartass full of useless information.

“At least it’s a clear day,” the guy next to me said. “This would have been a bitch if it had happened during yesterday’s thunderstorms.” I nearly added that it was still a bitch, but the stupid aileron comment had me holding my tongue. No use in pointing out what everybody already knew.

“It’s still a bitch,” said one of the two old farts behind me, and the other one chuckled. I laughed out loud, maybe a little harder than I should have. My seatmates probably thought it was nervous laughter.

Someone made a joke about recompensing us for this with additional mileage credits for the flight. Another person wondered if we’d get a free ticket out of this. I observed that we’d probably be charged extra for the “E-ticket” value of the flight. The lady beside me observed that Disney didn’t sell E-tickets any more. The cabin got silent.

I looked out the window. We were close enough that you could easily tell the difference between sedans and SUV’s on the roadways below. I wondered since I was on the plane as a last minute addition if it would make it more difficult to identify me. I wondered how fast we were moving relative to the ground. I wondered if the pilot had walked away from any crashes in Vietnam, and then realized he probably hadn’t even been born yet. We continued to circle the airport. It occurred to me that we were burning off excess fuel.

“How dangerous is this?” the woman across the aisle asked in a small voice.

“Well, I read that they tell you to put your head down to your knees if there’s a chance of a crash landing because it minimizes injury. They haven’t asked us to do that, so I imagine they think everything is going to be OK.” That was me again, with more useless knowledge. The lady smiled and thanked me. The ground was getting closer rapidly. We passed over the blue lights at the end of the runway, skimming just over the ground, and then we touched down.

“Here we go,” said on of the old farts.

“He did a nice job of slowing us down,” said the other old fart.

“Slow?” I thought to myself. The plane was hurtling down the runway, making slight jerks from left to right to left. “THIS is slow?”

“Yee HAW!” someone called from the front. I made a mental note regarding people who fly first class.

“Hey look! Fire trucks!” called an old fart. Sure enough, out my window, there were two yellow fire trucks racing along with us on a parallel runway, and two ambulances as well. We were going faster than they, and I watched as we pulled up even and then pulled ahead. I craned my neck around to watch them fall to the rear, belatedly realizing that if anything happened I was not in a particularly good, low-potential-for-injury position. I turned back around to sit square in my seat.

After about thirty seconds worth of forever, we came to a halt. The lady beside me broke out into applause. Perhaps half the cabin, including myself, joined her.

“Sorry folks,” the pilot said over the PA. “Even when we come in damaged we still have to wait in line to pull up to the gate. Bear with us, and we’ll have you back on the ground in about ten minutes.”

“So much for any extra frequent flier miles,” a voice in back piped up.

I realized that I was still clutching my book in my hands. I slipped it back into the pouch on my carry-on, and waited for us to come to a halt and deplane.

The pilot came out of the cockpit and stood by the door to greet us on our way off the plane. He looked tense, but he was exceptionally cordial to each person as they passed, shaking hands and accepting praise with equanimity. I shook his hand when my turn came to disembark. “Give ‘em hell,” I told him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I intend to.”

It occurred to me that this would have been a good group of people to spend my last minutes with.

Why Wednesday wasn't a good day either

2006-07-23T12:25:00.000-04:00

Why I like Tuesdays

Tuesday I got a late afternoon call from the dealership. They had not only already looked at my car (after assuring me that Thursday was the earliest possible time they could start on it), but they had fixed it. The on board computer needed an upgrade and some part that managed gas pressure in the lines required replacement. In all, the fix cost me less than $100, because the computer was under warranty. Hell, I’d spent more than that on towing it there. Double hell, I’d spent just as much at that center city auto repair shop for the car not to be fixed! But I digress. I’d made arrangements to pick the Prius up Wednesday morning (so I wouldn’t be charged for storing the car at the dealership – they like things to be picked up within a day or so of when the work is completed). That meant I could return the weird little Camry rental they’d given me and get my beloved Prius back.

The result was that Tuesday night I came home in a far better mood than I was in Monday night. I have come to regard Tuesday nights as my evenings. Mondays and Thursdays after work I spend the bulk of the evening checking over the shelter cats’ health. Wednesdays I get to line up with the other cows, weigh in, and then sit around talking about new ways to eat hay. Math Man’s current schedule has him teaching Monday through Thursday night classes, so I reserve Friday through Sunday nights for together time. That leaves Tuesday night as the period of time when I serve no master but myself.

This past Tuesday I decided what I needed was a nice fling in front of the television set. I wasn’t up for driving the weird little Camry to go out any where. Don’t get me wrong. The Camry I got was a brand new one, with a very sharp new design and nice acceleration. It was an automatic with a very weird shift though. The shift was on the floor, and designed to zigzag to get it from park to neutral to reverse to drive. Basically it was an automatic designed for standard shift wannabe’s. Adjusting the seat and steering wheel required an advanced degree, and I drove for about five miles like a ballerina en pointe until I figured out that the same button that moved the seat higher and lower also moved it forward and back if you pushed it differently. The Camry had a superior sound system with tiny tinny speakers that made everything sound like it had been rattled around in an aluminum can first. I was not about to relax by driving a car that was even stranger than I am. So I came home, slopped the cats, showered, put on the most comfy clothes I own and belly-flopped onto the sofa in front of the telly, with no idea what it was I was going to watch.

I clicked the remote, making the complete circuit twice before stumbling upon the opening sequence of the first episode of “Dead Like Me”. “Dead Like Me” had been a critically acclaimed hit on the Showtime network. I never got to see any of it because I refuse to pay out that much extra money a month to get a handful of “premium” stations on cable that I’d virtually never watch. I had no idea that the Sci Fi network had picked up “Dead like Me” for reruns, but finding it was like hitting the Loser’s Lottery. Maybe Monday had been the day from hell, and maybe Tuesday had been the day after the day from hell, but things were definitely looking up.

Why Tuesday Night Was a Disappointment

I watched the main character Georgia get up, argue with her mother, go to the first day of her first job, go out to lunch, get hit by a piece of the MIR space station when it re-entered earth, and talk with the grim reaper about what had just happened. She attended her own wake, and I was just starting to watch her watch her own autopsy. Based on the first half hour, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone with a really black sense of humor. That’s about all I have to recommend the show on though, because at that point the power went out.

I had become so wrapped up in this show that I had somehow been oblivious to the fact that the winds outside were blowing as hard as I’ve even seen non-hurricane winds around here. I opened the doors to the deck and walked outside to see if the power loss was a local thing or if I had company in my misery. I live on a corner, and the people across the street in both directions had power. I figured it was just a really localized outage, and hung around outside to admire the sky, which was an unusual and eye-catching shade of grey-green. This explains why the first piece of hail I noticed hit me in the middle of the forehead. About the same time as the hail started, the winds blew even harder, and the pine trees by the road began to bend at an impossible angle. Cowardice being the largest part of self-preservation, I went back into the condo.

The back of my mind wondered if this were a tornado. I briefly thought about whether or not the cats and I should retreat to the basement. I realized that while it might not be a bad idea, I had no idea where the flashlights were, and less idea of where two of the four cats were. I decided to stay upstairs and search for a flashlight. Besides, the power would probably come back at any time.

The winds finally began to abate after about twenty minutes or so. That’s purely a guess on my part, since I couldn’t read any of the clocks that were working. The eerie green twilight was back, but was fading rapidly as night set in. I did the only thing I could think of. I gathered every candle holder I had (which is a fairly big number, since I really like candles), set them up on the hearth, and lit them. I then carried one of the lit candles upstairs, located my boom box and found out with a sinking heart that it required six D-cell batteries to operate. Against hope I checked the hall closet. There, in an opened plastic pack, were six remaining D cells. I popped them in, and returned to the living room.

Talk about ambience. Me, four cats (now that the storm had toned down, the two cowards had returned to the fold), several dozen candles, and the all-news-all-the-time station. And in all honesty, once I had confirmation that this was not The Rapture and that no hurricanes or atom bombs were in the forecast, I was free to relax and do nothing. What I wasn’t free to do was relax and do anything. Cook myself a meal? Forget it. Read by candle light? Amazing our founding fathers had any eyesight left. Fool around on the computer? Watch a DVD? Have a nice relaxing soak in the Jacuzzi? Tuesday night opened my eyes to how dependent we’ve become on the grid. And I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll make sure that we have plenty of battery-run entertainment devices in the house. You never know.

Math Man returned from his class early. He was forced to gather back the test he was administering before it was completed. I set the alarm on my cell phone and went to bed. He stayed up, devising a clever little system of mirrors, aluminum foil and candles to try to get enough candle power to read.

Unfortunately, the contraption didn’t work all that well, but it still stands as a testament to the ingenuity of mankind and his refusal to bow to circumstances or admit defeat.

Reclaiming the Prius

OK, this part is subtitled “Why the crap didn’t I just leave work early Tuesday and pick it up then?”

The phone alarm did not wake me up Wednesday morning. I was so concerned about whether the alarm would wake me up that I woke up every half-hour or so to check what time it was. Since the power was out, that required me to pick up the phone and hit the little button on the side that lit up the time. About a half-an-hour before the alarm was set to go off I gave sleep up as a lost cause and wandered downstairs to feed the cats before they started stalking each other. My handy-dandy boom box with its six D-cell batteries was happy to inform me that I had 360,000 other power company customers to keep me company in the dark. I started to make coffee, and then realized the futility of that endeavor, so I took the dregs of yesterday’s coffee from the pot and poured it into a mug to nuke. Only then did I realize how fruitless that endeavor would be as well. In the background the newscaster gleefully announced that my power company was saying that many homes would be without power for up to three days. I cast a baleful look at the quiet refrigerator. I’d just gone grocery shopping on Sunday. Most of what I’d bought had gone straight into the freezer.

Since the people across the street in both directions on my corner still had power, I figured my outage was a small, local thing. I went to work with minimal problems, and then I waited until rush hour traffic was mostly over. The all-news-all-the-time station was reporting terrible driving conditions, but my area of the world wasn’t even mentioned. Of course, we never lost power at work. Most of my coworkers live north and west of me, and they either never lost power, or only lost it for half an hour or so. I figured I could zip out of work for an hour, pick up the Prius, and get back before I missed too much time.

Apparently the power outage in my area was so bad that news wasn’t getting out of the zone about it. The houses to the front and side of me may have had power, but the miles and miles of houses behind me were dead, dead and dead. I drove ten miles through backed up traffic, no traffic lights, downed trees and fallen power lines. I saw police, firemen, and construction workers in orange vests trying to clear roads and direct traffic. What I didn’t see were any service trucks from the local power company. The all-news-all-the-time station explained that calls had gone out to neighboring states for assistance from their utility companies to help in the clean-up. All our service trucks were already dispatched to the areas most in need of emergency service. Apparently just-plain residential sections weren’t particularly high on the list.

The hour I thought it would take me to shoot out, pick up the Prius, and shoot back to work was spent sitting on Little Back Road With No Turn Offs. Many of the people I was sitting in traffic with did a U-turn and headed back the other direction. I sincerely doubted that anything was better on any other road that went where I needed to go, so I continued to sit. The car two behind me did a sixteen-point turn. A lady in a white sedan going the opposite direction from me stopped to let the moron jockey his car into her lane. The Jeep-like vehicle coming up behind her didn’t notice that traffic was stopped until too late. He swerved, missed the car next to me, went down the embankment into and through someone’s front yard, continued perpendicular across her driveway through the midst of a bunch of orange clad construction workers, drove on through the next two yards as well until the embankment shallowed out and he was able to pop back onto the roadway. The woman in the white sedan and I exchanged looks. She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and then drove off. It was the kind of day where a lot of head shaking and eye rolling occurred.

I did get my Prius. The process took nearly two hours. I wish I’d had my camera with me.

Dry Ice and White Collar Crime

I kept an ear to the radio to find out where my power company would be distributing dry ice. I learned from a similar disaster about ten years ago that one does not wait to get dry ice when the power is out. Get it early, stuff it in the freezer (the stuff in the refrigerator be damned – it costs far less to replace) and then DON’T OPEN THE DOOR AGAIN. About noon time the even more gleeful newscaster reported that the local power company had just announced that it was “not in the dry ice business” and that local governments would have to manage to acquire it on their own. Since the power company had always supplied dry ice before, there were no procedures in place to for local municipalites to get dry ice. Computers were down, in some cases phones were down, and town officials were S.O.L., which meant I was S.O.L. as well.

I was in better shape than some. I had internet and phone service so long as I was at work. And indeed, we use dry ice in some of our areas at work, so I tried there first. My employer wasn’t selling, though. Neither. it turned out, was anyone else in the area. So I did what any desperate person would do. I called in a favor from a friend in another department, and he stole fifty pounds of the stuff for me.

I’d only asked for ten pounds. I managed to cram twenty-five pounds frozen carbon dioxide into my freezer and refrigerator compartments when I got home. I then (dressed in winter coat and leather gloves in 99 degree weather) went door to door to my neighbors, giving away the left-overs. When I was done, I took the coldest (and therefore briefest) shower of my life.

As I was drying off in the bathroom, I heard voices downstairs. Panicked, I pulled on the closest clothes I could find, grabbed Math Man’s huge flashlight (he’d kept them hidden under the bed, unbeknownst to me) and snuck downstairs as quietly as I could. Keep in mind that the floorboards creak mercilessly in my place, so “quiet” here means little. I peered around the corner into the rec room. The television was on, and Scully and Muldar were arguing about something.

It's true what they say. Crime does not pay. Then again, I had dry ice to play with for days afterward.

The Day the Prius Died

2006-07-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

Monday I had my annual appointment with Dr. Skin. Being on immunosuppressants has its negatives, one of which is a greatly increased chance of skin cancer. Along with accumulating a Dr. Liver and a Dr. Transplant and a Dr. Heart, my portfolio now also includes a Dr. Skin. Dr. Skin operates out of Big City Hospital where I had the transplant done. This is convenient because she has access to my rather massive files, thereby relieving me of having to run through my whole damned medical history each time I go. This is inconvenient in that I actually have to go downtown to Big City Hospital for the opportunity to strip in front of strangers while they investigate various parts of my anatomy for suspicious lesions. The ignominy ….

The doctor's appointment went well. I got there at 8:30 for a 9:10 appointment. They not only took me immediately, but they kicked somebody else out of the examination room and bumped me ahead of them. I should have known then and there that I had used up all my good fortune for the remainder of the year (possibly for the remainder of the decade).

I returned to my car about 9:15, well-pleased with the way events were going. I figured I could be at work shortly after ten, well ahead of the "no later than noon" that I had originally forecast. We’d had near-record-breaking heat the past weekend, and Monday was shaping up to be more of the same. The parking garage was already hot. Driving to Philly I had watched my temperature gauge go from 79 to 94 degrees, and it was without doubt hotter than that in the garage at that point.

I turned on my car. Immediately I got a message on the screen that "Outside temperature is above 100 degrees." Well, duh. I'd never seen the error message before, but it didn't worry me at all. After all, I've driven this car all around the Mojave in August, and it never even whimpered. I started down the parking garage ramp. The dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Heck, there were message codes on the screen that weren't even in the user's manual. I figured that maybe it was a good idea to find a place to pull over and let the car cool down a bit.

It may have been a good idea, but finding a quick place to pull over in center city is like finding diamonds in a Philthydelphia gutter. They might be there, but nobody's ever heard of them. The line of traffic I was committed to carried me over the South Street Bridge over the Expressway. By this time my little Prius is starting to hesitate. It would run fine for one minute, and then lose power the next. Losing power in my car on the South Street Bridge would have ensured that I'd be an item on the all-news all-the-time radio station’s traffic report for several hours. I stuck the car in neutral and let it glide down the last half of the bridge. Ahead South Street loomed, its sides an endless, unbroken string of parked cars. I saw my chance in the form of a right hand turn at the very end of the South Street Bridge and took it. Too late I realized that it was a one-way street. One-way the wrong way, I should add. As I went around the turn I saw another smaller street coming in alongside the bridge. I figured it was a service road, and took it. At least I wouldn't be blocking traffic there.

That's how I discovered Expressway Avenue. It's a little street lined with gated parking lots and empty buildings. And yes, even here in the middle of bloody nowhere, there were cars parked everywhere. I continued to drive, and in two blocks I used up any remaining luck I'll ever have in my life. I not only found a parking space, but it was a legal parking space and I had enough momentum to make a U-turn and pull into it with a minimum of effort. I turned the key to “off”, and the temperature inside the car immediately shot up to just below the point of molten steel.

I still wasn't convinced that this wasn't a situation where I couldn't just let the car cool down a bit and then be able to drive it home. The neighborhood didn't look great, so I sat with the windows up and doors locked. For ten minutes I stayed that way, until I couldn't stand the heat anymore. I turned the car back on. All the Christmas ornaments on the screen came back. I figured it was time to cry "uncle" and call Triple-A. (I just joined two weeks ago because of a traumatic incident with the 12V battery that is no longer worth relating because this current failure I’m writing about is far juicier.) I put the car into reverse, trying to tuck it in a little closer to the curb, and backed up a bit. Then I threw it into forward. The car wouldn't move. I threw it back into reverse and moved a couple of inches. I tried forward again. Nothing. Zilch. Nadda. I did the only thing I could do. I turned the car off again and said something that can’t be repeated within the earshot of anyone under the age of 21.

Then the unbelievable happened. A cop showed up when he was actually needed. As I sat in the car debating what to do next a police car drove past me and pulled into a garage about two blocks behind where I was parked. I grabbed everything of value I had in the car and dumped in a duffle that I just happened to have with me. Throwing the duffle over my shoulder, I trudged up the sidewalk in that direction, thinking the cop might be able to tell me where I could hole up safely in that neighborhood while I waited for AAA to arrive. What I found when I got to where the cop turned in was an office of the School Police for the District of Philadelphia. I never even heard of School Police before. That didn't stop me from walking in.

From the time I got out of the parking garage to the time I entered the police station about twenty minutes had elapsed. If I had realized that over seven hours remained to this ordeal I might have simplified things and just asked one of the cops to come out and shoot my Prius. Instead I walked into their cluttered, closet sized office and explained my dilemma. They were not only kind enough to let me use their phone to call Triple-A, but then they let me hang out in their postage-stamp sized waiting area.

I called AAA using the contact number on my card. They explained that I’d have to negotiate through the Philadelphia office and patched me through. The person who picked up the phone spoke broken English. After a five minute attempt to explain my need for a tow truck, I gave up and called again. In all, I called five times. The fifth time yielded a representative who spoke English. I gave her my street address, and she said she knew right where I was and would arrange for a tow truck.

I made myself at home as perhaps a dozen cops came in and out through the office. Philthydelphia’s schools were in summer school session, and a call came in that the school district would be closing at 11:00 because the schools were not outfitted with air-conditioning. The woman behind the desk informed me with a shake of her head that summer school only lasted nineteen days, which was hardly enough time to teach someone who had failed a course anything of importance. Losing this time wasn’t going to help any.

I spent the time bonding with the Officer Joann. She’d had gall bladder cancer some years back, which was successfully operated on. When I got my liver transplant I lost my gall bladder. Gall bladders don’t get to come along for the ride during transplants. Both of us being without gall bladders gave us more than adequate bonding material. This was a good thing, because we had more than adequate time to bond.

Triple-A said they'd show up no later than 11:00. They were about an hour and fifteen minutes later than that. Keep in mind that I have neither eaten nor gone to the bathroom in this time. Officer Joann did offer me some of her Lean Cuisine, but those things barely have enough for one person. Splitting it into two halves would have only left two people starving. I thanked her for her offer, and then told her I was going outside to make sure that I’d removed everything I needed from the car. That way she could eat in peace, guilt free, and I could salvage my reputation by finding something else to do other than sit there with saliva dribbling down my chin.

Thus it was that I was by my car when my cell phone rang. Apparently the English speaking AAA representative who knew exactly where I was didn’t have a clue where I was. She had directed my flatbed to an entirely different section of the city. The driver of aforementioned flatbed was calling to try and pinpoint where I could have possibly hidden in the residential district he was circling like a vulture looking for something dead. I explained that there were no residences anywhere within view of where I was, but that the old abandoned Dead President Vocation Training Center was directly across the street from where my car gasped its last, and that there was an intersection with Old Dead Queen Avenue about two blocks away. Fortunately the flatbed driver knew exactly where I was and promised to arrive within half an hour.

Meanwhile, I discovered a cache of about twenty Bookcrossing books in the trunk of the Prius. I’d been waiting to release at a local coffee house. It seemed fitting that I release them at the Police Station instead, as a sort-of thank-you for their hospitality. Unfortunately most of the books were of the bodice-ripping romance variety, abandoned in the basement of the condo I purchased from my sister. (I have literally hundreds of books down there that I’m in the process of dumping on an unsuspecting public, but that is yet another story for another time.) I gathered up said books and made my final trek back to the Police Station, thanking them for everything and apologizing that I didn’t have the best selection of books with me. Officer Joann seemed pleased enough with the selection, and I promised to return with some better quality books in the near future.

Triple A showed up with a flatbed. The driver was a certified mechanic, and whipped out his license to prove it. He was convinced that the Prius was probably fine by this point, since it had been resting for several hours. He spent half an hour working on it. The Prius remained not fine.
The driver then talked me into letting him tow it to his repair shop so that he can reset the computer. He was still sure there was nothing wrong with the car. This option being far cheaper than towing it seventeen miles to my dealer, I agreed, and we set out for parts of North Philthy that I had never previously known existed.

I sat at his shop for another two-and-a-half hours while the mechanics dickered with my car. The net result of above-mentioned dickering was that every error message the car is capable of producing kicked out from the computer, and the computer wouldn't reset itself. They couldn't fix it on the spot, but offered to work on it for me. I declined. My gut feeling was that something was wrong with the computer, which would still be covered under warranty. Realizing that I should have just had it towed to my dealer to begin with, I belatedly tell them that I want the car towed there for the work to be done. The little cash-saving maneuver of letting the local shop reset my computer has cost me $120 in towing and service charges, and three hours of time.

I then had to negotiate with AAA for a second tow. Everything seemed to be in order. My car was hoisted back onto the flatbed, and I was directed to climb into the cab of the truck. As we were preparing to set off, the nice kid from the service desk who’d been keeping me company ran out to catch me. Triple A was on the phone. Apparently they had no record of my calling to get the second tow. I had to get back out of the truck and renegotiate. I argue. Then the kid got back on the phone and argued. He'd witnessed me making the phone call. After we got off the phone, things were still unresolved. The kid behind the desk told me to go ahead, that he'd personally OK the tow. At this point I figured I'll deal with any fall-out later. I got back into the truck. I still have no idea how/if that got resolved.

Unlike my first driver (who was a nice South Philly native with eight kids, four of whom were in college), the new guy was a 450 pound bigot with a massive head cold. I anticipate showing symptoms by some time this weekend. The less said about that leg of my adventure, the better.
I arrived at my dealer’s at about 5:00. They regretted but couldn’t look at my car until Thursday at the earliest, with no promises. I got a rental and returned home about six o’clock Monday night.

I left out the parts about the cops running out of coffee and donuts at the station, the maniacal Pepsi machine in the auto repair place that bounced my diet Pepsi all over the place causing it to explode upon opening, the junk yard dog at the repair station that I gave a physical exam to while I waited because the owner thought it was sick, and the drive into Norristown with the aforementioned bigoted tow truck driver who regaled me with unrepeatable stories while snorking up the snot in his nose. If you stuck with the story this long, I imagine you’re thanking me. If you gave up before now then this tardy bit of succinctness makes no difference.

Coming to work looked pretty good Tuesday. Returning home Tuesday night was another matter. That’s when the Storm hit, killing power to about 360,000 homes in the area, including mine. But tales of rental cars with weird shifts, the white collar crime of stealing dry ice, and driving through devastation to reclaim my Prius are whole ‘nother stories for whole ‘nuther times.

Our Newest Additions and Subtractions

2006-07-15T14:42:00.000-04:00

Life in these parts hasn't been the same since we lost Clueless Wonder in February. Four cats seems to be the perfect balance in a place our size. There's plenty of interaction, plenty of spaces for everyone to hang out when they don't want to get in each others way, and enough selection that if someone wants to play they can generally find another cat interested. Three cats just seemed to leave an empty space on the cat tree that would eventually need filling.

Since The Little Grey Shit (LGS) and The Little Brown Shit (LBS) are considered mine, and the Warrior Princess is considered Math Man's, it was agreed that he'd get to pick the next cat. He knew exactly what he was looking for. It definitely had to be another male, since Math Man was now surrounded by nothing but women of all species. He wanted an orange cat, since we already had brown, grey and black. And he wanted a young adult, one that had outgrown its kitten antics, but would still be around for a good long time. Meet his final selection:

Apparently they locked glances in the PetSmart where the shelter I volunteer for has some of its cats, and that was that. She's four years old, about Warrior Princess's size, and does a mean head butt when she wants attention. She's only been with us three days, so she hasn't yet earned a "screen name", but I suspect one won't be long in coming. She's a character, and will eventually do something worthy of a user name.

In other news, my younger sister finally came over to start purging my basement of her accumulated junk/treasures. She hit the massive collection of books down there first, and selected a small mountain that she wanted to keep. These are now in a large plastic tub, a small brown box, and a minor pile to one side of the room. What remains is a Mount Everest of paperbacks, hardbacks, trade novels and oddly shaped children's books that require donation to some worthy cause. I reactivated my account at Bookcrossing and released a handful of the little darlings (mostly romance paperbacks, many of which appear never to have been opened) at a local Starbucks. I suspect that I'll find different places to leave books in the future, though, since I've never hand any great luck with Starbucks releases.

I can't remember ... did I mention I'd joined Weight Watchers? If not, then I guess I'm announcing it here. I had a visit with Dr. Liver at the end of February, and I weighed in at a rather astounding fifty pounds overweight. I gained back everything I lost on South Beach, and put on a bit extra for good measure. It's not like I needed Dr. Liver to read me the riot act. I knew from my rapidly shrinking wardrobe (shrinking both in its ability to make it around my waist and in my choice of what I could actually zip up) that I was going to have to do something soon. The gentle reminder that there were more ways to die than just liver failure prompted me to finally get serious about the situation though.

I joined WW in the first week of March. Since then I've lost 32 pounds officially (a couple more if you go by my current bathroom scale reading rather than the latest weigh in). I think I've finally accepted that I can't go on a diet to lose weight and then return to my "normal" eating habits. I find the prospect of modifying my eating for the rest of my life rather daunting, which is why I think WW is a good idea for me. I hope to lose another twenty pounds, give or take, which will put me at the top of the "ideal weight" range on the charts. Whether or not I maintain at that point or lose a few more pounds depends entirely on how I look and feel when I get to that point.

Parting the Red Sea

2006-07-07T06:53:00.000-04:00

So I got this piece of wundertripe in my in-bin yesterday at work. Feel free to skim. Please take note of the colored text though. I did my best to duplicate the exact format of the email.

Red Fridays.	For a moment, I thought this was going to concern the Socialist Movement in the US.
Very soon, you will see a great many people wearing Red every Friday. The reason? Americans who support our troops used to be called the "silent majority." We are no longer silent, and are voicing our love for God, country and home in record breaking numbers. We are not organized, boisterous or overbearing.	The "silent majority" is neither. So this time we're voicing our love for "God, country and home" are we? In other words, if you don't wear Red on Friday you hate God, country and home. For some reason, I doubt the accuracy of that surmise. Oh, and for what it's worth, Nixon was the one who dragged the term "silent majority" into common currency, calling upon them for their support. The term seems like a convenient way of saying "everybody's backing me, even if I can't prove it."
Many Americans, like you, me and all our friends,simply want to recognize that the vast majority of America supports our troops. Our idea of showing solidarity and support for our troops with dignity and respect starts this Friday -- and continues each and every Friday until the troops all come home, sending a deafening message that ... every red-blooded American who supports our men and women afar, will wear something red.	"Like you, me and all our friends"? I think maybe whoever drafted this needs to get out more. I'll try to get past this though. I am amused by the Socialist leanings in this piece of virtual propoganda. Wearing red, seeking solidarity, treating the workers with dignity and respect: all very Marxist of them.
By word of mouth, press, TV -- let's make the United States on every Friday a sea of red much like a homecoming football game in the bleachers. If every one of us who loves this country will share this with acquaintances, coworkers, friends, and family, it will not be long before the USA is covered in RED and it will let our troops know the once "silent" majority is on their side more than ever, certainly more than the media lets on.	The inference continues. If I don't participate, then I don't love my country. If I don't dress in red ... I mean RED ... I don't support my country. Dressing in RED will support our troops AND prove my love for the USA. Uh, news flash here guys. The best support we could show our troops right now is to get them decent battle armor, decent tanks, decent living conditions, decent officers that give them decent commands, and decent wages so that their spouses and children don't have to live in poverty waiting for their breadwinner to return to the states. Even better, let's support them by starting to withdraw ASAP. Trying to make this into a high school football game only emphasizes the sophmoric logic going on here.
The first thing a soldier says when asked "What can we do to make things better for you?" is ..."We need your support and your prayers." Let's get the word out and lead with class and dignity, by example, and wear something red every Friday.	I suspect that I have a very different idea of what "support" means than this writer. But I've addressed this already. I continue to doubt that many soldiers in battle over in Iraq will give a flying Fig Newton if I put a red t-shirt on today.
IF YOU AGREE -- THEN SEND THIS ON.	Note that agreement is color coded red. Clever, eh?
IF YOU COULDN'T CARE LESS -- THEN HIT THE DELETE BUTTON.	Ah, and disagreement is color coded blue. Democratic blue. Blue doesn't support our troops. Blue is un-American. Yeah, I could have deleted it. But the nice thing about this country is that you get to voice your opinion. I choose not to be silent, even if I am in the majority - the majority of people who feel we trapped ourselves in a war we shouldn't have started an may not be able to finish.
IT IS YOUR CHOICE.	Dear, dear. Which to choose, which to choose...? Shall I prove myself a sheep-brain and follow the red-clad flock, or shall I put myself on the list of traitors and ne'er do wells and risk another color tomorrow? Decisions, decisions ....
WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE!!	How I loathe rhetoric. We have appointed ourselves the "land of the free" and then have the hubris to turn this war into a fight for our freedom. I'm not making any statement about Iraq and its politics. Whether or not the prior government of Iraq deserved to be removed is not what I'm discussing here, because it isn't what this absurd email is discussing. It's making a direct tie-in of our freedom to the war in Iraq, and I resent that misrepresentation. It mocks the men who truly did buy our freedom with their deaths, and it does it in a particularly self-righteous manner.

Today I wear blue to work. Blue is every bit as American as RED, and you don't need capital letters to spell it.

Time flies

2006-07-01T10:49:00.000-04:00

when you're having fun. That would be the likeliest explanation as to why June dragged on so interminably.

I can't complain, though. Actually, I can complain. I've proven quite equal to the task of posting complaints. It's just that I don't have much of a leg to stand on in the complaint department.

Work is unchanged, which is to say that while the torture chamber still works, they haven't added any new implements of destruction or disaster to it worth mentioning. Home life continues to be good, though if truth be known I probably still mourn the loss of Clueless Wonder more than I should at this point. Gas prices still hover around the $3.00 mark, making my European friends laugh at how ridiculously cheap our fuel is while my upstate friends laugh at how they're still paying less than $2.70. The remaining cats remain healthy, albeit somewhat lethargic in this oppressive humidity.

Rain did not help June's case one whit. There's an oft worn-out saying, applicable to most parts of the world save Southern California that if you don't like the weather around these parts, wait an hour or so. That hasn't helped for the past week. If you didn't like the rain around here, waiting would do nothing more than ensure you'd continue to hate the climate. I have been unable to find what the total rainfall was for my area in the past week, but it hardly matters. Severe local flooding occurred over much of my region. I was lucky in that most of the roads I take to work follow the local ridges. Just to the left or right of where I drove I could see that other roads were impassible. Impassable? Blocked by lots of water. Whatever.

I am a member of my county's CART (County Animal Rescue Team). We're currently in the planning stages of putting together plans for dealing with animals (companion and large animals) during local emergencies. We work under the SART (coincidently standing for State Animal Rescue Team), and we've been told by the state that our county is rather ahead of most other counties in terms of our initial phases of organization. I was half expecting to be called out during the worst of the local flooding, since people were being relocated just outside our county, but the call never came. It turns out that the local Red Cross screwed up and forced people to evacuate without their pets. One man was forcibly evicted from his home when he refused to leave without his cat.

This is not supposed to happen. We have plans for housing and tracking and vetting any animals caught up in this sort of situation. Red Cross has been kept completely informed of this. I don't know who is a fault here, but I have a feeling this will be discussed in detail at our next meeting in a few weeks. I'm thinking that our committee chair should invite our county Red Cross supervisor to attend the meeting.

Other aspects of my life have also failed to go as planned. I refer specifically to my 2005 taxes, prepared and filed by H&R Blockheads. In a set of circumstances too lengthy to list, they completely screwed up my Prius rebate filing. They finally got around to filing for my 2003 rebate this year (like I said, long story), and did an amended filing for me. It turns out they used the wrong form, and while it was an amended filing for 2003, they used the 2005 form. Of course, I got a very nice, very imposing letter from the IRS (certified mail) this week that informs me that the deduction has been denied and they'd like their $500 back, please.

On other weeks I'd have been crushed. Actually, I was pretty crushed this week too, but at least it comes in the last week of June. At my company this is traditionally "Profit Sharing" week, when they hand out checks and a free lunch to the employees. This past year my company killed off the profit sharing plan and replaced it with something they called "Goal Sharing". They set the goals, they develop the metrics to measure if we are accomplishing these goals, and then they payout based on these goals. This year the goals had to do with abuse of equipment, plant cleanliness, and some other thing that was so important to me that I can't remember off the top of my head what it was now.

Anyhow, measuring plant cleanliness around our place is telling a cat not to shed. The bulk of the workers in the company work the production lines, do not speak English as a first language (if they speak it at all) and are getting paid minimum wage. Yes, they do get great benefits. And for those willing to put the effort in, promotions are readily available. But it is still for the most part stultifying work. They get two fifteen minute breaks during the day. If they are given the choice of spending a couple of minutes during their break cleaning up the break room or of spending the time relaxing with their friends, they're going to relax with their friends every time. Need I say that we failed to make our "cleanliness goal" this time around?

Anyhow, my profit sharing check was far, FAR less than in any previous year. Sorry, I mean my "goal sharing" check. It's enough to cover what I owe the IRS, with almost enough left over to pay for the refit of a larger 12V battery into my Prius which was done yesterday. (Another long story, only of interest to drivers of generation one Priuses. Priusi. Priai. Whatever.)

But all is not doom and gloom. I finally chucked that piece-of-excrement printer that came "free" with my new Dell computer last year. It may have been free, but I still paid too much for it. The color cartridges (Dell brand, made especially for the printer) were always clogging, and for most of the time I owned the printer the best I could get out of it was a sort of sepia-toned color print. Not that this wasn't interesting, in an infuriating sort of way. I just wasn't into sepia-toned maps for directions and sepia-toned e-tickets and sepia-toned picture prints. During my trip to Costco (may its grounds be hallowed forever) last week I happened to notice an $89 Hewlett Packard printer that scanned (can't use my scanner any more because the new computers don't come with the right ports for the old scanners), took flash cards to make prints, and printed quality photos as well as regular print-outs. Costco (may its grounds be hallowed forever) might be a bitch to shop at, with its understaffed check-out lines and aggressive shoppers that will elbow you out of the way if you manage to duck quickly enough to avoid being run over by their carts. But the deals there can be really sweet, and this printer is definitely one of those deals. Life is good.

If anyone wants a free printer that specializes in sort-of-sepia-toned prints, you know where to find me.

Through a cloudy lens

2006-06-11T13:14:00.000-04:00

My job is weird. Many of my responsibilities fall into the realm of "who in the world would ever want to do that?". There are compensations, though. Last Thursday I was waiting for something with nothing to do in the interim, so I dissected an eye that was lying around awaiting disposal. Don't ask. Trust me when I say it was a spare, it was slated for disposal, and it wasn't human.

I hadn't dissasembled an eye since undergraduate days. We didn't do one in vet school - there wasn't time to waste on stuff that you could study adequately from slides and diagrams. I didn't have the proper tools for a decent dissection, so I made a hash of some of the more delicate parts in the anterior eye (the iris came out a scramble mess). Still, I was able to tease out the lens with only minor difficulties. It's the lens that has always fascinated me most about the eye.

This one was perhaps two-thirds the size of my thumbnail, and came out crystal clear. It's shape and size were reminiscent of those red and yellow Tylenol gel caps. Circular rounded edges, it looked more like a small clear plastic pellet than an integral part of the visual system. It was fresh and still clear, so I held it up to see what the world looked like through it. Holding it up in the air caused it to rapidly cloud over though, and after a short period of time it had taken on a milky cast.

That's been happening to me a lot recently. I'm not particularly gifted at seeing the world through other people's eyes. Perhaps it's a rigidity that comes with age. I try to force my mind to encompass another's viewpoint in attempt to understand why people do what they do. I think I used to be better at it.

I turned fifty yesterday. For most of my life I have managed to resist that superstition that numbers ending in zero are somehow more powerful than those ending in another digit. There was no more significance in 30 to me than there had been to 29 or 31. I made the usual jokes about entering new decades of life, but I never really felt the trauma that others I knew seemed to encounter. It would seem that there is some magic connected with 50 though.

Perhaps it's because 50 is half a century. Maybe it's the certain knowlege that there is more life behind me than ahead of me. Or maybe it's just because I get to apply for my AARP card now. Most birthdays seemed to pass as any other day, but yesterday felt different. It was more joyful, more life-affirming, more significant than the usual day, even the usual birthday. I felt like I had something to celebrate. I met up with Dr. Twenty Cats at a local mall and attended a "by invitation only" jewelry showing. (Actually, she's now Doctor Eighteen Cats, but for the sake of consistency, I will stay with Twenty. After all, it is a nice number ending with a zero that somehow makes it seem more significant.)I puchased nothing at the show, though she purchased two absolutely gorgeous blue diamond pieces. Me, I'm holding out for my canary yellow diamond.

We then went into an estate jewelry store we both like. I had planned to purchase something for myself to commemorate the day, and was disappointed that I hadn't seen anything I liked that I could afford at the private showing. (There was a gorgeous 20-something carot tanzanite necklace there for a mere $57,000 that I could have happily given a home, but decided it wasn't the right color to go with the outfit I was planning to wear that evening.) At the estate store though I found a sweet little gold band with twelve tiny diamonds set in a channel that was lined with rhodium. The stones were small, but had a flash and sparkle that belied their size (mostly thanks to the rhodium behind them). It wasn't what I went in expecting to buy, but it's what rode out on my hand with me.

I've been having a hard time making entries for months now. I compose them in my head. I make little mental notes of observations that interest me, and of events that should be commended to some sort of record. I have things to say. But when I sit down at the keyboard, things I wanted to say vanish, or at least diminish into insignificance. I can do nothing but patiently wait for the wind to shift.

What's on my mind today.

2006-05-25T06:51:00.000-04:00

I got the call.

He was thirteen. His brother and he were killed in a house fire. Another brother was left with severe injuries that would require multiple surgeries. The mother was left with that son, her daughter, and the clothes on her back. And she was left with a decision.

Think of her today. And of the child who would have been sixteen, looking forward to a driver's license, the last days of school and the Memorial Day weekend.

Sleeping with Strangers

2006-05-18T10:46:00.000-04:00

Math Man likes a no-fuss haircut. If he can't hop out of bed with perfect hair, then it's grown too long and he needs a cut. After his last cut, he came home full of angst over whether he should have gone with a number 1 razor. I asked him why he bothered dithering between number 2 and 1 and didn't just shave it all off. I have an alarming sarcastic streak that comes out when I hear that he pays perhaps a third of what I pay to get his hair done.

Yesterday when I came home I found that he had done exactly that. I went halfway up the stairs to the second floor, saw him standing at the top of the stairway, and stopped cold. I knew my jaw had fallen to the landing, but I was powerless to do anything except stand there and stupidly stare. I may have said something witty like, "Oh, my God." I don't remember now.

I've wondered for several decades now if I'm somehow deficient in facial recognition. Watching back episodes of "Law and Order" hasn't helped this worriment any. On television the witness sees the perp for perhaps ten seconds, but can accurately pick him out of a line-up composed of several of the accused's identical twins.

Me? I've been working with people at my current job for over seven years, and still don't recognize them if I run into them in the supermarket. It's been an embarrassment on a number of occasions.

I have no trouble remembering people in context. Stick these same people I don't know at the supermarket back into the workplace, give them white coats, eye protectors and head coverings, and I�d know them instantly.

But take these people out of the white coats and stick them in the company cafeteria half-an-hour before their lunch time - they'll look familiar, but I may not actually know who they are until I hear their voices. Then take these same folk and put them outside the work environment altogether and I have no clue who they are, even if they come up and speak to me.

I've been this way all my life. Fellow students, teachers, members of the same organization, friends of the family: it's always the same. If you take them out of the context I met and got to know them in, I'll have no clue who they are. Indeed, I have this niggling little fear in the back of my head that some day I'll be the only witness to a major crime (or, heaven forefend, the victim myself) and I'll be completely unable to pick out who the criminal is, even if I got a good look at their face. Whatever it takes to remember faces, it just isn't hardwired into my brain.

It's probably why I like the Internet so much. Everybody has to identify themselves every time they say something.

Which brings me back to me, standing slack-jawed on the stairway landing, looking at Math Man doing his impression of Jean Luc Picard. I didn't recognize him. I don't recognize him. He's unrecognizable. Apparently I've been dependent upon his hair to cue me in on who he is. It's going to take me days now to relearn how to recognize him. I've got no real complaints with the cue ball look he now sports (except that for some reason he now looks about ten years younger than he did with hair). It's just that I'm going to have to learn who the hell he is all over again.

I hate when stuff like this happens.

Babies!

2006-05-05T10:52:00.000-04:00

I'd about given up on my sea monkeys. After hatching what seemed like
half-a-thousand of them, they rapidly dwindled to six over the first week.
This week the survivors got bigger (probably helped that they had all that
high-protein cannibalistic fate) but even the tiny tank they came in seemed
rather empty. Today I noticed half-a-thousand specks floating around in
there. It would seem that I should have been watching their antics a bit
more closely.

There's at least three distinct sizes of seamonkeys swimming around in there
at the moment. With luck, the Jumbos won't eat all the minis over the
weekend.

It's Life, Jim.

2006-04-21T11:36:00.000-04:00

Finally, I can see sea monkeys swimming about in the tank. Granted, two of them could easily fit on a Font sized 10 comma, but at least they're there. I can make out perhaps a dozen of them, but I suspect that by the time I no longer require magnification to make them out there will be fewer. I'm tempted to drop just a little food in the tank tonight in hopes of minimizing the weekend cannibalism toll, but the instructions are pretty strict about not feeding them until five full days have elapsed.

Oh, and mj, I emailed the info to you. I won't post private stuff in a public forum. If you still don't have it, email me and let me know where the heck to send you mail nowadays.

A Desk is a Lonely Place

2006-04-20T13:49:00.000-04:00

Spring is upon us, and the spirit has moved me to do a major purge in my office at work. There's stuff I've been hanging onto forever because it might be useful. Trade magazines, carefully saved scraps of paper with notes on them that I no longer understand but might need some day, stale sugar-free lemon drops, and company newsletters dating back to 1999 spent an afternoon commingling in my trash can before disappearing to where ever my trash goes when it no longer resides in my office. Things that I don't want to think about were removed from sample fridge and disposed of surreptitiously. Files were made, and other files were purged. It was a weeklong orgy of destruction and quat disinfectant diluted with alcohol.
That's alcohol in the quat, NOT in me.

My office is still far from sterile. My Gumbies and Dr. Potatohead are still displayed. My specimen skulls are still lined up on the credenza behind my desk. And my coffee pot ain't going nowhere. I'd just be willing to actually drink coffee made in it now. But somehow, the desk seems emptier, a little less interesting without its piles of paper and carefully orchestrated mayhem. So I decided to do something about it.

Yesterday I added eggs to water, and today I am the proud mother of an as-yet undetermined number of sea monkeys. The kit my sister had given me at Christmas had been sitting around in the master bathroom at home for months, waiting for me to pass judgment on it. The cats were far too interested in the Triops Project, and I didn't want to have to fight them off the sea monkeys. Then it occurred to me that I could spruce up the office by growing a tankful of friends.

The dang things are too tiny to really see yet. There are four little magnifier bubbles built into the side of the half-pint tank, but I'm thinking they'd have done better to build in an electron microscope for me to monitor the progress of my crustaceans. Either that, or they were all stillborn. They're supposed to be big enough to feed on Monday, so I won't despair yet.

Heck, it'll give me a rare reason to want to come into work on Monday.

Easter

2006-04-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

Easter Day was a nice one in these parts: typical sun-shiney, flower blooming, squirrel and bunny frolicky mid-Springtime fare. Easter dinner was held at the Younger Sister's. She's apparently made the transition from her own condo to her fiancé's with little in the way of transitional pangs. Indeed, the guy gutted his old garage (which happens to be situated immediately under the master bedroom), installed a spiral staircase down to it, and turned it into a giant walk-in closet to house her clothes and shoe habit. Mathman counted over fifty pairs of shoes in there alone, and she's left behind at least that many in our basement.

In fact, Mr. Fiancé is in the process of gutting and reassembling his house to suit his bride-to-be's whims. The wall separating the living room from the eat-in portion of the kitchen has been removed, and is apparently going to be replaced by an island/bar. Marble countertops will be installed. An existing pantry will be expanded.

I'm trying to be disdainful of their money disposal problem. It's a safer course than the jealousy lurking just around the mental corner.

----------------------------------------------------
Easter morning was laid-back. I read a book, sleeping cat on my lap, Jewelry Television in the background. Sorry. I'm a sucker for baubles, and it's cheaper to look at them on television than in a jewelry store, where one tends to window-shop while constantly shadowed by friendly, on-commission sales people. While experimenting with making a sleeping cat purr, I mused on how different Easter mornings were from when I was young. Don't laugh. When you're my age, you'll be doing the same thing. Anyhow, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in a very long time.

When I was a kid I used to hunt caterpillars in the fall. Autumn is the best time to hunt the really cool ones, because that's when they're at their largest. Many caterpillars also give up their arboreal existence for the ground, as they search for secure places to hole up, cocoon, and pretend winter doesn't exist while moving on to a higher plane of existence.

About once a year I'd find a really exotic looking caterpillar. I had a luna moth caterpillar one time, and another time I found a spiky black morning cloak larvae. The best ones I'd take home to show my mom, and then keep them overnight in a shoebox full of leaves to be released the next day.

One autumn I captured a lime-green caterpillar on the road in front of my house. It had rows of bristly bumps, colored blue or red or yellow. The thing looked like a mutant: huge, garish, and apparently on urgent business that I rudely interrupted. It was chugging away, crossing the road at a speed I wouldn't have credited a caterpillar capable of. Tucked inside its box, it continued to chug away, making quick circuits about the perimeter like some crazed baseball player who can't seem to stop when he reaches home plate.

The next morning, the caterpillar was gone, replaced by a large grey cocoon firmly affixed to a bottom corner of the box. I couldn't just leave the box outside with the cocoon attached, and I couldn't remove the cocoon without risking injury to the critter. With a sheet of plastic wrap rubber banded to the top, I put the box between my bedroom window and the storm window for the winter, in hopes that that would protect the cocoon while giving it close to the right conditions to continue it's metamorphosis. I then proceeded to pretty much forget about it.

Six months later I was awakened on a frosty Easter morning to the sounds of what I first took to be a mouse scrabbling around in my room. Screwing my courage to the sticking place, I got out of bed and started searching for the erstwhile mouse, only to find the noise was coming from just outside my window. The cocoon had opened, and a newly born cecropia moth was trying to gain a perch while its half-expanded wings continued to blossom.

It being Easter, and I being the pious youngster I used to be, I immediately latched onto this as a sign from God. The symbolism of rebirth on Easter morning was just too strong for my young mind not to make the obvious association. I quickly found a larger box to house the still-growing moth, and watched my little miracle for almost an hour before the rest of the house awoke and started their day. Shortly after noon, when the sun was out and shining as strongly as it was going to that day, I released the moth.

It was only as I grew older that I realized that I'd probably released the moth to certain death. Because it had weathered winter in a slightly warmer environment than the rest of its ilk, it had hatched out weeks too early. There were no other moths around. The flowers were only just starting to open. The days were too cool. The newly arriving migrating birds were hungry and the nocturnal moth would have been bewildered in the daylight without sufficient foliage to hide in.

There's always another side to a miracle. I suppose that's in part, why
Easters no longer feel like they used to when I was a kid.

Honestly.

2006-03-29T22:54:00.000-05:00

There’s 168 hours in a week. I spend between 42 and 50 of those hours asleep. I spend another five or six hours watching television. Add in DVD’s and you can tack another ten hours perhaps onto that. Volunteering for the cats usually eats into another six hours, if you count commute time. Errands/appointments can easily eat another ten hours out of my week. Household chores take perhaps five hours a week total (it should be more, but I tend towards lazy slobhood in that regard). These days I’m spending about five hours a week reading. That accounts for about 92 hours of my week, with 76 hours not yet identified. Some of that time is frittered away on the computer, on personal hygiene, on playing with cats, on zoning out.

I leave the house at 7:15, give or take, each morning. I arrive home around 6:00 each evening. That's a tad less than 59 hours of my week, and accounts for most of that leftover 76 hours. That’s more than a third of my week, more time than I spend at any other task, sleep included. And I can’t write about it, save obliquely, in my journal.

You’d think that spending that much time at one place with the same people day in and day out would promote friendships. And in some cases it does. But the place I work for is famed for holding on to employees. The people I work with have worked together for ten, twenty, twenty-five years. They go to the same church, live in the same communities, and in many cases actually grew up together. I’ve been here seven years now, and I’m still considered a newbie, still an outsider. The more I learn of my co-workers, the more comfortable I am with this position. Religion, children, and work are their worlds, and there isn’t much overlap with my world. It makes for lonely days, though. And it makes for little to talk about.

So what instigated this particular piece of omphalic introspection? I was searching for something to write about. Current events tend to anger/depress me. Work is, for the most part, verboten. I have no social life to speak of at the moment. So I went web-hopping to find a site with prompts for journaling. I happened to stumble across one intended for teachers of elementary school students. I was getting a kick reading through the prompts: Talk about animals; Describe yourself; what would you buy if you had a lot of money? et cetera. Then I tripped against this one:

Write about a time when you were honest.

Now yeah, I know what the intent was. Have a kid talk about a time when he ‘fessed up to something, or when he found something and returned it. The sort of kid moral-fiber thing that makes you wonder why “fibber” is “fiber” with an extra “B” in it. (My personal favorite theory on this was expressed by a fellow twelve-year-old that the extra “B” stood for “Bullshit”. It was the first time one of my peers used that word in front of me, and made an impression both for the word and its clever application.) But I digress.

Write about a time when you were honest. I took that entirely the wrong way at first, in a “when did you stop beating your wife” sort of way. Tell about a time you were honest. It implies I’m dishonest most of the time, and so a time when I was honest is something noteworthy to tell a tale of.

Write about a time when you were honest. Well, maybe I’m not honest the bulk of the time. I certainly don’t reveal who I am at work. Withholding the truth can be construed as a form of dishonesty, especially if it lets people think you are something you aren’t. And I certainly hold back about work when I’m home. That’s partly because much of my work is technical, and to tell a story from work requires a ton of preparation and set-up, as I explain what it is that the story centers around. It’s also partly because when I leave work, I want it left behind. Some aspects of my job are more than moderately disturbing, and I prefer not to drag that baggage home with me every night. And I sure as hell ain’t honest in my journaling. Between the poetic license, the editing of “bad think” and the selectivity of my subject matter, I know that only a slice of the real me appears on any given page. Is that lying?

Write about a time when you were honest. Hell, half the time I’m not even honest with myself. Much of that is a purely Heisenberg Principal thing. To look at a thing is to change that thing. Looking at atoms takes energy. When you look at an atom, you’ve put energy into it, and you end up changing the atom. You can know where an electron is, or how fast it’s moving, but you can’t know both. You can peer into your own mind, but you change how you think by doing so. In that vein, you can never really know yourself. I’m not entirely sure that’s dishonest, but thinking you can understand yourself totally is deluded at best. Yet it’s a delusion I buy into every time I justify my actions to myself. And I suppose that’s a form of dishonesty.

Write about a time when you were honest. I suspect the last time I was honest was when I was around twelve years old, and my classmate’s use of the word “bullshit” struck me as daring and clever. When I laughed out loud at that, it was an honest laugh.

Nine years ago

2006-03-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

It's the twenty-first of March again. Time to get stuck in the
same-time-X-years-ago game. This year X=9. Nine years ago from the very
moment I type this I was in the emergency room while my heart was doing its
best to kill me.

I've written it all up before. I feel like a broken LP, doomed to rotate
just so far and then skip the track over and over again. This time one year
ago ... this time two years ago ... this time three years ago ... ad naseum.
I begin to bore even myself, until I look at the date on the calendar and
feel the impact yet again.

Nine years is nearly 20% of my life ago. That's a huge hunk of change, time
wise. I feel like an event as big as near-death should have made a marked
deviation in the course of my life. I should be able to look back and see
how my life improved, how I improved, because of that day. Sometimes, when
I squint, I think I can even see how it made a difference. But most days I
just don't know. Then again, most days it doesn't cross my mind any more.

Idiopathic viral cardiomyopathy. Beware doctors when they use
"idiotpathic". It's a big word that means "I don't have a clue". It's
intelligent sounding, a phrase designed to inspire confidence at the edge of
the cliff. They just threw the "viral" part in there because there's got to
be a reason and viruses make good fall guys when all else fails. The only
word in that phrase that makes any sense is "cardiomyopathy". Another big
word designed to impress that pretty much means "sick heart muscle". Some
undetected presumed virus attacked my heart and idiopathiced my heart muscle
into trying to kill me. Oh well. At least it didn't succeed.

I wish I'd said that.

2006-03-17T09:23:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, March 1, 2006, at a hearing on the proposed
Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor
of law at AU, was requested to testify.
At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: "Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?"Raskin replied: "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

The room erupted into applause.

Snopes verification

Spring Eternal

2006-03-15T18:04:00.000-05:00

Well, hope may spring eternal in the human heart, but spring sure as hell ain’t springing eternal anywhere around here at the moment. The tantalizing taunt of spring we had earlier this week (seventy degrees on Monday – 21 degree, to those of you who are Fahrenheit impaired) gave way this morning to just above freezing with snow squalls thick enough to seriously impair visibility while driving. Because the world revolves around me, I’m taking this nosedive in ambient conditions personally. Mother Nature has been crossed off my Christmas list.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We have a fourteen-year-old brown mackerel tabby at the shelter right now. She’s a year older than Clueless was, and there the poor thing is in a cage on display in a pet store. She’s a sweet cat, but she’s scared and shy and doesn’t “show” well. I don’t know what her history is, that she’s ended up in a shelter during what should be her lazy senior years, and I get a lump in my throat when I see her lying on her blanket in the back of her cage while all the youngsters around her press up against the bars demanding attention while trying to snag your sleeve on the way by. When the time comes for another cat it will be up to Math Man to decide whom we adopt. I know he wants another altered male cat with Clueless’s slightly ditsy disposition and a different coat color than the rest of our herd. This little brown tabby fits none of the requirements. Right now I guess I can only trust that fate will match her up with the right home quickly, giving her the chance windows full of sunshine to bask in and laps to lounge on when the sun goes down.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Offering no excuses, I simply note here that it has yet again become time for me to diet. I have let myself go in a rather spectacular way this time, and Dr. Liver let me know it in no uncertain terms. I managed to make him chuckle when I murmured some nonsense regarding cognitive dissonance, but it didn’t get me off the hook with him. So yes, I am yet again dieting. And no, I am not doing South Beach this time (nor did Dr. Liver recommend it this time). I have proved I am incapable of keeping weight off on my own, so I am biting the bullet and doing group therapy. Last week I signed up for Weight Watchers. Tonight I get to weigh in and then sit through another motivational meeting. After a few weeks I might record more about it, but I want to give it a fair shake before I start in on how pathetic I’ve become. At least Weight Watchers provides a nice forum for potential public humiliation if I fail to adhere to good eating habits. Apparently I need that kind of motivation.

Back

2006-03-12T09:58:00.000-05:00

I've gotten out of the habit of making entries. There was a time that if I'd gone to bed and not updated it used to bother me. Now I go days at a time without giving it a second thought. I'm resolved to try and reverse the trend, but it's hard to build up the inertia I once had.

I remain in mourning for a cat. I'm not so far gone that I don't realize how socially unacceptable this is, so I refrain from talking about it in public. Yet I think that a part of me resents that I lose a little of the grief every day.

Meanwhile, there are a thousand little errands and deeds to do that have piled up and can no longer be ignored. The Prius needs to go in and have a few minor glitches taken care of before they become major. I need to get my taxes taken care of. I need to finalize arrangements for homeowners insurance for the condo. My family doctor has left private practice for a position at a local hospital, and I need to steel myself for the dog and pony show that happens each time I take on a new doctor. (Relating my medical history can now take the better part of an afternoon, and requires a file of paperwork about six inches thick for the past couple of years. I have several files like that for the past ten years.)

I'm lucky in that Math Man is off next week for spring break. He's offered to take the Prius to be worked on for me. I just have to remember to make an appointment tomorrow for that. I was also supposed to get blood work done tomorrow morning, but discovered that my paperwork for the recurring tests expired the end of February. I'm annoyed because I just saw Dr. Liver a week ago, and could easily have gotten new script at that point if I'd realized I needed it (even though it's usually my family doctor that wrote the orders). Now I don't have a family doctor and I'm going to have to jump through hoops to get Dr. Liver's office to issue script for a PT for me. grumble

Regardless of my current mood, spring is still making inroads in my neck of the woods. Daffodils have started to bud, tulips are beginning to leaf out, and snow piles have melted into muddy pools. Temperatures this weekend fluttered into the low seventies, and though they are supposed to plummet again after tomorrow, the trend will be towards mellow and mild as the month progresses. The first robins have appeared in the shrubs outside our windows, providing the cats with more to do than to lounge by the space heater with stoned expressions on their faces.

I suppose it's time to push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free.

George 1993 (?) - 24 February 2006

2006-03-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

George
Clueless Wonder
1993? – 24 February 2006

I was going to try and do a bit of an obituary, but it just won’t come together. When I do get a sentence or two to read just the way I want, I end up busting into tears all over again. If I keep that up I’ll just end up short-circuiting the goddamned keyboard.

Some random thoughts:

His full name was “George of the Jungle” because he was found on the streets of West Philly when he was about a year old. Even then he was a big goof. He was emaciated, and had a severe upper-respiratory infection and a fine case of worms, but he was an utter spazoid. How he survived on his own for so long is anybody’s guess. My guess is that he was abandoned by a college student in the spring, and managed to scrap his way through until the fall semester started up.

He came into my life when a fellow vet student rescued him off the streets. I gave him to my mom, and then inherited him when she died. My second-best friend in the entire world died Friday, and so did a piece of my mother.

When he was young, his favorite toy was a ping-pong ball. He’d chase the damned thing through my mom’s house for hours until it lodged under something, and then he’d spend another hour trying to extricate it. I’d spend hours watching him do it. I’m not sure which of us was more pathetic.

Two of our remaining three cats don’t seem to have noticed that anything is different. LGS has been sticking closer to me, and has kicked LBS out of her accustomed sleeping spot next to me at night. I don’t think that LGS actually misses George, but she’s noticed something is different, and she’s a bit unsettled.

I had a postmortem done on George. This seems to upset the people who I’ve confided this to, so I’m not telling people about it any more. The postmortem confirmed that on top of all his other problems (heart, kidneys, inflammatory bowel) he also had pancreatic cancer. Life expectancy from time of diagnosis of pancreatic is usually less than three months. I was lucky to have been able to manage this medically for as long as I did, but most of the credit goes to George. For a goofus, he had unsuspected veins of feline fortitude running through his being.

He started to decline the week before, but he’d always bounced back, and I left on a two-day business trip optimistic that I’d come home to a slow but perky cat. My plane was delayed, and I arrive home 10:30 Friday night to find George in a miserable state. Math Man had done a wonderful job of caring for him while I was gone (four pills in the morning, seven pills at night, two liquid medications on top of all the pills, and subcutaneous fluid therapy in addition to all that). I’m not sure any other cat I know would have tolerated such a regimen, but George did, and for a while it worked. Friday night I knew that the time for such measures was ended.

We ended up at the vet ‘s at 11:00 that evening. The veterinarian who had been attending George for most of his final months made a special trip back into the clinic for this last visit. We were all nearly in tears after. George died on my lap, looking as though he had fallen asleep. I stayed with him for a while after. When his ears started to feel cool I was finally able to turn my back and walk out the door. I wish now I’d looked back.

The vet made an impression of George’s paw-print for me in a sculpting plastic that could be baked to permanent hardness. Using this woman as a yardstick, I do not believe I’d have measured up to acceptable standards had I gone into private practice. I need to find an appropriate thank-you gift for her.

I’ve taken all but the cardiac medications to the animal shelter I work at. There was a fair amount left over, and much is stuff we use on a regular basis. I’m returning the rest to the veterinary clinic for them to use for low-income clients. I haven’t been able to bring myself to take this stuff back to the clinic though.

I’m having George cremated, with the ashes to be returned to me. It’s the first time I’ve had the ashes returned for any pet I’ve ever owned. When I’m ready, when the weather’s warmer, when I’ve worked up my courage, I’ll take them to the cemetery where Mom is. I’ll have to sneak to do it though. The cemetery where my parents purchased funeral plots is one of those all-flat places. No headstones, no vases, no memorials of any kind that you can’t mow over. The place is beautifully kept, but sterile, and I’ve never taken any comfort in visiting there. The turf is kept green and plastic looking, and I figure I should be able to roll a piece of it back when no one is looking. I’ll dig a small hole over my mother’s grave for George’s remains, then roll the turf back so the area looks undisturbed. It’s probably a stupid plan, but it gives me some comfort to think about doing it. I think my mom would have liked it. When she was alive she hated this cemetery, and she would have gotten a kick out of me finding some small way to screw them over.

It seems almost obligatory in any memorial to mention that in lieu of flowers a donation can be made to George’s favorite charity. It’s rather presumptuous to do so though, especially since George didn’t have a favorite charity. Still, I’ve asked the few people who have asked me if they can do anything that it would be nice if they could give a small donation in Clueless Wonder’s name to Cat Tales, Inc., the shelter I volunteer for. It seems appropriate, since George of the Jungle was a rescue kitty. In a continuation of this presumptiveness, their address is: Cat Tales, Inc.
Animal Rescue
P.O. Box 165
Warminster, PA 18974

God, I miss him.

Bought and sold

2006-02-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

Settlement is completed. The house is ours. Yesterday I walked out of my rental unit and returned to my home. Math Man seemed to take it in stride. I found it all a tad surreal.

-----------------------

Math Man's aunt and uncle are in the area on business this weekend. We had dinner with them last night, and then the uncle visited us this afternoon while the aunt tended their table at the big crafters' wholesale show. The Warrior Princess had a vet appointment early afternoon, so all three of us trundled her to the vet's for a check-up and pre-teeth-cleaning bloodwork. A good time was had by all, except for the vet, whom the Warrior Princess attempted to take her ounce of flesh from. Fortunately the vet's thumb escaped unscathed. The Warrior Princess did not, and while no ounce of flesh was taken, about an ounce of blood was. Believe me when I say that it's unusual for the Warrior Princes to have blood taken from her without her extacting some in return.

-------------------------

This morning I flushed the toilet in the downstairs bathroom and the cheap plastic lever in the tank snapped in twain. Had this happened yesterday, it would have been the last item I could have called my landlord over to fix. Since it happened this morning, it was my first home repair project. And so begins the joy of not renting.

Settlement

2006-02-17T14:14:00.000-05:00

In one hour.

I worry as to my sanity.

Stay Alive - Do 55

2006-02-09T20:18:00.000-05:00

Or maybe not. This is the most compelling argument I've yet seen for breaking the speed limit.

Not Today.

2006-02-08T13:09:00.000-05:00

These past weeks have hurled me headlong into a decision that I'd hoped never to face. When is it time to say "enough"? When is it time to say
"goodbye"? Six weeks of staring that question dead on, and I still don't
know the answer.

I've watched my second-best friend in the entire world slowly declining over the past weeks. In all honesty, the decline started several years ago. Occasional bouts of diarrhea, the once a month refusal of dinner, the slow weight loss that brought a once tubby figure down to svelte cat status. I've discovered how easy it is to ignore early warning signs when they
disappear into the following day's dawning. I've discovered how easy it is to foresee the future from yesterday's signs when the future is today. That's the stuff guilt is made of.

They tell you that when it's time, you'll know. This same they assure that your pet will let you know when he's ready. They are full of bullshit. Or maybe they are right, and I'm simply too blind to Clueless's needs, too deaf to his voice. It's a toss-up if I've learned too much or not learned enough. I know exactly what
Clueless's diseases are doing to him, I know the best way to treat him to
relieve discomfort and help his compromised organs to do the best they can.
But nobody has ever taught me how to quantify quality of life. When is it
time to say "enough"?

The medical reports haven't been discouraging, but neither are they a death sentence: constrictive heart failure, chronic kidney failure, pancreatitis, inflammatory bowel disease, liver damage, a cyst that may or may not be cancerous. It's all treatable, and any one of these might be something a pet could live with for months or years and continue to have a near-normal quality of life.

The treatments have forced me back to my pharmacology books, and have honed habits gone rusty. There's metronidazole (immunomodulation to help control the inflammatory bowel), captopril (a vasodilator to help in congestive heart failure), butorphanol (a narcotic analgesic to relieve the pain of pancreatitis and inflammatory bowel disease), vitamin K (to reduce the chance of bleeding that comes with an insult to the liver), atenolol (slows down the heart rate and increases cardiac output while helping fight the hypertension that the captopril can cause), prednisolone (to reduce the
inflammation from the inflammatory bowel and from the pancreatitis), cyproheptadine (an antihistamine that has the happy side effect of making cats ravenous) and plain old Ringer's solution (a balanced electrolyte fluid administered just under the skin to help the failing kidneys do their job as best as they still can). I never used to be any good at pilling cats; now I can get seven pills down one in under a minute while keeping the stress factor to a minimum. I used to wince every time I had to push a needle into the tough, resisting skin of a dog or cat's back; now I can pop that sucker in so smoothly that Clueless doesn't even notice what I've done until I've administered most of the fluids.

Guilt pervades everything now. Am I doing too much? Am I doing enough? Is he suffering when he lies with his nose to the carpet, or just tired? Am I refusing to let go because I'm selfish, or am I tempted to let him go because the costs connected with his medical attention? No matter how I look at things, no matter what action I consider taking, it all feels wrong.

Sometimes, at night, when it's just Clueless in front of the space heater and me in front of the television, I watch him bask and think up fragments and phrases that should go into his memorial when his time comes. I can plan what to say, but yet I can't make the hard decisions before their time. Cremation or illegal burial in the garden by the deck? Do I stay during his last minutes at the vet's, or should I leave lest I break down and upset him? Do I give the sisters a last chance to say good-bye, or do I keep this to myself and MathMan, if he wishes to be there? And still the guilt. Am I
doing too much? Am I doing enough? How dare I think of this while he's still alive and comfortably snoozing in the warmth? When is it time to say "enough"?

Clueless was perky this morning. He's having trouble with the stairs, but he still made good time making his way from the master bedroom to the
kitchen. He ate an ounce or so of slurried canned chicken food thinned to the consistency of creamed corn and a tablespoon or two of kibble, and then made the arduous climb back upstairs to nap in the master bedroom. I took his food upstairs and set it next to his cat bed in case he decided he was still hungry. When I left, he was again lapping at the chicken gruel.

When is it time to say good-bye?

Everything I Know About Christmas I Learned From a Cat

2005-12-24T21:27:00.000-05:00

Clueless Wonder is still a patient at The Vet Clinic. He's become a favorite among the staff, and the techs all argue about who gets to bring him out to visit with me, and who gets to take him back.

He's eating now, and a little problem we were having with retention of bowel contents was relieved by two enemas on Wednesday. His belly is shaved for the ultrasounds, his neck is shaved for the central venous catheter, his leg is shaved for the peripheral catheter, and apparently all the shaved parts itch. I visited Clueless twice today, for 45 minute stretches each time, and he fell asleep on my legs while I scratched all that velvety naked skin. He showed little interest in the laser pointer that I brought with me this evening, though he deigned to watch the little red dot sit on his paw for a while. Of more intereste was the fresh catnip toy I had purchased for his Christmas present, though he showed minimal enthusiasm for that as well. He's quiet, and he's patient, and he's content to accept attention in the form of belly rubs and chin chucks until he falls asleep.

I sat in the waiting room this evening next to a couple with a golden retriever, whose belly was shaved. The retriever had a feeding tube, its end taped in place mid-neck. The couple told me how their dog had been diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of lymphoma the week previously, and how they were trying chemo in order to extend the dog's life for as long as he seemed to be enjoying it. The chemo seemed to be working well, and I wished them luck with therapy. If they are lucky, it will extend their dog's life by about six months or so.

It will be Christmas here in two hours. I've got LGS on my lap, Squeegee's on the bed trying to break in to the new catnip I bought, and the Warrior Princess is asleep downstairs in front of the space heater. I've one more present to wrap, and then I can sit down and read a book or watch some rotten television and sip some equally insipid spiced apple wine whose label appealed more to my eyes than the wine does to my palatte. I know Clueless is in good hands. Tomorrow morning, after rounds, I'll visit with him again. It will be a better Christmas than I've spent in a long time, because I already have everything I really want.

Clueless Christmas

2005-12-22T16:53:00.000-05:00

It's been a frantic, busy period. Days at work are long and hard right now.
I've volunteered most of my free time away wrapping books at the local Big
Chain Bookstore, earning donations for the cat shelter I give time to.
Christmas has once again failed to take care of itself, leaving me in my
usual last-minute frenzy of desperation. The Prof leaves for California
tomorrow afternoon, and won't be back until late next week. I'll be
spending Christmas with my younger sister's new fianc�s family whom I've
never met before, and who apparently are very, very Catholic. (I'm very,
very nonreligious/unreligious/irreligious.) The Prof often refers to this
period of the year as "Jingle Hell". He has a point.

Last month, as my handful of steady readers will recall, I took Clueless
Wonder for his regular annual veterinary check-up. I had recently
discovered fleas on the other three cats, and since Clueless has heart and
kidney problems, I wanted to get some bloodwork done to make sure that he
didn't have any problems. Everything looked good on him, except that his
creatinine was up a bit, meaning his kidneys were perhaps a little worse
than they had been this time last year.

Shortly after that last visit, George started refusing to eat. Over the
course of the next three weeks he lost about three-quarters of a pound.
This is not a good thing. It's bad for any animal to lose weight rapidly,
but in cats (an ponies) rapid weight loss can damage the liver. I tried
everything I could think of to get him to eat, but finally ended up bringing
him back to the vet on Monday of this week.

Several sets of blood work, one ultra-sound, an x-ray, and a set of biopsies
later, and it turns out that Clueless has an infected pancreas. He's still
in the hospital, on IV fluids and antibiotics, and once we get him
stabilized enough, he'll have to undergo surgery to obtain a pancreas biopsy
and confirm the diagnosis, as well as clean out some of the damaged tissue.
He'll be hospitalized through Christmas, with the surgery tentatively
scheduled for Monday if we can get him stabilized enough. Meanwhile, he
gets a central venous line tonight, so we can get plenty of fluids into him.

I have no idea how I'm going to pay for all this, and I don't care. Tonight
I'll go through my jewelry box and see what I have that can be sold. That
might cover half of this or so. The vet clinic gave me the number of a
financing company that creates credit accounts for this sort of thing, but
they charge 22.98% interest annually. My credit card can do better than
that. I'll look into getting a second job come the New Year. That should
help too.

Shaved and frozen

2005-12-16T16:53:00.000-05:00

Clueless Wonder returned home with a good deal less hair than he wore when he entered the vet's office. His entire belly had been shaved for the ultrasound, poor guy. You can't tell by looking at him, so I was taken quite by surprise when I lifted him up and felt the velvety wrongness of his belly skin. The skin over his tummy is a mottled pink and black, and the pattern doesn't match the black and white pattern of his hair when he's in a less alopecic condition. I don't know why that surprised me, but it just added to the incongruity of CW's current condition.

I got out of work, brought CW home, then took off in the snow and freezing rain to Big Chain Booksellers, where I spent an empty three hours waiting for people who were too smart to go out in the storm. Other evenings we've made a tidy sum in donations for our book wrapping, but last night I think I spent more on hot chocolate and latte than I brought in. A local author was doing a book signing for his new book about when he was newly married and the new "father" of a golden retriever, but after a small group of hard core fans got their copies, the line to his desk was short and sad. If it weren't for the ever-closing proximity of fruitcake and sufganiyot, I doubt anyone at all would have been in the store last night.

I still need to get to more of the story about Murphy. I have to work a full day tomorrow. I resent having to work a full day tomorrow, when the majority of my department does not. I may make time to complete the Murphy story then.

CW Update

2005-12-15T15:53:00.000-05:00

It's like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Each time you fit a piece into place, you create two or three new places for as yet undiscovered pieces. Answers often yield nothing other than new questions. It can be frustrating.

Clueless Wonder's ultrasound indicated the kidney changes we expected to see during renal failure. There were also hyperechoeic areas in his liver and spleen, and something that could or could not be a cyst in his pancreas. This could all be from simple inflammatory changes, possibly due to pancreatitis. Or it could indicate what my veterinarian prefers to call a "neoplasm". "Neo" for new. "Plasm" from the Latin root that refers to the stuff that cells (life) are made of. "New Life." Such a soft word for cancer.

I've given permission for aspirates to be performed. Aspirates are a way to take tissue samples using a needle. It's a lot less invasive than performing an operation to get a sample. CW will have to remain at the clinic overnight though, to make sure that he's OK after the specimens are obtained.

I no sooner got the above typed than the veterinary clinic called me again. They ran a preliminary clotting time on CW's blood, and it may be slower than it's supposed to be. They've collected a sample for further testing, and are sending it to an outside lab. They won't perform the aspirate until they know for sure it won't cause bleeding problems, so CW gets to come home tonight after all. If we do the aspirates, it won't be until next week at the earliest.

I think I'll make time Sunday to get pictures of George with Santa this year. Anybody I have to buy presents for can just wait until I have the time. Some things are more important.

Not a Murphy Entry

2005-12-15T11:12:00.000-05:00

I haven't forgotten about Murphy. This time of year, commitments intrude on intentions, with neither one winning a clear-cut victory. Another way of saying this is that I'm making a half-assed job of just about everything right now, just trying to make it through to January with all the pieces of my sanity located, identified, and ready to glue back together.

I've overextended on the cat shelter, but it's hard not to at this time of year. Most of our donated income arrives in December. It makes the coming year somewhat easier to budget for; we never have enough, but at least we always know in advance how much we're going to be short. Pet Pictures with Santa was off to a slow start, but with two weekends under our belt and a third and final weekend to go, it looks like we will surpass last year's earnings on the event. I still want to take Clueless, and maybe LGS, to have pictures taken, but it may not be fated to be this year.

Last night and I wrapped pictures at A Big Name Book Store Chain, and I'll be doing so from 8:00 - 10:00 this evening, Sunday evening, next Wednesday evening, next Thursday evening, next Friday evening, and next Saturday afternoon from 2:00 to the 6:00 store closing time (that day being Christmas Eve.) We've already banked about $6,000 in donations, and the heavy-giving part of the month is still ahead of us. At this rate, our dream of having a true, independent shelter may actually be within our grasp in five years or so. We remain indebted and dependent upon local pet stores and people who are willing to foster cats in their homes until permanent homes can be found. It would be nice to have a place the cats could call their very own.

I took Clueless Wonder in to the vet two nights ago. He's been refusing most of his food for the past three weeks, vomiting off and on, and showing signs of being nauseous. I figured it was his sick kidneys talking, but was hoping to get something to cut the nausea and perhaps stimulate his appetite. While I did get a supply of Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic that can stimulate the appetite in cats), the veterinarian discovered a palpable mass in CW's abdomen. This is Not Good. Today I dropped him off so that they can perform an ultrasound and try to determine what the mass is. Bye-bye, Christmas bonus.

It seems almost cruel; the Cipro worked well, and CW was hungry yesterday for the first time in weeks. He ate well (more than the entire last week combined) and then begged for more. Then at ten o'clock last night I had to withhold food from him in preparation for today's ultrasound. The poor guy finally wants to eat, and I don't feed him. He'll be lucky to survive my ministrations with his poor little feline sanity intact.

In other matters, I have to work this Saturday. It will be a full day of fun and merriment at Ye Olde Grindstone, and I'm grumpy as hell about it. I still have shopping to do, and am reduced to this Sunday afternoon and next Saturday morning to accomplish it in. The Prof leaves for California the end of next week, and I'm grumpy about that as well.

While we're on a grump theme, I'm also grumpy about having to spend Christmas with a bunch of strangers. My younger sister's engagement to a nice Italian Catholic divorcee requires that we do the Salamander version of Meet The Fockers in anticipation of My Big Fat Italian Wedding. This means I'll be dining with a huge family I've never met before, with the only support being my two sisters, who tend to band with each other and exclude me. I'm not fond of my sister's fiancé, though much of that may be because he commandeered MY birthday celebration last year and tried to turn it into an all night dominoes game. It's a petty reason to dislike someone, I know, but what can I do? Besides, the whole time I lived at my last apartment my sisters deemed it too far to go for any of our small family festivities. Birthdays, holidays, or just plain socializing always had to be done at their homes (they lived five minute from each other) because I lived half an hour from the both of them. Now the little sister is the one who lives 45 minutes away, and expects us to have Christmas with her? Obviously I still live too far away to celebrate with, but at least Sister the Elder will now find out what it means to commute to the holiday festivities. Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. (Yes, I know better than all this, but it's been simmering a long time, and better I regurgitate it all here than in her face the next time I see her.)

They should be doing CW's ultrasound right about now. I hope he's doing OK.

A Cat Named Murphy

2005-12-12T22:54:00.000-05:00

A couple entries ago, I listed a few of my favorite things while humming Mary Poppins show tunes. One of the things I listed was “unexpected memories”. I’ve only become appreciative of this phenomenon recently. I suppose I could make a flip comment about how the aging mind gets to the point where there’s so many memories tucked away that a few just can’t help falling out of the storage closet every once in a while. Who knows; it might even be true.

What I do know is that a chance comment about the misadventures of a friend’s cat triggered a sudden memory of me in my late teens, sitting on the sofa with a cat named Murphy. I haven’t really remembered about Murphy in a good long time. That’s not to say that I don’t mention Murphy now and again, or tell the occasional funny Murphy anecdote. What I don’t do is remember Murphy. I hadn’t remembered his purr, or the coarse thickness of his hair, or the odd little merp of joy he uttered when chasing crickets in quite some time. What I want to do is remember Murphy now, while the smokey smell of cat is still in my nostrils, and the warmth of his body still lingers in my lap.

It was the summer of 1975. I had just completed my freshman year of college. One afternoon I went to the mailbox to get the mail, and when I returned there was a small brown tabby trying quite desperately to get into the front door. We had several neighborhood cats, but I didn’t recognize this one. She was friendly and immediately turned her attention from the door to me. I bent down, scritched her ears, and then told her to go home. She didn’t make it easy, but I managed to slip into the house without her getting through the door with me.

Hours later the cat was still at the front door, still trying to get in. I remember putting some food out for her (probably dog food, since we had no cats, but we did have a basset at the time). That night I went to bed without thinking much more about it.

The next morning I checked, but didn’t see the cat at the front door. It seemed apparent that she’d grown tired of trying to adopt us, and departed for parts unknown. I was a little disappointed, since I’d actually gotten a kick out of the little cat. The disappointment didn’t last long, though. There was some rustling under the yew bush by the front door. When I bent to see what the noise was, I saw the little cat lying in the leaf litter on her side. My first thought was that she was ill. Then I noticed the squirming little balls of life she was curled around. Momma Cat had had four kittens overnight.

I’d never been close to young kittens before, and was entranced. Momma Cat didn’t seem to mind in the least that I had found her, and let me watch her most of the day. I supplied more food and, if memory serves me correctly, some milk. Yes, I know. I’d never give a cat milk now, but what did I know back then about cats? My mother was a bit annoyed that Momma Cat had had her litter literally on our door step, but permitted me to leave some food by her. I was warned that there was an excellent chance that Momma Cat would move her kits to a safer place, and that I might find the nest under the yew bush vacant in a day or so. That didn’t happen though.

What did happen was that on second day of the kittens’ lives the day dawned grey and cool. By midmorning a drizzle had started up, and by afternoon the drizzle had turned to rain. Momma Cat, rather than finding higher, drier ground for herself and her brood, stayed put under the yew as the ground around her became soggier and soggier. I checked on her every few minutes, hoping that either the rain would stop or that the puddle that always formed by the side of the front walk wouldn’t encroach on the yew bush. Momma Cat held firm as the water’s edge crept closer to her and her babies.

Finally I could tolerate it no longer. I took an old cardboard box, lined it with some old towels, and grabbed an umbrella. I put the box down on the stairs by the yew, and Momma Cat jumped right into it. She watched as I lifted each of her four babies and put it into the box with her. When I had the entire family reunited in the box, I carried the whole crew of them down to the garage, and left the door open a crack for them. That’s where Momma Cat and her kittens spent the next six weeks, and that’s pretty much where I spent the next six weeks as well.

Momma Cat seemed unperturbed by my constant presence. As the kittens grew older, she’d leave them for longer and longer intervals. After her absences, she’d return, often with a mouse or vole dangling from her mouth. The kittens were all brown tabbies, and all males. They had distinct personalities right from the start. I’d spend hours in the garage with them, sitting on the concrete floor reading a book while the kittens all piled on my lap and dozed. That’s what we were all doing a few days after they turned six weeks old, the day I heard a car screech on the road in front of my house, and then speed away, leaving Momma Cat dead in the drainage ditch.

The kittens were barely old enough to be on their own, but they’d just been introduced to kitten chow, and they continued to grow and thrive. The three larger, bolder kittens all eventually found homes with friends, or friends of friends. The smallest, shyest kitten found no takers though, and when his last litter mate left for its new home, my mother relented and let me bring the kitten inside the house. That was the first night I ever had a kitten curl up in bed next to me. I named him Murphy, after Murphy’s Law. Not much had gone right for the little guy up to that point, and the name seemed appropriate.

To be continued….

Christmas Lights That Don't

2005-12-11T23:12:00.000-05:00

Last year I had a new (for me) fake tree. It was at least seven feet high, and is easily the largest tree I've ever had in my adult life. I like a Christmas tree with lots of lights, so I took myself out to Wal-Mart to appropriate that which I would need to do this tree up proper.

It was during that shopping expedition that I discovered Wal-Mart garland lights. Each string had 200 lights on it, arranged so that there were three lights at each interval along the string. The tree was large enough to require ten strings of these lights, for a glorious 2,000-light Christmas tree extravaganza. Add silver, gold and white balls, and it made for a rather elegant looking tree.

The best thing about the garland lights was that if one bulb burned out, the rest stayed on. It is a major pain to have to fart around with every damned light on the string, trying to find the one bad bulb that's ruining things for the rest of the bulbs. As cheap as I've apparently gotten in my old age, I will happily shell out extra for lights that stay lit through trial and adversity. The garland strings were a little pricier than the other lights, but they were worth it.

This year, I was all set. I dragged the tree out of the cellar, and assembled it (it was during that project that I slipped and fell on the cellar stairs earlier this week). I dragged all the ornament boxes up, and all the boxes of lights. Two thousand lights take up a hell of a lot of box space. As is my wont, I plugged in all the strings of lights so I could replace burnt out bulbs before I proceeded to affix the strands to the tree.

The first set of lights I plugged in failed to light.

The second and third strands of lights I plugged in had large sections in the middle that were completely out.

The fourth strand of lights failed to light.

The fifth and sixth sets of lights both lit up properly.

The seventh and eights set of lights were completely out.

The ninth and tenth sets of lights had large sections in the middle that were completely out.

Keep in mind, these were lights purchased only a year previously. Lights that had worked perfectly on the tree last year. Lights that were just fine and dandy when I packed them safely away. I ask you: What in the world could possibly go wrong with unplugged lights just lying around in a box for twelve months? There was no visible wear or fraying. Replacing and jiggling bulbs made no difference. Replacing fuses with known good fuses made no difference. The lights were effing dead.

My personal theory is that this is a Wal-Mart conspiracy. They design lights that only last one season so you have to go back to Wal-Mart and buy more lights. Ever notice that Wal-Mart’s selection of replacement lights sucks? That's because they don't need to sell replacement lights. Their version of replacement lights comes attached to a brand new wire and plug.

This was an eighty percent morbidity rate, with a forty percent mortality rate. That is beyond a statistical aberration; that is a deliberate design flaw! I'm angry enough that no amount of mollification is going to convince me otherwise.

The Professor was calm throughout my ranting and tirading. After I'd vented my last expletive, he gathered me up, took me to Sears, and bought me ten strands of name brand warranteed GE frosted berry lights (which just happened to be on sale). I find it ironic that although this year I only have 100 bulbs per strand rather than 200, I have far more lights on my Christmas tree than I would have with last year's light strings.

I have a very nice looking Christmas tree this year. All little colored berry lights and silver and white balls. Thank-you, Sears. S***w you, Wal-Mart.

Five things

2005-12-11T17:24:00.000-05:00

There is a tag event going through Dear Diary at the moment (a former haunt of mine), and KiwiKimi there tagged me for the following:

Name 5 of life's simple pleasures that you like most, then pick 5 people to do the same. Try to be original and creative and not to use things that someone else has already used. Tag 5 people on your list.

I have no idea who to tag. Most of my regular on-line friends are already tagged for this, including virtually everybody "on my list". I leave it to those reading this to decide if they want to participate or not. If they do, they can tag five people on their own. Don't worry if five people have already done this or not. It hardly matters. The important thing is doing the exercise, rather than the tag team effort.

So, five simple pleasures. I have no idea how "original" these are, but then again, what does it really matter? Original or not, they're my pleasures, and I lay claim to them.

1. Going to sleep with a migraine, and then waking up without it. There's a residual feeling after a migraine that's quite indescribable, and really quite pleasant. I can't say that it's worth having a migraine to experience the relief, but if I've got to have the pain, then I'll gratefully accept the postdromal pleasure.

2. Stumbling into a good author by randomly reading books at the bookstore. I've been disappointed too many times by the "best seller" lists out there. In my jaded experience, if it sells well then it can almost be certainly guaranteed to be a mediocre book at best. Yes, there are exceptions to this. I will not list the exceptions, because my list will differ from your list and I don't feel like arguing about books right now. What I do want to discuss is that thrill I get when I randomly grab a few books in a Big Chain Bookstore and take them over to the cafe section where I indulge in a large mocha cappuccino while browsing through them. This is how I discovered Alexander McCall Smith's new series, "The Sunday Philosophy Club". I hadn't really gotten pulled into his series "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" and so was not prepared to be wowed by his new opus. But I sipped my cappuccino and ended up finishing The Sunday Philosophy Club while sitting there at the table. If there is a better way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon than finding new authors while getting caffeinated, I'd like to hear about it.

3. The love of a good cat. Sorry, dog people. If you want to make sitting next to a fire on a winter's night with a good dog at your side part of your list, then go do it. This is my list, and it was inevitable that cats would figure here somewhere. [Those of you who know me are no doubt amazed that it took until point three for cats to show up.] If a cat seeks you out, it means you've been hand-picked special for the honor. Cats choose for themselves whom they wish to associate with, and it's therefore that much more of an honor when the Cat chooses your lap to nestle into, or your side to fall asleep against, or your feet to lie across. I will never be truly alone as long as there are cats in the world, and I like that.

4. Unexpected presents. I am not talking birthday or Christmas presents from people you didn't expect to receive any presents from. Those can be awkward and embarrassing, especially if you haven't returned the favor. No, I'm talking about totally unexpected presents for no special occasion, for no good reason, just because. They don't come with tit-for-tat expectations or with strings attached. You just get them because somebody was out shopping when they saw something they knew you'd like, and they just buy it for you. A surprise DVD from the reduced rack, an unexpected pomegranate, a book that someone thought I might enjoy: stuff like this can be the highlight of my week.

5. Unexpected memories. You know what I'm talking about. You're walking down the street and the smell of fresh baked bread from the bakery, or the strains of music from an open upstairs window, or the sight of a kid with a toy suddenly takes you short. In an instant, you're transported back to an event that you hadn't thought of for years. It happens suddenly, and you're surprised by how vivid the memory is, and shocked that you hadn't thought of it for so long. The memory is like a gift, a part of you given back to yourself. As I gain in years, I experience more and more of these moments, and I treasure them each time they happen.

I was going to write about a cat named Murphy, but I've run out of time. I was also going to rant about Christmas lights that don't, but that will have to wait for another time as well.

Downs and Ups

2005-12-07T15:48:00.000-05:00

The last week saw the first snowfall of the season, the second snowfall of the season, and a rather spectacular fall by the author down the cellar stairs. Fortunately, I didn't even make it down to the first landing, much less the entire way down the stairs.

Picture if you will the archetypal banana pratfall. Cartoon character steps on banana peel, cartoon character slips, with feet flying above head, and finally, cartoon character lands flat on his/her/its back. Now insert me into the spot previously held by the cartoon character, and picture an incline of stairs rather than a nice flat horizontal landing pad. That's about how it happened, minus the banana.

I've been tempted to write that one of the cats tripped me at the top of the stairs. Heck, for all I know, it might even be true. If I permit honesty to win out, though, I have to admit that I have no idea whatsoever why I felt the need to test the law of gravity personally. What I can tell you
is that my butt hit the edge of one stair, my mid-back hit another edge, and the back of my head hit yet a third edge. I know this because all three are bruised today. My ego is also bruised, though the only thing I'm aware of that it might have hit was my vanity. Vanity, however, appears unscathed.

I've been disgruntled at work the past few days over a policy statement I had to sign off on. A piece of mail from another site arrived Monday, addressed to moi. I opened it to find a policy statement with the other site's veterinarian's signature affixed, and a space for me to sign off on
as well. There was no accompanying cover letter. The policy statement addressed a procedure that is standard in our industry, but has become controversial in recent years. It said that the procedure was soundly based on health, safety and ethical grounds, and that we supported it.

I was not asked to provide any input on this document. I had objections to the stand the document took. I was told that my "job security" could not be guaranteed if I didn't sign. I signed. It's left me feeling a bit dirty.

This isn't how it happens in books and movies. The hero/heroine takes a moral stand, refuses to support something they don't believe in. They lose their job, gain the adoration of millions, and get a new, better job because they stood by their convictions.

Me? I need the income, the medical benefits, the potential future job recommendation. I can't afford to be an ethical being. I have a bouncing baby liver to support. I have to worry about things like falling down cellar stairs. Regardless of realities, it never feels good when something reminds me that I'm never going to grow up into the person I always thought I'd be.

Ah well, no matter. The tree is up, the lights are strung, and the white and silver glass ornaments are upon the boughs, awaiting death by cat. Tonight I leave work and head for Barnes and Noble, where I will be wrapping books in red and green or blue and silver paper in exchange for donations that will help feed, vet, and find homes for homeless kitties. If nothing else goes right this week, at least I'll have done some good somewhere. That's got to count for something, right?

Vay Cay Shun

2005-12-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

I'm officially in the midst of taking my last two-and-a-half days of vacation for this year. So far, it's been sufficiently stressful to inspire me to never take vacation again.

Yesterday, I was to have left the office by noon. I made plans to meet Dr. Twenty Cats at two that afternoon in a town about an hour from me. The was time to go home, change and shower, feed the cats, wrap her Christmas present, and get on my way. The best laid plans of mice, men and veterinarians are oft fated to take unexpected deviations, however. I managed to extract myself from the office at quarter after one, never went home, and used my non-existent pilot's license to do some low-level flying to make it to the appointed rendevous on time. Of course, as fate would have it, Dr. Twenty Cats was a few minutes late, so I managed to get there without making her wait.

Our original plans were to spend the afternoon mall ratting (= people watching), and then grab dinner out somewhere. Dr. Twenty Cats had to truncate our time due to unexpected obligations though, and we ended up parting ways at 6:00 without benefit of supper. I'd gotten nothing out of the freezer that morning, so I returned home without having any specific plans on what I was going to prepare. Fortunately, Math Man was only too happy to make an Indian-style concoction that he'd been fine tuning earlier in the week. It had to be made in two pans, since I like food less than incindiarily spiced. Is "incindiarily" a word? If it isn't, it should be. If you don't agree, I'll invite you over to a repast prepared by Math Man some time.

The reason I left work late yesterday was a request that was made to me first thing yesterday morning to perform some work today. The request was incomplete, and I spent most of the morning trying (unsuccessfully) to track the requestor down to get additional details. I finally found someone I could dump the request on, teach them how to do a few things that they'd need to know to accomplish the job, and then leave a message with the person who wanted said job done that I'd passed it on to someone else. Don't call me; they'll call you.

Because of the nature of the job requested, I've been expecting a phone call all morning asking for advice. I got the phone call this morning, but advice was the last thing the caller wanted. Apparently, while I was out, they've gutted my department.

Virtually every manager in our department has been reassigned to another department. Of the dozen or so of us who are "middle management" level, five of us are remaining with the department. The rest have been scattered throughout the other departments in our company. Of the minion level employees, most are moving to other departments. Official announcement is being held off until Monday (the day I return), but the Big Boss is telling everybody about it now.

According to my source, my job is untouched, but we'll all be expected to take on a greater load of work to cover the loss of minions. I can't wait to see what that means.

I begin to think I should have just skipped vacation.

While the Rain Pours Outside My Window

2005-11-29T22:50:00.000-05:00

So here I sit, on the cusp of my two-an-one-half day vacation. I was in a position of "use-or-lose" with these final days of vacation, and I was going to be damned if I lost them. I tried to take off the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, but too many other people in our department were out, and the Boss Man wouldn't let me take those days. I then shot for days between Christmas and New Years, but my new minion may have jury duty those days, so that was kaboshed as well. We finally sat down with the department's vacation calendar, and I found to my dismay that the only days I could take off without conflicts were the end of this week. Technically, I shouldn't be allowed off Friday, as it again conflicts with someone else, but it was the least problematic of the possible days I could take, and so it was approved.

Tomorrow I leave at noon and drive north to meet up with Dr. Twenty Cats. We'll do the mall rat thing, and have dinner out. With luck, I may be able to finish present buying then. Thursday and Friday I'll clean up around the place, and try to get Christmas up. I may run into the city at some point; I have twenty dollars in gift certificates at a store downtown that will expire at the end of the month, and I'd rather spend it than lose it. Rather like my vacation, actually.

Every year at the office I put lights up outside my door and window, and sometimes around my desk as well. Last night, before I left work to go home, I broke out the Christmas lights to do a quick decorating job before vacating the premises for the day. I had eight strings of lights altogether - five colored garland lights, and three plain white ones. All worked, with a few burned out bulbs, at the end of last year. NONE worked this year. Not a single friggin string would light. At one point I began to doubt the outlet I was plugging them into, and plugged my radio into it. The radio played just fine.

I ask you, what can possibly happen to lights that are shut away in a box for twelve months, that they'd work going into the box, and not work coming out of it?

Sunday evening Mr. Math Man and I went out to T.G.I. Friday's for dinner. I decided to be bad, and treated myself to a Lynchburg Lemonade. When I ordered it, the waitress asked me if I'd brought any I.D. with me that evening.

It took me a moment to realize that I was being carded. I told the waitress I loved her, and reached for my wallet for my driver's license. It occurred to me as I fumbled through my wallet that this was something that likely would never happen to my in my life ever again.

Some days bring unexpected surprises.

Jumping Ship Again

2005-11-26T11:13:00.000-05:00

I have become what I despise. Instead of making a decision and sticking with it, I flit from site to site, expecting to find something off the rack that fits without any tailoring. I stand by my decision to bail on deardiary, but jumping over to modblog was a singularly piss-poor decision on my part. I was (and still am) intimidated by the necessity to learn enough code to customize this current host, but the fat remains that I can customize it, and it has a far better downtime history than either deardiary or modblog. So here we go again, hopefully for the last time.

It's been a while since I've updated. I can't get into modblog to verify, but I believe the last time I updated the job offer I'd been working on fell through. At this point I'd be a fool to bail, with the Christmas bonus a week away and payout on my unused personal days coming at the end of the year. I'm content to leave my employement situation alone for a few months and return to considering my options in the new year.

On a sad note, Duncan the Triops finally died sometime Thanksgiving night. I had a feeling that was coming; he'd been looking somewhat sad for a few days prior, and was overdue to shed. The empty bowl is sitting beside my computer desk now, and while the temptation is to go out and find a nice beta to reside in it, I believe I'll resist the urge to provide one of the cats with fresh fish.

Thanksgiving dinner found me and the Math Man at the home of Dr. Twenty Cats (yes, she adopted a new stray, and is back up to the full complement of twenty again). Because Dr. Twenty Cats' S.O. is a vegetarian, Thanksgiving was a vegetarian meal. The spread was actually quite nice, with scalloped potatoes, a fresh tomato casserole, an interesing dish of butternut squash and pears, fresh rolls, and I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter. The stuffing had some sort of pseudo-sausage in it. Desert was a walnut-pineapple cake, which looked rather like yellow carrot cake and was, I am told delicious.

Unfortunately, I ate very little of the meal and enjoyed none of it. Yet again at a critical time I was hit with a migraine. I knew it was coming on, and should have stayed at home, but I managed to convince myself that I didn't know what I was talking about and forced myself to go to dinner anyway. Poor Math Man had to drive us home immediately after dinner (a definite eat-and-run scenario), and I surprised myself by not heaving my cookies for the hour and fifteen minute ride home. The moment I got home, however, Thanksgiving dinner was headed down the same toilet that poor Duncan later received his burial at sea in.

If this works, I should be making more regular entries from here on out. Let me know what, if any, problems you encounter with this set-up, and I'll see if I can figure out how to tweak things so they look a little nicer.

The First Day of the Rest of My Blog

2005-11-17T02:26:00.000-05:00

This dependency upon the coding skills of others makes me cranky. If I weren't so cheap and lazy I'd buy web space and learn to code my own journal. But I'm cheap, and I'm lazy, and so I try yet another site.

But it's a good night to start again. So let's see if I can't make this place feel like home.