Confessions of an Internet Junkie

Doesn't he look happy and pampered? Morse's new name is Maalu, which I think really suits him what with his exotic good looks.

I should be sleeping. I need to be sleeping. But it's the bottom of the 8th (I think) and Colorado has come back so it's now just 4-3 Boston. Sew this up, guys! I have a wicked busy day tomorrow. Thanks.

It was cloudy today, so I took the opportunity to walk around the property.

( What's gray and white and orange? Autumn. )

My Chloe kitty.

Yeah, I think I have officially become the crazy cat lady. Although hopefully dumbphilomel and her friend will appear tomorrow and her friend will waltz off with Jane and/or Morse - or even better, the Mommacat -, because even I realize that we can't add all of those new felines to our already burgeoning family of indoor cats.

Kitties!

(That thunderstorm is still rumbling and yet it never seems to get any nearer. Verra, verra strange.)

It was a better today, but then it almost had to be, eh? Thank you all again for the support and the putting up with of me. Ungrammatical but heartfelt.

I got out and ran a few errands with Dar. It was a beautiful day, and when we came back home I just wanted to do something, you know? Be outside, move around, accomplish something. So I grabbed a couple of clippers, slapped a huge sun hat on my head (fortunately I'd put the clippers down first, because . . . ow) and cut back the bushes along the front sidewalk. It took all of fifteen minutes. And then I came back inside and passed out for two hours. Sigh. But you know what? I'm extremely fortunate to be able to do that. Life could be a hell of a lot worse.

Dar got email from her friend who said that Miranda had a great first night; she was curled up on her friend's chest all night, purring away. Awwwww. They have a 3-year-old cat at home, too, named Joey. If Joey and Miranda don't become play buddies in another week, they'll be back to take Jane home to be Miranda's pal. That works.

I have an appointment with a urologist about the kidney stones that showed up in the CTscan. I thought I was going to see a renal specialist, so I'm a little disappointed. It will be good to get the stones taken care of, of course, and there's still a chance that the rheumatologist will get me a referral to a kindey specialist. Maybe he can set me up with a gall bladder doctor, too, because my clinic is having no luck with that. Because I refused their preferred doc (who, you may remember, did the botched surgery on Dar) they're having trouble finding a substitute.

I spent some time outside later this afternoon with the barn cat family. God, they're such funny kitties. I guess we're at the point where we have to decide what to do with them all now. Mirabelle (the mom) is much older than we thought, and to be honest I don't think she's up to spending another winter outside. She's very content just sleeping the day away curled up on the spare cushions for the lawn furniture; I can't see her out in the barn chasing down mice. She shows absolutely no interest in mating again, but I think we should have her spayed anyway just to be on the safe side.

I should wrangle the rest of the kittens out to the barn just to introduce them to the alpacas and vice versa. Maybe they can do light duty chasing down mice during the day and spend the nights in the house with us. I'd rather have them all inside all of the time, but I haven't run that by the rest of the humans here. I just remember how terribly cold it could get out there, and while the alpacas have all that fleece, I fear the poor kittens would turn into popsicles. Am I being a wimp? Don't know.

So, before bed, two cat pics. I think I could be quite happy spending my days taking pictures of cats and clouds.
( Cut for those who would rather not. )

As Dar would say, Wendigo is here. The wind came roaring out of the north, off of the ice fields, and we had a sharp reminder that winter is just around the bend. Everyone by-passed the sweaters and went right for the coats. The temps are supposed to rise this week but not really supposed to get above the low 70s again. Bye-bye summer!

I went through my clothes and switched out most of the summer stuff for the fall and winter. I really thought that I had more cool weather shirts than I do. I sense a shopping trip in my future, because I really don't think that four turtlenecks and two crew necks are going to cut it. I'm good to go with the pants, though. I had to ditch two pair because they no longer fit which is always good for a small bout of depression. Just a small one :) It's weird that most of the pants still fit the same, but those other two are just way too small now. I think it's a cut issue. I haven't gained a lot of weight, but because I've had to stop exercising my body shape is changing a bit.

The kittens came to visit for a while this afternoon. They all ended up on the deck, running around, giving me a heart attack with their clueless "Look, Ma! No hands!" routines on the bannisters and lip of the deck. (I think that browncoat will be posting some pics that he took of their shenanigans.) We opened up the screen door between the kitchen and the deck, and the girls wandered in; after a few minutes they started exploring the living room and dining room. Holmes would hiss every once in a while, but he did touch noses with Jane and Miranda. Pixel hissed once but then skulked around after them as they went room to room. Rocky just sat there with a look of shock on his face; if he'd had one of those cartoon bubbles above his head it would have read, "You're fucking kidding me, right?" Poor Rocky :) Mao slept through the whole thing, unfortunately, because the Maoser never met a kitten that he didn't love. He is, shall we say, very in touch with his nurturing side.

Dar went all Energizer Bunny with the vacuum. Her friend is coming to visit tomorrow and to take one (I'm pushing for two) of the kittens home with her. I hope it's not Miranda. I love that little girl to death. I mean I know that she'll have a perfectly wonderful home with J*, and I'm being selfish, but such is the truth of my heart.

And speaking of the furballs, here's a pic of three of them caught in the midst of a kitty rampage on the deck. And there's a shot of the gorgeously surreal skies we had this afternoon for good measure.

( Kitten clouds )

Cinnamon Girl is craaaaaaaaaaawling toward giving birth. She was wide open at about 7PM, but then she started to shut down again. Poor darlong is out there pretty much from sun up 'til sun down keeping an eye on her. She comes in to go to the bathroom, throw down some yogurt, and refill her water bottle, then back out to the paddock she goes. The up side is that she's getting some extraordinary research out of this. Part of our problem in dealing with CG's labor is that so very little is written about maiden births. It's uncharted territory to a very great extent. After burrowing deep into the internet, Dar found out that 75% of late afternoon/evening births are by maidens. What the average breeder is always told is that a birth that late in the day means trouble , but, it turns out, not if it's a maiden birth.

I'm so glad that we've called in the vet backup when we have. Well, outside of that clueless bastard who injured her, of course. But the other vets have confirmed that CG is progressing through her labor and she's not really in any trouble; she's just extremely slow about. Every procedure has its outliers, and Cinnamon Girl is the outest of the outliers, I guess. We'll just have to be optimistic about tomorrow.

Except I won't be here for most of the morning, so I'm trying to be extremely optimistic that it's going to be an unremarkable birth once it actually gets going. I have an appointment to get my OHIP card renewed. (That's my national health card for you non-Canucks out there.) I still haven't received any sort of confirmation from Immigration that my renewal is in the works, so that might put a fly in the proverbial ointment, but I do have the receipt for the renewal application that I sent in last month. Hopefully everything will go smoothly.

The lupus has zigged from its usual routine over the past week or so. The pain is much more manageable (yahoo!), but now I'm hit with extreme fatigue. It's insane. I've been tired; we've all been tired. But this is like someone has turned off a switch and shut me down. I literally have to find someplace to lay down or else I'll just fall where I stand. Along with the fatigue I'm getting nausea and upset stomach, very stiff joints, and that lovely malar rash that my doctor believes I'm making up. As you can see, most of that list is no big deal, but the fatigue is the show stopper. Today during one of the four fatigue attacks, I realized that I was dreaming about Rip van Winkle. Heh. I believe that I'm more than a little concerned that I'm sleeping my life away :) The appointment with the rheumatologist is two weeks away; I can do two weeks no sweat.

The kittens are huge and funny and getting way too adventurous for their own good. Well, that last part there mostly pertains to Chloe. She's taken to wandering around to the front of the house and crawling under the cars. Uh, no. When I was a kid our family dog got killed that way; now way is Chloe going out like that. Plus, we get heavy farm machinery up and down our road all hours of the day and night. Not a day goes by that we don't drive by some poor kitty dead on one of the roads around here. We've been wanting to wait until Mirabelle (the momma cat) goes in to be spayed before we brought the kitties inside, but everything to do with the cats has been on hold until CG has her baby. We may have to force the separation between mom and kittens a lot more dramatically than we'd hoped.

I also want to introduce Mirabelle to the barn and the alpacas, but again that's off until CG has her cria. The alpacas are bound to get ten kinds of freaked out by a cat on the premises, and the last thing we need is an even more freaked out CG. C'mon Cinnamon Girl - just please have that cria. Please.

Well it's a safe bet that there's kidney damage. The ultrasound took an hour, most of which was devoted to taking pictures of my right kidney. Either there's something medically wrong there or else the kidney is now imprinted with a likeness of (choose one: a)Mother Teresa b)Virgin Mary c)Jesus d)Stephen Colbert) and the tech is going to sell the photos to a tabloid. In which case I demand a cut of the profits, and you'll all be getting invites to the freakin' huge bash I'll be throwing.

I'm going with something being medically wrong. She started off assuming that it was a simple stomach complaint, but that lasted about 90 seconds. Of course professionally she had to be circumspect, but she was fairly easy to read. I told her I was being tested for lupus; after hitting my right side she asked rather pointedly, "And when did you say all this started?" So it's a safe bet what she was seeing has been going on for a while. And later, when it was obvious that she was concentrating on the right kidney, I told her that my latest blood work showed a high probability of kidney involvement. She asked if the blood test was done there, because she'd like to see the report because she was sure it was going to be "interesting." Uh-huh.

Next was the chest x-ray, which I'm almost positive is going to be unremarkable. Except for the spot on my lung that always shows up and has been determined by the doctors in MA to be scar tissue from past pneumonia. Of course these guys don't know that, so I expect a call about it.

Then came the upper GI test. The good news is that it's not an ulcer. And my pouch is still really small. (I've been wondering if I'd expanded it over the years.) The bad news is that there's a blockage or something that's stopping the food from flowing smoothly between the pouch and the intestines,and that's most probably what's causing the pain and nausea. I'll have to be referred to a GI specialist for further work.

The radiologist was very funny, because he thought this was the most interesting thing he'd seen in ages. I was still standing on the pedestal on the x-ray machine in my lab gown, waiting for them to give me the OK to get dressed when I see the radiologist waving me over to his little room. "Come here and look at this. It's fascinating!" Who am I to say no to a chance to see a movie of my innards? So I pad over to him, and he starts reviewing the scans and explaining everything to me - except he's using very technical terms. You know that Gary Larson cartoon about a dog listening to her owners talking to her, and what she's hearing is "Blah blah blah blah blah blah, Ginger."? Well, that was me. But I still got the gist if not the jargon, and it was wild to see my little pouch and all of the other working (or not) parts. Hurrah for high disclosure radiologists! Hee. I just wished that I could have dragged darlong out of the waiting room to interpret for me.

After that it was more blood work and a urine sample. Easy peasy. Or eesy peesy, as it were. The tech, who was a delightful young woman, told me that the ultrasound, x-ray, and GI results would be on a disk and on their way to my doctor's office by tomorrow afternoon. Which means I'll start hounding my doctor Friday morning. I'm very anxious to see those ultrasound results, as you might imagine.

Along with all of the medical nonsense, I also had to bring my car into the shop today. It's been in bad shape for weeks now and getting worse every time I took it on the road. Yesterday coming back from the vet's office was so bad that Dar and I were pretty sure that we weren't going to make it home. I have no idea what's going on with it. So far the guesses are tie rods, bearings, transaxle, and exhaust system. All I know is it makes a horrible, loud, scary grinding noise - off and on. So since Mark stayed home today to shepherd me to and from the hospital, we took the opportunity to have him follow me to the garage so I could drop the car off out there in the middle of nowhere down a gravelly country road. Seriously. The mechanic is the brother-in-law of one of our alpaca friends, and he has a great reputation. He's just a bit off the beaten path. And the paved road.

So that was our day. Never a dull moment, eh? Oh, and Dar found a growth on Chloe Kitty's stomach. So we'll be hauling her furry butt into the vet for sure.

But for now, I sleep.