Oh my cat is happy. He has a new canned food. Nature's Variety Instinct Lamb, Rabbit, and Venison formula. He digs all of them, and so far all of them are kind to his gut. Pending lab results from his next vet appointment or a turn on the gut symptoms, I think we have a winner.
On with the job search. My temp position has ended, both blessing and curse. Really it's more of a curse but with a bright side. The bright side is of course that the people I worked for/with were the sort who can't get the hell out of their own way. K-cop and her buddy, Queen B (with all that B stands for) were chronic thorns in my side. They were each causes and embodiments of much that was wrong culturally with that office, however I can't say the "big boss lady" didn't hold some responsibility in the mess that was the office climate and overall philosophy of "let's just assume everything will go according to plan". I don't get that mentality. It doesn't fit with my own experiences in any domain and I can't imagine running an office like that. Sure, sometimes you can't cover all the bases. It might be impractical or impossible. Time constraints, personnel allocation, and budget may conspire against preparing for possible outcomes. And some shit is just straight up unpredictable. However, at this past job I witnessed some seriously blatant head in the sand, grossly shortsighted behaviors which left me simply stunned and left everyone scrambling when the shit inevitably hit the fan.
And so I am somewhat happy to be done there. I am very unhappy to be unemployed though. Another day on the internet, surfing the job boards and updating my online resumes and candidate info sites (think PeopleSoft but worse). I just rewrote a cover letter, my entire resume, and revised my work experiences on this god awful hosting site called Taleo. Holy crap that thing was a pain in the ass....speaking of the link between poor business culture poor business practice, it seems Taleo sucks in ways beyond my limited job seeking perspective.
While I am off and in need of projects, I've decided to look for cat food alternatives for my cat Max. Max has IBD, probably some food intolerances. For some time now, he's been on a limited ingredient/novel protein diet. We had him on Hill's prescription diet D/D, rabbit, venison, and duck. He tends to eat only one kind, then after some time, he refuses it and we need to switch to a different flavor. A few years ago now, he stopped eating the D/D altogether so at the advice of our vet, we switched him to Royal Canin's limited ingredient/novel protein diet. He ate that happily for a while and with less good (but still not horrible) digestive results than with the Hill's. Then he started getting bad in terms of digestive symptoms (as a friend calls it, "Pandora's Cat Box") and also constitutional symptoms. We took him to the vet and he had some funny blood chemistry values. So back to Hill's, which he ate as if it were new and which agreed with him better. But now he's refusing the Hill's again to the point where he's losing weight. He's hungry, he wants food, but not that food apparently.
We have been punting with just feeding him meats he can eat "au jus", mostly consisting of shredded pork with water and fish oil since he has a demonstrable intolerance to chicken, turkey, and beef. But this is not going to give him the nutrients he needs, moveover, he's still losing weight. I took some time on Monday and Tuesday to research cat food that meets the following criteria:
Has no chicken, turkey, or beef
Has no glutten/wheat or corn products
The first we tried was California Natural salmon and sweet potato. This was a bit of a risk since I suspect the cat doesn't do well with salmon. However, it wasn't clear if his past salmon problems were a result of salmon alone, salmon in combination, or were simply due to some other product in the salmon based food he'd eaten in the past. Yeah, well, turns out that salmon is apparently a definite part of the problem. So no more of that. This morning we are on to Nature's Variety Instinct for cats. The one I've selected is Lamb. It's in no way a limited ingredient formula, nor does it have a single source of protein, however it has none of the items I know or strongly suspect Max to have an intolerance to.
So far, he's had most of a can and not pooped it all out. Keeping my fingers crossed on this one.
Today is officially "Don't take shit too seriously" day. It is for me at least. I was hoping to try this earlier in the week, but the hormonal storm that is my period on progesterone made it impossible to take anything at a level lower than very, very seriously.
My arms hurt, my job is ending, one of the few people I like at work has been told to stop talking to me (long story, I'll write later when I actually know more about it), the holidays are coming, I dislike christmas on a less bad year but this year I think I'm really going to want to drop kick some lawn ornament Santas. I can feel all this stress over things which are largely out of my control building in me. And so today I've resolved to try to let shit go, and what can't be let go, I'm going to try to laugh off. I don't have to take the job too seriously because now that I know there's no way in hell I'm going perm because they have a bias against temps, my work consists of not fucking things up too much. This is liberating if approached correctly. E.g., most if not all of my problems with K-cop result not simply from her being her but from me being me too. I want to assume that people have logical reasons for doing shit. When I discover evidence that they don't, it just blows my mind so completely. Moreover, when I believed that there was even an eensty chance of this job being permanent or longer term temp (or of these people being good connections to find another job), I cared more about not following K-cop's effed up reasoning.
The big problem with this kind of reaction is that I have the anti-poker face. I can't keep the look of what I imagine is shock tinged with outrage and/or disgust and/or contempt off it. This does not help matters because even idiots like K-cop can read that level and type of emotion when it's displayed right there at eye level.
So if K-cop is in my face with her moronic crap today, rather than start down this path to horror at the largely unexamined self serving idiocy, I'm just going to laugh at her.
To get me started on not taking shit too seriously day, I thought I'd share this video.
Again, stealing from Bubblewench (whose blog has made me smile on more than one gloomy day). Here are some personal truths that make me smile and get me through my day.
- I have had an abundance of love in my life.
- Migraines suck, but if you can manage to rise to the occasion, migraine sex is amazing.
- Having all this time off (i.e. unemployed) means extra time with my fella and my kitty.
- We have three pounds of coffee in our fridge (sale!) and as my fella says, if you have three pounds of coffee on hand, things have gotta be at least moderately ok.
- I have a clean credit history.
- It is extremely easy to make me laugh.
- I'm pretty good at making other people laugh.
- My siblings are funny, smart, strong, and loyal.
- I know that I have made at least some aspects of a few people's lives easier or better.
- On any given day, someone somewhere is probably having the best day of their life.
Bubblewench has asked "What are your personal lies?" That is, lies you tell yourself to get you through your day. Here are some of mine.
- People find me more charming than abrasive.
- My cat is going to live forever.
- Someday when I live near real doctors at real hospitals and I once again have good health insurance, I will be given a diagnosis of something which explains all my daily physical ailments, is readily treatable by eating something q.i.d. that tastes remarkably like candy, which has a 100% cure rate, and which has any or all of the following side effects: boundless energy, an unshakable sense of happiness and belonging, increased intellectual efficiency, and multiple orgasms.
- I do not have an autoimmune disease.
- The real reason I haven't found a job yet is that all of these jobs I've applied for are crap. The excellent, just right job for me is still out there waiting and will make itself known ANY DAY NOW, but certainly before I run out of health insurance and money.
- My fella is not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream of illnesses.
- My family are not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream illnesses.
- I'll feel better tomorrow.
A video of my cat making out with his catnip plant. The quality is bad because it's recorded on a cell phone. But what I'm wondering is will it even play? Go blogger - yay! The lovely audio is the downstairs neighbors remodeling. At least they have the decency to work on the condo during reasonable hours (not like my old landlord, who felt 10:00 PM was a perfectly reasonable time to begin stripping the floor on the apartment above me). When I get a chance to sneak into my (ex) lab next, I'll use the version of quicktime pro I bought those losers and add some nicer audio. Perhaps a love song, maybe some Isaac Hayes. For now, I give you my cat (with carpentry, allergro ma non troppo).
Who wants a kitten? Anyone? Vengicar perhaps? C'mon....you know you want another kitty.
8 week old grey female who was rescued but who can't be kept by her rescuer. I'm told she's very sweet. More details as I get them. For now, here's a not very high quality picture of the kitty. 
Email me if you're local to CT or MA and interested.
The cat woke me up at 5:30 (a half hour before my alarm was set to go off) for food. He's been crying on and off throughout the night most nights these days. So up I got, and stumbled out to the kitchen. I bent down to get a can of cat food from a low shelf and smacked my head off the corner of the counter.
My day followed in a similar vein at work. No injuries, but it was not a good day. Lots of fuckery, some preventable and some not. The latter I can accept with some grace. The former however, tends to push my buttons, especially on a day that started out as unpleasantly as this one did.
Today was my last official day at work, and I don't have a job or even an interview.
My siblings, who were both just down for my sister's birthday, are both cranky right now too. And my fella's in some kind of semi-depressed or possibly sick state so he's sleeping a lot and feeling like shit.
On the plus side, I've never been a fan of July. Aside from my sister's birthday, the month generally is one of my less favorites. Too hot and lots of stagnation. So this July sucking already, well, it's not like it's wrecking a month I love and that's a little sliver of a bright side.
As you can perhaps surmise from the title of this post, today was not a good day. The list is just sort of depressing crap, some trivial and some not trivial. While I'm a fan of venting, putting it all down here isn't going to help right now. I know because I just started to and realized it was only winding me up more. So here's the abridged version.
- A____'s parents can't afford their house and are moving under less than exhaustively planned circumstances next week. Everyone's sick, so A____'s doing a very large amount of the work. Just what he wanted, another move. He's so damned busy and stressed over this (understandably) that he probably can't go to the wedding this weekend with me, which makes for the not super pleasant prospect of going alone. I tried calling some pals, but no one is up for it, or more to the point, everyone's out of town, chronically unreliable, or sick.
- Along the everyone's sick theme, my cat Max is sick. The only thing that was odd in his bloodwork from last week was an elevated calcium level. The vet told me today that this can be a sign of a particular kind of cancer that attacks or affects the intestine, which his symptoms are consistent with. We were really hoping it was thyroid, not because that would be great but because it would be less bad.
-In about two weeks, I will be unemployed and nothing (zero) has come of all the applying I've been doing. Last night, between the cat and the prospect of joblessness, I couldn't get to sleep. This hasn't helped my mood. Not one bit.
So it's officially Dump Day here in Connecticant.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.
Well I woke up late for a day which is late heavy. I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon in Hartford and immediately after I need to race to campus to work. Campus is not close by. And I am apprehensive about the doctor appointment. I already saw one guy in this office and he was a jackass.
So for today, we get one of mine because it's here. And it's seasonal too. How about that.
Spring 1999
Her hair ribbon's on the counter.
Blue green coil, a plaid crisp when she first bought it
brought it home fresh from the store
still holding the shape of the spool it was cut from.
My mother lifted it out of the bag and held it up to be admired. She had made a big deal of ribbons that month. I don’t recall the details, just the quest: To find a ribbon for her hair.
The bathroom scale is broken, and has been for a while. I still weigh myself on it when I'm home, hearing something stony crunch against the charcoal porcelain tiles.
I wonder when she wears it, why? And how she fastens it around her head. With a bow, small and almost perfect, perched on the top, or worn to the side? In a slipping knot underneath, in the back, so all that shows is a neat thin strip of blue green plaid? What is she thinking when she ties it? When she tries this side, then that, and the shades of lipstick to go?
I would rather not see her hair ribbon wilted and knotted,
obscured by the tumble of cremes and powders,
or lost in the midst of lacquers and gels,
or sulking behind splashes and ointments.
Seeing it crumpled there over rings of rust
caked with dried soap lather, I fight the urge to clean.
I comfort myself by blowing a bit of powdery lint off a corner of the counter.
She is a christian again, or seems so since she goes to church now.
On the door, the useless one that has loose hinges and no knob, she's hung a calendar from the church. It has a picture of jesus and some lambs.
She says she doesn’t WANT to be angry. She asks God to forgive her for hating.
My sister says “if she really wants to stop hating, she should practice on the small shit”.
She wakes up 5 minutes before I leave to drive two hours in the car to clear my head before Monday starts. She comes into the kitchen dressed in a pink robe holding her reluctant cat. The cat jumps to the floor.
She sits on the foot-stool and sighs.
The dogs greet her with wags and snouts, and she pushes them away.
She shoves and says “No, God damn it, No! Go away, fucking dogs”.
She tells me I wouldn’t understand, that it is loathsome to me. I ask her if compassion is really so bad.
We have been given the wrong scripts, I realize this as I am saying my part. Or we are not on the same page.
I flip ahead and back, looking for where she is. She says she hates February. I watch jesus pat his loving lambs above her, calmly waiting for her to turn to April so he can die and come back as a fluffy bunny with candy and plastic grass to teach us that an egg is just an egg.
Today is March 1, but I do not tell her. Any contradiction will be taken as a blow, and I'm still looking for a smooth ride home. And anyway, God will forgive her for not knowing what month it is, for blaming the days and weeks, for hating Februrary, for hitting the dog in the face for trying to give her a kiss. Everyone knows God likes plaid.
According to the cat, it's bedtime. He's developed a new habit of insisting on a bedtime. This means he starts meowing any time after 11 and is inconsolable until we get INTO bed. If I get into bed and then out (as sometimes happens), he seeks me out and finds me. I'm really not at all exaggerating on this. I know I have a tendency to read into my pets' behaviors but truly, the cat is acting like it's his job to ensure A____ and I are in bed well on our way to sleep by a decent hour every night.
Tonight I bribed him into letting me stay up with a fresh catnip fest on the living room floor a while ago. It seems the high has worn off though and it is most definitely bedtime.
Here's my first attempt at making an animated image. I think it came out good, lots of fun too. I made it for my sister - A, the one I sent you has a background image. This is just Rosie. And bike.
I'm awake and honestly, no one's more surprised than me. Ok, maybe my intestine is slightly more surprised but I'm not sure parts count.
Sitting here while the car thaws out, drinking coffee and water, checking the weather to see if the promised overnight snow was a washout or if it's merely delayed.
What do people normally do when they're up this early? Aside from drink coffee. Eat I suppose. Er, maybe not. When I'm up this early, my gut tends to feel like I tried to swallow a cast iron pan whole around 4 PM yesterday. This morning it feels like cast iron pan washed down with a bit of dirty oven mitt.
The reason for today's way too early rising is that Max has an 8:30 appointment to have his sutures removed. Although I don't believe I've made any suspicious moves such as prepping the cat carrier, I think he's come to associate my getting up before 9 with him going to the vet since at the moment, he's hiding under and behind the christmas tree. Trying to blend in? Or just making it very hard to extract him? I think the latter.
Max is recovering well. His biopsy results are back and it's all good. (Huge sighs of relief!)
He's stuck with his lovely blue poncho for a while, at least until the sutures come out next week.
Although I know he dislikes being shaved, his wrist shave makes it look like he's wearing a mitten, or maybe one Ug boot. And that's kinda cute.
My cat's only dalliance with art (of any human sort) was the time he decorated himself with my green watercolor paint. When I paint, I like at least some of the paints to be quite viscous. This results in my often having somewhat heavy, sticky glops of paint on whatever is passing for a palette. Max found a slightly old palette and stepped into one such blob which had nearly dried through but retained a soft sticky center. He had tracked green paint around my office for a while, leaving little dark green partial toe prints here and there, before I realized what had happened.
Since he seemed fine with my attempts to wipe the paint off his paw, I got ambitious and dunked his paw in water to dilute the blob. That was decidedly not ok.
During the struggle that followed, Max ended up with green paint streaks all across his snowy white chest and neck. Then he took off out of the house and stayed out so late I went looking for him. As I scanned under cars and peeked into back yards around the neighborhood, I couldn't help imagining the "lost cat" flier I'd have to post if Max didn't come home that night: "Lost - Enormous Orange and White and Green Cat"
Thanks to A____ for the link below.
It has begun. I have the loathing. It came upon me yesterday evening when I wasn't looking at a clock. It had been dark for hours but this time of year my body's apparent blithering optimism fails me and my internal clock. "Too early" is about all I get out when I consider the light and the hours between 3:30 and 10:00 PM. So I tend not to consider them.
I was on the carpet in the living room and it was dark outside. The cat in his blue soft e-collar, which looks like a cardinal's cape (except blue not red) was alternately snuggling and biting. I thought of the invitation I had gotten to a grad student potluck end of the semester weeeee thing going on this Friday. This Friday my cat is not having surgery because we pushed it to Monday. This Friday our grades are due. And somewhere in there I suppose I ought to buy a tree...but when? Before any frivolous extras like tree decorating, I should probably clean. And what if things don't work out well for Max? Will I really want to come home to a half decorated christmas tree next Monday?
I think it was the last bit, the nod to "things to do" which are at least in principle enjoyable. It was that last bit which heralded in the loathing. Not that the thought of a tree irritates or even upsets me. I like lying under christmas trees and looking up the lights. I like turning off the lamps and letting christmas tree glow, a light which certainly has it's own peculiar - dare I say magical quality, illuminate the room. What got the loathing going was, I think, the somewhat well worn but still unexpected path running from things cat and health related, things school related, and The Rest - which lead me into an accounting of what The Rest is and can be for me. The answer tends to come out as not a whole lot. And then my automatic questioning begins(why? am I ok with that? if not what needs to be different? how can I make it different?), turning me back to what will necessarily be a closer and more pointed examination (or at least consideration) of things health related and things school/profession related and the interactions between the two.
And once that circuit is complete, we have loathing.
Max is a very unhappy kitty right now. The vet shaved Max' tail and butt and cleaned the wound Max has fussed at so much that it is now about 1.5 times as big as it originally was. Max has surgery scheduled for next week. They're going to remove the growth, as well as another one that's closer to the base of his tail (fortunately it's more dorsal than the open one). And Max got a shot of antibiotic. He's one pissed off cat. I'm sure he's in pain and to make it all worse I won't let him lick and bite at his tail.
We tried the elizabethan collar. Wow did that not work. So now we're on to the "soft collar", or we will be in a few hours after we get it from the vet. Man I'm really hoping that's better. One of Bubblewench's kitty's had a tail injury recently, maybe she can weigh in with some advice on how to keep the cat away from an injured tail.
My cat Max is sick. He's been biting at his tail. Actually, he's been biting at a lump on his tail which the vet saw once a while ago (pre-biting) and said it didn't look too bad. But now, oh boy does it look bad. He's got an appointment for late this week to see the vet, but tonight I discovered his tail was bleeding. No details since I know my constitution for ick is higher than some, but the short story is it's looking ugly and he won't leave it alone.
A___ awesomely came up with a good bandage from a nonstick pad, a bandaid, and a small section of elastic bandage, and of all things duct tape (no tape is actually stuck TO my cat, just around the bandage to hold it together). So far Max hasn't fussed at it too much, but he's clearly cranky (ok, crankier), which means he's in pain.
I feel like a bad pet mom for not getting him in sooner.
I'm also worried about leaving this bandage on - it's snug but I don't think it's too tight and we cleaned the wound before we dressed it. But I know it's not good to leave bandages on long (for sure > 24 hours is a big fat no-no). I'd love to change it tonight...ok well "love" is perhaps the worng word. I'd feel better if I could change it tonight but A____'s out of town for the evening and there's no way I can wrestle nearly 20 pounds of cranky, pained furry fury into acquiescence long enough to do the dressing change alone.
It's going to be a long night I think.
