this is the noise that keeps me awake

Texas

Sun, 24 May 2009 17:15:27 GMT

I am in Austin, TX for a conference this weekend through Tuesday. I love it here. That is all.

woo hoo

Wed, 13 May 2009 17:10:10 GMT

Took kitty in for some follow up blood work yesterday and all the blood values are trending back toward where they should be. Everything still elevated past normal range but certainly more manageable than before.

She's acting a little punky today, so I'm not shouting that we're totally out of the woods.

But the doc seems to be on board now with my original theory that perhaps an infection caused an epsiode of acute kidney failure, rather than this being end-stage of chronic kidney failure. He seems hopeful that when we finish out the course of antibiotics - three more weeks! - maybe the numbers will be in the normal range.

Leveling Out

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:42:06 GMT

I'm so proud of my kitty. She's taking meds, holding still for fluid treatments most of the time, and gaining some weight. I'm keeping her in one room for now, because I need to know what's going in and what's coming out (and we have another cat), but she seems comfy and is always happy to see me (even on some level she must know I'm about to stick a needle into her).

There's so much that's not in our control. But for these weeks, however long it lasts, I am able to take care of her and help her improve. The vet wants to check her blood values again. Grrrrgh. There's a slim chance that an infection was affecting the values adversely, and by treating the infection, the values may improve and the situation may not be as dire as we thought. I'm willing to pursue that theory and see it through with the antibiotics.

Sigh

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:58:47 GMT

My kitty is sick. It's hard. The vet actually didn't give her very long, based on the stupid blood values (kidney disease) but she's doing pretty well at home. Of course I am having to shoot her up with fluids every day or two and if you know my cat, you'll laugh out loud picturing that, but there you have it. Some CRF (chronic renal failure) kitties who are given weeks to live surprise us and go on for years, so we will see. She's down to just under 8 pounds but pretty darn feisty. One of our spare bedrooms is now exclusively Sophie's. I daresay she's even a little bit nicer of a cat.

Or as a co-worker said when I lamented the $1100 vet bill for a week's hospitalization, intensive care, meds and tests out the wazoo - "If I were to die today, I'd want to come back as a cat in your house".

ETA at 4.45 pm: Another successful run with the needle and fluids. Batting 3 for 4 now (the first attempt was ridiculous on my part). I never thought she'd let me do it, and she really perks up after the treatment!

a small observation

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:11:01 GMT

So during the whole awarding of best supporting actor to Heath Ledger, anybody notice the camera keep flashing back to Robert Downey, Jr. and RDJ was all serious and choked up...like "there but for the grace of god..."

And, I love Kate Winslet and pretty much every performance she's turned in back to Heavenly Creatures, but I'm so cynical I think her whole ode to Leo (in the second acceptance speech) was given the stamp of approval by Sam ahead of time to sell more movie tickets. And it will work.

Miss Finicky

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:25:26 GMT

This cat is getting expensive. I know it's NOT bladder or kidney stones or some nasty abdominal tumor. How? By having her x-rayed.

Oh yeah, she was fine last week. I went to San Antonio for three days and came home to a sick cat (this was just as the 14-day injection of antibiotics had worn off).

So now..more meds, more money. Sick cat. She's just mopey and uncomfortable, but better already (now that I've spent another two hundred).

It's like a joke - every vet visit adds up to about two hundred dollars.

Darn cat

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:23:40 GMT

Poor baby is sick again, with some type of inflammation/infection that is urinary tract/bladder/kidney related or somewhere in that area, we're trying to figure it out through series of tests and elimination of things. She's down to 9 lbs again, after being up to almost 10 after the last UTI. The vet gave her a shot of an antibiotic that should work over the course of two weeks. No pills this time, thank heavens.

SOOOOOO...Miss Finicky is getting homemade chicken/rice/veggies, since we discovered last night (thanks to some take-out Thai food) that chicken is the only thing she'll eat a decent amount of and with gusto these days. She's eating the chicken, sleeping a lot, no more litter box accidents so things are looking a bit better.

reaction to Twilight the film

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 18:16:23 GMT

The music they selected for the film sucks. I can't see how that soundtrack is selling like hotcakes unless the little girls are just buying up everything that's twilight branded.

As a result I have been filling my head with music that would have been better for the film -namely, Evanescence, which I know is old and has already been played to death in films and tv series.

Whatever, if the song "My Last Breath" is not THE song when they get around to filming Breaking Dawn then well, I don't know...

I can't even believe I am expending this much mental energy on it. Except that I GET it. If I were thirteen right now, I'd be totally obsessed with this thing. When I was thirteen, it was all about Flowers in the Attic.

twitterpated update

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:24:00 GMT

went to Salt Lake City and just got back last night (work)
going to Orlando this weekend (work)
work is weird - just weird
need to do more yoga
am broke because we had the roof replaced
should really find job that pays more

Oh yeah...

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:43:33 GMT

So the company I work for (Company 1) that owns the other company that I really work for (Company 2) announced two weeks ago that Company 2 will be 100% shut down come January. Ha. Ha ha ha. I've been told I can re-apply for my job. I'm not even terribly concerned. But I should be. Meh.

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:43:55 GMT

Sophie's been pukey and behaving oddly and then was off her food for a day or two, so it was off to find her a new veterinarian. And the local animal hospital seems very good. We took Mici in for a checkup a few weeks ago to one of those cat clinic places that had loose cats roaming all over the waiting room, and that's just my Sophie's worst nightmare, so no "cat clinic" for her.

Soooo...checkup, blood test(s), urinalysis, blah blah blah...$239.00. Less expensive than the vet in Fairfield.

And I tell myself I swear, if she's come this far and is all clear of kidney disease,
diabetes, and other common kitty diseases, I am taking her to get her thyroid radiated, or as Chris says "Nuke her! Nuke the b(*&^!" Because my Sophie is not a pleasant kitty at times. And the hyperthyroid is, I think, making her more aggressive.

Tests back tomorrow.

Oh and of COURSE my kitty made the vet tech bleed. That's my girl.

Ahhhhhhh! Shirley Manson on Sarah Connor Chronicles!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:56:08 GMT

How did I NOT know about this? So I was flipping through some channels last night (confess to being more focused on Gossip Girl) but caught a bit of the SC Chronicles, just long enough to think "gee that chick's look is totally inspired by Shirley Manson" and I read today that it WAS, in fact Shirley Manson. SO COOL!

Kinda like when I went to the movies a couple of weeks ago and saw a French film called "Tell No One" (terrific movie, BTW) and had the passing thought "gee that French actress looks like Kristin Scott-Thomas" and of course it was.

I finally read that Twilight book

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:58:13 GMT

Someone whose opinions and tastes in these things usually jibe with my own insisted I read these girl-loves-vampire books. And I said "blah blah blah read it/seen it all before" but okay.

And there is absolutely nothing in it that's very original. I felt like I'd read it or seen it all somewhere before. And I still couldn't put it down.

And then (where have I been?) "oh, there's a movie, too?" I quickly got all caught up on the movie (and other assorted fandom weirdness) online and it looks like they're gonna knock it out of the park.

change

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:47:49 GMT

What a freaking PITA to get to New York City from my new home, but I knew what I was signing up for. It was hot and humid, in that way only NYC can be and I remembered being 25 and totally underdressing (in every way) for work on days like today. Went to a meeting in the West Village and then met a friend for dinner in Bryant Park. On the train home now. Good times. :) I'm gonna crash when I get home. Getting old(er) sucks.

updates

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:49:06 GMT

Anybody else here feel like they post less to LJ because they are posting mini-updates to facebook all the time? no? just me? ok then...

Apparently, at the new house, I have to fret about my cats being eaten by coyotes, foxes, and now big nasty hawks. I thought I lost Mici on Saturday, but she just disappeared for two hours and came back FULL of burrs.

I finally got all my stuff out of Fairfield on Saturday as my tenants were coming in and planning their colors and such. I feel (so far) lucky to have these girls as tenants. The place will look 10x cuter than it did when I lived there. They're totally planning it out and their parents bought them brand new furniture from Lillian August, for pete's sake. So it *seems* like they are settling in for a good while. Yippee yi yay, as this allows me to keep the place until the market comes back.

I feel out of sync and out of sorts, though, not being fully settled here yet. Everything still in boxes, joints and back still tweaked from all the moving and lugging, not all the services are up yet. TV is on his list, I did everything on my list. High speed internet coming this week, right now I am on an air card and it is dodgy and slow.

There are three yoga studios within a 7 mile radius of me, the best one being just about 3 miles away. I'm going tonight, and signing up for a 20-pack.

Freakin' Miracle Drug for Cats

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:22:27 GMT

AMAZING. No more knock down drag out brawling, no more pukies, no more peeing outside the box, these two cats are behaving exactly as I expected them to now. Avoiding each other, choosing separate corners, and occasionally growling and hissing in passing.

Comfort Zone Plug ins more info

These are a boost to Feliway spray. Comfort Zone plug-ins are most ideal for cats who are fighting and not getting along. Comfort Zone alone may not stop inappropriate urination but we have seen that when you install one or two in each room where there has been a spray/urinating problem this usually works wonders in addition to Feliway spray.

http://catfaeries.com/feliway.html

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:31:24 GMT

The movers came
The movers left
And now I don't know where anything is

Not in Fairfield anymore...

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:27:13 GMT

I came back to Connecticut off a 5 day business trip in VT and MA last night, and spent last night at the new house. I'd attempted to move Sophie over there for C. to take care of while I was gone. That's another story. She's back with me in Fairfield for the next few days until I move.

This morning a freaking hawk or some other giant bird of prey flew smack into our huge bedroom window. The window survived, the bird stunned itself, hopped around a bit on the ground, and flew off after a few minutes. Freaked me the hell out. May need some decals or something for that window if that happens often.

Literary Fun

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:05:02 GMT

Here's how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or change the color of ) books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below. Six? Only six? A good number of these were covered in my high school English classes. I'm surprised at some of the books I haven't read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt (ooh! ooh! See icon on this entry for crop of the cover of the book! I am that much of a dork!)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Another one

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:21:04 GMT

Reins and Reigns. Both are totally mis-used all the time, and it ticks me off.

Hell in a Handcart

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:53:24 GMT

More and more I am seeing egregious spelling and grammatical errors on news websites and in catalog e-mails.

Here's the latest. A mailing from a retailer that says "Sneak a Peak at our Fall Collection"

A PEAK, people, is the top of a mountain, or an apex of something. Hence, Pike's Peak. Or a tv show whose ratings have PEAKED.

When sneaking, the proper word is to Sneak a Peek.

Peek being a glimpse, or a first look at something.

This is at least the third time I have seen peak related to sneak in about ten days, and it was the last straw.

Today I...

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:11:48 GMT

...pretended like I don't have to pack up everything I own in less than a month, since I figure much of the summer will be shot with the moving and organizing and cleaning and painting and decorating. So I went to L.'s house, sunned on the deck, we did a couple of errands, went to the beach, then I came home, showered and went to yoga. So now I am sunburned, clean, stretchy and very very relaxed. Fabulous day.

Yesterday

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:42:22 GMT

At 9.30 in the morning I got a phone call from my realtor saying that the seller's movers were running a little behind and we needed to push the walk-through back one our. Okay. I go to my bank, make the 2nd biggest withdrawal I've ever made (first one being when I bought the place I have now) and went up for the walk-through. Well, the sellers and the movers were running way behind, so we did the walk-through as best as we could with everyone from the neighborhood, their kids,and their dogs all tramping through! Not one but two of the neighbors repeated back to me "oh, you're not married". Pfft. Whatever. We can be the scandalous people on the block. Then it was off to the attorney's office, sign sign sign x 800 and took the key and went to Target for essentials (shower curtain, rod, soap, toilet paper, snacks) and went back to the house to walk laps around and inside it ad nauseum. I've been walking laps around the inside of the house for the better part of the last 24 hours.

Friends came to see it and when we left to get a bite to eat we...LOCKED OURSELVES OUT! We each had a key but it was the wrong key to open most of the doors - it was the key for the deadbolt on the front door. All the other doors open with another key we left inside. Oops. After dinner we broke into the house. If the cops came I had identification and the warranty deed saying we own it. But it was ok. 'Cause we got back at 11.30 and the street and other houses were pitch dark. This is when I first got a little panicky. OMG I am moving to the boondocks. There is nothing going on out here, nowhere to go, nobody awake. Then I remind myself I've pretty much been a homebody the last year or so anyway, and this gives me more space in which to be a homebody, and all was well. And I drank champagne.

This morning we showered in the new house for the first time. Great water pressure, yay! Walked around the house some more. Went to diner. Went to paint store. Grabbed samples went back and sat around talked about paint colors for about two hours. Made no final decisions, only we're both really keen on shades of grey. But I don't want every room in the house to be some variation of grey.

I'm back home in Fairfield now, exhausted. Looking around thinking about packing all my crap. Urgh. We love the new house, but there is so much to do. So much. And so much money to spend. Chris sells his condo in two weeks, yee-haw!

Closing Tomorrow

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:04:46 GMT

Just got the HUD statement and instructions from attorney telling us just how many buckets of money to bring to closing tomorrow. I'm gonna throw up.

I am alternately excited and nauseous. My favorite part will be going to the house after closing and jumping around it. It's amazing that I am buying a house I have only been inside of three times: first showing, second showing, and inspection. It will look so different empty.

IE

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:47:20 GMT

Explorer shutting down on my when I try to view my LJ.
Very Strange.