Cat grooming

I love my Nioxin hair conditioner.  Karena ChopChop sells it to me at cost.  It's thick and has a tingly scalp presence, plus a lovely brisk peppermint smell.  I bring empty bottles to my appointments and come home with several month's worth of conditioner.  

Simone likes the Nioxin, too, as I was reminded today.  

It began with my morning routine:  Take a shower, brew some stiff coffee, toast a bread product, collect the newspaper, and lie on the couch to do the sudoku and crossword.  Carbon lies nearby, awaiting the crumb-covered plate.  (I know you should only feed the dog in the kitchen, but such discipline fell by the wayside years ago.)

Enter Simone:  a leap up the couch to perch on the back and look out the window.  I pat my stomach:  "Come on down, sweetie."  She puts her forepaws on the diaphragm area and turns her face towards me, eyes inches from my own.  I pet her, and she returns to the couch back.  Fickle beast.  I return my attention to the paper and she comes down to the pillows and couch arm behind my head.  She rubs her head against mine and then starts chewing at the scalp.  It tickles.  I giggle and tell her she's a crazy cat.

D thinks I'm the nutjob.

A gorgeous morning

Glowing morning light,

Pastel clouds, crazy rosebuds:

This is not winter.

Awful serendipity

This morning I was reading Holly's blog.  She was talking about weeding through her notebooks and finding entries about Louie, written before she knew he was dying.  It was a place to vent about the irritating facets of elderly-dog ownership.  I started to write a comment about how I NEVER find Carbon irritating, even when she pees on the rug;  but I was running off to work and didn't have time to figure out how to post non-anonymously.

I actually almost didn't go in to work.  The sub line calls at 5:50 am, and I just don't function well at that hour.

He brings me my phone:

"You have a sub job, Sparky."

It woke him up too.

Plus, it was way out in St John's.  That's a lot of driving for a 4-hour gig.  So I waited, hoping that someone else would pick it up before the call cycle got back to me.  Vain hope.

Normally Carbon and I walk Holly part way to work on Wednesdays, so I send her a quick Mea Culpa message.  Then D says, "I'd like to walk with her."  An Addendum message goes out.  I make some coffee, have some home-made granola, wake D up (again), and I'm out the door.

An hour later, I'm feeling kinda smug, because it's my 4th gig, 2nd time at this school.  I know the players, my passwords all work, and I'm actually a little bored.  Then D calls:  he's at the vet with Carbon.  Apparently, after the walk with Holly he walked over to New Seasons on Division, and Carbon collapsed in the street.  She lay down, frothing at the mouth and panting heavily.  

Bus drivers apparently won't pick up men with sick pet dogs, even when the foam has been wiped away.  Taxi drivers are also not very responsive.  But sisters, thank god, do not have these flaws.

D is in the waiting room, and he's mainly calling to see about payments:  it's a $560 estimate just going in the door.  Oy.

A second call, letting me know the diagnoses, or rather the lack thereof.   They are still doing some tests and x-rays to rule out heart or other conditions, but they have no idea why she was foaming at the mouth.  They think the panting, and probably the collapse, is from a condition called laryngeal paralysis.  Surgery is over $2K, is very invasive, and can be fatal.  Three excellent reasons to not even consider it.  

The heavy breathing has actually become a Carbon leit motif in the last few months.  Normally she breathes heavily when she's excited or over-heated, but now she pants just sitting and watching us.  We thought she had asthma.  That would actually be preferable, I think.  This condition is harder to treat: they recommend no exercise, lots of water, keeping her out of the heat. 

Problem number 1:   She loves to walk.  When Holly comes in, she goes into her Lipizzaner stallion imitation, curvetting and leaping and running back and forth between us and putting her head between my hands and my shoe laces.  She manages to extend her docked tail into an energetic wag. She leaps out the door and promptly sits for the leash, looking up with an endearing mix of expectation and adoration.  I may need to have Holly wait at the gate from now on.  In Carbon's eyes, Holly = walk.

Problem number 2:  The more water she drinks the more she has to pee.  The more she has to pee, the more likely she is to revert to peeing in the house.  The more she pees in the house, the more I time and money I have to spend on cleaning.  And the more she's likely to think it's okay to pee in the house (nota bene:  it's not.)

Problem number 3:  When it's summer, I want to lie in my hammock.  When I'm lying in the hammock, she wants to be outside with me.  When she's outside, she wants to sit in the sun.  Maybe her old arthritic bones like the heat?  Anyway, she likes to be overheated, and she does not like to swim or get wet.

So now I'm fretting over the difficulties of keeping her comfortable and well.  I'm not irritated, but Holly's blog is starting to resonate.

We took advantage of the visit to have the vet look at her mouth:  one side has had a red sore for over a year.  Last year at this time, they took a biopsy while they did dental work, but I said I didn't want to spend $250 to find out if she has cancer.  (I know that makes me a bad pet owner.)  Today they didn't push the biopsy:  they think it might be bacterial and sent home some ointment and antibiotics.

So now she's home, happy as always, sleeping with her Dad while I work.  And I just hope this is not the beginning of the downhill slide.  Yes, she's old and her muzzle has gone from grey to almost pure white.  But she is too adorable and loving, and I have enough trauma and expenses for now, thank you very much.  She's just going to have to hang on.

It's always something.

Old dogs like to frighten us...

We both need a hug.

 

Sleep vs work vs play

Last night I came home from work at 10 pm.  I was greeted with the microwave crisis:  sometimes it gets overloaded and stops working or displaying any signs of life.   The key is to leave it alone for awhile.  If you do that, it will emit a little beep, the electronic version of a deep breath.  The lights will come back on, and it's ready to rock.  D did not know this, so he had checked the breaker box and then shlepped the whole thing into the studio to test it on the plugs in there.  No dice.  He returned it to the kitchen, grumbling the whole way.  I sashayed in, jiggled the plug, and voila!  We once more had a working microwave.

But the damage was done.  It had been an exhausting day for me:  I got up early to walk the dog, then baked a pie and a quiche for tonight's gathering.  Then I spent 2 hours doing virtual reference ("is there a site for table manners in Israel?")  M stopped by to cut some juniper and cedar and gather some pine cones for her home decor.  (Smells are the most important part of the seasonal activities:  greenery, spices, baking.)  During breaks, I edited some OLAQ articles.  I did dishes, put away groceries, changed into khaki and white, and took off for the mall, which was frantically busy.  Again, I spent a good 15 minutes hunting for a parking space that wasn't in another state.

It was so busy in the store that the cleanup happened after we locked the gates.  It was my first time with the push broom.  I didn't like it.

However, I was determined to spend an hour on decorating the tree and listening to Christmas music and enjoying the lights and the annual ornament discoveries (where's the pickle?  the sailing santa?  the skaters?  the grandma ornaments?)  Unfortunately, D did not recover so quickly from the microwave incident.  We bickered, I fought with the tangle of lights.  The usual discussion ensued re:  process.  I believe in deploying the glass balls symmetrically around the tree, making sure the reds and golds are evenly distributed.  Then, I fill in the spaces with the ornaments.  D thinks the balls take up too much space.  Bicker, bicker, bicker.

By the time we were done with the main tree and the Charlie Brown tree in the studio, it was 1 am, and I had to get up for a 9 am rehearsal.  But I was too wired from the events of the day to sleep, and I had forgotten my restless legs meds.  So, it was another half hour of electronic scrabble, e-mail, etc before I got to sleep.  Today I rehearse from 9-noon, work from 1-6, and dash home to make toffee and cut up fruit for the gathering, which starts at 7.

Next week I am essentially working every day, sometimes at two sites in one day.

I am starting to feel like the microwave.

Refer to blog title

So, I get up, groggy with sleep and my ever-escalating cold, just wanting to feed the dog and go back to bed.   My usual ritual is:  feed dog, start coffee, pee, get newspaper, settle in to the crossword.  On automatic pilot, I walk into the studio bathroom.  I'm thinking, oh yeah, we need to clean this place up today for tomorrow's guests.  I glance at the floor to see how dirty it is, and I see....feathers.

Just two of them.  Little gray-brown ones.

Sigh.

I look under the sink cabinet.  No corpse.  I check behind the shower curtain.  Clean as the proverbial whistle.  Hmm.  And then I see my cat, silhouetted against the shoji screens that are pulled against the 3 large front windows, her blackness and skinniness accentuated by the white screens.  She is standing on the sofa back, stretched tall, paws batting at a fluttering soft grey silhouette on the other side of the screen.

Shit.  I almost prefer to find a corpse.   I scoop up the cat (and she is not going quietly) and shut the bird up alone in the studio while I ponder what to do next.

Maybe if I wait long enough E will find it and deal with it.