Alenda Lux

I feel bad for Daeva. First of all, she’s feeling better, no doubt about it. She will seek out attention now, and she’s meowing more - things she did not do when she was running a fever. She’s also fighting us more when the medicine is administered, which is great fun, and then she hides for a while after that. I can tell her tooth is bothering her, though, because she’s seeking out defensible places - classic cat behavior when they’re not feeling quite right. I want to make it better, but I have to be satisfied with knowing that we are providing her with all the food she could think about eating, and we are making sure she gets her meds, no matter what she thinks of it, because that’s why she feels well enough to be a pill about, well, the pills.

Well, they’re not pills, it’s liquid, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I’m glad that she’s getting her teeth cleaned on Monday. There will be an extraction as well, and we’ll have our girl back, 100%, not the 85-90% we have now.

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This actually has nothing to do with politics, but I do love throwing people off.

Last night at about 8:30, in the middle of a perfectly innocuous episode of House, Daeva started acting weird. She ran under the ottoman, would not be dragged out and stay out, and her pupils were the size of dimes. If I didn’t know better I’d say she was high, but since we don’t smoke up, I was pretty sure that wasn’t it.

We took her upstairs with us and she immediately went under my desk and would not be drug out under any circumstances. I was pretty sure at that point that she was running a fever. In grand old crazy cat lady fashion I started freaking out - we checked online and found that some cats have a poor reaction to distemper boosters, so maybe that was it, but . . . I don’t trust the internet to be clairvoyant and I don’t trust cats to show all of their symptoms. It was probably midnight before I managed to fall asleep at all, and I don’t know when Thomas managed to fall asleep, but I woke up like clockwork at 5am. We called the vet’s office and got the first appointment, which was 9am.

Now, this is the difference between seeing a vet and seeing your vet. Dr. Lafferty looked at Daeva and told me that she did have a fever, and he looked at her teeth and did not say, “She needs her teeth cleaned,” he said, “She has a rotten tooth. When is her cleaning?” This is a really key difference. I am not a vet. I do not know anything whatsoever about feline dentition and I expect animals to have not-great breath. You tell me they need a teeth cleaning, I think that’s routine maintenance. Like my yearly cleaning. What I needed to hear was what he said, which is that this cat needs a metaphorical root canal. So we got antibiotics, because there is no way to distinguish between whether she is having an adverse reaction to the vaccine or if her tooth has well and truly gone off, and she is switching appointments with her brother and will have her teeth cleaned next Monday.

And, we are not seeing that other vet again. She’s someone’s vet, and I’m sure they love her, but Dr. Lafferty is our vet, and they will be seeing him from here on out.

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I have noticed that I seem to start out a bunch of sentences with “So.” I am not really sure why I do that. It’s annoying, even to me. Anyway.

Today was a busy day. We got up pretty early, in order to have time to eat breakfast and have it not be stupid to meet Ilene for lunch in Roswell before our board meeting. We had oatmeal pancakes, chopped veggies for soup after having let the beans soak the night before, and we did a bunch of laundry. (Note to self: I STILL need to pull all the clothes out of our closet and change things around for winter, rather than living out of bins.) Shower, scrounge around for a sweater, and we were off to Roswell, where we met Ilene, as stated, for lunch. We went to probably my favorite lunch place in Roswell, other than the Fickle Pickle: Magnolia. I nearly always get 1/2 a chicken salad sandwich on wheat with the tomato basil soup. Yum!

After lunch, we had a board meeting for NFDC, which was informal, featured a small amount of recreational vulgarity, and in which we also had no action items, so that was good. Action items are for people who don’t get things done the first time! Not really, but it’s nice to not have a bunch of BIZNISS to deal with, just report in on meetings with Cultural Arts Board people and management of long-term goals (ie, maintaining our current level of activity).

THEN, because we are gluttons for punishment, Thomas and I headed down toward Atlanta to meet my friend Heidi and her husband, Ilya (I think I spelled that correctly), for dinner. We were at Hudson Grille, which was fine, but loud because it was full of football people. None of us are football people. None of us “gets” it. I do find it funny, however, that there are guys in there in full mother-fucking football regalia - jerseys, shoes and shoelaces that coordinate with those jerseys, helmets, rally towels, the whole nine yards (ha!), and I have no doubt that at least 50% if not 80% of those guys would cream a nerd in equivalent Star Wars, Star Trek, or, I don’t know, Pernese garb.

OK, the Pern guy? Would be asking for it. But you get my point.

Anyway, it was loud as shit in there, but we managed to pass a pleasant two hours or so catching up. As two liberals produced from the same conservative, formerly home of the KKK region, she and I need to stick together, dammit.

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So we took the cats to the vet this morning. It was, as usual, traumatic. Daeva is perfectly happy to be “going on an adventure” until that adventure ends in a stethoscope, a thermometer up the butt, and a couple shots. Daksha is not into travel, so even getting him in the carrier requires welding gloves and a ninja. So, needless to say, it’s a good thing we like our vet and it’s also never easy to force these guys, who are pets to some people but, and I realize I am anthropomorphizing here and I do not care, who are family to us, to go out to see Ye Olde Rectal Thermometer.
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One of my most-used delicious tags is “cooking.” Another is “recipes.” As time goes on with the theater, we get less and less time to cook a lot. I’ve already posted one of my favorite recipes, the soup a couple days ago, but today I was rooting around my “cooking” and “recipes” tags and found a few other favorites.

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