deliver us from weasels

Unrelated thoughts on a weekend in Seattle

I love going to see women play sports. It pleases me on so many levels. I don't usually like kid-friendly events, but when I see all the little girls and even boys cheering for women athletes it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling I am not familiar with and makes me feel a little ill. But ill in a good way.

Raccoons - one (or two, or a hundred, who knows?) has been casing our house and waited until we were out of town to destroy our new garden hose and do something indecent to the dog's toys in the backyard. There was stuffing carnage everywhere as well as some nasty raccoon poop.

When you come home from a four-day weekend and immediately begin reserarching campgrounds, that means the vacation wasn't long enough.

We walked around Seattle for 6 hours with the puppy. He was tired and hot but not limpy or injured afterwards.

Seattle loves Bentley. We could not walk a block without getting stopped by someone who wanted to know about him or ask to pet him. Mostly tourists, but some sketchies as well. Note to sketchies: no you cannot feed my dog anything. Ever.

I find Portland to be a more manageable city than Seattle. But then Seattle has the Puget sound which is so lovely.

In our quest to have the most lowkey vacations ever, mwt got a haircut on Queen Anne's Hill. Who goes on vacation to get a haircut? We do. The hairdresser also loved Bentley.

Even if you are tired and hot and hungry and need a place you can have a bite to eat with a dog, an "Irish" pub in the tourist area is never the right choice for a meal. This is not negotiable.

We spent most of the holiday weekend rewiring the bathroom and installing a fan/light combo. It was, as usual, a bigger job than expected. Also, mwt is a perfectionist and that makes things take longer. And also means that we no longer risk burning the house down every time we turn on the bathroom light. So, I guess that is ok.

A portion of the weekend was spent in a hovel we built in our unfinished basement for Bentley for July 4. The fireworks went off for a long long time. I am not happy with this situation in general but I am tired of talking about it. I am evaluating my options, whatever that means.

Sunday we realized we had not done anything fun all weekend. Isn't that sad? So we packed up and headed to the Riverside Trail on the Clackamas river. Then found out that there was nowhere to buy a day-pass, so drove all over the damn place until we found a ranger station and bought a year-pass dammit. So this is a good thing for the long-term, but in the short-term, by the time we go to the trailhead we were tired, distracted, and not paying much attention.

Hence the snake. On the trail ahead of me, mwt and Bentley stepped right over it. But not me. I noticed it and got this picture. mwt, however, is afraid of snakes and was on the lookout for the rest of the hike. A very nice hike in fact. With a little wading into the the freezing cold Clackamas.

And what I figured out on Sunday is that I need more time with the garter snakes and less time with the city snakes. This is the situation that would make me happy. Good to know. Harder to do.

And also always walks towards the camera when I hold it in front of him. He is sweet that way.

He also needs retraining after 6 months recuperation. How can you say "no" to a puppy with a broken leg? Lucky for us, he is generally a good dog, so the fact that he has forgotten all his training is not too big a deal.

I've been blogging for almost 4 years now and I was just reading through some older posts to try and figure out a timeline for what I was doing a year ago and 2 years ago, etc. If anything, this blog is a record. But otherwise, I am not really sure of the value.

Sometimes I get e-mails from people asking me to link to their blogs or their businesses or review a book or somesuch and I certainly understand their strategy. I work on the internet and all. But this blog is the anti-marketing blog. I refuse to use any of my internet marketing knowledge here because I do that all damn day. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I just don't want to do that (market my blog, that is).

But what I want to ask people who want me to link to them is: Do you read this blog? Have you noticed the profanity? The sacrilege? The misspellings and bad grammar? The incessant whining? Because that is what this blog is all about. And I don't know if people would really want to associate their product with the neurosis that goes on here if they read through the archives.

This blog helps me, for sure. I love getting feedback and help with my decisions and sympathy for the continual animal medical issues. And interacting with other bloggers is great. I do feel like I am part of a community, hokey as that sounds.

But still, I just have a hard time understanding why any professional establishment would want a link so badly that they would want to associate it with 4 years of neurotic whining and pictures of the livestock. I don't know, maybe they do though. Maybe this blog is more valuable than I think. Anyone ready for more pictures of my cats?

Labels: blogging

Ernest does not have diabetes. Or at least the vet doesn't see it as of this weekend. On Saturday, Ernest's glucose tested within reasonable levels.

We are thrilled. We are disappointed in the vet, of course, for getting the details wrong. But so happy about Ernest. Something else is likely wrong, of course, and that is causing the wonky test results. For now, our lives stay the same. Ernest can eat all the candy he wants. Well, actually we are keeping him on the special diabetes food, just in case. Because Ernest is a big fatty and may need more protein to help get his weight down. Not that I want him to get too thin. We don't like skinny kitties here.

Amazing how much happier our entire household is when we are not having animal medical issues. This weekend was a big celebration of Ernest. Really. A fancy celebratory dinner out and big much rejoicing. For the humans, that is. We are way to into the livestock I know. Obviously need to get out more.

Labels: craziness, ernest, kitties

All this talk of Ernest and his health problems -- the thing is, he seems to feel pretty good. The UTI is bothering him a little, but he is still running around, chewing electrical cords, and acting like his normal self. He is not suffering, and that is a good thing.

Our human health is good. Considering how easy it seems to be for bodily functions to completely fail for no apparent reason, mwt and I are doing pretty well. Although last night I realized I could take my pants off without unbuttoning or unzipping them. But think of the time I will save! OK, I need some more carbs or fat or something. Or maybe I should give up that heroin habit....just kidding. Not on heroin and never have been, although I once ran with that crowd. Let me tell you, that scene is not cool. Although I do prefer them to the meth-heads.

Summer seems to be here. I have green tomatoes and my parsley, cilantro, and basil are sprouting. Of course, warm weather brings out the crazies. 10am this morning I witnessed a huge altercation in front of my house between a neighborhood teenager and a "friend" of his. It was ugly, but I did learn some new words. See, I learn new things every day. And no one got shot. Another positive.

We have tickets to see the Seattle Storm in July. Not sure how we will swing our weekend in Seattle now that Ernest is sick, but maybe it will be magically revealed to us. I am thinking we need a pet nanny. A live-in to take care of all this crazy stuff. She could drive the animals around, petsit, give meds and shots, etc. Anyone want to apply?

Labels: badwords, craziness, ernest

People are always so squirrelly about money. I know I am. It is embarrassing to talk about what people pay for stuff and how much you have and how much you pay, etc. It is somehow ugly. But then when someone tells me how much something costs I am thrilled. I think, "Ah, so that is how much that costs. Well, now I can be prepared if I ever have to buy that."

But here is the deal, mwt and I are very frugal and so we talk about money all the damn time. To summarize our combined life experiences, we don't want to ever be poor again and are doing all that we can not to live beyond our means. As Scarlett O'Hara said, "As God as my witness, I will never eat steak'ums again!" (Or something like that.)

This means we have one car we paid cash for. Our only debt is mwt's tiny student loan and our mortgage. We would only buy a house we could put 20% down on. So, we live in a crumbling old house in a shitty neighborhood and we pay cash for the repairs we make. As we have the money, we make the repairs according to the priority list.

We have a budget and we stick to it. (And, yes, moderate animal repair is in the budget.) We save up big chunks of cash and then spend it on big things. We take months researching house projects, pricing things out, and getting estimates.

We cut costs everywhere there is a long-term gain from cutting those costs. We do not have cable, we buy most our clothes from thrift stores, I use coupons unapologetically. But we still eat organic food, drink microbrews, take little vacations, give to charity, and buy the best care for the animals. Because there is a long-term payoff to paying more money for these things.

And that is where I am going with this. We had a fair amount of money saved for new windows and we spent it on Bentley's surgery. We scaled back the window plan, saved up again and arranged for another window estimate. Now Ernest is sick. The vet just called with an estimate for just the testing (not the long-term care, just the analysis) of Ernest's diabetes situation. $1000-$1500. And you know it will be at the high end. Because that is how this stuff works. We are about to hit the 10K mark for emergency animal care this year. And it is only June. Yes, 10,000 bucks. We also have a 15yr-old-kitty who has not yet gotten sick this year.

There was a time not so long ago that I did not even make 10k a year. There are people in the world who would have their lives changed forever by 10K. Something is fucked up about this on so many levels and I do not remove myself from blame here. This is crazy. It would not be so crazy if we had not just gone through Bentley's leg surgery. But we did. And it is influencing my decision-making.

Now, I will not let Ernest suffer. From what the internet is telling me today, untreated cat diabetes is a pretty awful thing. So we are not going there. Not sure where we are going, but not there. Really, my mind is completely blank in the "options" section of my brain.

Yes, I am freaking out about the money and the long-term care. And how all the work we have done to simplify our lives (like with the one car and living in the part of the city we could afford) is not making my life better. Apparently it is not making the lives of the animals any better either, because they have been sick since we got to Portland.

I know people have worse problems. But we are in the position of weighing the value of a life here. Ours vs. Ernest vs. Mr. Kitty vs. Bentley. And it always comes down to money. It's ugly, isn't it?

Labels: ernest, kitties, money, whine