Yesterday I finally stopped hitting the Snooze button on the little reminder that’s been dinging impatiently at me for the past week on my computer. That curriculum I was supposed to be writing was due by the end of the day today, and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. I did do a few cursory things on it, like tracking down a copy of the United Methodist Discipline (which I think I shall have to read, cover to cover, one of these days because I am just the sort of strange individual who actually read technical manuals thoroughly, and this is really just another version of that ilk) so I could peruse the social principles and find ways to work them into my text. But I had about half of the thing still left to write as of yesterday when I got home from work. So last night I decided to sit down and finish it off (a day early, no less. Take that, procrastinating gene!)

Richard very nicely acted as editor, reading through each section as I sat in the computer room hunched over my laptop, typing madly. I asked him to be completely blunt, and he did offer me some extremely useful criticisms, which I tried to incorporate in the ‘final’ version. And then, at shortly after midnight, I finished, about 1000 words over what they were looking for. But they did say they’d rather we gave them too much instead of too little, and it’ll go through a more complete editing process, so I’m not too concerned about ending up a little too wordy. And the most important thing is that it is, at least, done. Check one more thing off the list.

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Along with my complete inability to notice that I had misplaced 25 gb of space on my very own laptop, we can add a complete inability to deal with a missing passenger door window. I know that one is supposed to cover the hole with cardboard. I’ve seen this on cars all the time. But we couldn’t find the duct tape (I know it is in the house somewhere, but unfortunately it is not in the drawer where it is supposed to reside) and I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed, so I tore off a few good sized pieces of cardboard and stuffed them into the window and then used regular clear tape to hold them in place, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

It lasted all the way to work. But on the way home I lost the entire thing while crossing the causeway. This morning I gave it another try (still unable to find the duct tape) and I did lose part of it on the way in to work. But at that point I no longer cared. This afternoon they came out and replaced the glass. Insurance is a lovely, lovely thing.

When I got home from work today there was a message on the machine from the insurance company, asking for additional information on the stolen laptop. Since I wasn’t sure Richard would get home before they closed and I knew he was anxious to get this resolved, I called them back.I couldn’t find where Richard had stashed the receipts for our laptops (since we’d had to get copies a year or so ago anyway for warranty and service purposes), since I knew they would list out all the relevant information. figured, however, that since our laptops were identical, I could muddle through on mine and figure it out myself.

The DVD-CD read/write drive was obvious – that’s right on the outside of the laptop. The software was easy to figure out. But then we got into the other specs and that’s where things all fell apart.

I opened up my File Explorer (because I am a dinosaur and much prefer the old File Explorer and classic Windows functionality to the cartoonish hideousness that is their Windows standard these days) and did a quick properties check. I was actually a little startled to find out that I only have 15 GB of space. Huh. Weird – I thought I had more. But maybe I’m just remembering incorrectly. So I told the guy the laptop had 15 GB, and then I noted that once we tracked down the receipt, I’d have Richard call them back with all the other numbers and facts. Then I called Richard on his cell phone to tell him what they’d asked, and what they still needed, and mentioned the hard drive size.

But wait. I was not remembering incorrectly. They *do* have more space – 40 GB of space, to be exact. Um. So why do I only see 15 GB in my C Drive?

To Richard’s credit he did not start laughing hysterically at me. He very calmly noted that my drive was likely partitioned – that I should have a D drive which would be where all that additional space was hiding.

Bear in mind that we have had these laptops nearly two years. TWO YEARS, people. I had no idea I had a second drive. It’s right there in the list on the File Explorer. It’s not like I haven’t been staring at it all this time. My CD/DVD drive is drive E. You think it would have occurred to me at least once in the past 24 months to wonder why I had this D drive and what it might be.

I could try to blame this cluelessness on the fact that it is a Monday, except that it hasn’t been all Monday’s for the past few years.

Just dye my hair blonde and call me Muffy. Even us nerds can sometimes be too stupid to own a computer.

Since the article was posted for the Sunday paper, I decided that we ought to get an actual paper copy. I know my mom prefers to have the hard copy, and I’ll admit I was curious to see where they’d put me. So this morning we headed for one of the local coffee shops, and as I was rummaging in my purse for quarters, Richard got out of the car and started heading toward the paper dispenser. Then he stopped. “Well, there you are,” he said. And he was right. There I was, my picture plastered all over the front page of the paper, staring out of the paper dispenser. Wow.

We got our coffee and our chocolate croissants and asked for change so we could get a paper (the curse of the ATM generation – never having cash or change anymore) and then we got a copy of the paper, and I kind of stared at it in a little bit of shock for a bit because I wasn’t exactly expecting this to be a front page sort of article. I can only figure this must have been a really slow news day. Heh.

So much for the good part of the day. Today was the last day of the Lord of the Rings class Richard and I have been joint teaching for adult Sunday school at church. We’d been bringing my laptop to church to show clips from the DVD’s during discussion, but Richard’s laptop was finally back from Sony after being serviced, so today we brought his instead. We did the class, Richard gathered up all the materials, and then he put them all into the car, which was parked right outside the door of the church, and we headed off to the service. It wasn’t until an hour and a half later that we emerged again, only to discover that someone had broken into the car and the laptop was gone.

I am counting us lucky, in a way. All they took was the laptop. When the police came he noted that they likely used a spark plug, held in their hand, to smash in the back passenger window. The glass wouldn’t shatter and make noise, since it’s meant to not shatter in an accident, so all they had to do was then pull the pieces out carefully and quietly, reach in, grab the bag, and run. So the only damage to the car was the broken window. The policeman dusted for fingerprints but none of us were surprised when nothing showed up. It was obvious they didn’t try to take anything else.

Sigh. Once the policeman had left, Richard and I swept up the glass all over the sidewalk and street as best we could, figuring we didn’t want to leave the mess to hurt someone else, and then went home to rummage around and try to find the serial number for the laptop. The police will keep it on file, just in case they run into someone with stolen property, and luckily we’d been smart enough to hang onto the receipt (mainly for warranty issues more than anything else). We dutifully called in the information, but I think the general consensus is that the chances of the culprit being caught are pretty much zip, and I think it’s safe to say that we can pretty much kiss that laptop goodbye.

I will admit to being grateful that at least it was his and not mine. Since he’d just had his in for service he’d just backed up all his data, so he didn’t lose any data. Mine hasn’t been backed up in ages and if mine had been the one lost I am not entirely sure what I would do to try to replace some of that information.

We called and made an insurance report. They’ll send someone out to replace the window early this week. I suppose I should be angry, yelling and cursing, but really, I’m just resigned. Even if the car had an alarm they would have been able to steal the laptop and run before anyone would have made it outside to see what was causing all the noise. No one was hurt. All that was broken was the window, and that’s what we have insurance for.

It being early in the year, this meant it was time for the annual Girls’ Time Out with my female in-laws. The emails started flying early last week, choosing dates and making plans, and the date was finally set for today.

I’m not sure how long my female in-laws have been doing this, but they’ve involved me since I became a part of the family, and it’s been a lot of fun. I drove down to Campbell to meet at his parents’ house, where I got to interact with the very excited puppy. He keeps growing – every time we see him he’s stretched out, either taller or longer than the last time. They’ve been working with him on some simple commands, but the excitement of someone new in the house always seems to be a little too overwhelming and there is often much leaping and licking involved in meeting him. At one point, I’d gotten up to do something, and when I sat back down the puppy shot across the room, completely airborne, launching for my face. I was licked in the eye by an extremely exuberant wiggly thing before I could calm him down and remember that I’m supposed to say ‘Off’ and not ‘Down’ (I am sure I do not help matters any by continually confusing the command words!). Here’s where I am so very glad I’ve been doing the allergy shots. Six months ago I would have likely gone red and itchy at this sort of contact. Today I just burst out laughing and wiped the puppy spit off my face and told him he was a very good puppy.

Our first stop was Lisa’s Tea Treasures, which has been the traditional gathering place for our Girls’ Time Out for the past three years now. We met two other women there – coworkers of my mother-in-law – so it was a nice sized group sitting around the table. It is always a little surprising just how full you can get on a plate of tiny, bite-sized tidbits of food – tea sandwiches, mini tarts, tiny little croissants, scones with Devonshire cream, ginger cookies with lemon curd. By the time they brought out the dessert I could barely finish even half, although since it was a slice of incredibly rich and dense chocolate cake it felt almost criminal to leave so much of it behind.

Next up, a chick flick. We’d all heard great things about Sideways, so we all piled into cars and headed off to the theaters. I wasn’t sure what to expect about the movie at all, but I ended up loving it. It really is a chick flick, in its own way, even though the two main characters are men. It’s at times funny enough to have us laughing out loud, and at other times poignant and sad.

I think if I hadn’t had to leave there might have been another hour or two after the movie of lingering and chatting and possibly more eating. But it was getting late and I had a two-hour drive still ahead of me. So we all headed back to Richard’s parents’ place, and we hugged our goodbyes, and I got back into my car and hit the freeway and the cruise control button, and somehow made it back home before midnight.

I was still pretty wide awake even though it was getting late, so just out of curiosity (because they told me the article might run this weekend) I went to the website of the Fairfield Daily Republic, and hey, what do you know. The article was posted. My 15 seconds of fame has come.

I should have known things were going too well. Friday Allegra stopped eating; by that evening she was listless and dehydrated. Luckily we had no big plans for the weekend beyond sitting at home so I could finish up this doll for my niece’s birthday (which was on Saturday so it will reach her a little late – ah well). So I could be home to occasionally grab Allegra, stuff some food and pills down her throat, and stab her with a little needle to dump fluids under her skin to keep her hydrated.

I told a friend today that I feel as if I am on an emotional roller coaster with Allegra. I wish she would either stabilize, or just get sicker and be done with it. Not, mind you, that I am eagerly anticipating her death – I just want to know. Watching her go up and down over the past few days has been extremely frustrating. There is never any clear answer to the question of how far I should go. I firmly believe that quality of life for the cat; what’s best for her, should always take precedence over my desire to keep her around because I’m not ready to lose her. But where do you draw the line? I told myself this weekend that if she did not respond to the treatment – hydration therapy, force feeding – that this would be the end of the line. I have told myself that if it comes to it, I will give her a week on any drastic treatment, since that seems like it should be long enough for there to either be improvement, or for her to let me know in whatever way she can that enough is enough. But it’s so easy to be calm and rational about it when she’s not sitting there, lethargic and dehydrated, and you are faced with the prospect that ‘someday’ might just very well be now.

The happy ending to the story is that this time, a few doses of sterile fluids under the skin, a few quarter pills of anti-nausea medication, and a few rounds of force feeding (which she tolerated far better than I would ever have imagined) and she’s now right back to being her perky and opinionated self. Plus now that I’ve had a taste if some of the bad side of kidney disease I’m prepared for the next bout – and I do not doubt for one instant that there will be a next bout, and a next one after that, and so one and so forth.

I had to call my old college roommate on Friday because while I know how to give fluids (it’s insanely easy if the cat’s being cooperative), I hadn’t a clue how to actually set up the bag with the infusion drip set and I knew she would be able to talk me through it. She’s the one I spent four years fostering baby kittens with, so she and I have been through a lot over the years. One of our first litters was a group only a few days old, where they all got sick and all but one of them died. The one who survived had some issues from being abandoned and orphaned and from being sick. And now that little kitten who I will always remember as this tiny black and white thing barely big enough to fit in my hand, even though I have seen him often enough as an adult, is her oldest cat. Between the two of us, in between all of our cats, Sebastian still is the oldest, at 13, but then comes that little holstein cow-patterned runt. During the conversation she mentioned that a friend of ours who’d also done a lot of fostering, back in the day, had just had to put one of her oldest kitties to sleep. And she asked me, when did we get this old? How did this many years pass without our noticing, so that our babies are now starting to die?

You don’t think about it when you look at the little kitten in the cage; when you are coaxing this hamster-sized thing, whose eyes are still not even open, to take formula from a bottle. You do not think about the fact that in far too few years you are going to likely be trying to convince them to take food from a plate for a far less hopeful reason; that you will be trying to get them to swallow the pills without fighting or spitting them back out; that you will slowly accumulate a small pharmacy of needles and syringes and bottles and bags to keep them happy and stable just that much longer, and that eventually you will have to make a decision you do not want to make; eventually you will have to watch them die.

A week or so ago I received an email from a reporter for a local paper. He noted he was doing an article on bloggers in our county and wondered if I’d be willing to answer a few questions. Since my online journal isn’t something I’ve kept secret, I figured it might be fun.

Tuesday night he called to do the interview. I’m sure I came across as more than a little distracted – I’d just got home from work and was in the process of setting up food for the cats. Now that Allegra is on her special food, every time I open a new can for her, I have to give the other cats wet food as well, to distract them from the fact that she’s getting ‘the good stuff’ on her own plate on the kitchen counter. So I was on the phone with this poor guy, cats hollering as if they’ve been starved for weeks on end at my feet, trying to pay attention to what he was asking me while simultaneously keep all the other (healthy) cats off the counter and out of Allegra’s food. Still, I think it went fairly well and hopefully I managed to say a few vaguely intelligent things amid the cat food-induced excitement, and at the end he noted that he’d like to get some pictures and he’d have a photographer contact me.

They called to set that up the next morning, prompting me into a small bit of cleaning panic, since the desk where my computer lives tends to be a good place for piles of stuff to spontaneously generate. I figured there’s no point in pretending I’m anal about cleanliness, because when one lives with pets there is no such thing as pristine in one’s house. Besides, it was as good an excuse as any to do a little much-needed sorting and tossing and putting away.

The photographer came out this evening – a very nice guy with the sort of camera that thoroughly intimidates us ‘point and shoot, dummy’ types. He wanted pictures of me at my laptop, and naturally, since I was sitting at my computer desk, Allegra decided she needed to up and settle into her spot. I’ve had a folded towel next to my laptop for years now, for the cats to sit on, and also for my feet, since when I lean back and put my feet on the desk, I inevitably have at least one, if not three, cats on my lap and on my legs, and it’s nice to have a little padding under the ankles while I’m sitting there, trapped under pounds of purring fuzz. The photographer actually wanted to get a few shots of me with one or more of the cats – although Allegra was the only one willing to be cooperative – so we posed her as much as one can pose a grumpy cat while he snapped lots of pictures with his intimidating camera.

Other than that, it’s been a mostly quiet week. We’re settling into a routine for Allegra’s new diet. Richard finally succumbed to yet another bout of the winter ick that’s been making the rounds – this one has had him out of work all week and glued to his nebulizer (oh, the joy of asthma). Richard spends his evenings (and his mornings and his afternoons) coughing and sniffling and waiting for the antibiotics to kick in. I spend my evenings frantically working on the doll for my niece – a doll full of far too many tiny knitted parts, which has necessitated more than one late night of work – and occasionally tracking down Allegra and plopping her in front of her food to entice her to eat, eat, eat.

Let’s say that you are sitting in a comfy chair in your library at home, working industriously on knitting up a doll for your niece’s fifth birthday. You are using pale pink yarn because you are in the process of making the head piece.

Your perpetual kitten Azzie decides to come ‘help’ by bapping the ball of yarn onto the floor and you think “oh, how cute.” He pokes at it a few times but then it no longer seems to appeal.

And then, lets say that the phone rings and you have to set the knitting down and walk out of the room for all of about 30 seconds to answer it.

What do you suppose you might see upon returing?

Let’s check the hall outside the library first, what say.

That would be Sebastian peering around the corner, wondering just what the heck happened. Also, note the presence of the very cool lava lamp nightlight on the wall.

Now let’s poke our head into the library. What do you suppose we will find there? Could it be Azzie, looking oh-so-innocent? He has *no* idea how the yarn happened to wrap itself around the feet of that chair, and then go skittering out into the hall. Really he doesn’t.

I ask you. Would this face lie?
(this entry cross-posted to Knit One, Purr Too)

This morning I sat at home with tiny knitting needles and worked furiously on the first section of the topsy turvy doll I am hoping to have finished in time to mail up to Seattle for my niece’s birthday, and Richard headed for the computer room to scan through the huge stack of Lord of the Ring DVD’s, looking for the scene’s we’ll be using for tomorrow’s Sunday School class. My dad called to find out if I’d mind if the recorder group played the prelude, which also reminded me that I am the accompanist tomorrow (ack – guess who hasn’t practiced a bit!), so I dashed downstairs to my piano at that point and discovered that the price for my forgetfulness was one hymn with five sharps and one with six flats, plus one that would have been a bear to play even without all the added accidentals. If Richard is not sick of hearing that hymn played over and over and over this afternoon and evening, he’s got far more tolerance than I.

We drove down to Campbell to meet Richard’s parents for the annual Robert Burns dinner – or the annual endurance test called eating haggis. I dutifully ate a small piece, since I figure there are far worse things I’ve had to eat, and while I am never going to become the slightest bit fond of the stuff, the whole point of the Robert Burns’ dinner is the haggis so I might as well. It’s only once a year, after all.

The dinner had the usual mix of entertainment and confusion. There were songs based on Burns’ poems, the Ode to the Haggis, the parade of the mottled gray orc embryo….I mean, the parade of the haggis, dancing, and so on. We didn’t stick around for as much as last time, however, since Richard was starting to get a little wheezy. So after the Immortal Memory was given (a long, dry speech given in a monotone, making it certainly seem immortal, since we were all convinced it would never actually end) Richard and I quietly slipped out and headed home.

Over the last few days I’ve noticed that Allegra has started to feel really old. Mainly it’s due to the fact that she feels as if she’s lost weight, to the point where underneath that thick pelt of fur there is nothing but bones jutting through. She’s acted as if she still has the same amount of energy as before, and the lump on her chin hasn’t gotten any bigger as far as I can tell, but there was something definitely up. Plus it’s been about four months since her initial diagnosis of bone cancer, back in October, and I decided it was time for a follow-up visit, just to see how things were going.

The good news, confirmed by the vet, is that the lump has not, in fact, gotten any larger. There was still a small possibility that it wasn’t cancer at all, even when the radiologist confirmed it as such, but short of doing more invasive procedures there was no way to be 100% sure. Back then, faced with a fairly short life span remaining I decided it just wasn’t worth it to put her through anything traumatic.

Back then she also showed elevated kidney indices in her blood tests, suggesting she’s showing signs of kidney disease. But since we expected that the cancer would be the thing to do her in, and since she’s been notoriously snitty about any sort of cooperation for health-related poking and prodding, we decided we wouldn’t worry about that either.

Now, however, that things seem to have stabilized on the cancer front (if it is, indeed, cancer), we realized it was time to deal with the other issues, like figuring out some way to somehow switch her to a completely separate food than all the other cats, without adversely affecting any of the felines in the household. It didn’t work very well when we’d attempted to do it for Rebecca last year so I wasn’t exactly hopeful it would work much better for Allegra.

Ha. I should know by now to never predict what a cat will do. Luckily Allegra loves her new food (probably because it’s canned food and all cats seem to vastly prefer the canned to the dry). She loves it to the point that she will come downstairs and stand in the kitchen and holler indignantly until one of us gets it out for her so she can nibble a few more bites and hop back down off the counter to go off somewhere for a few hours before she repeats the process all over again.

So…I guess we’ll see how it goes. It could still be cancer in her jaw. There could be other issues we haven’t even touched yet. But at least we seem to have the kidney disease issue mostly in hand at this point.

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. Unlike most everyone I know, I did not have the day off. The roads were practically deserted when I drove to work this morning – no traffic at all, not even coming up on the causeway, where there is usually a slowing because apparently people get confused by the prospect of going up a gentle hill.

I was listening to NPR, as I usually do on the way to and from work, and they had a short segment where they had members of the Boys Choir and the Girls Choir of Harlem reading Dr. King’s famous speech. I’ve heard snippets of King giving the speech, of course, and have read excerpts here and there. But I’m ashamed to say that I have never actually *heard* the entire speech all the way through.

By the time I reached work I was nearly in tears. The power and the beauty of those words ring just as deep and powerful as they did when they were first uttered aloud by Dr. King himself.

My older sister teaches second grade, so they have today off from school. But she said that on Friday she was talking to her students about who Dr. King was, and what he stood for. When she got to discussing segregation, her students were appalled. It wasn’t just that it was a horrible thing – it was that they could not even believe that such conditions could have ever existed. No way, they kept insisting. Surely she had to be making it all up, right?

They are young yet – only in second grade. And they have the benefit of attending a school where there are children from many races and cultures, in a place in this country where liberal values are far stronger in our society than the old school ideas of the South – sexism, racism, and elitism. And they are too young yet to have experienced the more subtle forms of discrimination, or if not too young to have experienced them, too young to really grasp what it all meant. They are used to thinking of their fellow classmates as just other little kids – nothing more and nothing less.

I wonder, listening to that speech this morning, read by children older than my sister’s second graders, how many of them would have such a hard time envisioning a time when segregation and discrimination was the norm. I wondered whether Dr. King would have been proud of the progress we have made so far, or disappointed at the overwhelming work that still has to be done.

We all have our own prejudices, based on culture, gender, age, race, and color of skin. What we do with those prejudices, however, is our own choice. Do we act on them and refuse to look any further than our own self-imposed blinders? Or do we overcome them, and try our hardest to treat every person as an individual, looking for their character and their values instead of at their physical appearance.

What a wonderful world it would be if every child could be just as appalled as those little second graders were – that anyone could dare to think that someone was less of a person because of where they were born or the color of their skin; that someone deserves hatred and scorn because of where they come from or who they love. We have come so far since Dr. King first made that speech. But we still have so much further to go.