Thursday morning – that would be the same day I lugged Sebastian into the vet, in case you’re keeping score – I saw Rosemary in the litter box and it looked like she was straining, followed by what looked like a little blood in what came out. Thursday night, a repeat performance, and Friday each time she went to the litter box she would strain and strain and nothing would happen.

Friday at work after finally managing to get everyone involved in this presentation that *must* be done by next week on the phone together, my boss decided the best way to finish this is to have us all in the same place. Hence, I now have tickets to Los Angeles, to spend all of Monday and possibly Tuesday at the office in Santa Monica. With that looming over my head, I knew that there was no way I’d be able to get Rosie in to the vet until the end of next week – and if this is a urinary tract infection, we really didn’t want to wait that long. So this afternoon, on the way back from Apple Hill (because it was time for our yearly dose of the best caramel apples ever), Richard called the vet to see if we could squeeze her in. They very nicely agreed to give it a try, so we dashed home, tossed her in a carrier (where she expressed her displeasure most pathetically), and the verdict is that tomorrow we will have to figure out some way to collect a urine sample so Richard can take that in on Monday to have it checked so we can figure out just what it is. Oh, and best of all, in the meantime she gets a pill once a day. Have I mentioned before how much Rosie *hates* being medicated (or how next-to-impossible it is to medicate her as a result)?

So if you’re keeping score at home in the game of How High is the Vet Bill Today, so far in the past three months we’ve had to have teeth cleaned and extracted, hyperthyroid treatment in the form of blood tests, pills, creams, and radioactive iodine, tests and treatment for a strange growth on the head, and now a possible urinary tract infection, all spread out between three of the cats. I have been eying the other four cats warily and am doing my best to convey to them the utmost importance of remaining healthy, by golly, because otherwise Richard and I are going to look in our stockings on Christmas morning, and instead of candy and presents, there will be rolls of vet bills, which are certainly not any sort of happy gift, no matter how festively one might tie them up with big velvet bows.

Wasn’t it just yesterday I walked outside the office to go to Curves at lunchtime and had to climb into an oven that was formerly my car? And wasn’t it just earlier this week that my coworker wasn’t even willing to sit outside on the balcony because it was too hot?

Apparently the weather gods were listening and decided enough was enough. Today autumn hit with a vengeance. By the time I got home from work it was cold enough inside that I immediately dashed upstairs and down, turning off every single ceiling fan. Later I wrapped myself in my big fleece bathrobe before skimming through my email, and before I went to choir practice I changed out of my work clothes and into a sweatshirt and jeans. Tonight will the first night in a very long time where we will leave the windows closed. Tonight is the first night in a long time I can actually start thinking seriously about putting on the flannel sheets, and maybe even cranking up the gas fireplace in the bedroom. Today was the first day that actually felt as if it might possibly be October.

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I left work a little early this afternoon in order to get home in time to grab Sebastian, stuff him in a carrier, and head off to the vet. He’s had a small growth on his head, right near the inner corner of one of his eye, and it’s been there for weeks. I’ve been eying it anxiously for quite a while, trying to be patient enough to let it go away if it was something as simple as a scab. But it didn’t go away, and while it didn’t get any bigger and it didn’t seem to bother him very much, that didn’t much matter, because cats are not supposed to randomly grow little things on their skin without some kind of really good reason.

The vet poked and prodded (and weighed him – he’s up to 17 pounds, and oh boy could I feel it when I was lugging around that carrier!), and then decided to try to get a sample to send off to the lab. One dab of topical numbing cream and a thin needle prick later and suddenly it wasn’t nearly as scary any more. As near as we can figure, it was just some sort of little cyst. He’s going to send the sample off to the labs anyway just in case, because after all, Sebastian is 12 years old now.

But while the whole strange growth on the face incident appears to have dissolved into nothing too horrible, we did discover that he has a heart murmur – something which isn’t exactly a good thing. I doubt it’s for the same reason as Rebecca (see the earlier note that he is *up* to 17 pounds), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s nothing to worry about. Rebecca goes in for follow-up blood tests in a few months so I’ll be carting them both back to the vet so he can check his heart again, and so we can discuss options for how to proceed next.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, because this sort of thing tends to come on so slowly that you don’t really quite realize it’s happening until it’s there. All I know is that in the last few months I’ve started having a hard time seeing. It’s not all the time, luckily, but when I am tired things have this tendency to start to blur together, and when I am driving it has been harder and harder for me to read street signs until I am almost upon them, and after spending an entire day staring at a computer screen my head starts to hurt and lately I sometimes feel nauseous when the blur begins. And the worst of it is, if I really think hard and concentrate, I *can* see things okay. But I know that seeing shouldn’t require this much effort. And it’s been worrying me more and more the more I notice it.

I know it’s not presbyopia, which is what happens when you get older (older than I am now, at least) and you start having a hard time seeing things close up. Age-related far-sightedness is probably the best way to describe it. I have always been near-sighted, so the prospect of going far-sighted is almost a bit intriguing. Or rather, it might have been intriguing back when I still wore glasses and contacts and staggered around in a blur without some form of corrective lenses.

I don’t know how old I was when I first got glasses, but I do know I was very young; still in elementary school. I wore glasses up until high school, at which time I finally wheedled my parents into letting me get contacts. Naturally, it was at this point that I discovered my rather nasty allergy to thimerisol, which was a mercury-based component of a lot of the saline storage and cleaning solutions used for contacts back then. After dealing with puffy, reddened, crusty eyes for days on end an optometrist finally clued in on why I was having such a bad reaction to contacts, switched me to a thimerisol-free solution, and the glasses were relegated to something I only wore on days I was feeling so slothful I barely got dressed, let alone combed the hair or put on contacts.

I hated wearing glasses and it had nothing whatsoever to do with vanity and everything to do with convenience. They fog up when it is cold outside and they slide down your nose when it’s hot and you are all sweaty. They get scratched and they get dusty and they get lopsided and loose. They break and they can be lost or sat on or bent. And contacts, while free of the fogging and sliding and scratching problems, are just as much of a hassle – with all the little containers and the solutions and the drops and what have you. I know there are those of you out there who are deliriously happy with your glasses and your contacts and more power to you if that’s what floats your boat. But by the time I made the decision to do something permanent about it I had been wearing some kind of corrective lenses for nearly 25 years of my life and I was pretty darn sick of the whole thing.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I got the lasik surgery, but I do know it has been at least five years (perhaps six? I’m not sure). My left eye’s always been the bad one – the right eye is nearly normal and so they only had to zap the left one. I thought the entire process was fascinating. In and out in less than ten minutes, home with a horrible headache from the feeling that something had scratched my eye (well, technically, something had), and the next morning I woke up and could see clearly, without the need for glasses or contacts. Based on the fact that I was in my late 20’s, I figured I had a good ten or fifteen years until I would be faced with the need for corrective lenses ever again.

Ha. Apparently that was just wishful thinking on my part. After spending weeks trying to convince myself that these stupid vision issues weren’t really all that much of a problem, last night I finally broke down and tracked down an optometrist who is open in the evenings (who knew the Costco membership would be this useful?). She did all her magical incantations and used her mysterious machines and made me squint at all manner of little pictures and letters, and then finally gave me my verdict.

I have mild astigmatism. While my vision hasn’t changed one smidge since the lasik surgery, the left eye has decided to go ever so slightly off. It’s not enough to warrant another zap of the laser (which would have been my preferred choice), and it’s not enough to send me back to wearing contacts fulltime (secondary preference), but it’s enough to warrant me having to get glasses.

We picked out a pair of octagon-shaped, rimless lenses, and today I drove off to the nearest Costco (their computers were down last night) to drop off the prescription and my order. In a week or so I’ll have them back. To say that I am not looking forward to their impending arrival is putting it mildly. The only bright spot in this whole mess is that they are only for temporary use, like driving. At the very least I will not have to wear them all the time. Whee.

Glasses. I am back to having to wear glasses.

Sigh.

Apparently we are completely out of the loop in our household these days, because if it hadn’t been for a stray reference in Stacy’s last journal entry, we would have not figured out that Sunday morning was Daylight Savings unless one of us was clued in enough to realize that the computers had magically updated themselves overnight. And what is worse, unlike earlier versions of Windows, Windows XP cannot even be bothered to give me that nice little message box telling me that my computer time was updated.

On the plus side, this meant we ended up getting up an hour earlier than planned, and thus had enough time to drive into Davis and have our weekend waffle breakfast Sunday morning before heading off to choir practice. On the down side, this whole Daylight Savings thing really screws up our internal clocks, because by 5pm we were both starving and by 8:30 I was ready to crawl into bed and call it a day. This was not helped by the fact that we went to dinner with my mom to a new restaurant in Davis and ended up eating far too much (especially of the desserts), and while we did try to walk it off afterwards by meandering around Borders (where my mom procured my older sister’s anniversary present and if she is reading this, may I just point out right now that mom has really outdone herself with this one. And I’m not laughing hysterically as I write this at all, nosirree), by the time we got home I was still too full from dinner and went and curled up on the bed waiting for the sheets to finish going through the dryer, too sleepy to care that the still-slightly-radioactive cat had settled on my head and was slowly cooking my brain.

It’s been a quiet weekend. Saturday we had a small donut binge while watching Bend it Like Beckham, and then we sorted through a few crates of things left over from our days in Benthic Creatures to finally get rid of it all, and dragged the recycling to the recycling center. We also made a trip to Costco, to wander the aisles eating samples for lunch and stock up on canned food. It was a worthwhile trip because we managed to score three Christmas presents, thereby dropping only minutely the number of items still remaining to be purchased before the holidays (and winter birthdays) are upon us.

We did not get around to hanging the curtains in the living room or the pictures in the dining room (sigh), but I am not too concerned, because there are still two more months before the end of the year when I promised myself that these things would be done. I did, however, sit down and crack a huge pile of walnuts – a task which resulted in my shredding my fingers on shell shards (And by the way, if there is some sort of technique to cracking walnuts so that the nut comes out in those perfect little halves that you can buy in the store, will someone please tell me? Please? Thank you).

I ended up with this huge pile of walnuts because my parents’ walnut tree is determined to provide enough walnuts each year to feed a small nation, and it is now the time of year when those with fruit or nut-bearing trees start foisting their extra produce on the rest of us (not, I should add, that I mind this one bit, because hey, free walnuts!). There are buckets of walnuts still at my parents’ house and this does not include the few tons of walnuts the gardeners scooped up and threw away the last time they mowed the backyard. I am eying the rather hefty bag of nut meats that is currently taking up a large portion of my freezer space and pondering how many loaves of nut bread I will need to bake in order to make any sort of sizeable dent in them. This is actually kind of nice, since autumn brings out my urge to bake. Even when the term ‘autumn’ has absolutely no relevance to the actual weather (in the 90’s today because, you know, it’s October and it’s not supposed to be *cooler* or anything. Sheesh).

A few months ago I had this bright idea of starting a photo journal, posting one picture per entry, with the goal of one entry per day. I’ve been intrigued by some of the other photo journals I’ve found online, and since both Richard and I now have digital cameras and the ability to snap pictures at a moment’s notice, I didn’t think it would be too difficult to keep going.

I am discovering that it is far more difficult than I had previously imagined. I look at other sites and see beautiful or interesting snapshots that span the range from wild and bizarre to ordinary and every day items. Obviously finding things to take pictures of is not difficult at all for everyone else who has tried this. So why is it so difficult for me?

I know that one reason is that I am continually looking for something special – some great photographic moment – and that half the time I do not have my camera actually in my hand when I see something that might be worth capturing, or else by the time I fumble it out of my purse the moment has passed. And don’t get me wrong – I’m actually pretty proud of a few of the pictures I’ve taken since we started this project, especially since I know I would never have thought to drag out the camera without such a motive. What I have such a hard time with is the notion that every picture does not have to be the perfect moment (And also, there’s the little matter of the fact that no one would ever accuse me of being any kind of great photographer). We’re still plugging away at it, however, if only because it *is* kind of fun, in a slightly frantic sort of way. And if nothing else it is forcing me to pay attention to things around me – something that’s probably a nice change for someone who often defines the word ‘oblivious’ a little too well.

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We had an interesting discussion last night at the bible study. I noted before that this week was all about law and order and how it is laid out in the bible (if you want some fun, go poke through Deuteronomy and check out all the nitpicky little laws. My personal favorite is the one about how if two men get in a fight and the wife of one grabs the balls of the other, she gets her hand cut off. But anyway, the subject came up, as it inevitably does in these sort of situations, about people who do not believe in god but claim that they still are spiritual, and the natural question is, of course, how is this possible? As the token agnostic in the group, naturally I felt it my duty to at least attempt to offer some insight into how the rest of us wackos think, so after fumbling around and pondering it for a while I finally hit on an explanation that at least makes sense to me. Being spiritual does not require a belief in a supreme being. I believe that there are other powers out there that may not be visible to the human eye. I believe that people can interact with those powers to some extent, and that those powers can have an impact on what goes on around us – whether it be our own lives or our environment. What I have a hard time believing, however, is that there is one, central power that is supreme over everything else; that has ultimate power over me and every living creature and that is guiding my fate. That is, for me, the distinct difference between spirituality and belief in a god.

It seemed to make sense to the rest of the group (once I finally figured out how to put the whole concept into words), but I’m curious if I’m just some weirdly abnormal agnostic or if this is the general perspective of other people who are in my position. Not knowing very many other agnostics, I can’t take any sort of informal poll, however. So I guess it will just have to do.

In other, less weighty news, Rebecca is home. The vet said she hadn’t made a peep the entire time she was there, but the minute they opened the door to bring her out I could hear her yelling, and she did not stop yelling for more than the time it took her to suck in a breath the entire drive home. And people wonder why it is that house call vets are worth their weight in gold…

So far, she seems to be doing fine. The only thing remaining is to keep her shut up at night for the next two weeks because she’s not allowed to sleep with us because she is still slightly radioactive. Why yes, this does makes me giggle like an idiot every time I say this, just so you know. And the plus side of this is that it’s a great incentive to get out of bed in the morning, because as soon as the alarm goes off, she knows I am awake and starts yelling. So much for my usual habit of smacking the snooze alarm at least once and rolling over to get a few more minutes of sleep. I could be wildly optimistic and say that two weeks of hopping out of bed at the first sound of the alarm might cure me of the snooze button habit, but I think we all know better than that.

I suppose I should be tired today, but surprisingly I am not. Or rather, I am only yawning a little bit and I am not starting to doze off while waiting for web pages to load during yet more research online, and I am not getting more than slightly annoyed by the extremely obnoxious lawyers downstairs who are getting the week off to a fine start by yelling and screaming at each other at the top of their lungs much earlier than normal for a Monday morning. At least it hasn’t degenerated into swearing yet, but I figure it’s only a matter of time. They’ve been doing a lot more swearing at each other in the past week. In a way it’s almost laughable, but in another way it’s a little disturbing.

Richard has gone home from work already due to more cramping, and I sent him an email about jello and pudding and yogurt and other soft, non-intestine-irritating foods we have in the kitchen. Packing lunches is usually pretty easy for both of us since we’ve been actively trying to follow the program and eat lots of high fiber food with fresh fruits and vegetables and low-point chili and soup and such. It’s not so easy when one half of the house is supposed to be on a low-fiber diet for several days, and isn’t allowed to eat any fresh fruits or vegetables at all. I have been having a merry time running through my mental list of recipes trying to come up with things that will be okay for him to eat, yet still low in points. Somewhere along the way I need to find something that fits that category and still uses bananas because there is an entire bunch of them sitting on the counter getting a bit overripe, and making my kitchen reek of banana, and I have already eaten my one banana for this quarter so they’re going to just sit there until I either get disgusted with them and throw them away or I cook them somehow.

I am mulling the pros and cons of solar panels over and over in my head now that we have an actual estimate for them, and pondering whether we really could lower our energy bills any more than they already are (my conclusion is ‘not likely’). I am pondering things I want to do with one of the databases I built for work but having a hard time finding motivation to go beyond scribbling little notes. I am wondering when the vet will call to give me an update on Rebecca and hoping that she has not decided that we abandoned her and is therefore turning her radioactive super powers toward evil instead of toward good. And I am most of all wondering if, just maybe, my entire office went downstairs en masse and told off the obnoxious hollering lawyers, they might actually shut up.

I am starting to slowly get more involved in the reading I am doing for this bible study I’m involved in. Next Wednesday we’ll be discussing order, which means that most of the reading for this week is full of lists of rules – rules on when you should stone an ox and when you should free a slave and how many sheep or goats are to be paid to whom for all manner of wrongs. Despite expectations to the contrary, I am actually finding these rules rather fascinating. I’ve always maintained that one of the reasons for having gods and goddesses and religions in the first place is to instill some kind of order on people because people are usually more afraid of divine retribution than of punishment from other people. What better way to lay out the beginning of a rather comprehensive judicial system than in the form of religious text.

I am not saying this to mock the bible, however. I am beginning to understand just why it is that so many people find the book so fascinating. There are a lot of interesting messages hidden in the words we’ve read so far, and I freely admit that it often takes someone else to point out an interpretation that makes it a little clearer for me. It has not, so far, suddenly convinced me of the existence of a supreme being. But it has shown me the way that people thought, thousands of years ago, and that in itself is worth something.

It has been nice to get something out of the readings from the bible, if only because I am not getting much out of my other reading material right now. Someone posted a link to the BBC’s 100 Best Loved Books list on TUS and after discovering that I’d only read about 40 of the books listed, I decided it might be fun to try to read some of the others. I usually avoid doing this sort of thing with published book lists because they are usually full of the type of ‘classic’s that are foisted on unsuspecting and unwilling students in school so that we might all benefit from someone’s interpretation of what the author was really trying to tell us – whether or not the author might agree with that interpretation or not. But this list included books by Terry Pratchett, so surely the rest couldn’t be all that bad.

I started off with The Alchemist, which is just chock full of flowerly rhetoric that had me rolling my eyes pretty much the entire way through. And then I printed off a list of all the other books I hadn’t yet read and handed it to Richard and he brought me home a stack on Tuesday night from the library.

So far I have read three of the ten books he brought home and I am eying the remaining seven with more than a bit of trepidation. Anne of Green Gables annoyed me the entire time I was reading it. The BFG was extremely disappointing, if only because Roald Dahl wrote other books that were far better written and far more entertaining than this one. And Artemis Fowl should have had a different spelling for the last word of that title because it was just not worth the effort. A number of the remaining books are of the types that usually do not interest me in the slightest and after being extremely disappointed in the first three I am seriously beginning to rethink this grand idea of reading the remaining fifty books on the list. After all, despite the fact that the list included Harry Potter and Discworld novels, it also included Clan of the Cave Bear (the first of a series in which a young cavewoman discovers every conceivable thing that led to the first primitive culture. I still shudder when I think of the time I lost in plowing grimly through those books, naively sure that somehow they would redeem themselves). Surely that addition alone should have indicated that something was painfully amiss.

Today started far too early, at about 12:30 this morning when Richard woke me up in a lot of pain. Normally I can wake up fairly quickly, but I had just fallen asleep only about an hour before and had a hard time dragging my brain out of the fog. Luckily I managed to wake up enough to drive him to the hospital (although I think it was to our benefit that there were few cars on the road to distract me because I’m not sure I was entirely awake even then). We spent the next six hours at the emergency room while they poked him and prodded him and took blood and filled him full of painkillers and made him drink nasty concoctions of dye and ran a cat scan and finally determined that he has diverticulitis and is pretty lucky that it was caught before he had to be admitted for surgery. And hey, it’s been probably a year since I’ve taken him to the emergency room (because the last time he went he was in Riverside and had to go by himself), and at least this time it wasn’t due to his asthma. One can always find the bright side to anything if one looks hard enough, even after one has spent six hours in one of the most uncomfortable chairs ever manufactured from cheap molded plastic listening to blood pressure monitors and loud drunken people getting mad because no one asked them to give a urine sample, or explaining to extremely patient policemen just how it is they happened to ‘run into’ someone else’s teeth.

So by the time we got home there was only time to catch a quick nap of about an hour before we had to get back out of bed and somehow make ourselves presentable and coherent enough to interact with the guy who came out to evaluate our house and give us an estimate for solar panels. To summarize – yes we can put them on our roof, yes we could probably avoid ever paying for electricity again, and by the way those things are expensive, even *after* the state rebate, which we may or may not get because that program has been running out of money much faster than expected. We agreed to at least put in the application for the state rebate funds, which gives us a few months to think about them, and for me to panic about what we would need to do to get this started, and for us to remind ourselves that if we’re going to be serious about our impact on our environment, this is a really good first step. But it’s expensive. Really really ouch expensive.

And then it was off to the pharmacy to fill Richard’s prescriptions of some heavy-duty antibiotics and painkillers and also to find a picture frame for one half of the wedding gift for the wedding we went to this evening, and while we were there I decided I might as well get a flu shot because I have been saying I should do this for years, and I am somehow convinced that if I get a flu shot I will miraculously avoid the several-month-long sinus infection from hell I have been getting every winter for the past few years. And then back home to eat lunch and then try to sleep for another hour before we had to get dressed and hastily wrap the present and find the card for the reception and go to the wedding.

The wedding was lovely, as weddings usually are, and the reception was far too much fun, or at least it was fun for those of us at our table, where we spent most of the time amusing ourselves by taking wild and wacky pictures with the disposable camera they put on our table, voguing with our plates in the buffet line, and making lanyards from the raffia that decorated the table, and very little time actually paying attention to what was going on with the bride and groom and everyone else. And none of that fun had anything to do with the fact that Richard and I have had very little sleep since Thursday night and he was heavily doped on vicodin, I am sure of it.

We’ve been treating Rebecca for her hyperthyroidism now for probably about three months; the last six weeks of which have been spent chasing her around with a finger full of goo twice a day that has to be smeared in her ear. To say that she does not enjoy the process is putting it mildly. And admittedly we’re not all that crazy about it either.

This morning was, I am hoping, the very last time we will have to do this. This morning we smeared the goop into her ear and then bundled her into a carrier and she yelled at me non-stop the entire drive into Sacramento, where she was poked and prodded and weighed and examined and then we left her there – left her for most likely up to ten days – so that she can be treated once and for all and hopefully return home to us with normal thyroid function once again. The fact that she may also return home to us slightly radioactive for a short period of time (thus prompting weeks of anticipatory glow-in-the-dark super-kitty quips) is just a slightly annoying side effect.

The procedure seems fairly simple. She doesn’t have to undergo any surgery and she doesn’t have to be put under anesthesia. She just gets an injection of treated iodine which – if all goes as planned – goes into the thyroid and destroys the parts that aren’t working and once she reaches whatever acceptable level on their geiger counter, we can bring her home.

It has a 95% success rate – good enough odds that we were willing to go for the procedure. Plus, the loss of twice-a-day cat-ear-smearings isa definite bonus. And so far, things look really good. They just called to let us know that her goiters (I love that word) weren’t too huge, and that she’d already been treated, and is doing just fine. And most important of all, they told me that iit was just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill hyperthyroidism, which means that her chances of recovering normal thyroid function after this is all over are pretty darrn good.

A few weeks ago I was bored and poking around online, and decided to look for information about synchronized swimming. I’ve known about the Masters swimming program for people over 18, but could never find a team close enough to join. Well imagine my surprise when I actually tracked down a team in Sacramento. It’s only been around for a few years (and I get the sense that the website has been around for even less time), which is why I’d never been able to find anything about it before. There was a day or two of worried frustration since their website’s hosting company was having issues and I kept getting errors trying to reach their site, and then more anxious waiting while I fired off an email to the contact person and waited impatiently for a response. But the whole point of this rambling is that I found a team. I found a team! I get to swim again!

I admit my timing couldn’t have been worse. They swim in outdoor pools, at night, which means that because of bad weather, they shut down at the end of October and don’t start up again until February. Plus due to previous commitments I can only make two practices for the rest of the season (last night and one more Sunday night in two weeks). But none of this matters. What matters most is that I can swim again. And I hadn’t realized until I got into the pool last night how very much I missed it – not just the swimming, but being in a pool with other women who understand this sport – who *get* synchro.

After last night’s practice I can see already that while I’ve still got the strength for it (thank you biking and Curves), I need to do some serious work on flexibility. It was quite an effort to extend my leg straight enough for even the simplest of figures and I didn’t try anything too complicated last night. But I know it will all come back, especially once the season starts up again.

There is a faint smell of chlorine in my hair and a nose clip in my purse. I am already visualizing choreography with every piece of music I hear. After twelve years without any ability to practice my favorite sport (and the only one in which I was ever any good), all is right in my world once more.

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On a completely separate note, TUS has been involved in an interview project, where we take turns asking people five questions and they have to respond in long and rambly essay answers. I finished mine this weekend. You can go read it here.