Having finally been driven to the brink of insanity for too long by the sound of the dripping faucet (okay, so it’s been more like a steady stream than a drip lately), I determined to dive into the murky world of do-it-yourself plumbing again. But this time no mere showerhead stood to be changed. Oh no! This time it was an entire faucet!

One thing about having some situation where the only time one would want the landlord to come over is in a dire emergency like, say, it’s raining in my hall, is that I have learned to be rather self-sufficient when it comes to home repairs. I figure it’s probably a good thing – everyone should know their way around a tool box, and it’s actually a good way to make yourself proud of yourself when you can fix something all by yourself. Naturally, now that Richard has moved in, I didn’t want him to miss a single moment of that self-pride stuff, so I suggested we replace the faucet this weekend. In between moving him and his 7,329 books into the house.

Okay. I’m exaggerating. (There’s only 7,238). On the plus side, I’ve got *tons* of new reading material to distract me from doing more menial tasks like scouring hard water stains from the sink, but wow does that man have books!

But anyway. Back to the plumbing. A faucet. In order to replace one, we had to go get it. Off to the hardware store, where we pondered the shelves until we found one that most closely approximated the existing faucet. Then I cornered their plumbing expert for advice, which involved him opening the box and suggesting that perhaps we really didn’t want to do the *full* replacement, which would have included some rather large pipe sections and detaching the whole sink from the pipes below. Gee. For some odd reason, Richard and I decided rather hastily that he was right, and we really could leave *that* bit of fun for another day. Armed with faucet, a pair of tiny rubber connectors, and a jar of putty (plumber’s putty to be precise. Not to be confused with whatever other types of putty there are…it was fun and squishy and sort of like clay, and quite useful for more than just creating a water-tight seal underneath a newly installed faucet. It’s got just the right stickiness to tug a stopper from a drain, were you to put the wrong drain stopper in and have a moment’s panic because it wedged itself in there and you cannot get it out…but where was I?) we headed back to the house to wreak havoc….um…I mean, replace the faucet.

The very helpful plumbing person at the hardware store had given us dire warnings about the hoses underneath, making it sound as if they might break if we merely gave them a hard glare, and if *those* broke, then we’d have to replace the valves…and frankly, after deciding to avoid the scary pipe sections of the faucet, the thought of replacing valves was even more daunting, so I climbed into the cupboard under the sink, wrench in hand, and rather gingerly loosened the screws while Richard, in an attempt to be helpful (uh. Not!), regaled me with a blow-by-blow account of how the cats were coming up and sniffing me because I was doing Something Weird.

Using a wrench while giggling helplessly and trying to avoid breaking hoses is not quite as easy as it sounds. Thus, I determined that it was Richard’s turn to Play With Plumbing. Out I crawled, and in he wriggled, while I assisted by handing him wrenches, bolts, and trying my best to make him laugh (payback, you see).

We had a brief moment of panic when the handles under the sink didn’t turn off the water supply, but that only meant we got to go figure out just where the main water connections were for the house. And when I went out to turn the water back on, I was half-expecting to come back inside to bellows of “Turn it off!” as we discovered a leak or something in our newly installed faucet.

But there was no yell. We did it. A perfectly installed faucet. No leaks or drips. It’s all shiny silver and water tight.

The ironic thing about this whole ordeal is that if I didn’t have more cats than the lease states, I’d probably be perfectly happy to just call the landlord and have him come over anytime something like this needs doing. But because I’m ultra-paranoid about having him in the house when I’m not here (that whole pesky lease-violating thing), what’s resulted is that I’ve had to learn to fend for myself. Plumbing isn’t really all that scary when you’ve played with it for a bit. Most of that Fix-it type stuff isn’t.

Hmm. I *knew* if I tried really hard, one of these days I’d find a great reason for why having all these cats is a *good* thing….

We started the process of moving Richard in today – a friend came over and he helped us fill two cars with some furniture and all his clothes. I started the process earlier, simply because I had to clear out a closet and move some bookshelves to make room for his things.

Moving the shelves meant removing all the books, dragging the shelves down the hall (a complicated process which included stopping every few steps to remove one of three cats who decided that riding in the shelves was a really cool new game, and they didn’t care that it made it that much heavier for me to lug), and then reshelving the books. It’s been a good way for me to do some sorting – I’ve got a full box of books to go to the local thrift store – but it was also an unexpected trip down memory lane when I started to put things back and found my old college dorm yearbooks.

I spent two years in Titus Hall at UCDavis – two incredibly amazing years. I was a shy, quiet bookworm of a kid back in high school (oh, quit snickering. Ask anyone who knew me then – I’m not making this up). During my freshman year, the girl across the hall – a short and exuberant girl by the name of Rowena – decided that she wasn’t going to let me be shy, so she dragged me along to parties and gatherings. By the end of the first quarter, our end of the hall was one of the social hang-out, despite the gloomy presence of my first roommate – a girl who was seriously lacking in self-esteem. She eventually moved out, a new girl moved in (the one who would become my best friend and roommate for the next nine years, and who will be my Maid of Honor next summer), and things just kept getting better.

But back to the yearbooks. One of the girls in the room next to mine and I decided that the floor needed a ‘yearbook’, so we wandered the halls with cameras during the last few months. Neither of us possessed much skill in photography, but we figured that by sheer volume of pictures taken, we would end up with enough good ones to make do, and when we added in all the pictures we begged out of the other residents, we ended up with a great selection. We put it together on the floor of my dorm room, staying up til early morning to type up captions on my typewriter (Most of us didn’t have computers in the dorms back then. Sheesh, now I feel old) and then scotch tape everything in place. Then we carted the whole mess down to the local copy place and copied and assembled the whole thing there. It was an amazing amount of fun, and while the pictures (since they were copies) didn’t come out so well, everyone seemed to love it.

Year two some outfit on campus decided that dorm yearbooks might be a good thing to look into, so they sent out information saying that if someone gave them the stuff, they’d put it together. My new roommate and I got together and took on the task (we were the designated Social Committee, so it naturally fell into our laps anyway). The picture quality in this one was much better simply because they were done by someone who actually knew what they were doing, but it is still a ‘homemade’ book.

One of the sections in the book was where we’d all listed our goals – what each of us saw for ourselves in our future. For the second year, I had listed as my goals to go to graduate school in Nutrition, to travel, to earn a lot of money, and then live in a big house with lots of cats. And it occurred to me that out of all the others in that book, I might just be one of the only ones who’d achieved everything I set out to do (okay, so the ‘big house’ is still to be built, but the contract with the builder was signed Friday night, and by next spring, it will be reality). The few friends from that era that I still am in contact with have changed directions probably just as often as I have, and so their goals are no longer in synch with their reality. I’m not sure if I deliberately made mine vague, or if I had more in mind at the time, but it’s kind of nice to know that I succeeded anyway.

As I flipped through the books, peering at pictures (and luckily I’d had the foresight to go through mine and write names next to faces), I was struck, not by how much I remembered, but by how much more I’d forgotten. The names were familiar, but it was hard to recall who the people were. Each book had a list of quotes submitted by each resident for that year, I think in the hopes that they might trigger some memory later on. Um. Sure. I read through my list and couldn’t remember what half of them meant. But oh, what I do remember:

Christmas in the dorms (and by the way, mistletoe smells *nasty* when you have a huge laundry basket of it sitting in your dorm room overnight). Late nights with ice cream. Poodle perms. Mud volleyball. Dancing in the rain. Caffeine addictions. Singing around the piano. The rat getting loose in our room. The water fight in the men’s bathroom. Inner-tube water polo. Pranks. Friends. So many friends.

Okay, I admit it. I lied. It wasn’t intentional. You’ll have to believe I did my best. I said I wasn’t going to watch again but I couldn’t help myself. Despite my best efforts, it got the better of me. I wanted to know. I *had* to know. I was sucked back in, but at least I know I wasn’t alone.

I watched Survivor. Yes, twice more. Last week and then tonight. I actually left work at a decent hour just to get home in time to watch it. I was hoping for Rich to be voted off the island. I even yelled at Kelly when she chose Sue over Rich in the beginning. I thought perhaps the rest of them would clue in on how he’d used them from the beginning, but it didn’t happen. He won. I broke down to watch this stupid little show – I became one of the mindless masses, and the weasel actually won!

I’ll give him credit for consistancy though – I can’t fault him for that. He’s never tried to hide what a pompous arrogant jerk he was. He was just that and nothing more. But still, I was rooting for any of the others. Oh, I’m glad Sue didn’t get it – her pouty sore-loser attitude toward Kelly at the end only underscored why it was good that she was booted. And it would have been nice to see Rudy get it, just because I liked his attitude. He just didn’t seem to care. He was just coasting. I’ve got furniture to rearrange and closets to consolidate and shelves to move to prepare for Richard moving in, and this TV show dragged me down into its clutches and held me in procrastination mode, morbidly fascinated despite myself.

At least now it’s over. Even though I think the wrong person won, at least it’s done and I can go back to my normal life without getting sucked into the vortex of TV-land anytime soon. And if I can avoid getting anywhere near a TV for the Survivor II, so much the better.

As an ending, you’ll have to humor me as I go into an entirely unrelated gushy auntie mode. I received this picture in my email on Monday. I’m going up to see her in a few weeks. Go ahead. Tell me she isn’t just the cutest thing. I dare you. (but if my email doesn’t work, be patient. Pacbell did something funky with the servers and aliases are bouncy lately)

Ever since I purchased the stone dragon and named her ‘Rhyme’, she has needed the obvious mate. Richard and I agreed that we would find him together, no matter how long it took. I did find the identical dragon when I was at DragonCon in Atlanta a while back, but I remembered the deal – find him together – and left him there. We figured the most likely place to find him was at another festival like the Scottish Games event where I found the first one.

This weekend, we were wandering around Old Sacramento. Searching for Reason was the furthest thing from our minds, but then I suppose that’s often the way it goes, so of course we found him. He was high on a shelf, flanked by a rather grumpy looking gargoyle who also ended up having to come home with us, but there he was. We’ve joked about our search for Reason (yes, in a world gone mad), but it was surprising, at least to me, that we found him so fast.

Finding the dragon doesn’t mean that our search for reason has ended – just the physical part. This past weekend Richard and I came to a decision that is a rather big one for me. He’ll be moving in this weekend when he flies back from spending the week in Portland for work. I suppose in a way it should be no different, simply because for all intents and purposes he has been ‘living’ with me for months. But it will not longer be the pretense of keeping two addresses. When the phone rings on Saturday mornings with my parents on the other end for the weekly phone call, he’ll be able to pick it up. The answering machine message that says ‘we’re not home’ really will mean ‘we’ now. There will be new furniture in this house and I’m going to have to rearrange some things so that his stuff has somewhere to go. The fact that the garage door remote died a few weeks back now becomes a moot point because we both can’t park in this skinny garage so it will become a place to store boxes of stuff he’ll bring over. I have no idea where we’ll put all his books (he’s got a lot of them, just like me). There’ll now be two of us responsible for filling cat food bowls and making sure that the trash gets to the curb every Thursday morning (something I’m really good at forgetting to do). I’m going to have to get my extra mail key back from the friend who usually watches my house when I’m out of town. And most importantly, he’ll be living here. With me.

So this is where my own search for reason has taken a sharp turn. I know that a lot of people have lived with their significant others and so maybe this isn’t quite so big a deal for most of you. But it is for me. I’ve never lived with a man before – not even as just another housemate. One of the reasons I never anticipated even getting married is that I simply couldn’t visualize the concept. I’ve spent too many years independant; at least with roommates we each had our own room to go to when things got tense. Living with a significant other means no privacy, and I really never thought I would find someone who would make me want to give that up.

Fair warning now – if you abhor mushy I suggest you stop reading right now…because you see, I cannot imagine Richard *not* being here. When he is up in Portland I miss him. I miss curling into his arms as we sit on the couch to read. I miss looking over at him while we are both on our computers, being silly with Instant Messages when we’re only a few feet apart. I miss just knowing that even though we are both in different parts of the house, I at least know he is *there*. There are a lot of perfectly good, rational reasons for him moving in – financial, convenience, etc. But none of these matter more than the simple reason that I have discovered that having him here does not mean that I am giving something up, but actually gaining something far better.

Friday morning I was late for work, but there was a really good reason. I had to drive out to sign the paperwork finalizing the construction loan. The final appraisal of the house plans was finished and now we had an amount we actually get to borrow….so after the bank is done with all the processing that they need to do in the next week or two, we’ll be the proud owner of one very hefty debt. Wince.

And I left work early Friday, for a similar reason. Last night we met with the builder to go through the plans one last time so he could get the budget finalized, and work up the contract. Thursday night, despite both of us being exhausted from work, Richard and I headed out to a restaurant, plans under one arm and notebook in hand, and went through them room by room, trying to jot down any changes, additions, suggestions and questions that we had. The list turned out to be fairly small. I think. I’m not sure exactly what to compare it to, having never done this before, so perhaps our little handful of changes were on the excessive side, but I have to assume that less than ten is fairly small….and anyway, after our chat with the builder, the list did grow a tad.

He’s been wonderful – offering suggestions gently without being pushy, pointing out alternatives if something we ask for isn’t really feasible. I am already drooling over the master bedroom suite. I can’t wait to take a bath in the sunken tub, and the shower is going to be huge, and we’re putting linen shelves into the closet, and moving a wall to make the closet bigger, and adding a window, and….and….and.

The builder suggested a front door he’d seen, so Saturday morning, before heading off to meet with friends for a day of rafting (during which I managed, despite the application of copious amounts of SPF-30, to turn parts of me the color of a tomato), we went down to the lumberyard he’d recommended to look at doors.

It’s an odd feeling, staring at front doors, trying to figure out which one should go into a house we have only seen on paper. We didn’t find ‘the door’, but it did underscore the amount of work this is going to take on our part. We’re going to have to start accumulating catalogs of doors and windows and cabinets. We’re going to have to take weekend trips to Home Depot to browse faucets and fixtures. We’re going to have to start browsing through Consumer Reports to figure out what brand of garbage disposal works best, and what stove we should buy. I’m already looking at this and realizing that if we’d simply done the normal thing and bought an pre-built house, things would be so much easier. Not, mind you, that I think the end result won’t be far better for building it from scratch, but I’m looking at the fact that our weekends are already booked through the end of next month, and knowing it will only get worse from there, and wondering just exactly when we’re going to find the *time* to do this stuff we need to do.

He’s planning to break ground in November. At this point I’m antsy to get started, even though I have to keep reminding myself that initially we had agreed that since we didn’t have a time constraint, he could start later. But now that the paperwork is all but done, I am impatient to see some sign of something happening. I wouldn’t care if he just went and moved random piles of dirt around on the Lot-Of-Weeds. I just want something to happen.

But in the meantime, Richard and I will focus on tracking down tile patterns and cabinet knobs, stair banisters and toilets (yes, apparently there are different sorts of toilets to choose from. I’m not sure just why this makes me giggle, but it does). And of course, a front door.

I’m regularly working 10-15 hours per day on this project. We’ve entered crunch time – development is at frantic pace, and we’re all overworked and over tired. I come home too exhausted to want to do much more than poke at my keyboard. I have things to do around the house that I just never seem to have the energy to do, and I keep telling myself that it’ll only be for a bit longer, when in reality I know that it’ll be longer than just a bit. Phase 1 development is final in mid-October, so if all goes well and the gods are smiling, perhaps then I’ll go back to a more ‘normal’ schedule (normal being relative when one is a consultant).

We were discussing resources with the head of the project, and when it came to the issue of myself and my fellow consultant-from-Davis, he noted that he fully intended to keep us around as long as he could. So contrary to my earlier guesses, I won’t be rolling off this project any time soon. I’m having mixed feelings about this. I have told my new manager, and reminded her during her recent trip to see us, that this will be my last project as a consultant. I wheedled the office manager back in my ‘real’ office to not give my desk away because even though consultants do not officially get their own desk space in this latest incarnation of my company, I won’t be doing it forever, and I’d like a place to go back to. But that was when I thought that perhaps by the end of the year I’d be able to go to a ‘normal’ desk job. Now it’s looking like I might be still on this project through summer or fall of next year and I’m torn, because there *are* plusses to staying. It’s within driving distance of my house (the existing one, and the one we’re building). The project – while frustrating and hectic and time-consuming – is a wonderful project and I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. And as long as I remain a consultant, I get the quarterly bonus, which can only help when I’m looking at suddenly becoming a house owner in less than a year.

And yet I also realize that sooner or later I have to make the decision to leave, and be strong enough to walk away from not only this project, but from all that I have known and done over the past three and a half years. Because not only am I wanting to leave consulting, I have also started down the path of thinking that perhaps I want to leave the company as well. When I worked for the smaller fish (prior to it being bought by the current larger fish), they understood that consultants need to be allowed a certain freedom to do their work. I liked my job because I liked the corporate policies. I liked the software I was working with. And I honestly liked the company. Okay, so the travel was starting to wear on me and I’d already been working on getting out of consulting when my then-manager dangled this project in front of my nose and I backed down and took it. But I still felt like I was more than just a number to my company.

Not so with the bigger fish. The continuing message we get, pounded into our weary consulting brains by the higher-ups, is that we don’t count as individuals. The emphasis is on being billable. It doesn’t matter how it affects our personal life. Billable. That’s the key word. We’re penalized for taking training or going on vacation because our entire bonus structure (and with consultants, it’s the bonus structure that keeps us here – that’s what is our compensation for having no life. It’s a BIG chunk of our salary) is based on hours worked. If the hours spent don’t count, we might not even *get* a bonus. When the salary is lower because they expect that you’ll make it up in bonus, this means that if you take vacation (non-billable hours) or take advantage of the training offered (assuming, of course, that you can actually find the *time*), you lose part or all of the bonus for that quarter.

It’s not that my older company didn’t want us to be billable – it’s just that they had a much nicer and more understanding way of putting it. When we were required to give up a weekend to go to that horrid conference in Las Vegas that consisted of three days of utterly useless Death By Power Point presentations, we were reminded that we should find some way to make up the hours we’d be losing as billable work to go to this sharding conference. That made me angry. Very angry. It’s good that I refrain from replying to some of these emails that come out or I might have my decision of what to do made for me, but regardless, it’s this sort of thing that is tipping the scales toward me leaving the company entirely.

But despite the attitude – the big-company corporate policies, the time-wasting mandatory meetings and conference calls during work hours, the fact that it has become more and more obvious that to my company, consultants are merely billing machines that can and should be overworked – I am still clinging to the idea that I could just transfer to another department. Because frankly I’m still scared of what’s outside. I inheireted this position by the simple virtue of my previous companies being bought up around me. I never had to go through the stress and worry of the whole job search. I had this opportunity handed to me on a silver platter and while I consider myself darn lucky it didn’t blow up in my face, it still means that I never had to work to find it. So I’m scared to leave because at least if I stay then it’s easy. I might not be happy, but at least it would be the easy way out.

So I go back and forth, and little things tip the scales one way or the other. Another lovely email from the VP’s discussing how we could all save costs if we did some inane little thing that probably makes all sorts of sense to the desk-bound people who came up with it, but doesn’t apply in the slightest to the thousands of us who are out in the field. Another reminder that I am nothing more than a number to them. And then that lovely bonus check every three months, and the thought of having to go out into the big scary world of job hunting and back the pendulum swings the other way.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do. I do know that I’ll most likely spend a fair amount of time dithering back and forth, and that as this project continues, it at least gives me the luxury of time. And perhaps by the end, when I’m ready to either transition someone into my position, or the project itself runs to completion, the balance will be skewed more heavily on one side or the other and I’ll finally be able to make up my mind.

This afternoon as I was prattling on about these really neat paper dragons Richard and I have been putting together, my mom wondered aloud exactly when she and my dad would get to see them, since she’s been hearing about them ever since we started on them, weeks ago. I caught the hint, a bit belatedly, and invited them over for dinner since I was in a mood to cook anyway (the close proximity of that wonderful produce stand just off the freeway inspires me), and it’s always better to take advantage of those moods with guests.

This meant, of course, that now Richard and I had to finish the remaining dragons before they came over, but there wasn’t much left to do. We’ve been working on them ever since he came over to my house one evening with the book in his hands – something he’d spotted at Borders books and thought might be fun to do. I was, of course, thrilled. These are not simple little paper figures you punch out and fold. They’ve required hours of work, carefully cutting and gluing. The authors of the book apparently felt that instructions were for wimps, so we’ve had to muddle through most of them on our own. Not that that has made it any less fun, although we’ve joked about our exciting lifestyle – evenings spent hunched over the coffee table, scissors in hand, smearing glue with just the right touch onto stiff paper cutouts that slowly have transformed themselves into colorfully detailed three-dimensional dragons.

Making paper dragons is obviously not everyone’s choice for entertainment, but somehow it just seems to fit Richard and I. We’re both dragon fans, and our tastes run more toward the eclectic anyway. Between the two of us, we’ve got a small assortment of gargoyles – a collection which I hope will grow over the years. We’ve also found all sorts of things in the Dancing Dragons catalog that we think the new house will need. I suppose we’ll have to forgo perching gargoyles on the roof corners as drain spouts, and the iron dragon lawn ornament might be a bit much, but the ‘Here there be dragons’ sign will hang outside on the gate for all to see, and there’s some dragon house numbers in that catalog that are awfully tempting…

The paper dragons are all lined up on a shelf right now, waiting til I get the time to string them together into a mobile, which will dangle somewhere in the new house. But this isn’t the end of our construction. Wandering through a toy store last weekend while shopping for birthday presents for three year olds, we spotted our next project. It’s a puzzle clock, the cardboard formed and shaped to look as if it’s carved wood, decorated with ivy, and two little elves at the base. Small wonder we took one look at the box, then at each other, and then marched it right to the cash register. It’s us.

My new manager decided that my practice of taking the laptop to my ‘real’ office and downloading email only once a week or so just wasn’t going to do, and unlike my previous manager, and the folks I deal with on a regular basis from my company, she isn’t willing to work with alternate email addresses. I explained to her that getting my email from home on my thoroughly crummy telephone connection just wasn’t an option, nor was I willing (or even had the time) to go by my office every night just to get email. So she told me I could request a token card to hook the laptop to my DSL connection that I already have. Hey! Now this is an alternative I didn’t know was available to me. This does, of course, hinge on my actually getting that request approved, and judging by the way things are going with my request (some tech support person decided, in his infinite wisdom, that what I really was requesting was to have DSL installed. I’m not quite sure how he deduced that out of my note that said “I need a token card so I can hook my laptop to my DSL”), but eventually it will happen. I am being optimistic.

In order to do this, however, I would have to either set up another phone outlet for DSL – something I could do by myself now that I know it’s nothing more than taking off the cover for the phone jack, figuring out which color wires go where, and then attaching said wires to the appropriate places, but I really didn’t want to go through that hassle. The only other alternative was to constantly be unplugging the cable from the back of my PC in order to plug it into the laptop, and I figured that was going to get really old, really fast.

Richard and I had already discussed setting up our own internal network when we move into the (as still not-begun house). But with this new wrinkle, and the fact that this would mean he could hook his laptop into my DSL when he comes over as well, spurred us to doing the hub thing sooner rather than later.

It wasn’t quite so easy as one might think. The first time we headed out to Fry’s, we got a switch. It was what the guy there told us to get – hey, we didn’t know any better – and after poking at it, glaring at it, and finally breaking down and calling tech support on it, all to no avail, we realized we didn’t have the right thing.

We have it now. This little sucker is not only a hub, it also acts as its own little internal server and firewall. Okay, so maybe we went a wee bit overboard, but hey, we’re talking two nerds in an electronics store, faced with aisles and aisles of gizmos and gadgets guaranteed to make us drool. If we could register for wedding gifts at Fry’s, we would. I figure the fact that we managed to escape with only a handful of cables and a DHCP hub for DSL was pretty lucky.

So now it’s here, all blinking lights and sprouting a rainbow assortment of cables. Of course, once we get the file server and the web server online, we may have to break down and get a larger hub. But that can wait. For now.

There is a cat in my hall bathroom. She has been there nearly two weeks now, although there are times (more often than not, lately) that it feels she has been there a lot longer than that.

She is sick, and that’s why I have her. Her owner – a friend of mine from PernMUSH – is out of town and so I agreed to watch her, since all she needs is a few pills at night, and the usual cat care. No problem. I’ve taken care of dozens of cats before, most sicker than this one. This would be a piece of cake.

Ha. I didn’t know any better, apparently.

She gets two pills every night, and one of them is teeny. And she is smart – she’s figured out that pills are icky and she doesn’t want any part of them.

I know how to pill a cat. In fact, I know how to do lots of things to cats – I spent four years as a foster home for a local humane society and when this evolved, very early on, into bottle-feeding orphan kittens, I got a crash course in feline medicine. Babies of any species get sick more often than adults, and when those babies are already compromised by being abandoned by their mothers, they get sick even worse. So I learned how to give shots. How to rehydrate a sick cat. How to get a recalcitrant feline to take medication, in whatever form it needs to be delivered.

This cat has been testng me a *lot*. She is queen of pill-avoidance, and it doesn’t help that one of them is actually a quarter pill, and the whole pill wasn’t all that big to begin with. And the key factor in her ability to avoid taking the pill is that she has this amazing knack of somehow snagging the pill with her tongue, and then stashing it in her lip until I let go of her and she can go spit it out.

She gave me a few rough days in the beginning, but I finally got the hang of it – a combination grab, turn the head just a bit, scruff the neck, and stuff in the pill. She glares at me but we both know who the winner is going to be, and it isn’t the smaller of the pair of us.

If the pilling battle was all of it, I wouldn’t mind too much. When it comes to medications, whether they’re liquid or pill, or when it’s time to trim claws, I always win. It may take me a few tries, and I don’t always emerge unscathed (with seven cats of my own, I’m usually sporting a few scratches and scrapes), but I win.

The biggest problem is that this cat cries. She mews and yowls and doesn’t shut up, and for a teeny little thing (probably no more than six pounds dripping wet), she has an amazingly overdeveloped set of lungs. I go to sleep listening to the sound of her yelling and it wakes me up. She wants out and she wants out now. And if she was perfectly healthy I may have broken down and let her. But she’s not. She’s got a nasty little gastrointestinal problem that causes her to have…well, I won’t go into the gooey details, but it ain’t pretty and the bathroom is the best place for her to be because at least all surfaces are bleachable. My cats peer curiously at the bathroom door and haven’t even blinked an eye on her nightly bolt out the door when I head in to feed and medicate her, even though she’s hissed at them plenty. And the yelling doesn’t seem to faze them at all.

Me, on the other hand – well, let’s just say that I’m starting to count the days til she’ll be gone, and telling myself that at least I’ve gotten some practice in trick pilling techniques. There’s got to be a good side to this somehow.

I took my car in for an oil change today. While I was there, the mechanic mentioned that I was closing in on 30,000 miles, and that meant a major checkup to the tune of approximately $500 that I had to look forward to. My first thought was – how on earth did I manage to put nearly 30,000 miles on this car that I’ve only had a year? Of course, driving nearly 100 miles round trip to work every day helps….but that’s not the point of this particular monologue, so I’ll just leave it that at sometime in the near future I’m sure there will be a whimpering post about spending lots of money on filters and air hoses and such.

My plan was to drop the off the car and have my mom pick me up at the dealer, since we were to go spend the afternoon together anyway. My mother suffers from distinct lack of direction sense, but even with this I didn’t think it would be an issue – the dealerships are plainly visible from the freeway and I knew she had been out in that direction many times before. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And as the time passed I became more and more annoyed, and then started feeling guilty for being annoyed because what if she was stalled on the side of the road or there had been an accident and here I was, pacing back and forth impatiently at a car dealership where at least I had somewhere air conditioned to wait.

I finally broke down and asked to use their phone to call my parents’ house. My mom wasn’t there, but my dad was, and he hadn’t heard from her. Twenty minutes later, I decided to call again and this is when I finally remembered what I had in my purse.

Yes. The evil thing finally arrived. I ordered it back in May from the my company’s web site, and then dutifully called once a month to see just when it was that the cellular phone would grace my presence…and about two weeks ago, it came. In their infinite wisdom, my company had it sent to my house. Bear in mind that my job description clearly states 100% travel, and with that caveat, that would make it highly unlikely I actually would be able to be home to pick up a package, but regardless, they had it sent there instead of to the nearest company office. And the package required a signature to retrieve. So not only did I *have* to have this horrid little device, now I had to go out of my way to go *get* the darn thing. This involved leaving work early to meander around Sacramento and find the Fed Ex distribution center. I got the box, opened it up in the car, and made my very first call on it to Richard while sitting there in the parking lot. Then I dumped the phone into my purse, carried all the associated gizmos and instructions inside my house when I got home, and hadn’t really had any time to play with it since.

The first warning I should have had was when I opened the box. This thing is cute. And I mean cute. It’s tiny and black and folds up to less than palm size and it’s CUTE!! It’s not supposed to be cute. It’s an evil device and I hate the things and how can I truly hate it if it’s cute?

The second warning was that suddenly there were reasons why it was that I should use it. I was more than a bit alarmed to find myself one day driving home from work and even contemplating making a call from the freeway. When I realized what I was thinking I was truly shocked. What happened to me? Luckily I stifled the impulse, but still. Just the mere presence of one of these things in my purse and I was becoming one of them.

I hadn’t given the number out to anyone because I hadn’t even had the time to figure out how to do simple things like make it ring, or set up the voicemail. I figured I’d get to it one of these days when it was important, but it wasn’t really crucial, and perhaps if no one had the number it could just languish in my purse and I could pretend it didn’t exist.

Then today I remembered that it was there. I didn’t have to borrow the phone from the dealer to call my dad. I could call direct. And it occurred to me that if my mom had one of these, I could call her direct and see what the problem was. Or if I’d thought to give her the cell number, she could have called me to let me know what had happened – which, as it turns out, would have been a significant time saver, as for whatever reason unbeknownst to either my dad or I, she ended up going to the Toyota dealer and waiting there for me for an hour, even though not only did I tell her I was goin?”g to the Nissan dealer, she left a message for my dad saying the exact thing.

So….we finally found each other, and after much relieved laughter that neither of us was lying beside the road in a bloody heap (okay, so I have inherited a bit of my mom’s tendency to worry) we were on our way.

But not before I made sure that I had figured out how to make the phone ring, and given both my mom and my dad the number.

Okay, so I still hate the things. And I think I’ve successfully squelched the impulse to need to use it to call for small things. But I’m grudgingly starting to admit that perhaps they really could be useful, and maybe it isn’t goiing to be quite so bad having one after all. Mind you, I still would have preferred to keep my pager. But I don’t have it, and if I’m stuck with something, well, the phone is alright for now.

Besides. How can I resist it? It’s cute.

Sigh.