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21 years is a very good run for a cat. For the last couple of years, Angel has been spending most of the time on her heating pad with regular excursions for food and foot-rubs. (I.e., she rubs; my feet.) But though she was clearly an old lady cat, she was in more or less stable health. This week, that changed. (Short version, probable digestive obstruction, but with other minor long-term issues including probably kidney misfunction.) After several days close observation, I decided it was time and took her on the one-way trip. It felt a little premature ... but then, with previous aged cats I know I've left it later than it should have been. I had a certain amount of self-pressure due to the upcoming holiday trip and not wanting to leave hard decisions to a cat-sitter. The folks at the vet's office were great. I came in all prepared to be defensive about my decision and the doctor said, "You know your cat. If you say it's time, it's time."

I spent the last hour sorting through items to be freecycled (canned food, unopened bag of dry food, unused litter, absorbent pads, recirculating water fountain after I sanitize it) and items to be trashed (box, opened food, grooming equipment, opened health supplies) and cleaning up the inhabited areas (including several stains, curtesy of this week's decline).

It's going to be a little strange not having a cat after 40 years of continuous cattedness but I'm not planning to get another one at the moment.

She was a good cat. She came to me with the name Angel and a reputation for an unfortunate fondness for small furry creatures (that were supposed to be fellow residents). In honor of that, I decided her secret true name was Melangell, after the Welsh saint whose fondness for small furry creatures was much more benign.

What were the first clues? Well, the mouse droppings on the windowsill above the sink were pretty conclusive. (As a former lab animal colony worker, I know from mouse droppings.) And it also explained the little nibble-marks in two of the tomatoes in the fruit bowl (which I though had been handling damage to over-ripe spots). But the hole in my bag of bird seed and the scattered sunflower shells are pretty strong evidence as well. Oh, and the skittering sound behind the tool cabinet when I was packing the bird seed into a mouse-proof container was suspicious.

Clearly my cat is allowing her reputation to be besmirched.

I have come to a compromise with my cat about the proper use of a lap when seated on a recliner chair. My theory is that it's for a laptop computer. She disagrees. So when I was perusing the Fry's insert on Friday and spotted an on-sale cantilevered computer tray I capitulated. The computer is now a little on the high side for comfort, but I no longer have to keep shoving the cat off my hands as I type.

I validated the altered pants pattern on a pair of shorts yesterday but haven't started cutting out the pants fabric yet. The living room is still a bit of a mess what with the sifting and sorting process. It has occurred to me that I could greatly reduce the volume of the fur stash by picking the items apart and discarding the coat-guts that I won't be using. That would free up a bin or two. And there are a couple of bundles of cut-out and semi-assembled medieval garments that never went forward because I decided I didn't like them for me, that could be passed on if completed. (Or maybe passed on semi-completed, but that's less likely.)

I did go out and see Becoming Jane, which I'd tried to see on Friday (but got off on the timing) and then had as a fallback on Saturday in case we didn't make the timing for Last Legion. It was a pleasant enough costume flick with excellent visuals, but unsatisfying in some ways. I guess I can understand that some people figure a brilliant, talented, and personable young woman who doesn't marry -- especially one who wrote so ably about affairs of the heart -- must have suffered some tragic heartbreak to turn her to a single path. (Stephanie Barron, in her "Jane Austen mysteries" has taken a similar tack, giving Jane a hopeless romance with a mysterious adventurer.) But I can't help taking it as an insult to all the women across time who simply decided they didn't need marriage to live a complete life.

I spent my lunch hour today talking to the bank about an equity line of credit -- partly with the painting job in mind but partly with the thought that it would be useful to have it set up in case ... well, in case. I'd only meant to drop by and make an appointment, but the person in charge of that topic was available so we got down to specifics. I think he was delighted to be dealing with someone who actually wanted to know all the details about how the process worked -- what the benefits were and where the pitfalls were -- although he didn't quite get the notion that I only wanted to spread out the cost a bit, not to artificially defer it. I'll be going in again tomorrow with a couple of supporting documents and I'll get a much more specific notion of the pluses and minuses of that option so I can compare it with my other option(s).

The squirrel follies seem to be in ratings week this morning. To visualize this properly, you have to know that my deck (off the 2nd floor kitchen) has a railing about waist high with posts that rise to about head-height (the builder was planning to trim them to just above the railing but I said to leave them in case I wanted to use them as an anchor for something else at some point ... but I digress) with a variety of trees snugging up next to the railing on the other side. So I'm sitting having breakfast right next to one of the posts when there comes a violent rustling in one of the trees at the other end of the deck and suddenly a squirrel pops out onto the deck floor. Just about nose-to-nose with a very interested cat. The squirrel does one of those teleportation things up onto the deck railing and runs like mad ... straight at me. Says me to squirrel, "Did you really want to do that?" Squirrel teleports to top of post and we have a brief and amicable stare-off. Squirrel then does a backflip into the apple tree and scampers off. Cat stares longingly.

Another squirrel (or maybe the same one) is currently sitting in the birch tree, just in tantalizing distance from the cat, nibbling on seed-thingies. Another is checking the ripeness of the green almonds in one of the almond trees. I haven't quite figured out whether the squirrels actually find unripe almonds nutritious or whether they just nibble at them reflexively all through the season out of habit.

I day-tripped to Crown Tourney yesterday and did the butterfly thing -- if I take a chair, then I'm much too inclined to plunk it down and stay in one place, and one of the benefits of daytripping is doing a lot of circulating and talking to different people. That I did in abundance. Saw the brothers and all the usual suspects. In addition to general schmoozing, I offered the leftover games booklets from the Games Tourney to the Princess, since she's very interested in promoting games in general and she was delighted to take them off my hands to pass out. I've been drooling over acanthusleaf's jewelry for quite a while, but nothing had ever quite grabbed me by the throat, although I was quite enamored of the little "hat jewels" she makes and had talked a bit about maybe getting something in that line. Well, I've also mentioned to her in the past that I'm quite fond of emeralds (#1 they're green; #2 they're my birthstone) -- not necessarily the top-quality ones, but I quite like the low-grade ones as well. And she has kept pointing out that they're enough more expensive than the usual run of stones she uses (e.g., in the garnet range of prices) that they're hard to sell. Well, this time she pulls out a little box with four small round emeralds -- just perfect for the corners of a hat-jewel -- and they grabbed me by the throat. So it'll have a square garnet in the center and a pearl drop. Now I need to think about what sort of 12th night dress would go well with it.

In the end, I decided to bug out before evening court, since it was shaping up to be long and late as usual and the peerages that I knew and cared about had been taken care of earlier in the day. So I even got home before dark and got a rather good nights sleep ... interruped only somewhat by vivid dreams of hordes of cockroaches in my house. Not sure what that's a metaphor for.

The cat is once again going through skin issues -- "hot spots" which she licks and bites neurotically until they go into bald patches. This time I'm trying a topical remedy that's supposed to combine soothing qualities with an unpleasant taste. It certainly smells strongly, although I'm not sure this is an advantage, since it won't discourage licking and biting if it overwhelms her nose just from the fumes. I had a dream last night in which I acquired two new kittens -- one a sort of sandy puma-color and the other an orange tiger. I have reassured the cat that I intend no such thing in waking life.

( iTunes and the less furry software )

As if to thumb her ... um ... paw, at my last post, the cat has been energetic this evening and has ventured away from her kitchen counter perch to make some valiant attempts at lying on the laptop. Then she hopped over to the sewing table and peed all over some mending. I can't take this much longer. I'm getting really tired of mopping up cat urine three times a day. Have I mentioned that the kitchen counter is grouted tile? Have you tried mopping up cat urine from grouted tile? That you plan to prepare food on? (We will leave, for the moment, my opinion of an interior designer who would make a kitchen counter out of grouted tile. These aren't your nice big 4x4" tiles with little tiny strips of grout. No, these are 2.5x2.5" tiles with big wide strips of decorative grout ... that have gradually been eroding over the years.)

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours composing a strongly but diplomatically worded letter to the lawyer who handled the partnership dissolution. I pointed out that his billing statements had a different (higher) hourly rate than the signed contract, hence I was sending him a check for the correct, lower amount. And I questioned the plausibility of him having spent almost twice as much time on my case after the completed documents had been handed over to me than he had spent in researching and preparing those documents in the first place. I then went on to request further explanation of a number of line items on the statement: phone calls on days when my phone log shows no calls, time spent reviewing a memo regarding someone whose name I don't recognize (and this was after he had completed all my paperwork), time spent consulting with his associate (after all the paperwork was complete) when all of the work was being billed at the primary attorney's rate rather than the associate attorney's rate. Things like that. The kicker was the phone call when he asked me, "What was it I'm doing for you again? And could you fax me a copy of the contract -- I can't seem to find my copy." He billed me for that call. I figure that at some later point in the process I'll be sending copies of the correspondence to both the agency who referred me to him and to the bar association.

And then this morning when I was getting cash from the ATM I noticed that my checking account balance was $5000 less than it should have been. Turns out that instead of making a single transfer of $5000 into a CD as requested, they did it twice. (That was what I suspected when I saw the amount of the discrepancy.) So they're working on sorting it out. I'm going to want to spend that money before the 6 month term is up -- got redecorating to do.

Tired. Definitely tired.

Unresolution: In 2006 I will endeavor to spend at least as much on my own dental work as on my cat's. Unfortunately, she has a significant head start. The broken tooth (right upper canine) did have to be extracted. *ouch* It's always hard to tell how much a cat is in pain. The pain-killer the vet gave me says, "twice a day, or three times if the pain is severe." Ok, Angel, meow twice if it's at least an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. But since the main thing she was peeved about last night after coming home was not being allowed to eat anything, I figure the drugs were working nicely.

In the mean time, I got the "feline hobbles" treatment in the kitchen yesterday evening while making mini plum puddings for 12th night gifts. I ended up with a rather improvised recipe since I didn't have enough currants and dates to stick to the original recipe. It came out something like this:

Ad Hoc Plum Pudding (based on a 16th c. recipe)

Cream 1 c. butter with about 2 c. brown sugar
Beat in 8 eggs
Add lots of ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and somewhat less of cloves
Stir in all the currants and chopped dates available. Then proceed to add other available chopped dried fruits and chopped nuts until it looks like enough.
Take from the freezer a couple of the leftover loaves of bread from the collegium dinner. Trim off the crusts and process into crumbs in the Cuisinart.
Into the above mixture, stir in bread crumbs until it looks about right -- about 8 cups.
Cut cheesecloth into double-layer squares about 4" square. Place 1/4 cup pudding in the middle of each square, gather the edges into a little "purse" and wrap and tie with carpet thread.
Heat a large pot of water to a boil. Add 8 puddings at a time and boil for about 12 minutes. Drain, trim the cheesecloth to leave about a quarter inch above the gathered tie. (This means people will be able to unwrap the pudding without needing scissors.)
Makes slightly over three dozen.

Today, after much getting my act together and making sure all necessary data was available, I took the first concrete step towards taking on a mortgage. Family members know the whole backstory, but for the rest of you ... ( Read more... )

Horrible dream last night about bad things happening to my cat, all connected with the wound she had back a month ago. Fortunately it was one of those dreams where the inherent logical problems made me realize it was all a dream and I could just let it go.

The weather remains coldish, but it looks like it may not rain for the jaunt to SF tomorrow.