Fiendish Glee Club

 

 

Short version: Cheeto has become ginormous and likes to shoulder-tackle us with love and affection. We call this "flumping" - he'll get a running start in the hallway, thunder down the straightaway, leap onto the bed, and then land on his side on top of us. It's different from Ham's more dainty, more reserved, and yet more slobbery "flurfing" -- in which he finds a comfortable spot with his head next to mine on my pillow and then commences purring and patting my face with his paws while drooling and licking his lips. Yeah, I know.

I've come to the conclusion that Ham might be mildly autistic. He completely lacks social skills; he'll go from being hissy and yowly and aloof to contorting himself in order to be petted Just Perfectly, and he shows his love by standing with his hind feet on my lap and his front feet on my shoulders while headbutting me in the face hard enough to give me a nosebleed.

 

Ham did have a bit of a rough patch in August, right before we went to Montana. He developed a real corker (pun intended) of a UT crystal and had to go in for surgery to unplug the pipes, so he boarded at the vet while we were on vacation instead of hanging out at home with our awesome Goth girl catsitter. Now he eats the fancy expensive prescription food. I'd switch him to raw if he would consider anything other than pea-sized dry kibble to be food. Especially since Cheeto has ballooned to almost comic proportions on the prescription chow. :P

 

 

 

 

Cola, the long-suffering Corgi, is the world's best condo dog. She's compact, beautiful, and sweet. She likes to run off-leash at the dog park and hang out at our feet in the TV room and sleep on our bed on the days that we let her. There was that one time she ate my one-of-a-kind patchwork leather with brass studs knee-high boots, and I won't lie -- I'm still bitter. But mostly she's awesome to the max. While we were in Montana she learned how to swim and even ended up playing on a board in the lake of her own volition.

 

October: I met Alton Brown and I dyed my hair blue and purple. The former was pretty amazing; he's one of my two biggest influences in wanting to be a professional chef one day. The latter is like having plumage.

 

September: I saw baby goats and panda cows at the county fair, and I cleaned out my garage in the middle of a thunderstorm.

 

August: The boys and I saw picas, taught the dog to eat huckleberries, and hiked in the wilderness in Montana.

I hope this finds all of you peeps well!

Nutro is recalling their dry cat foods with "use by" dates in a certain range. Details are on their web site.

I was at Petco today to return the food we had that was in the date range and was surprised to see some Nutro dry food still on the shelves. Before I could look to verify that the production dates were in the "safe" ranges, a Nutro rep ran up to me and wanted to know if she could answer any questions. I said, "Why is this food on the shelves?" She replied that it was in safe date ranges, but that the problem with the recalled food was "just inaccurate labeling" anyway. (Long story short: some recalled food contains very high levels of zinc and all of it has low or no potassium.) In spite of this "inaccurate labeling" claim, Nutro's web site suggests that owners be on the lookout for stomach upset, vomiting, refusal of food, etc.

Ham had a few rough days about two weeks ago during which we'd just gotten a new bag of Nutro kitten food and he was eating some of it. I will spare you the details, but he had some fairly serious gastrointestinal issues. In an unrelated move, we decided to switch to feeding both cats adult cat food for a while, and Ham's issues cleared up (in fairness, the adult food is also Nutro, but with a different expiration date so therefore in a different lot).

Lucky for the Nutro rep I had two impressionable young children with me in the store. I still told her in no uncertain terms that she had no business acting like the recall was no big deal or just an administrative move, and told her that my cat had been sick before I knew about the recall but taking him off the food solved his problems. She backpedaled and apologized, but in my mind it's still too little, too late. As soon as I can phase the cats off of Nutro food, I will switch for good.

Brief update: orthopedist says I do not need surgery. I do need another 4-6 weeks (for 6-8 weeks total) on crutches and in a leg brace, and I start PT to keep from losing all of my strength and endurance next week. I have to acknowledge that there is no triathlon season, no Race for the Cure, and no Century this summer, but I am still fortunate not to be worse off, I suppose. My dear friend Megan bought me a beautiful new helmet that I am excited to get to use again sometime before it snows this year, and I ordered myself a new bicycle too. Nothing as fancy as the racing bike I wanted to buy before this happened, but an upgrade to my old commuter that will make a great hand-me-down to the boy when he outgrows his current bike.

And now, Corgi 'tocks.

 

 

Cola wishes you all a happy Mother's Day.

 

I don't think Cheeto and Cola wanted me to feel too bad about sitting around on my butt all weekend, so they showed some solidarity. They do this a lot. Cheeto also lays directly on Cola, but then she says "boof" and heaves a long-suffering sigh and moves out from under him. I have yet to manage to get a photograph first.

Let me preface this with "it could have been worse."

On Monday Dan and I were riding our bikes back from the bank on our way to meet a friend for our weekly trivia outing. We were riding through campus when a woman came out of a parking garage toward the street I was on and didn't bother to stop at the stop sign or look to see if anyone was on the sidewalk. Dan was screaming at me, and I saw it coming and tried to speed up, but I didn't get completely out of her way. Her car made contact with my knee and the rear rack on my bike, apparently spun me ass over teakettle, and deposited me on my knee with my bike on top of me in the path of oncoming traffic. 

I got to chat with the paramedics while Dan talked to the cops. We got a ride back to the house (our bikes too) in an ambulance. About 15 minutes after I got home I realized my knee was in a lot worse shape than it seemed when I was just sitting there on the grass next to the sidewalk. Fast forward 3 days through ER visits, insurance company visits, and lawyer consultations, and I'm sitting here at home stir crazy because I can't do a single thing I normally do to vent my stress and frustration. However, I am very lucky -- it could have been a lot worse. No bones are broken although my knee will require therapy at a minimum and possibly surgery, and I won't be doing any running or cycling for the forseeable future.

The moral of this story is that triathlons aren't dangerous. Sidewalks are.

Because according to the LA Times (via the Chicago Tribune), triathlons are twice as deadly as marathons.

This is, of course, relative. 14 triathletes died during races in a 2 year study. 13 of them died during the swim, although the author of this "article" treats that as an anecdotal fact rather than the very crux of the matter. I guess "Open water swimming in huge crowds can be deadly" was too obvious and uninteresting a headline.

Yep, training for another one (maybe two) tri's this summer. And a century bike ride. Just as soon as I get over this flu.

 

 

Today Dan was at Petco getting Cola her shedding-season grooming. As he walked by the cat adoption cages, a magical orange kitten called out to him. When he held Cola up to the cage, the kitten rubbed his entire body against the dog and purred.

He called me and sent me cell phone pictures. I was in an all-hands meeting; I told him to stall. As soon as I could, I went to see the kitten -- and knew instantly that we had to go fill out the paperwork or he'd be gone. We rushed between the Petco and the adoption center and the cash machine; we had to be home by 3:20 to meet the school bus.

The kiddo arrived home from school and we concocted an elaborate ruse about needing to pick up Cola and have Ham's claws trimmed. Away to Petco we went. I suggested my son go look at the cats. The magical orange kitten took one look at my son and let out a long, insistent holler. When he went silent, he didn't so much stop as he ran out of breath.

It felt like fate, like a second chance. Like we were meant to have a magical orange kitten, and even though one had been taken from us much too soon, Serendipity delivered another one just when we were ready to think about it again.

Currently, he's rotating between Dan and my son on the couch. If one of them stops petting him for any length of time, he yells about it and then moves to the other boy.

And we shall call him Cheeto.

First: Thank you to everyone for your responses last post. I still can't handle going through and responding to everything individually. I hope you'll indulge me in my desire not to sniffle through my day at work.

Second: I am the poster child for butter. If the naturally occurring saturated fats lobby ever needs someone they can trot out and point to and say "this is what butter and bacon can do," I'm their girl. We had our annual health screenings (free, optional) at work last week, and once again I passed my cholesterol and blood sugar tests at levels "exceptional after fasting," only I took the test 45 minutes after eating an egg fried in butter and two slices of bacon, which I washed down with a cup of coffee whitened with heavy whipping cream. My total cholesterol is 178.

Take that, margarine.