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January 28, 2007
Rituals
Sunday mornings are the only times that I can think anymore. Work is so busy, and it takes so much out of me that weekend and relaxation have shrunk down to a few hours now. The good news is that writing here has become a part of that ritual -- for better or worse -- and it's nice to have a recap of the weeks to look back on. Monday was work busy, as was Tuesday and Tuesday night. Recovering from doing overnight work gets harder the older I get :) Work continued to be busy through the end of the week, though I started coming down with something on Friday. Friday night I took the dog out for a walk, and ended up spewing twice. The look on Gbic's face was precious -- don't do that HERE, I go potty HERE! Uhh, yeah. You had to see it :) Yesterday I slept off and on all day, and whatever hit me Friday night seems to have passed.
We did get some grocery shopping done Wednesday night, so I've been trying to cook more at home. No success yesterday of course, but I have a gigantic vat of Mexican Beef and Beans simmering on the stove right now, so higher hopes for today. Gbic is doing fine with her recovery. Her fur is starting to grow back and she's been much better about not scratching. The Aveeno hydrocortisone cream really seemed to heal up her dermatitis that was bugging her above the incision. She's still not liking her normal dry food, so I think we'll have to switch that up a bit.
Today will involve some more shopping -- Target and Petco this time. The cats are out of food, and I'll see about different food for Gbic too. Next weekend Richard's headed to Toronto for NANOG, thus it's time to stock up on cleaning supplies at Target, heh :) Not sure what I'll be able to get done while he's gone this time, but we'll see.
On the agenda for this coming week: possibly another short Costco run tomorrow. They have a shredder that I'd like very much on sale starting tomorrow. It's also time to send another batch of goodies out to folks. I think we might be going brownies this time. Maybe some more of the other items that have been popular. The dreaded end of the month task falls this week -- oh so looking forward to that! That suckiness will be mitigated by attempting to get in on the Halo3 beta program. Something like 2 or 3 hours of online play required between the 1st and the 3rd, then signing up on the website on the 5th. Halo3!!
Posted by jodikins at 9:19 AM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2007
Post-op and catching up
It's been a busy week. At work, I feel like I'm finally making some headway, both in standardization and in people building, so that's a plus. On the home front, Gbic's rescheduled surgery was yesterday. The vet reported that the giant sebaceous cyst was actually a cluster of three together. Bad news is that they were pretty infected, but the good news is that once they got them out, the tissue behind them was perfect. Dr. Jacobsen said that it looked so good he wasn't even going to send the cysts out to pathology, so that's good to hear. Her teeth were okay -- no extractions, but her gums were a little infected. I'm a little disturbed by the infected stuff because she was just on a 10 day course of antibiotics, but the doc didn't seem too concerned. He just gave her a prescription for another 7 day course. And now the sticker shock: total for surgery, bloodwork to check her phenobarbitol levels, cyst removal, and teeth cleaning: $778. Ouch indeed.
Had a bit of a scare last night. Because of where Gbic's stitches are, an Elizabethan collar wouldn't help her -- the incision is on her neck/shoulder, so she can't lick it or chew the stitches. Leave it to little Miss Gbic to find a way to fuck with them anyway :) The stitches and the incision are of course, well within scratching distance. With the amount of fur they shaved away, she's really itchy, so it's going to be a long two weeks trying to keep her from scratching there. Last night she actually broke the incision open a tiny bit between two of the stitches and had some bleeding. This sent me into freaked out puppy-mom mode, and I grabbed some papertowels and applied some gentle pressure to stop the bleeding. All was fine, except for my nerves :P
Yesterday we also went to Costco and stocked up on toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, and other random items. It was an okay experience as far as Costco goes. We got lucky with a close-ish parking space that we didn't have to camp out or drive around for. Navigating in the warehouse also wasn't terrible, though it was crowded. And we didn't have to wait in a line to check out either. As Costco goes, not bad ;)
Posted by jodikins at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2007
Freedom... briefly
So. On Wednesday we got some snow... about 3 inches or so. Unlike most snow events around here, the temperature didn't immediately climb back to the 40s, and melt all the pretty snow. When you don't do anything about snow, and people drive on it, it compacts into ice. This then refreezes into a mess. With the nifty new rear-wheel drive car, and too much horsepower, we opted to stay home til it's gone. I called the vet on Friday and cancelled Gbic's surgery -- we'll reschedule this coming week. Since she's on antibiotics, I felt okay about postponing it -- she hasn't been scratching and thus far, she hasn't been getting sick from the antibiotics.
On the positive side, I've been cooking at home since Tuesday, and going through some of the chest freezer treasures. Lots of hits, a couple of misses, but overall, we've been doing pretty well. We started running low on toilet paper (I'd been holding out for costco's coupon this month), things to drink, milk, and eggs. Then Richard started getting sick. Snotty sick. Yucky sick. He's now tagged me, and I think even Gbic's a bit under the weather. Everyone sick, and no cold products!
Today we slept half the day, miserably, I might add. But, it was also sunny all day. And relatively warm compared to the bitter cold of the past few days. We decided to make a run for it this afternoon :) Richard hadn't had a cheeseburger in nearly a week, so we hit Wendy's first. My food was meh, but I'm also to the point where I can't taste things either. While we were partaking of our meal in the car, we saw the cutest tubby little squirrel. Richard was too hot in the car, so he opened the window. Tubby Squirrel came running up to the car, apparently expecting french fries. Guess we know how he got tubby, eh? So Richard tossed a fry out to him. Then I tossed a few out, and Mr. Tubby Squirrel picked them up one by one and ate them with extreme cuteness.
Then I hit Bartells for every cold, cough and sore throat remedy they had. Halls drops, N'Ice drops, Cloraseptic strips, Dayquil, Nyquil, etc etc. Also picked up some Breathe Right strips in both mentholated and plain so that Richard and I can attempt to breathe tonight. Woo. After that I went to Larry's because it was right next to Bartell's. Stocked up on more stuff, though it was kind of random and haphazard shopping.
Looking at the weather forecast, looks like we may be stuck in here for another few days at least before temps climb high enough to get sustained melting to get rid of the ice sheets. Wheee!
Posted by jodikins at 4:31 PM | Comments (0)
January 9, 2007
Vet and stuff
So, Gbic had what we thought was a skin tag removed last year when she got her teeth cleaned. I noticed another one on her shoulder last month, and it was something that was icky, but didn't seem to be bothering her. I noticed last week that she'd been scratching at it and that there was some gunk in her fur there, so I made an appointment to take her into the vet. We saw Dr. Miller, and he took a look at it and said that it was another sebaceous cyst. He looked up in the chart and said, yep, she had another one removed last year with the teeth cleaning. Thanks so much to the previous doctor for NOT TELLING ME EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS.
Anyway, he felt around the cyst, and umm, expressed it a bit, and we agreed since she was scratching at it, it should be removed. It's fairly large -- like 1.5 inches in diameter, but Dr. Miller said she's lucky she's got so much neck skin -- they can afford to cut a big chunk out with no problem, heh. In the meantime, she's on antibiotics, and we're supposed to put a tshirt on her to keep her from scratching :) Her teeth are also yucky again, so since she has to be under general anesthesia for the cyst removal, we'll shell out the massive chunk of change to get her teeth cleaned again. And she can have more blood work, yay!
She's scheduled for surgery on Saturday, and this time I'm going to let her go through recovery at the vet and not pick her up until 6 or 7pm. She'll be a lot happier coming out of the haze without the cats around to annoy her :)
Other than that today's been kind of quiet. Still working on lots of infrastructure things, and generally laying low.
Posted by jodikins at 6:35 PM | Comments (0)
January 7, 2007
2007
The fact that this is the first post of 2007 and that it's 1/7/07 is indicative of life thusfar this year. Busy. Beyond busy. Tons of work stuff, but much more promising work stuff. Lots of things to learn from, and an enormous amount to teach.
I'll get around to posting my Christmas wrap up later today, I hope. We had fun, still way too much food, and some things worked better than others. Right now I'm feeling fairly balanced and content with life in general. We're making a concerted effort at normalcy -- regular sleep habits, eating better, cleaning house, etc. After such an angsty few months, it's definitely a nice place to be in.
Posted by jodikins at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)