Partial to the bean…

OMG, y’all, where have I been, and why haven’t I blogged? When is everything going to slow down and let me breathe and feel like I’ve got time and energy to spare? Clearly not in September, so cross your fingers for October…

Notable news from the past week:

- My cat’s still in the freezer. Bleh.

- Anth’s MS ride went very smoothly, although the weekend trip surrounding it contained an unusually high level of chaos. You know that point where everything is so annoying that it all becomes funny? I passed that point and wrapped back around to annoyed, and then by the end I may have gotten to funny again. Oy.

- Sammi’s course of antibiotics is almost done — just tonight and tomorrow morning, thank gawd because getting each dose into her is a 60-minute struggle.

- Alice has switched her school schedule around so she can take Japanese I, which is cool. Now she goes all day Mon/Wed/Fri and then mornings on Tues/Thurs. Sammi still has Tuesdays off and goes full-time the other 4 days of the week, so I’ve got Tuesday mornings one-on-one with her, and Thursday afternoons one-on-one with Alice. It’s a bit of an adjustment, but she’s really loving Japanese so far, so yay!

- Hmm, what else? Alice had double ballet this week, to make up for a class that was cancelled last week. That, plus the fact that she started her twice-monthly mother’s helper job on Tuesday, has left her feeling pretty worn out. She had insomnia last night, on top of everything else, and several of her friends (in school and ballet) are out sick this week, so I’m trying hard to keep her healthy and keep her resistance up despite all of the energy drains.

- My proofreader plugin wants me to be sure I mean “ballet” in the preceding paragraph, and not “ballot”, or perhaps “bullet”. Thank you, proofreader plugin, but I know what I’m doing here.

(Unless/until we get kittens…)

Adjusting to a cat-free home is weird. This whole thing is weird. Having my cat in a box in the freezer* is super weird, but the rest of it is weird, too.

I’ve had at least one cat living with me for my entire conscious life, except for the 2 years I lived in the dorms, and my first year out of the dorms when I was in a no-pets apartment. We moved out of there specifically to find a place where we could have cats. And I’ve lived with this cat for 19+ years — almost half my life. So having no one meowing at me while I cook or sitting on the comfiest blanket in the house or otherwise co-existing in a furry sort of way is very odd. I keep looking over to where I expect her to be and she’s not there.

I’m not really sad about her being gone — she was ready to go, and honestly I was ready to have a break from the care she’s required recently. But everything just kind of feels off. It’s nice to have the guinea pigs here, at least. So I’m never totally alone.

Alice, I think, feels pretty much the same way — she says that she’s been preparing herself for Lilith to die since she had that “attack” on Christmas Eve ‘08. Sammi, on the other hand, has been having various emotions on the subject — crying while the vet was here, then rebounding immediately after the euthanasia and wanting to investigate the body. Sometimes she is really mad at me for killing her cat, and sometimes she is excited to get kittens**. It’s a process for us all, I suppose.

* Anth hurt his back over the weekend and was not up for digging a hole on Tuesday, so we put her in “the morgue” until such time as we can send her off right…

** In my ideal world, we’d start looking for a couple of sweet kittens sometime in early 2011. I think Anth would like a much much longer hiatus first. He also has some stipulations about which cat(s) we get (i.e. we have to know their parentage and be able to prove conclusively that they will “not be neurotic”). It remains to be seen how all of this plays out.

So we went out to run some errands – no use sitting home and feeling sad, right? We get to the shoe store and Sammi takes her shoe off and I see that a toe that she vaguely mentioned was itchy in the morning is now completely red and hot, and there are pink streaks leading off of it and halfway up her leg!! Her doctor’s office was great about getting her right in, and now we’ve got a prescription for antibiotics and Epsom salt soaks, twice daily for 10 days. *sigh*. What a day. Is it any wonder we stopped for ice cream??

My cat is very weak today — she can’t walk much, doesn’t seem to want or be able to eat or drink, and is having some poop issues as well. I’ve made an appointment for a home vet to come here at 10 tomorrow morning, and I’m thinking that we will probably put her to sleep at that time, barring any miraculous recoveries in the night. Her quality of life seems to be plummeting pretty drastically, and I’m ready for this to be over, for all of us…

I’ve just installed the Wordpress app for my iPhone. If this works, I’ll be able to blog wherever I am!!

- Anth upgraded to an iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, and I got his old one. For the first week of use, I did not hear the damn thing ring once. For whatever reason, frequency or old age or whatever, it would ring and Alice would hear it and I would not. So my quest began to find ringtones that I would actually perceive, resulting in the TMBG ringtone mentioned in an earlier post. I also set the text message notification to some very loud bleepy kind of noise. So now I totally hear my phone every time it rings, because it scares the living crap out of me. Honestly — I just got a text from Alice and I jumped out of my freaking chair.

- Speaking of Alice, I dropped her off at school this morning and she won’t be home until Friday. It’s Icebreaker — a very cool thing that our school does to build community among students. Lower Schoolers like Sammi just go to school during regular hours, but the older kids are staying at the school, sleeping on the floors and hanging out, for 55 hours. This is the first year that Alice has actually stayed, which is cool but kind of weird for me.

- I know I’ve said this an uncountable number of times in this blog, but: My cat is dying. I mean, she’s been dying for years — gradually losing weight, mobility, and teeth. But as of this week, she is hardly eating, weighs under 5 pounds, can no longer get up onto the couch for snuggles, and is letting me know in assorted ways that she is having a really hard time finding any way to be comfortable. I’m rapidly running out of tricks — we switched from dry to wet food as her teeth became useless; moved her litter box upstairs into the main living area when she got to be too rickety to navigate the stairs; got her a heating pad and Cosequin when she became noticeably stiff; and started mixing in flower essences every day (Kidney Kitty and Elder Support), even though she refused them straight from the bottle, which meant that I had to spend 3 minutes “de-alcoholizing” her drops each morning before they could be administered. Now that she can’t get onto the couch any more, her world has become circumscribed to the small circle between her food, her litter box, and the fluffy blanket on the floor by the deck door. I’m waiting for the signal that she’s done and wants to go (you know, go); I hope that when it comes, it’s obvious. I hope that it comes soon.

The last batch of pictures from 2009 is now up!

- Sammi had her first speech therapy session today. She was very nervous about it. She has an older woman as her clinician, which is different; we go to a local university for speech services, and the sessions are conducted by students as part of their training, so Alice had a string of cute co-eds when she was in therapy. Sammi’s got Roz, who seems to be my age or older (clearly going back to school for a mid-life change/start of career). It remains to be seen if this motherly vibe turns out to be a plus or a minus for Sam, who found the first session “boring but ok”.

- Also today we tried a new restaurant — a burger joint that just opened on the metaphorical ashes of a previous burger joint. There was nobody in there when we stopped by, the food was only adequate, the menu was full of typos and inconsistencies, and it generally had the stink of imminent failure all over it. I was feeling very supercilious about the whole affair, but then a very polite older gentleman with a heavy accent came out of the kitchen and gave us some free food, all smiling and nodding and trying to get us to like being at what was obviously his brand new business, and then I just felt sad. *sigh*

- I figured out (all by myself!) how to put a new ringtone on my phone — it’s 30 seconds of Istanbul (Not Constantinople) by The Might Be Giants. *beam*

These pictures are amazing.

Much to Alice’s chagrin and depression, today is the end of summer. Tomorrow is back-to-school, Wednesday is back-to-ballet, and the weather clearly indicates that the Dog Days have passed. *sigh* We had a pretty good summer break — went to New Hampshire, Rehoboth Beach, Dutch Wonderland… We only hit the pool about 8 times, but by the end of the season Sammi had started to get the hang of swimming a little, which is awesome. We hung out with friends, got a lot of reading done, saw some really good movies (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Inception were probably our favorites — Alice and I went back to see Inception again last night, and enjoyed it just as much the second time). Each kid had a birthday celebration that seemed to me to be just what she wanted. We honed our Goodwill skills to the point that we have now identified the best ones in the area, and both kids have greatly augmented their wardrobe with quirky and well-constructed second-hand items. Alice got her babysitter’s certification and has really started to build up a customer base for her sitting/mother’s helping business. We all spent a lot of time on Facebook. Heh.

So what’s up for the fall? Well, school, obviously. Alice is going into her last year of middle school (8th grade, I guess, although our school doesn’t really “do” grade levels). Sammi is going back to a greatly-changed lower school: enrollment in the l.s. dropped by more than half from last year, so they lost one of their teachers to keep the 5:1 ratio. It’s going to be a very small, very intimate, and hopefully very agile and flexible school experience for her. Hopefully Sammi will be able to move past the fact that most of her best school friends won’t be there this year, and enjoy herself anyway.

Alice is taking ballet again — her 9th consecutive year, and her 4th(?? um, 5th?) year at the dance school down the street). She’s been offered the chance to go en pointe, but has so far declined, with my support. I love that she has this extracurricular that is enjoyable and physical for her. We both gripe a lot about not being able to just come home from school on Wednesday and relax, and of course the end of the dance year is always a little bit exhausting with the dress rehearsals and the buns and the whatnot, but I hope she keeps going with this as long as she still enjoys it.

As I mentioned above, Alice is trying to build a business, and doing pretty well with it. She has a solid “3 hours, twice a month” job starting in a few weeks, and will probably have another similar job lined up soon. Those are both mother’s helper gigs, which of necessity are generally scheduled on weekdays when moms are home alone and need an extra hand or two. Two regular mother’s helper jobs will pretty much fill her calendar up, since she only has one day/week when she’s available. Once we see how this (school + ballet + mother’s helper) works out, we’ll see if she has enough energy to also try to find some babysitting jobs on evenings/weekends.

Sammi’s got speech therapy starting next week, which I hope will be really good for her. She’s at a point where she gets frustrated and angry when people can’t understand what she’s saying (she has major trouble with the -er sound, and more minor difficulties with -ng), so it’s definitely time for a little help. The timing of her appointments is pretty nice, giving us a weekly excuse for an early dinner out and maybe a little shopping between school and therapy.

I’m looking forward to A Quiet House again, something I have not had since May. I’m also looking forward to the kids being out of the house so I can surreptitiously declutter large quantities of Stuff without small people protesting, “no, not that thing! I looooove that thing!!!” every 38 seconds.

Oh, and one more thing that’s happening this fall: Anth’s MS ride!! Please consider donating!!!

Anth is biking 50 miles on September 25 to raise money for the National MS Society. Please consider donating! No amount too small (or too large)!! This link takes you straight to his donation page, where you can use a credit card. It would be wonderful if he could meet his goal of $1000 raised!!!