Deepish Wednesday

In one of those expected turn of events, I can no longer squeeze into spaces that once used to easily fit me. In restaurants, I get stuck between chairs. Entering my house, I never seem to open the door wide enough. I walk into walls. And, in related news, food seems to land on me, where once it might have fallen on a napkin in my lap. If I could eat more elegantly, this last one would not be an issue.

When not eating or trying to navigate the increasingly tighter world, I am often asleep. It's hard to stay awake for more than 8 hours at a time, which made my most recent sleepless night (last night) even more unpleasant. Rob is out of town, so Smokey wandered the house looking for him FOR HOURS. His rotation included stomping into the bedroom and hopping over me, meowing and walking around until he had established that Rob was, in fact, not there. This did not stop him from checking every 15 minutes, usually just as I was about to fall asleep. Smokey, despite being 7 pounds, manages to walk like a baby elephant through the house. Emma punctuated his antics by howling into the night at random intervals for totally unknown reasons. She doesn't share Smokey's deep connection to Rob, so I'm pretty sure she was just being an asshole.

Last night I also finished Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. I loved it--it opens with a letter from Vonnegut's son Mark, who calls his dad "Kurt" and who also calls him out on some of his more nonsensical thoughts:

"I'm as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy."

What? Mark Vonnegut called this "a sentence with no meaning." But then there are so many sentences full of meaning, that you just kind of go with it. There's a letter home after Vonnegut was released from a POW camp in Germany, and the short fiction that follows is all connected to his experience of World War II. The book is almost exclusively about war, which is a theme that ran through our house this weekend. No, we're not fighting, but we went to see Avatar, rented The Hurt Locker, and had friends over to watch that annual battle known as The Super Bowl (was it just me or did the commercials totally suck? I have reached my yearly quota of Budweiser ads, for sure.)

I'm thinking the theme for this week should be a little different, maybe fluffier and not so bomb-oriented. It could help the cats sleep easier, if nothing else.

Everyone Naps

Nine Lives

I want you to know how I now start and end my day: by chasing both cats around the house and forcing them to drink terrible, vile medication from a little squeeze tube. They gag, grit their teeth, and scream and I have to sit on them and fight to get the antibiotics down their throats. It is so, so not awesome.

Why are we doing this, you may wonder. It's not enough to say that the cats are just old or that we wanted them to see a vet as soon as we got to the west coast to make sure all was well. Those things are true, and eventually we would have taken them to get checked out. Smokey, however, forced our hand by taking it upon himself to jump out of an open window last week on moving day. Rob found him screeching on a ledge outside the 1st floor neighbor's kitchen window. At first, we were more confused than worried. Why would he jump? Does he hate life so much? Should we stop feeding him the same boring food every day so he has more to look forward to? Should we have short therapy sessions before bed each night to reinforce his worth as a cat and family member?

Then we realized that he had a huge fat, infected lip. So not only did he jump, but it was clearly not so graceful. Oh, the shame.

Anyway. I took both cats to the vet last week and it turned out that while Smokey just needed some meds, Emma had to go back in the next day for THE MOST EXPENSIVE DENTAL SURGERY THAT HAS EVER BEEN PERFORMED ON A CAT. She had 5 teeth removed and was with the doctor all day. Hence, the drugs for Smokey's lip and Emma's teeth.

Between his fluids for kidney disease, pills for thyroid disease, and antibiotics for the fat lip, I'm not so sure what will keep Smokey from making another attempt to jump. For now, the windows are all closed.

A Room with a View

We are in our hotel room in Burlingame. Smokey and Emma have spent much of their time out on the balcony, watching birds fly over the bay. I think they like it here, now that the sedatives have worn off and Emma has sort of stopped freaking out over the fact that Smokey smells weird. She tried to attack him repeatedly for about 2 days, but now it's just random hissing here and there.

The drugs we gave them didn't work exactly the way I had expected. We slipped them into tiny, ingenious snacks called Pill Pockets. Smokey, being Smokey, ate his right away. We could have put it on a chip, a piece of salami, or a garbanzo bean and he would have eaten it. Emma was not fooled, though. Rob had to hold her down and force her to swallow the pill. Not pretty.

Anyway, I thought the cats would pass out. But instead they just started yelling, and yelled all the way to the airport.

"Ahhhhhhhh!" yelled Emma.

"Ahhhhhhhh!" yelled Smokey.

Over and over. Then Smokey started bashing himself into the sides of his soft carrier. I was reminded of the warning from the vet. "Definitely test out the sedatives before you leave on your trip," she said wisely. "Sometimes they have the effect of making the cats more hyper."

So I confess that we did not test out the drugs. Obviously. But the bumpy cab ride seemed to be the worst of it. Once we got into the plane and put blankets over their carriers, they seemed to calm down. Or maybe it was just that we couldn't hear them.

An Evening at Home

Rob and I cleaned our apartment tonight because we had a potential renter coming over and we wanted her to think that we are clean people. Actually, I just wanted her not to kill us, because I have this strong reaction to people who respond to my Craigslist postings, which is that I assume they all want to come over and kill me.* So far, this has not happened.

We also moved a bunch of extraneous containers of clothing and dishes (and cat litter) into our neighbor Eric's apartment, and that really made the place look (and smell) extra clean. Almost like no one really lived in it and it was just a show home. I've never seen Rob happier. "I'm so bummed that it doesn't always look like this!" he exclaimed after she left. I don't think he enjoys that whole "lived in" feel.

After we brought all our stuff back in from Eric's, we sat down to have dinner and were interrupted by a knock at the door. No one ever knocks on our door, so we were confused. I got a little freaked out that the renter was coming back and would see that our cats actually do have a litter box. But it was Michael from down the hall. "You have a cat, right?" he asked. We confirmed. He then gestured to the hallway, where Smokey was having a little field trip, inviting himself into other people's homes. When we caught him, he was in 5A clawing up JD, the guy who lives there, in an attempt to escape. We brought him home, his little heart hammering away, and he is now passed out in bed. I hope this isn't an indication of how he's going to handle leaving the state and flying to California in a cat carrier. I mean, it was brave of him to attempt the adventure, but I think he lost his confidence somewhere near the elevators. We're going to have to get him some good drugs for the ride.

*This is not a new development brought on by that guy who actually was killing people he met on Craigslist. This particular affliction has been going on for years.

Happy Cats

I went to yoga twice last week, which is notable since I haven't attended a class in something like 8 months. What have I been doing? Mostly walking, I guess, but that feels somewhat pathetic as a form of exercise considering my primary path is between the office and my apartment. It's not a short distance, but I'm wearing my work clothes, so there's not really a lot of perspiring and elevated heart rate action going on.

So I made myself go to yoga on Wednesday and I was really happy I did. The teacher, P., gave me a big hug and there was a live 3-piece band in the corner of the room: two guitars and a bass playing festive Spanish rhythms. As light and fun as the music was, it didn't quite take my attention away from the pain of moving my now inflexible body into previously simple yoga poses. I was so sore the next day that I forced myself to attend class once again on Friday.

As usual, P. een-a-haled and giggled his way through class. During triangle pose, he wandered over to my mat, sat down, and touched my engagement ring. "There's my friend!" he announced, laughing. "Yes, I like it, too," I said from my sideways position. He sat there, looking at me and giggling for a few more seconds and then trotted away to observe things about other people.

It's so hard to go to yoga, and the gym in general, sometimes. It feels like such a commitment to set aside 90 minutes after work for a class. Who am I kidding, it feels like a commitment to do anything other than collapse on the couch and figure out what episode of True Blood I have recorded. With this in mind, I also ordered two yoga videos online to do at home. I set myself up on Saturday, mat on the floor in front of the TV. Smokey immediately placed himself on the mat, too, either because he is a zen master or because he simply cannot let me perform any function without his assistance. Each time I tried to place my hand on the mat, I had to remove Smokey from underneath it. My sitting poses were accompanied by his constant circling of my entire body, punctuated by head butts into each knee as he passed it. As he sidled up to me while I was in triangle pose, I pictured him exclaiming, "There's my friend!"

There's no Rob in Team

As I have shared before, my cat Smokey has kidney disease. He's actually Rob's cat Smokey, and has been for 17 years. He has been our cat for the last 3, at least.

What does this mean? Mostly that we take turns feeding him: cat food or blue corn tortilla chips, depending on what he's in the mood for; we open the door and let him walk around in the hall, rudely sniffing the neighbors; we endure his pensive nightly jaunts across our bodies as we try to sleep; and we inject him twice a week with fluids to help his kidneys work.

The injection falls mostly to me, but I'm ok with it since Rob is the exclusive handler of kitty litter duty. Plus, as I've also mentioned before, I'm better at it. So tonight, as we were watching another rousing episode of 24, I noted aloud that it was an injection night.

Rob and Smokey watch TV curled up in a ball together, so Rob leaned over and whispered in Smokey's ear, "Don't worry, I'll distract her and you can get away."

"I heard that," I informed them.

"RUN INTO THE BEDROOM, SMOKEY!" Rob yelled.