Real Life

And now there are three.

July 23, 2004, by No comments yet
Natasha, the Reporter Kitteh

Reporter Kitteh haz no comment.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

Meet Natasha, manic seal-point Siamese, 12-week old skinny, spidery kitty with a voice that cuts through wood and concrete, and an insatiable need to be in your lap right now. And April, 1-year old shelter kitty, thrown by some heartless bastard from a moving car and rescued by a nearby animal hospital. She’s scarred by both the injuries she suffered from her abandonment and from God only knows what kind of abuse. This longhaired beauty desperately craves affection, but is wary and afraid. She dislikes being held, and won’t sit in anyone’s lap; if I try to hold her front paws (a necessity as I clip all my cats’ claws every two weeks), or groom and brush her luxuriant tail, she whirls and sinks her teeth into my hand as a warning. It’s going to take a lot of love and patience to get her to trust us to the point where I can handle her as easily as I can Isabel the Mellow and Natasha the Needy, but she’s already come far—I was able to comb enough tangled hair from her coat to build another complete cat, she’s stopped vomiting at the slightest stress, she loves having her belly rubbed and chin scratched, and she and Natasha get along just fine. Continued…

Friday cat blogging.

June 18, 2004, by 2 comments

Me and Brianna

Once there were two, and then one.

Our sweet Briana-na, feisty tortie-tabby extraordinaire, died on June 7 at the age of 17. That’s eighty-plus in human years. I’m still grieving. It’s hard to watch a beloved pet get old and infirm, but it is torture when you have to play God and decide that giving her mercy is preferable to letting her suffer one more day.

She was so brave. She lived with arthritis, and then hyperthyroidism and chronic renal failure. Despite her grouchy ways, she was so patient as I gave her thyroid pills, gave her antibiotics for a broken canine tooth, monitored her fluid intake, fed (and then force-fed) her special foods, gave her medicine twice daily for stomach and mouth ulcers, and cleaned up after her at 3 am when the vomiting became continuous or she lacked the strength to get into her litter box in time. I marvel at the way she grumbled but didn’t fight me as I stuck her with needles to pour Ringer’s solution into a thirsty body that gradually became, despite our best efforts, a shrunken, frail shell of her formerly cobby, muscular self. Continued…

Catblogging no more. *sigh*

February 28, 2004, by No comments yet

Calpundit (aka Kevin Drum), terrific left-of-center blogger and the guy who started it all, has decided to discontinue his Friday Cat Blogging feature (in which he posts cute photos of his Jasmine and Inkblot at the end the week for all to enjoy).

It’s a bandwagon I fully intended to jump upon once I took the time to figure out how to use the digital camera my best beloved gave me for Christmas. But now it’ll seem but a pale reflection of the Master if I do.

Anyway, this depressing development has inspired one of my periodic Parody Spasms. The following is in Kevin Drum’s honor and should be sung to the Who’s classic “Pictures of Lily”:  Continued…

More substantive commentary from the NYT

January 15, 2004, by No comments yet

I love writing fan letters. Here’s my latest, to that redheaded bottomfeeder in the shallow end of the press pool, Maureen Dowd:

Ms. Dowd:

Boy, you must be running out of ideas. Having finished your fashion commentary on Wesley Clark’s wardrobe, you now become an advice columnist. You begin by saying that Bush wants to become “the national yenta.” But it sounds like you wish you had the job, given your snarky and uncalled-for pronouncements on the quality of Howard Dean’s marriage and the career and physical appearance of Dr. Judith (“crunchy Vermont hippie”) Steinberg.

Who are you to pass judgement on his–or anyone’s–marriage? And sorry, your “fair and balanced” inclusion of the campaign behaviour of Dean’s competitor’s spouses doesn’t excuse you. Your phony concern for Dean’s image, complete with handwringing repeating of the comments of unnamed “political operatives,” masks a barely-concealed condescension. To say–even in jest–that the corrupt and shallow Bush or his appalling supporters on the religious right should give Dr. Dean lessons in marital behavior is beyond the pale.
Continued…

To the moon, Alice! To the moon!

January 9, 2004, by No comments yet

So it would appear that the Flightsuit-in-Chief now wants to send humans back to the moon — and then send others onward to Mars. Take that, JFK/LBJ.

The question is, on whose dime? What with an 87 billion dollar quagmire in Iraq to fund, and WMDs to find… oops, never mind that last part.
At least the Times gets the reason for this BS announcement right:

Both new policy directives would allow the president to be portrayed as an inspirational leader whose vision goes beyond terrorism and tax cuts.

They also would have the added political benefit of diverting attention from the Democratic presidential candidates trudging through the retail politics of the Iowa caucuses.

Continued…

In the cancer ward.

October 16, 2003, by No comments yet

A memory from January 2001.

Hospital RoomI flailed to consciousness, the way a submerged and drowning person reaches for the surface. Or at least it felt that way—the involuntary and instinctive struggle toward light and air and voices. Then a second or two of surprise as I realized that I wasn’t immersed in a cold tide but lying in a hospital bed, tied down by sheet, blanket and tubes going into almost every orifice. The rhythmic distant roar of the surf I had heard in my disoriented state was the hiss and sigh of the little motor inflating and deflating the anti-embolism cuffs on my calves. A nurse bent over me, and offered me ice chips. I sucked at them eagerly—I was parched, for all my dreams of water—and tried to focus my eyes as I took stock. Continued…