wickedqueen.net

Her name is Isabeau. “Izzy” for short; “Dove Isabeau” for long; “the foulest beast in Christendom” for longest. It’s from a folk song (naturally).

Already she has improved my life by immediately developing an upper respiratory infection upon her departure from the Humane Society, resulting in two days of not eating and concomitant frantic worry and attempts on my part to get her to EAT SOMETHING, followed by a Monday trip to the vet that ran upwards of $50 for a penicillin injection and instructions/equipment for syringe-feeding. She’s already eating a little on her own now, and is a total crazed ball of energy again. For my part, I now remember why I don’t actually want a human infant any time in the immediate future. Win-win.

As you can see, she a) has giant ears like a bat and b) enjoys sitting on my shoulder/back during those rare moments when she is not break-dancing in mid-air for a mouse on a string.

She also likes the cat tower.

She did sleep under my desk for a little bit, but it was while she was starving and not in top form.

For the most part, she is in isolation in the bathroom; I put Bart and Dora in the bedroom to let her out to play. I was planning a slow introduction anyway, but now that she’s got hideously contagious cat flu it will have to be even slower. On the plus side (for Bart and Dora), I feel bad enough about disrupting their lives that I am constantly plying them with treats, including special hoity-toity grain-free wet cat food in various flavors that include 100% quail. I know; it’s a little embarrassing.

Awhile ago, someone on LiveJournal mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, which is a study associated with Brown University Medical School “developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss”–here defined as people who have maintained a 30 pound loss for one year or more.

Despite having regained a bit of weight in the past two months due to first being Full of Blood Clots and then, a week after they finally let me go back to the gym, catching the Death Flu, I am still within five pounds of my original goal weight, which I reached on December 13, 2005–coincidentally closely following Clot #1; I only missed about a week of gym time for that one. Anyway, my study consent forms arrived with my held mail today, so I got to initial a bunch of stuff and provide evidence that I did actually lose all that weight.

They offer two options: you can get your doctor’s office or whoever to provide documentation, or you can submit before-and-after photos. If there’s one thing I have ready to hand, it’s photos of myself–admittedly quite a few more “after” shots than “before,” as Matthieu has commented on in the past, but definitely enough “before” shots to prove that I used to be fat.

Although not, actually, the worst and most horrible of “before” shots, which for some reason my father had on his website for MONTHS after it was no longer accurate, until he finally listened to my desperate pleas and took it down. I don’t know what happened to that one. I looked like Jabba the Hut. It would have been PERFECT for the purpose of demonstrating how fat I used to be, so I am actually kind of sorry.

Anyway, here are the photos that are actually getting sent:

Before:

(October 7, 2004)

(June 2005)

(Christmas 2004)

AFTER:

(December 2005)

(July 25, 2007)

(July 23, 2006)

The Christmas 2004 one is probably the worst of the lot, mainly because that was when I weighed the most (178 pounds when I, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to weigh myself like two days after Christmas). It’s actually pretty encouraging to be looking at those old-old photos, since I’m actually only about five pounds over my preferred weight at the moment, and while that’s worse than it might initially sound because I’m also down quite a bit of muscle from being benched for so long, on the other hand, I do not look like Jabba the Hut. My face is still pretty much the way it looks in my “after” pictures, for one thing, rather than all chipmunky.

My gym is closed until January 2–I did get in some cardio and probably some strength-training shoveling snow this afternoon; I could only do so much since no one has been in residence for over a week and people have been walking on the sidewalk, packing it down, and eventually I got very, very tired of hammering away with the edge of the shovel to remove 1/8″ of snow from the walk. I put down salt. Come January 2, I will be doing 5-6 days of weight training a week until I am back to my former glory:

My biceps have really suffered. But I will get them back into shape.

While I may or may not have had any clots in my leg on November 2 when they failed to detect the superficial thrombophlebitis in my foot–the technician did actually do the ultrasound on my leg, although she failed to check the part of my body that I had indicated was red and swollen–there definitely WAS a clot in my leg when I had to go into the ER for another ultrasound on Friday, after about 18 hours of ever-worsening calf pain.

It’s a big clot. Apparently it extends into two different veins behind my knee–before you ask, I can only assume that it’s at a point where the veins branch off from some larger single vein. My ER nurse was very nice, but the rest of the staff were pretty much devoted entirely to getting me the hell out of there as fast as possible once they had assured themselves that I was not going to have a pulmonary embolism.

It’s funny; in the past couple of weeks I’ve done numerous course readings on medical technology and patient interventions, all centered around patient knowledge and the involvement of patients with their own medical care. I’ll try to write on those in more detail when I am not stoned on Vicodin–I’m giving myself daily injections of Lovenox, a blood thinner, for the clot, but my calf still hurts like a bastard. Fortunately I anticipated this from my previous DVT experience, and did not leave the ER without a prescription for a narcotic.

Assuming that it wasn’t a technical fuck-up and I really didn’t have a clot in my leg on November 2, then, what happened? I strongly suspect that being largely immobilized for two weeks trying to resolve the superficial clot actually caused this DVT. I didn’t actually think of it in those terms when I was calling my hematologist trying to find out if not anti-coagulating was really such a great idea; I was mostly thinking, If I had a superficial clot for NO REASON while taking a daily dose of aspirin, what exactly makes us think I’m not about to throw a big one?

In retrospect, however, I realized that the very course of action prescribed for the treatment of an existing clot creates risk for developing one if you don’t have it already: inactivity is a DVT risk factor. Given that I have a history of DVT and a known genetic factor, was not anti-coagulating me following an unexplained superficial clot** really a great idea? In hindsight, of course, I am inclined to say NO, and I didn’t really think so even before I had a giant DVT in my knee as supporting evidence–that’s why I consulted with my hematologist rather than taking my primary care’s word for it.

But he said it wasn’t a big deal, and I went along with it because although I generally think I am right about everything, I do not have any specialized medical training. Maybe I should have gone with my instinct. I’m pretty mad. I’m trying to cordone that, because being mad is not the best way to encourage someone to give you high-quality continuing medical care, and I’m reminding myself that my hematologist DID listen to me when coumadin was making me break out in hives and everyone else in the hematology clinic basically insisted that I was imagining things.

But my calf hurts like hell and I have to give myself injections in my stomach and I might not be safe to travel by Wednesday which means missing Thanksgiving with my family before one of my sisters goes off to Costa Rica for a YEAR and there’s a possibility at this point that I might now have to take anti-coagulants FOREVER and I can’t move and what I want more than anything in the world right now is meat loaf, which no one delivers.

I’m feeling cranky.

I have an appointment with my hematologist tomorrow. I am hoping that he’ll clear me for Thanksgiving travel, although I’m not terribly optimistic. I’m also hoping he has a reasonable explanation for why not anti-coagulating me really, really seemed like a good idea at the time.

On the bright side, I am a) high on Vicodin*** and b) extremely fetching in my new gumdrop pajamas, which are probably not what my friends Anne and Nathan were imagining when they told me to “call [them] if [I] need anything at all,” but not only is my apartment filthy, all my warm pajamas are dirty, too, and new pajamas are almost as cheering as Vicodin. Almost.

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*But not very often.

***And not trying to write any Christmas cards this time.

I’ll say upfront that I don’t know why the hell The Internet is represented here by a charming floral arrangement of brightly colored iMacs, which haven’t been available since, god, I don’t know, my sophomore year of college? People just like Macs because they look like spaceships.** Anyway.

The take-home point here is that writers get paid 4¢ of residuals for a $19.99 DVD (yeah, I haven’t paid that much for a DVD since I was feeling despondent about relationships and Mr. & Mrs. Smith was a new release, but you know, whatever). They get the same percentage on online downloads despite the fact that, as a reasonably bright chimp could probably work out, online downloads cost the production company VIRTUALLY NOTHING (DVDs cost them, like, a quarter).

Writers get no residuals at all for screenings of their work that are streamed online–which happens to cover about half of the television I consume, now that I do not own a TV at all.*** The networks argue that streaming online content is “promotional,” but if you’ve ever watched any of it, you know that it is full of stupid-ass ads for Visa. One assumes that the networks are not screening Visa’s “promotional” material for free; in fact, we’re talking about over $4.5 billion in projected ad revenue in the next few years, which I can assure you I would not be screening here at home for fun. I watch those stupid-ass ads for Visa because they’re embedded in television programming that I actually want to see, which was written by writers who would like, you know, something more than 0¢ for their role in generating that avalanche of ad revenue.

I’ve seen some responses on YouTube that entirely miss the fucking point here. Mainly, people are upset that writers get paid a salary for writing things and then–madness!–get paid MORE MONEY when their product does well. Well, gee, do we also rage against the practice of commission sales? Who benefits most when the product does well? The writer with his/her 4¢ per DVD sale and a big box of air for all those online streams? Gee, could it be the production companies, the heads of which already get to swim around in vaults of doubloons like Scrooge McDuck?

Residuals/royalties are normal compensation for artistic endeavors. They account for the fact that you don’t KNOW how much “Happy Birthday” is going to end up being worth when you pay some schmo to write it–or, say, Pirates of the Caribbean. I know I wasn’t expecting THAT to turn into a freaking trilogy.

My friend Nick from high school has been helping out with the strike even though he’s not yet union. I got the above video link from him; you can also see photos and video from the strike on his MySpace blog.

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*Not that I’m saying this is what I DO. Although the primary reason that I don’t is laziness, followed by impatience. Which reminds me, the latest episode of Chuck should now be up on NBC.com… For which its writers will see exactly 0¢.

***I “sold” it to my sister. I think she still owes me $30. On the bright side, I didn’t have to move it again.

I’m so glad ONE of the cats takes full advantage of the eight-foot kitty condo.

In other news, we went to our new vet today and Loxley tried to bite the vet. It turns out he’s not an aggressive biter… unless you’re trying to give him a shot. Not terribly surprising, in retrospect. The vet took it well. Also he does not have intestinal parasites.

Bart, on the other hand, got a shot of steroids and a trial bag of hypoallergenic food, because there were no demodex mites or other parasites in his stool, either, and yet he continues to chew off all his fur and a non-trivial percentage of his skin. I’m almost hoping it turns out he has some kind of airborne allergen reaction instead, because they can desensitize them for that and even with the initial expense of testing, it’s probably cheaper in the long run that 10+ years’ worth of hypoallergenic cat chow…

Some background in case you don’t know that Legba is now living with my parents: So last month, my parents hired the son of family friends to drive up to Wisconsin with a bunch of my stuff that had been in storage at their house, including my cats. I got a phone call at about 7:30 the day that this was supposed to happen, informing me that Legba would not be arriving that afternoon because my father was unable to get him into a carrier. I was a little snippy in response to this news, but I’d like to note that a) the phone call woke me up, and b) I didn’t know at the time that Dad’s valiant ATTEMPT to get Legba into the carrier ended up costing him a course of antibiotics and a tetanus shot.

So Bart and Dora arrived safe and sound at the end of August,* and Legba stayed at my parents’ house. Since he was the only remaining cat in the basement, my parents decided to let him come upstairs and mingle with the rest of the household. Now, Legba has always gotten along fine with Bart and mostly been tormented by Pandora, although occasionally he would refuse to cower when she swatted him and then she would go into paroxysms of feline rage. But apparently, he gets on with my parents’ two female cats, Finch and Darwin, like a house on fire. He loves them. He loves my mother;** apparently, when she goes to the bathroom, he and Finch and Darwin all hang around outside the door waiting for her to come back. He pays no mind to the dog. He also kind of terrorizes their older male cat, but Gurgi only spent like 30 minutes a day inside before, anyway.

My mother was lobbying for custody almost immediately. I was heartbroken, but when even my generally anti-extra cat father allowed as how he thought Legba was really fitting into the household and would probably be psychically scarred by yet another upheaval, I realized that I was going to have to leave him there. It’s not that life with me before was untenable, but making him come live with Pandora again after spending months with two sweet young things who worship him seemed borderline abusive.

And now we come to the upshot: I am not accustomed to a mere two cats in my home. I specifically sought out an apartment where I would be allowed to have three, so it’s on my lease. I love Bart and Dora, but I just felt bereft. I thought about it for awhile. As Travis pointed out, I didn’t want to go adopting a Rebound Kitten.

But I thought about it for a month and I still wanted a third cat, so I went out looking for one. The problem was that it’s not really kitten season anymore; the rescue groups have some strays and former ferals between 4 and 6 months old, but there’s really nothing much younger available in early fall. In general, the younger a cat is, the easier it is to introduce it into a household with adult cats, but I wasn’t sure how much of an advantage I’d have with a juvenile, and the only one that really struck me already had an application ahead of me.

So on Monday night, Keely and I went to the Humane Society, thinking they might have a bigger selection. As it turned out, they had no kittens at all, and so I thought some more about how MUCH of an advantage a kitten would really have, over an older cat, with winning the approval of a cat as inherently bitchy as Pandora. Then I thought about how, actually, I didn’t even WANT a kitten, because they are babies and they cry all the time and jump on your back with all their claws out and need special food that you have to prevent your already overweight bitchy cat from eating.

Then I asked the Humane Society people to bring out one male adult who seemed pretty cute and had all his original claws–this is a big issue at the Humane Society, where most of the animals are surrendered and I would estimate more than half of the adults are front declawed***–and was only two years old, and they told me that he’d only been surrendered three days ago, so they had his intake paperwork for me to look at first. The first thing the forms said was that he had been quarantined for biting a child, to which both Keely and I reacted immediately and identically: What the hell did the child DO to him?

So the former owners reported that he was a “chronic biter” and “gives no warning signal” and that they feared for the safety of their seven-month-old infant. Probably you shouldn’t leave your seven-month-old alone with the family pet regardless, but whatever–they also lamented that “he likes to go outside but he can’t in this neighborhood,” to which one might reply that a cat is not, say, a human adolescent, and can be contained pretty effectively in most cases, but you know, again, whatever.

Then I noticed that although the cat’s attitude toward other cats was unknown, the paperwork also said that he “got along well with former owner’s dog.”

At this point, I’m going, “Jesus Christ, how many owners has this two-year-old cat HAD?”
“Oh,” says the shelter person, “The people who surrendered him only had him for three weeks.”

Of course! I’d been figuring that these people had a cat, then they had a baby and the cat got kind of territorial, as they do, but no! There you are, with a six-month-old infant, and you think to yourself, What is this household missing? I know! A strange adult animal! An exciting unknown quantity! Some people are idiots.

But wait! It gets better.

“They got him,” says the shelter person, “at an estate sale.”
“WHAT.” is basically my and Keely’s simultaneous reaction.

That’s right. An ESTATE SALE. Apparently you can get cats at estate sales. Maybe he was inside an armoire or something. I’ll note at this point that this is a cute but unremarkable domestic shorthair. He is not a Persian or a Manx or a freaking Bengal or something. Just a brown tabby with extensive white splotches (see photos below).

So they bring in the cat, and we play with him for awhile, and okay, I’ll admit it: he bites. He’s not an AGGRESSIVE biter. It’s playful biting, but if you are an idiot–say, the kind of idiot who picks up a cat at an estate sale to watch their infant–and don’t, as it were, nip it in the bud, it can escalate into pretty intense biting. Still playful, from the cat’s perspective, but not so much fun for us tender little humans.

Also, it is extremely easy to tell when he might be about to bite you: if he has just been chasing toys around and is all hopped up, exercise caution. And if he DOES bite you, squirt him with a water bottle and watch him run like hell. (Unfortunately, Keely didn’t have one of those in the little room assigned for making his acquaintance at the Humane Society, but I don’t think she concluded that he was incorrigible, either.)

So yeah, as you might imagine, I adopted the two-year-old child-biting two-time loser estate sale refugee. I’ve named him Robert of Loxley, Loxley for short.**** Right now he is staying in the bathroom, with a blanket shoved up against the crack under the door since Pandora hissed at his paw when he was able to stick it out. I put another litterbox under the kitchen table,***** and when I’m home but not getting in bed, I put the other two in the bedroom and let him run around the apartment. For the time being I’m just trying to get everyone’s smells everywhere; I may try to introduce him to Bart in a week or so.

He’s two years old, but I think he probably didn’t get enough attention as a kitten–one assumes that his original owner was elderly, since he was SOLD OFF THE BLOCK AT AN ESTATE SALE.

Anyway, he’s two years old and has the adult cat physique, but he is CRAZY energetic. He basically acts like a kitten, but with less crying, and I actually think he’ll be pretty open to meeting other cats just based on his behavior so far. I have to take Bart to the vet on Saturday for further consideration of the demodex problem, so I made Loxley an appointment for the basic check-up–he’s got his vaccinations and is negative for feline leukemia and FIV, but he should have check-up. Microchipping was included in the adoption fee, which for an adult was a measly $40. (This represents quite the savings over a kitten, which would be $125.)

So. Yes. I got another cat, prompting a “What the hell?” email from my father when he saw the clues scattered around Facebook, but he is a sweetie and dear god, he needed me with his record. Poor Loxley. Ransomed from the Saracens and all that.******

It almost looks like he’s wearing a brown tabby hood, doesn’t it? Ha.

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*Well, mostly sound. We’re back at the vet for another round of ivermectin for Bart, who seems to be having another demodex flair-up.

******Humorous literary/folkloric reference. Not meant to malign actual Saracens or members of related cultural groups (see Gwen’s blog).

That’s me and some other kid in 1984. I’ve always loved that photo. Whenever I look at it, I think, If only I could get back into a wheelbarrow FULL OF GRAPEFRUITS. Everything would be okay if I was sitting on top of a wheelbarrow full of grapefruits.

My dad’s been scanning and uploading old family photos to his Flickr account. There was piece on CNN recently about the new trend in obsessive digital documentation of one’s children; as something of a compulsive photographer, however, I personally am not too worried about “fail[ing] to enjoy living in the moment.” I like to take pictures; it’s part of my enjoyment of some moments. I do get annoyed when I’m not IN any of the pictures, which is why it’s good that in my family, both my father and I take a lot of photos. It’s always a danger, when you have one documentary photo taker in a group, that they disappear almost entirely from the photographic record.

The article also panics over the possibility that photo formats could change; formats are always an issue with digital media, but I doubt we’re going to wake up one morning to discover that all of a sudden, .jpgs no longer work. Batch conversion is a pretty simple job these days. And while it may be true that “some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online — not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints,” it costs $25 a year for a FlickrPro account that WILL retain the original high-res versions, and you can also order prints of photos you upload to Flickr, either for pick-up at Target or to have shipped directly to you. A lot of the problems that the tech news people like to focus on are really “less advanced user” problems, which you know, they could actually address with helpful tips.

It may, however, be worth considering that publicly available photos on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites really are available to “the entire world.” One of the photos my father put up featured my sister and me in the bathtub in 1984. It got 11 views in about a third of a day. It did apparently have “bath” in the title, and I’m pretty sure that the pedophiles are a heavily networked community, so I guess only one of them has to stumble on a particular photo to start it on the rounds. Dad set it to friends only.

Yes, I have always had freaky hair.

Thanks to wicked anomie, who posted about it first:

I am feeling a strong inclination to find one of Frontalot’s shows and throw my underwear at him. Although I suppose my dice collection might be more appropriate, as well as more likely to put out someone’s eye. Blinding someone with a d20 is nerdcore, right?

You can get the high-res version of the video at the official site, which also offers assorted merch. I am leaning toward the purple ladies t-shirt.

In case you did not play Zork and require some explanation: Grue (monster)

One of the awesomer things about my new apartment is its proximity to the bike path. When I tell other grad students where I live, they often exclaim, aghast, that it’s “so far!” It’s really not. It’s less than three miles from where I work and I can bike it in about 15 minutes. I am told that the city of Madison has special snowplows specifically for the bike paths, so I should be able to commute without too much difficulty throughout the winter.

Also, I’ve discovered that in my new location, I am much closer to places that were always a pain to reach before, like, say, real grocery stores (Capitol City Foods so, SO does not count, no matter what they told the new post-doc about living downtown). There’s even a Sally Beauty within about two miles, so I can keep stocked up on my many grooming supplies.* And finally, the bike path is in WAY better shape than most of the roads around here, so it’s a nice smooth ride when I can keep to it.

At night, however, when it is cold and there are still puddles everywhere although at least it’s finally stopped raining, and the bike path is really, REALLY dark, it is kind of scary (although there are reflectors along the edge whenever it curves at all). Naturally, all I could think about the whole way home was vampires, and how even a very small and weak vampire could definitely overtake a bicycle, and how crashing into a vampire on your bicycle is probably not covered by renter’s insurance** (although actually, it seems pretty obvious that the curséd undead should not count as “Act of God”).

What I really should have been worried about was rabbits, which were a) everywhere and b) apparently very depressed. One of them ran back and forth across the path in front of me like three times–I want to die! Wait, no! Yes! No!–and another one paced me alongside the path for a nerve-wracking minute during which I was sure he was going to leap under my front wheel at any moment. Carly recently mentioned the current plague of insane Madison chipmunks, but I’ve mostly just seen the rabbits, and a few squirrels–although I did see a squashed chipmunk on Tokay this weekend. I assume it was hit by a car rather than a bike.

Perhaps these particular suicide rabbits thought I was some kind of strange cycling rabbit robot, based on the placement of my back light. It is red and sort of triangular with clipped off corners, and I used to clip it to my backpack when I biked in the dark but now that I have panniers, I don’t ride with a backpack anymore.*** Anyway, the light could be mounted on my rear rack, if I had the mount for it, but I have no idea where it went and I haven’t gotten to the bike shop to ask them to rig something up yet. Consequently, when I ride after dark I have to clip the light to the back of my pants, where it blinks merrily in case anyone was in danger of missing my butt. Fortunately, I never looked that dignified to begin with.

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*Developer, activating powder, lightener–you need all three of the preceding to make bleach–color-protective shampoo, color-sealing treatment, color-protective conditioner, super moisturizing hair masque conditioner, special protein serum to mend breakage… I don’t just wake up with beautiful, effortless pink hair, dear reader.

+Renter’s insurance includes liability.

Actual interaction I had with some craigslist lame-o who emailed me and called and was two hours late getting back to me about picking up two six-foot floor lamps:

“Do they disassemble?”
“Yeah, they unscrew into like three pieces, so they’re easy to move.”
“Would they fit in a backpack?”
“…They’re SIX FEET TALL. EACH. …No, they will not fit in a BACKPACK.”

I had to email someone else, who showed up in like 10 minutes with a pick-up truck, so they’re not ALL freaks. And they certainly aren’t all freaks like this:

Missed Connections: Pedestrian hit by car this morning

I was in the car behind the red SUV that hit you this morning. I didn’t see much of what happened, but I know we had a red light. You looked like you weren’t hurt too badly - maybe a bit dazed, but walking around, so I didn’t stop. Kind of wish I had, just to be sure. Feel free to email back if you want, just to let me know you’re ok.

Oh, craigslist. You guys are freaks.

And apparently some of you are prostitutes. Yeah, who saw that coming.

I am getting sort of settled into my new apartment. I have furniture, and I’ve started hanging pictures and putting up posters and shit. Soon I should even have a bed frame. Oh, the luxury.

The important thing is that I hung the Scary Child:*

I thought long and hard, and that was definitely the scariest place to hang it. Home sweet home.

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*The Scary Child is a piece of art–we’re not totally sure WHAT the medium is–created by my cousin and given to his brother, another cousin, who promptly gave it to my mother when she saw it in his house and remarked that it really reminded her of me. This is the fourth apartment that it has graced with its terrible presence. Matt really hates it.