Poor HRM!!

 Trigger warnings: blood / cat. 

Little Guy has returned!

 I am fine, but I didn't make it to con. The guys went without me. 

Happily, the cat is fine too, now. He had an adventure for perhaps 27 hours. Better than March, when he was missing 2.5 days! 

=-= LG went AWOL yesterday; he got scared while outside and hid.  =-= 

He stayed out all night. I'd been outside talking to him many times, stopping at midnight. We called him from the door too, both today and Monday: no dice. 

Blackie, parkour cat.

On 6-February, we trapped our associate cat, Blackie.  A day we're never gonna forget, I promise you.  

He'd hurt his paw; I suspect he'd got frostbite, and/or sprained his paw, which dangled unhappily for a few days.  I consulted our vet, explaining that he was partly tame, not a purely feral cat.  We set an appointment for Tuesday.  

Monday night, we trapped him, not knowing what we were in for.  

Years ago: Pontiac, Mich.

I was a college undergrad for years. So I moved around quite a lot, up to 0-4 times a year. Most of my roomies liked having me around; alas, that doesn't pay the bills. 

Usually I couldn't afford to not live with my parents, not until the mid-1990s. Paying for a car and food and rent, let alone utilities, was just too much. 

~ Income ~

For years, I earned Michigan's minimum wage, which was $3.35/hour from 1986 onward. I want to say until the 90s; FRED says it went up to $5.15 by 1998! 

Not a living wage, most certainly. 

(I'd been doing temp jobs from 1988-91, and in 1993, so my wages would've been higher. Probably as much as double. I clearly recall my final assignment in 2001 for Kelly Services. I said I could not afford to make only $9.00/hour for more than the fortnight* they claimed it'd last.) 

"Stair dot" | our cats.

A couple years ago, we had guests over for a long while. Back then, a game I'd play with our two kittens was throwing dots -- dots are what we call the Blue Buffalo kibble, you see. 

The kittens loved it. Chasing prey! Eating prey! Wheeeeeee!!

After our guests left, the kittens were full of energy, and I threw too hard: the dots escaped and went hurtling down the stairs. Ooooooooooh! said Digger and Misty, and promptly hurtled after them. I promptly blamed our guests for this-- 

Thus the "stair dot game" was born. :D 

I'd have to go down the stairs to rescue the lost dots. Once I ran out of steam, each kitten would get to snarf up the leftover dots in a bowl. Digger would try stealing it from his sister too. The pawsy squirt. 

2022 feline update.

It has been a crazy year in many ways. For one, our cat Jack elected to adopt more tomcats! 

No, really. First he'd mentored Little Guy, back in March 2022. Jack decided he liked it -- so after we trapped LG and adopted him ourselves, Jack found Cheeto, a fluffy-tailed ginger tabby, and then His Own Doppelganger cat, Blackie, another panther. 

Months ago, possibly last year, Blackie got accidentally let into the house, when my roomie realized the black cat present wasn't Jack. 

Where I'll be, aside from here.

*** UPDATE at end of this post. *** 

So since today the "Chief Twit" has decided that other social networks don't get "free" [wtf!!!] adverts in His Site... 

Going to the vet: June.

[ Written 9-June-22 ]

My SO is out of town; therefore I am currently Little Guy's main caretaker. 

I'm so used to him going and checking on LG that I keep forgetting, except that I do remember he'd need his boxes cleaned.  And my roomie has helped too -- apparently I strained my leg Tuesday morning. After twinges, my leg freaked out last night. So she kindly checked his box last night for me. 

LG has been very good, and barely hissed much at all. Heck, the last few times he did hiss were muted. Pretty much stating to us: "I am registering my dislike, but not horribly put out." 

Little Guy...

As I said on Twitter: 

"This is Little Guy. We trapped him 1-April-22. He was clearly abused or neglected when he appeared in our yard. 

"Next month he has his neuter appt. My SO has been socializing LG, who rarely hisses at me any more." And today, even though I got my SO to take this picture of LG -- still no hisses!

The lucky break (for the cats).

Happily, we got a new cat sitter this month. I say happily because at first finding someone was hard. NextDoor is my usual resource, and either people weren't answering or unavailable. 

I spent an hour hunting through sitters on Facebook -- and then messaging them. Not how I wanted to do things, certes! 

2021, in part.

 I may run late, but I do plan to do an overview on 2021.  

For a brief recap of the past six months, I finally had knee surgery for my right knee, which had two tears in the meniscus. I'm just over two months out from that, and although walking is far, far better now -- stairs, not so much.  

Doing stairs is weirdly random too; I've managed to go into the basement a few times, but other days, my knee[s] will freak out.  Definitely will need to see physical therapists for that next month.

Almost to 2022!

 What a year it's been. I kept hoping I joked when I'd say, "Year Two of the pandemic" while I feared I was not joking. And sure enough, it was not a joke, just a faint hope, swiftly disproved. 

New allergic reactions...

Last Friday I found a long red blotch on my left wrist. It seemed a bit rawer by evening, but didn't hurt, and reminded me of a scrape. On Saturday, it looked more like bug bites. Applied Benadryl cream...

That didn't appear to help much.

Not bug bites. Hives. Swapped today's chiro appointment -- which I needed, I had a really bad muscle spasm on Saturday, dammit -- for allergist instead.

Cogan's and my health.

Was noodling around, found out today that Cogan's syndrome -- my corneal dystrophy -- also affects hearing.  That's likely why I've had hearing loss since '90.  Cogan's is a rare autoimmune disorder; bet you that the ENTs I saw never thought of it. 

I didn't know that diagnosis before I saw either of 'em -- one in 2014, one last year. 

The bad news is that the hearing loss is not fixable.  I'm in the unlucky 15% who has both ocular and hearing troubles.

Apparently I wanted a full suite of problems when I chose genetically, eh? :p 

Sneaky muscle spasm. -_-

I am so tired. Makes sense, I had a major system shock. Muscle spasms are awful.

Apparently this was a slow spasm, so I didn't figure it out until the nausea hit. A really slow one. I hate those. They're all bad, but some spasms are worse'n others.


This morning putting on a hair tie hurt, and that didn't clue me either. Just thought I'd a really bad headache. I was also really congested, which I put down to not sleeping so well.

A couple weeks ago, I popped part of my left knee somehow. Hyperextended maybe? Last night, I'd had to put a lot of Tiger Balm (the arthritis version) on my knee to sleep. Once that wore off, I knew I'd be restless if I stayed asleep.

Apparently I did stay asleep overnight...

Message from MK: 2020 mythos antho.

MK sent me an email about doing a 2020 anthology. It's a theme antho -- he wants Lovecraftian mythos stories. Before 31-July-2020, ideally.

I created a page for it here on my blog, so you could see most of the info he wrote.

Adventure kittens!

In recent weeks, Digger has become addicted to eating everyday grass* and to simply going outside. He wears his harness, so he can inspect things, sit on the grass or the patio, and just hang out.  I always pick a handful of grass; that way I can let both kittens enjoy it when he's done perambulating.

Hell, yesterday I dumped a few handfuls of dried grass out.  It was on a towel, and Digger likes snuggling up in that box.  I suspect he likes knowing he can just nibble the grass at any time.  He finds it comforting, having that on his towel.  8)

Monday, O Monday...

Monday was an exciting day. First, the furnace guy returned. From last Thursday [starting sometime Wed. evening] through Monday, we had no heat. Again. 

Furnace got repaired maybe 2 weeks ago?

The kittens and I got shut into our BR so he could work. HRM was upset; the heat came on near instantly, but the imprisonment didn't end!

Queen Misty wanted to dig her way out from under the door. This was also the opposite of fun.

The plus was that I wasn't sitting there, sans socks, in a cold room in a cold house, trying to calm two kittens. Unlike the previous furnace repair!

ER trip 3: More health wth.

I AM FINE. It was not a heart attack as feared!  

ER trip 3 in under five months! since I went in on 29-Sept-2019, the day before my fifty-first birthday [!] and also last month on 5-Jan-2020, both for another health issue* [see bottom of page].

Am out of hospital and back home, so I just have to wait on seeing my GP, who's free next Wednesday.

Pain caused by one of three possibles, per Dr. Hershey: acid reflux, arthritis, or nerve problems. All of which I already have.

Spent nearly 24 hrs in Sparrow Hospital.

=-=

Yesterday I left home in an ambulance circa 1:16pm, going to ER. Sparrow Hospital checked me in come evening for a stress test -- to confirm it was not my heart.

I'd called 9/11 because I thought I was having a heart attack.

Intense pain at edge of rib cage, then in my back, that would NOT STOP. I have a high pain tolerance, but sharp sudden pain can debilitate me as much as anyone.

-_-

Hanging by a thread

-- Ahhh, and Blogger decided to eat the post's title, fun fun! Grrr. --


Most people who are mentally ill aren't in a good way. Not collectively. We treat our mentally ill poorly overall. Closing American mental hospitals was a rotten start to this century.

From NPR's review about The Great Pretender; the review concludes:

' The Great Pretender is an essential book, and a plea for the world to come to terms with the way we're treating some of our most vulnerable people. "We are all hanging on by a very thin thread," she writes, "and some of us won't survive our fall." '

She's right. :(

In 1992, I was in one of the last mental institutions that got closed: Clinton Valley Center in Pontiac, Michigan.