Yes, it’s time to take one of our cats to the vet again. Selene is chewing on one of her back paws until it hurts her; I expect it’s allergy-itching. For the moment I have some anti-itch salve for pets—all-natural stuff—I’m putting on it (she hates the smell, but it does seem to help), but I don’t want to use it too much. With our luck, after all, she’d end up allergic to it.

In this way, she and I are surprisingly alike. My husband and I often joke about it, it’s so eerie. She and I both tend to have allergic reactions to inconvenient things like medications and topical preparations, and we both become easily sensitized to things over time. We also both have asthma.

Unfortunately it’s a bad week to have to take her to the vet, as my husband has some long work hours coming up. I think we can manage some morning toward the end of the week, however. Now we just have to convince her not to chew on her foot in the meantime.

I mentioned recently that our KitchenAid stand mixer died (*sob*). Well, thankfully it was still under the extended warranty we’d gotten for it (just!), and KA has awesome customer service. Without any questions (other than what was wrong with it) they sent us a new one and had us send them the old one in the same box (at their expense). The new one’s a slightly newer model, so of course I’ll have to review it eventually. (*happy sigh*) We even had a chance to make cookies with it when we went to a friend’s on Saturday. We’ve been told our cookies may well be the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, but we have to give due credit to Shirley, the delightful food scientist who created the master recipe and all the tips we use.

We also finally had time to do some gardening this weekend. We weeded the little plot under our bay window, mulched it with pretty dark pine bark nuggets, and put in some silly-looking cockscomb annuals—furry-looking neon things in orange, red, fuschia, and gold. I think they appealed to the kid in me. I’m looking forward to being able to afford a good composter again one of these years, as well as everything I need for some good old-fashioned edible gardening (tomatoes, peppers, squash, kitchen herbs, strawberries…).

Anyway, too much to do today, too little time. I’m sure I’ll write about something interesting again in a day or two.

Really, I’ll be making some blog posts and writing reviews again soon. It’s just freezing here again since our heat went out yesterday (again). It’s been a long week, so I haven’t gotten much done.

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As one tiny part of what my husband is doing to the site, I moved the cat photos from our own hosting to a flickr set. That option wasn’t available when the photos were first taken, but now it’s the easier way to go. If you have too much time on your hands and just can’t get enough of cat photos you’re welcome to look at them, but they’re mostly for our own viewing pleasure.

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Selene update: the collar came off on the Friday before New Year’s. She’s all healed up, although it looks like she’s going to have a straight scar line down her belly, which is pretty weird, since this thing started out as an allergic reaction. Of course when she had the collar on for several weeks she couldn’t groom her fur, which drove her nuts, so now she’s over-grooming and leaving herself with little bare patches. Hopefully we’ll get her to stop that soon!

I have some good news regarding the cafepress shops, but it might be a couple of weeks before I can post it, so instead in the meantime here are some of our latest designs. First, the ones from the Gamers’ Heaven store:

And then of course, the ones from the Caffeinated Chicanery store, still in that new series of ours:

Technorati Tags: cafe press, cafepress.com, cats, t-shirts

EXALTED finally! Well, not me. But part of Christmas we spent on Warcraft hanging out with a dear friend, and we finally got him to exalted with Argent Dawn after many long months of grinding. We also kind of tricked him into getting MC attuned–we weren’t sure we could do it with just the three of us, so we told him we were going into BRD to farm elemental cores and dark iron scraps. Then we took the route to attune, and it worked out. That was fun. I also took part in one and a half UBRS runs to help someone work on their Valor set, and ended up with a green santa hat. Woot!

Another day or two and Selene should be able to get her cone-collar off! Her wounds are healing nicely. She has a line down her fuzzy belly that looks like it might well scar, but most of the scabs are gone. It’s so strange to realize she might well end up with scars from an allergic reaction.

Sit. Stay. DIE. Dark T-Shirt

Technorati Tags: cats, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

Somehow I managed to type up a review around Selene, despite the collar still getting in the way. I won’t say she’s happy with me over it, but at least there’s now a review of Everyday Celebrations by Donata Maggipinto.

Selene is doing much better so far. At some point Wednesday night she seemed to suddenly decide that, damn it, she wasn’t going to let that collar stop her from living her life. She still hates it, but now she isn’t constantly freaked out and unwilling (or unable) to do most normal things with it on. In fact, our clever little munchkin has learned to use the thing as a weapon. When she’s peeved she will now stand on my lap and butt my chin and arms with the collar. Heaven save us from clever, annoyed cats! (Just try helping a friend through Uldaman with a cat constantly trying to shove your hands away from your keyboard with a stiff piece of plastic. Sigh. Durn tool-using creature.)

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Technorati Tags: cats, cookbook reviews, cookbooks

I wanted to apologize in advance for how little stuff is likely to go up this week, in terms of reviews and such. This weekend Selene reacted to one of the meds the vets gave her for her dental work, and she developed lesions all up and down her furry little abdomen. We spent Sunday evening at the emergency vet’s, and I didn’t sleep much that night as I tried to keep her from grooming her belly.

Last night we took her to our vet. Now she has a collar to keep her from grooming, but it completely freaks her out, so she pretty much just hides under the couch while she has it on. When she does move around she tries to scrape it off on everything, and she’s taken a couple of spills when trying to get up onto or down off of places, so I’m mostly trying to keep an eye on her and keep her from hurting herself.

Technorati Tags: cat health, cats

We’re taking our friend to the airport today, so I won’t be posting much. At any rate, two new designs. One for writers, one for cat lovers:

“Write with strength” and “I’m almost as stubborn as my cat.” As you can tell, I’m having fun figuring GIMP out.

The cats seem to be doing pretty well. It’s much easier to get Selene’s pain meds into her than it is to get the antibiotics into either cat–probably because there’s a hell of a lot more volume of antibiotics. She’s quite something after having her–as the vet tech put it–lala juice. VERY purry.

Technorati Tags: cats, writers, writing

I just posted the review of Mary Crownover’s Cheesecake Extraordinaire, despite the drooling cat asleep with her head on my arm.

Speaking of which, the cats are doing surprisingly well. We managed to get all of Selene’s pain meds into her this morning, which shocked us even more than her, I think. I feel guilty for saying this, but I think it’s easier to squirt meds into her mouth now that she has fewer teeth. It’s harder for her to clamp her jaw shut. In happy news, she’s eating like a horse, and oddly I think despite the surgery it looks like she’s more comfortable eating now than she was before, which goes to show how bad her teeth must have been. I wish we’d had any idea, but she’s so good at keeping people out of her mouth that even the vets had a hard time looking at her teeth each year. And until they got the tartar off they couldn’t know how bad things were.

Anyway, today I made what I think is our most gorgeous writing-related cafepress design yet. I call it, “write with grace”:

We didn’t get much sleep last night. For the first half of the night we kept the cats in our room so we wouldn’t have to worry about them trying to jump down off of something while doped and hurting themselves. Cahlash spent the entire time racing around the room, occasionally jumping up near his curled-up sister and getting hissed at. Not much sleep there.

Next we let the cats out and I stayed up for a while watching them to make sure they were handling themselves okay and wouldn’t injure themselves if left alone.

Finally we went to sleep, with some success despite high adrenaline and stress levels.

This morning we get to try to dose Selene up with her pain meds, which ought to be, uh, fun. (Last night’s antibiotics only partially ended up inside of her.) I’ve been pointing out to her that the more she lets us get into her the less she’ll hurt today, but I somehow doubt she’s listening, eh?

At least now Cahlash is capable of sitting still. And both cats are very hungry, which is a good sign. They had about half their dinner last night (the better to not have them puke) after not having had breakfast or lunch, so they’re convinced they’re dying of hunger.

So, yeah. Our tiny little cat has basically her canines left, or something like that. Not much else. After they popped the tartar off they found what was underneath really didn’t resemble teeth all that much any more, and that she’d basically been chewing her food with tartar, not teeth, for some time. Which HAD to hurt. So hopefully she’ll be in a lot less pain once the surgery pain wears off.