Gatsby Update

The past two weeks have been an awful roller coaster with the kitty. Here are the highlights:

May 6 - Take Gatsby in for surgery. Get a call later that day that they can't operate because her pre-op blood work shows an extremely high blood glucose level. Seems she's diabetic. I freak and cry a lot.

May 12 - Go back to the vet for a consult about this whole diabetes thing and find out what kind of prognosis we are looking at. Sounds like things are not as hopeless as I feared, and she'll probably do ok on 2x daily insulin pills. In the interim since we were last at the vet, she hasn't been eating much, so the vet sends us home with medication to stimulate her appetite. Need to get that back to normal before we can start on the insulin.

May 13/14 - Gatsby is very upset and agitated, and seems to be in pain to me. So, we make a late-night visit to the pet emergency clinic in the wee small hours of Wednesday night/Thursday morning. The vet on-duty does a bunch of tests and thinks she has a cancerous mass in her abdomen. More freaking and crying ensues.

May 14 - Follow-up with the regular vet the following day. She tells me not to freak out, she sees no evidence of a mass and thinks the ER vet was looking at part of her kidney. Says the agitation was likely a result of the appetite stimulant. We'll try taking her off it and see how she does. The vet also extracts an infected tooth, which may be the source of the eating issues.

Today - Kitty still isn't eating normally; I'm going to put her back on the medication and hope it works. We have another vet appointment in a few days.

Lots of frustrating ups and downs, and all of it pretty emotionally and mentally exhausting. Here's hoping things even out soon, because I'm not sure how much more of this I can handle.

Mother's Day Socks

These are the socks I made for my Mom for Mother's Day. It's another Knitty pattern, one which I attempted last fall (intending them to be a Christmas gift) without success. I took another run at them this spring and finally cracked the code.


The pattern reminded me of quilt squares, which is why I wanted to make them for Mom - she's a quilter. I'm so pleased with how they turned out. Perhaps I'll make some for myself one day - hopefully it wouldn't take me 7 months to complete a second pair.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Happy Star Wars Day??

I've learned that today is Star Wars Day. Why, you might ask? (I wondered too.) It's because today fans can say "May the Fourth be with you."

(Groan) I am so not a fan of puns.

Anyway, in celebration of this momentous occasion (you'd think I would have had a bank holiday) enjoy this video of a non-fan who has never seen the movies explaining the plot. Hilarious.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Fallingwater

I was in Farmington, PA the past few days for a business conference at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort. I had a free morning and took the opportunity to visit Fallingwater, the famous home built over a waterfall - designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmann family.

I was intially disappointed to learn that there are no tours of the house on Wednesdays -the only time I was able to go - but was able to purchase a grounds pass, which is essentially a self-guided tour of the exterior. I figured this was better than nothing.

I was so pleased with the experience. Although I wasn't able to go inside the house, I could still walk around on several of the terraces, and peer in the windows. Since the outdoor spaces of Fallingwater are an integral part of the overall design, I still got a strong sense of the style and feel of it all.

the iconic view of Fallingwater

And the best part? THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE THERE. I am not kidding about this. There was one other car in the parking lot, and whoever it was, I never saw them. 135,000 people visit Fallingwater every year, and I had the grounds completely to myself. No people wandering through my photos. No pressure to hurry along. It was a wonderful silver lining, and I left not minding so much that I hadn't gotten the full tour.

Kitty's Under the Weather

I found a scary lump on my kitty's stomach, and took her to the vet last week to get it checked. Poor little thing has a hernia which will need surgery. :-(

The operation isn't scheduled until May 6. She also has a heart condition - well controlled with medication - but the vet wants her on a super-duper high octane medication for a month before doing the surgery. So I have to keep a VERY close eye on her in the meantime, and hope things do not go awry. If she gets worse, they'll just go ahead and operate and we'll hope for the best.

The good news is that she doesn't seem to be in any pain or discomfort at all - in fact, I'm not sure she's even aware of the hernia. She's probably just wondering why I'm fussing over her so much.

Keep your fingers crossed, okay?

Where the %!$#@ is Spring?

This is what it looked like outside this morning.


(sigh) I am SO tired of this. I want to plant flowers, and barbeque, and lay in my hammock.

At least I can feel better about procrastinating in getting the snow tires taken off the Beretta.

A Kitchen Innovation

Mom got me this cool new gadget the other day...it's called a BeaterBlade+. It's a replacement mixing blade for my KitchenAid stand mixer. What makes it special is the rubber wings on the blade that scrape the bowl as it's mixing, theoretically eliminating the need to stop the mixer and scrape. Supposedly it will reduce mixing time by up to 50%.

Naturally, I had to try it out immediately. So, I made...a cheesecake. Shocking, huh?

It worked beautifully - I am very impressed. I don't think that it cut my mixing time in half, but it definitely made things faster and easier. This will come in quite handy when December rolls around and I am cranking out several dozen cheesecakes for Christmas gifts.

So, I had a yummy Oreo cheesecake stashed in the fridge when my friend Trig called about an impromtu get-together with friends at his house Friday night. Not much in the way of leftovers!