Even More Absent Than Usual

Mr. Yenta is in the hospital at the moment. He's been there since Saturday and will probably be there a while longer, so I'm completely out of it. Has anything happened?  Of course, the dog has been able to keep up her  blog while all this is going on, but I figured out why. All she has to know is what's going on in her life. A dog's life is always interesting enough to warrant a blog post. Very few of us humans can say the same.

Daylight Savings Time - Could be better

Image via Wikipedia

It's come to my attention that today begins Daylight Savings Time and it's an hour later than I thought it was. While the trade-off is kind of worth it and we get the hour back in the fall, I believe we can improve the way we do this.

My proposal is simple. We leave the end of Daylight Savings Time the way it is. The change officially arrives at 2AM on the designated Sunday morning. Nothing wrong with getting an extra hour on Sunday. However getting an hour less of Sunday is not as good. How about we move the Spring Ahead time to, say, around 4PM on a Friday? What do you think?

Sunday Evening Pleasures

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

First, Indulgence

This was a pretty good Sunday night as those things go. First we got taken out for a Mothers' Day/Fathers' Day/Anniversary dinner. Our son and his girlfriend (who I think of as my future daughter-in-law) took us to a lovely café where we had a fantastic meal. Everything was good, but the most sinful part was the dessert I shared with my son. A "chocolate bag". We had to see what that was and OMG that was good. Pure chocolate shaped like a bag and filled with white chocolate mousse, whipped cream and berries.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

Then home and the season premier of True Blood. The living room was packed for it. It really hit the ground running and the second season is looking even better than the first. I'd watch anyway. It's worth watching just for the theme song and opening credits. I think the song for the closing credits is new this season.

On A More Serious Note - Iran

I'm in total awe of the reform movement in Iran. It was heartbreaking to see what had happened in the election, but those people are so amazingly courageous. And they've had it. I guess there's no way for them to win this battle, but down the road I hope there's some way that they can win their war.

Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there. I thought I’d  meditate on my mom a little bit. I think I’ve posted all this before in other places, but it’s what I’m thinking about this Mother’s Day, so there you go. I’ve posted this photo before, too, but I love to remember the time this was taken. We went down to Ocean City, NJ, where we met up with a bunch of friends and went to see Arlo at the Music Pier there and hung out around the boardwalk for a couple of days. I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but I do know it was the last big thing we did together and I’m so glad she decided to come along on that trip. When she was feeling like herself she was up for anything. Actually, one of the things that made her last year or so so hard was that she believed she was still up for anything but it was simply no longer true.

Mom died at the age of 85 – which is fantastic for her side of the family – in 2006.  I can tell you exactly what day she started her decline into dementia. It was Election Night, 2004. We had to call 911 and spent much of the night at the ER as she had the first and most likely the worst of a whole lot of mini-strokes which first took her short term memory and then took away more and more brain functions, including some that keep you alive. That Election Night is what did it.  God, she hated Bush. Every time she regained consciousness she asked about the Election and insisted that it could be a mistake and we could all wake up and found that Kerry had actually won.

How I wish she could have held on at least until the Democrats took Congress in 2006. And if she could have voted for Obama and seen him elected, well, she could have gone with the feeling that the world had made some progress after all, instead of going downhill and backwards with astonishing speed. It would have made her truly happy. Anyway, I miss her. I don’t think that you ever really get over missing people that are gone. I think you just learn to co-exist with the inevitable losses that life brings.

Weird Condition r Us

We’ve been spending the evening trying to diagnose Mr. Yenta, and by “we” I mean my sister and me. Mr. Yenta is asleep, and is likely to stay that way for some time. That’s the problem.  As I’ve mentioned before, Mr. Yenta has a number of things wrong with him. Physical things, I mean. This is not a critique of a husband. There’s Type I Diabetes with related complications including an unusually bad case of neuropathy. To complicate matters he lost a kidney to cancer and has phlebitis. Naturally this all involves a lot of different medications and getting to the cause of something new can be complicated. Which is why we’re working on the diagnosis ourselves. Doctors have done tests and not found anything that explains it yet. But he sleeps. And when I say sleeps I mean he sleeps deeply for a couple of days at a time. Sometimes more. He gets up only to answer nature’s call and when I wake him for meals. In between these bouts he’s reasonably energetic, busy and – well – normal. But this episodes have been getting more frequent and lasting longer since right after the holidays. They usually come right before or after a painful bout of neuropathy, so I’m assuming it’s related, but since it can be before or after it’s probably a little complicated.

This is completely contrary to his normal nature. He’s been an early riser since we’ve been married. Sure he might take an afternoon nap or fall asleep earlier than he plans in the evening, but this is a whole different thing. The closest we’ve really come is finding a rare syndrome that normally affects adolescent boys.  Of course we have to go back to the doctor and probably get a new referral to a neurologist for this, but being sure he’ll be awake to keep an appointment is a challenge. I mean, once this takes hold, he cannot be moved.

So that’s a lot of what’s been keeping us busy of late. Sleeping.

Honored As I Am

I’ve Award Memed by Annette! I’m honored to be considered for this prestigious thingy. So here go the instructions:

1.You must brag about the award 
Check
2.You must include the name of the blogger who bestowed the award on you and link back to the blogger
Check 

3.You must choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
MMM..this is harder. It’s easy to come up with seven brilliant blogs – or 70 for that matter -  but some of them are just not going to do memes. Will try. 
4.Show their names and links and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog.
Leftist Grandpa
That’s Right, Nate
Write Chic
Soup Is Not a Fingerfood
Rabbit Hole
The View From Here
Citizen K

Half check. The links are up – obviously – but it’s going to take a little time to get around to tagging everyone in their own comments.

5.List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself.

Oh, lordy me. I don’t think there ARE ten things about me. I’ll try.

1. I was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lived there for the first decade of my life before we moved to Long Island. (Lawn Guyland). Both of things are more significant as an ethnic heritage than any fluid running in my veins.
2. I’m not a very good housekeeper. I try, but it’s so damned boring. I’d rather be blogging. Like right now. Should be cleaning, but I’m blogging.
3. I’m an unenthusiastic cook most of the time. I do it, but I’d rather be blogging. I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about food either. A slice of pizza or a gourmet meal are both good. Too good.
4. Music is an overarching theme in my life but I have a tin ear and can’t even slightly carry a tune. My own children asked me to stop singing to them as soon as they could say “No!”
5. I love my job. I’ve only been there six years, which I think helps me truly appreciate it all the more. Working for an organization that has as its goal helping people instead of enriching some is a whole different thing. The working conditions suit me very well, too. Besides lots of compensated time off and paid medical, I have my own little office and I can wear jeans pretty much every day. Never thought the former cold go with the latter. Not a lot of money, of course, but then I kind of forgot to have the kind of career that would pay well anyway.
6. I’m 59 years old and I still hate dressing up as much as I did when I was 9. Way to mature – not. I’m still most comfortable in jeans.  See #5
7. My first love was art. My grandmother was an artist and the early consensus in the family was that I’d inherited some of her talent. I think that they may have been grasping at straws. I did study art when I was younger, but I haven’t painted in years and while I still like one or two of the things I did, great art, they ain’t. I sure do still like looking at art, though.
8. I have a rare disease. It’s not troubling me at the moment and it might never be a problem again, but I have CTCL, which is unusual enough that treatment for it has been developed under the orphan drug act. It took years to get a diagnosis so it was pretty far along when I finally knew I had it and got radiation and had to be on an oral medication for a year.
9. There was a husband before Mr. Yenta. That marriage ended while I was still in my twenties but it did produce my daughter so it can’t really be ignored. But Mr. Yenta and I have been married for over thirty years.
10. Mr. Yenta is somewhat disabled. He has a combination of things wrong with him that result in some days when he seems as fine as anyone but other periods of time when he can’t really get around at all and is in a lot of pain. The ratio of bad time to up time has been increasing of late, which causes us a lot of concern. He’s been home on Social Security Disability for the last couple of years. Life has been somewhat turbulent as we’ve had more changes in the last decade than in all the ones before, or so it seems.

The Ironic Thing Is…

This cat is named Happy.

Actually, the cat photo is to serve as a distraction from the fact that I haven’t posted at all this week. The excuses are as follows:

1. Been feeling a little under the weather. Not bad enough to stay home from work, but enough so that I fall asleep before any blogging can take place.
2. Lola, the new dog, is getting to be a bit more high maintenance. She’s al settled in and still well behaved, but wants attention and walks and things. She’s got a lot more energy than one would think just by looking at her.
3. And the top reason for not posting this week – TORTURE. As the situation regarding Bush era torture of detainees has taken on a life of its own it’s been a lot more absorbing to watch coverage of it and read about it than to write about it. Even though we already knew about it, those memos seemed newly shocking. There’s so much to say about it, but others are saying it much better than I could, so I watch and read.

As an addendum, I hope that Sean Hannity realizes that Keith Olbermann isn’t going to let him alone on his offer to be waterboarded for charity. Olbermann is taking him up on it and putting up a thousand dollars a second for the families of the troops, and I doubt Hannity is going to hear the last of it unless he agrees to do it.

Oh, and it’s kind of riveting to watch the GOP get nuttier and nuttier. It’s hard to look away from that for long enough to post this.

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And It's Only Tuesday

Image by ChrisGoldNY via Flickr

There won't be a whole lot of blogging from me for the next day or so. It's a sort of busy week. We had EastOver dinner here on Sunday followed by company on Monday. Some of our best friends came down from Massachusetts to see the Mets lose their home opener on our TV instead of the one that they’ve got at home. Normally they go to the actual ballpark to see the opener, but what with it being the first home game at the brand new Citi Field (otherwise known as Bailout Field) they couldn’t get hold of affordable tickets. One thing about your team losing is it can make you feel a lot better about not blowing the grocery money on tickets to the game. At least at our house they were on the same land mass as the stadium.

So we had our three friends and they brought along two of their dogs, making it the first time Lola has played hostess since she’s been living with us. Turns out she loves having her own company and all the dogs had a wonderful time romping around the backyard and then milling around the house. She definitely had a thing for the border collie mix and I think it was mutual. Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t love after spaying and neutering. There’s also humping. But you probably knew that.

Today was my day in the other office which is located an hour away instead of a few minutes and I don’t get much chance to keep up with events outside the office on those days. I missed the live coverage of the First Dog. I hope to catch up with that in the days ahead.

Tomorrow night Stevie the cat goes to the vet to get his stitches out, but I hope to be able to get up to speed on Tea Bagging day somehow. I don’t want to completely miss this. So that’s it. Not exactly a real post. More like just checking in.

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Ooh la la, Lola! La Chienne Parle Français

Lola came to the office for a couple of hours this morning. Everyone had to be out and we hadn't even had time to get a crate up. Not having any way of knowing if Lola has separation anxiety issues we figured better she spend the morning at work. My sister and I work at the same place, but she's in management and in meetings and running around putting out fires and all kinds of things, whereas I can usually be found in my office, so I took Lola. I learned that she gets really bored when you try to work on spreadsheets.

While she was keeping me from my actual work I got to wondering why such a well behaved, well socialized canine didn't seem to know the most basic commands apart from "No". Almost every adult dog I've ever met knows "Sit" and most of them have at least a passing familiarity with "Stay" even if they aren't really so good at it. Then it occured to me that Lola's from Brooklyn. There are a lot of different languages spoken in Brooklyn homes. Maybe English is not her first language.

A Google search produced a number of sites with lists of common dog commands in other languages. The first one I tried was TalkingTales.com. They list the same five basic commands in a whole bunch of languages.  I naturally tried Spanish first, since so many people speak it, but “Sientate” just produced the same blank look that “Sit” does. Next, figuring there’s a good sized Haitian population in Brooklyn, I tried French. “Assis”, I said firmly and….she sat. “Attend!” and she stayed. Say, “Ici” and she comes to you. So Lola is a French speaking dog. None of us speak French but we’re learning a little now, and we have to work on our pronunciation. She seems willing to put up with our atrocious accents for now and I do feel we’ve made a big step in communication.

Dog Day Afternoon

Yesterday afternoon my sister and I set out for Brooklyn to interview with a dog, as mentioned below. I have to tell you all about the place that we went to do this. It was a lot more interesting than we could have imagined.

All we knew was that we were going to see a beautiful cream color 2 and a half year old Shar Pei that we’d found on Petfinder at a privately run shelter in Brooklyn. On Saturday afternoon the Windsor Terrace neighborhood where Sean Casey Animal Rescue is located was pretty quiet. Except in the immediate vicinity of the shelter.  Two regulation size storefronts seem to comprise both the shelter and Hamilton Dog House, which sells pet supplies. The pet supply store part also serves as housing for a few cats, birds and reptiles, including at least 3 free range Sulcata tortoises, the smallest of which has a shell at least a foot square. They wandered around the place at will and everyone was careful to step around them. And by everyone I mean a lot of people. The activity spilled out onto the street.  People and pets occupied the bench out front, were conversing on the sidewalk and an alleyway next to the building was being used for a training session. There was an impressive amount of staff, including volunteers and there were people buying supplies, adopting animals and I think there were some just stopping by. In the center of this controlled chaos was Sean Casey himself. At the time we had no idea that he and his shelter were kind of famous. Turns out they’ve sent three dogs to the Animal Planet show, Underdog to Wonderdog. I’d even seen one of the episodes, but I didn’t remember anything about it until after we got home and I saw the links on the shelter’s website.  We had no idea at the time we were having a brush with celebrity.

We did meet Violet, the dog we went to see and she was just as beautiful as her photo and I fell in love immediately, but she’s not the one we went home with. We were also introduced to Lola, a six year old Shar Pei. Given the totality of our situation, including Stevie’s condition, the quieter, older dog seemed the better choice.  It was my sister who came to that conclusion first, but I could see she was right. It was hard to leave either of them behind and if anyone, anywhere near Brooklyn is looking for a gorgeous blonde Shar Pei, Violet will make a wonderful addition to someone or some family’s life.

Sean Casey works fast, but thoroughly. Once we’d decided what we wanted to do we were given an application to fill out. Three personal and at least one veterinary references had to be given. And they called every one of them.

Lola bonded with us on the way home by showering us with kisses, putting the car in neutral twice while it was moving and somehow or other undoing my sister’s seatbelt. We didn’t get home until about eight last night. Lola met Mr.Yenta. He was sound asleep when we got in, but Lola didn’t feel that was any impediment to getting acquainted. Once he was fully awake he pronounced her the perfect dog for us. When it comes to the cats she seems to be willing to play with them, but since they don’t seem so inclined that’s OK too. We’re still learning about her. She’s well behaved but seems to know absolutely no commands. She does respond to “No!”, thank God, but sit, stay, lie down – nothing. She just looks at you like, “I’d like to help you out but I have no idea what you’re trying to say. So far, everything’s going well, for us, for Lola and the cats.

We had a hardly used dog bed. She likes it.

You can’t really see it well here, but she has a pink camouflage collar. We thought it was feminine and yet little edgy. There’s a matching leash, of course.

Sad Cat News

We got the pathology report on Stevie. Not good. Not good at all. It’s cancer, it will recur and probably pretty soon. With radiation he has a few months to a year. Without, just a few months. The doctor doesn’t even recommend chemo. He wants us to see a veterinary oncologist, but he’s basically talking quality of life at this point and not so much quantity. I’m not inclined to torture him with treatments that aren’t going to cure him or extend decent quality of life for long. He’s had a good one except for a couple of rough patches.

He got dumped in our neighborhood when he was just a tiny kitten and wound up in our garage. My son and a friend found him there. It took a while but we – mostly Mr. Yenta, the cat whisperer among us – convinced him that he’d be better off living inside with us. They’ve been best friends ever since. They have a lot of personality traits in common. Mr. Yenta doesn’t know about this development yet. When he’s back and I tell him it’s going to be quite a blow.

When he was a couple of years old he developed a polyp in his ear that had to come out, and that was a painful surgery to recover from. But he did and he rose pretty quickly through our ranks to become the senior cat. That came with a lot of perks and he enjoyed them. Just recently, through attrition, he became the senior pet. The last dog who was here before him passed away last fall. In fact, we are without a dog at all for the first time in memory right now. At thirteen, Stevie’s not really a very old cat, but he’s certainly not young either. Some of them live a lot longer than Stevie is likely to, but a lot don’t make it past fifteen. Things could have gone a lot differently for an abandoned gray tabby, not to mention that he could have been found by a different type of teenage boy, so he’s really done OK in life.

On the dog front, we have an appointment, made before we got this news, to interview with a dog at a shelter in Brooklyn this afternoon. Now the timing doesn’t seem so good, but we’ll keep the appointment. The dog is going to be cat tested while we’re there to see and we’ll just be a little more hypercritical about it than usual. Usually I just assume that everyone will manage to work out an acceptable pecking order and that’s what’s always happened, but we really have to be a little more protective of Stevie’s comfort than that under the circumstances. The doggie appointment is a whole new experience. I don’t recall ever going looking for any pet before. My experience is that the house will fill up with animals almost on its own if you allow it, but no dog has turned up this time. I’ll update later if possible.

Stevie Ray’s Bad Day(s)

Today, we spent the afternoon taking Stevie Ray Cat to the vet. That’s Stevie in the photo, before he had a big icky thing hanging off his face. He’s the most senior of our three cats at just about thirteen.

He has a tumor that wasn’t supposed to be anything to worry about but it turned nasty, naturally, on Sunday morning. The good news is that there is a highly recommended animal hospital that’s open for appointments on Sunday. The bad news is that it’s at least a 45 minute drive away. He hasn’t needed anything more than routine care since he was a couple of years old, and he has a home visit vet for that. So, he doesn’t get out much.

Stevie is normally a very reserved fellow, so I hate having to have him poked and prodded, but he seemed to like the vet OK and was a perfect gentleman about the whole thing. No scratching, hissing or anything.  He just wanted us to stay very close in case anything went awry. They let us take him home tonight, but he’s scheduled for surgery in the morning.  He’s ready to go, I guess. He’s sleeping in the cat carrier right now. He loves it. I  suppose that means it’ll be part of the living room furnishings from now on. Of course, he doesn’t know that there’s one of those awful cones in his future. It’s going to be a difficult week or so all around.

I better make this an early night. We’re due at the animal hospital at 7 am. Which is at least 45 minutes away.

UPDATE: Stevie is home and purring like mad. We won’t know about the pathology for a couple of days, but right now he’s feeling OK.  He’s a little unsteady on his pins, but that didn’t keep him from having a bit of late supper and now he’s relaxing as close to Mr. Yenta as possible. He thanks everyone for their expressions of concern and we’ll let you know about the lab report when we get it.

Sick Day

Got the stomach thing that's been going around my office. I figured since I was going to be home anyway, I'd blog, or upload photos to Facebook, or read a lot of blogs, or at least something. Not so much. I spent all day just staring into space punctuated by napping. I am so in awe of people like Senator Kennedy or Justice Ginsberg or some people I actually know here in real life, who continue to work and function even while fighting really terrible illness. I get a touch of a stomach virus and become immediately useless. 

Now maybe I can stay awake long enough to find out what's been going on in the world today. 

Snow Day

That’s not a minivan or station wagon. That’s at least 16 inches of snow on the ‘02 Galant. The driveway is under about the same amount of snow except where it’s drifted higher. I think we’re too freaking old for this. Last time we had some snow we got an offer to shovel from some guys who looked big enough to be equal to this. That time there wasn’t enough on the driveway to bother with. We subscribe to the “let it melt” school of snow removal whenever possible. Not going to work this time. I sure hope those guys show up this time. We’re prepared to pay through the nose. I mean, what good is grocery money if you can’t get to the store, right?

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