Ordinary Day

And now, to make up for last weekend, I'd like to post about some things that don't suck.

I have once more begun to try to cut down on my soda. I am trying not to get too ambitious about the goal here or to make long-term plans, since my luck with that lately has been kind of sketchy, but for the last two days at least I've limited myself to two cans of soda a day. At the same time, I'm trying to take myself off the Trazodone since I have reason to believe it's messing with me, and I've stayed off that for the last two days too. So far I have noticed an immediate lessening of the general background noise of tension I've had in my system for a while. This is a very good thing indeed. And I need to remember this feeling for the next time I start getting way too interested in the diet Dew.

I got a surprise letter from the College of Veterinary Medicine at WSU yesterday, informing me that Ravenna Animal Hospital had made a donation to them because of Polly. And Polly has been added to the list of pet names here. That was an incredibly sweet gesture of the vet, and made me feel rather misty.

A story on our site made me feel kind of misty, too. A couple of days ago we'd run this article about how lack of dental care is leaving the poor in agony, and as part of that article a picture had been run of a guy who was sobbing in the dental office since his blood pressure was too high for them to give him anesthetic. Apparently this prompted an outpouring of offers to help from Times readers to get this guy the dental care he needs. That really made me go "awww". Sometimes, every so often, people don't suck.

As y'all have seen over the last week, I've been more aggressively reading. Which has meant that I haven't listened to stuff on my iPod as much, and that means I have yet to actually listen to the new podcast from Great Big Sea! *blush* I really must correct this little problem this weekend. I may lose my GBS fan cred if I don't. ;)

What I have been listening to, though, is Carbon Leaf. I am seriously grooving on Ether-Electrified Porch Music. I may even like it better than Echo Echo; so far every single track on it is striking me as potential repeat-play material, which puts it out ahead of Echo Echo. This will require a few more plays to give it a proper judging. And I've been slurping up the classical music compilations I've got, too; I have found that they seem to unwind me on a fundamental level. The same level that's been feeling quite good with the hard cut of caffeine over the last two days, in fact.

TV-wise, although I have not yet posted an in-depth post about it, I did like the second episode of the Dresden Files. I don't think I'll do in-depth posting about it this weekend just because I want to focus on getting some writing and editing done, but I did want to at least note that yeah, the episode was good. I liked it a little better than the premiere; it felt more like a Harry story to me.

Movie-wise, courtesy of boxer_ferret I hear tell that Russell Crowe has been signed in a new take on the Robin Hood story--playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As a good guy, even, investigating a string of murders for which Robin Hood is the suspect. This should be entertaining. And this weekend I hope to meet up with mamishka and go see The Painted Veil, which promises to be full of fun socialness and English-Patient-y romantic angst with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Last but definitely not least, I'm slowly closing in on the five-month mark with Faerie Blood in the e-slush pile at Baen. And trying to remind myself that this doesn't mean much, since their turnaround time is like 9-12 months... but still. It feels satisfying that they haven't told me no quite yet.

Miles from 1/20 up to today: 31.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1730.4
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 421.4
Miles to Isengard: 62.6

I got a call from the emergency vet just before lunchtime, with the verdict. They were able to do an ultrasound on Polly as well as get a sterile urine sample out of her, and they tell me that they've found a mass on her bladder. Because of the way it's situated, it would be difficult to remove via surgery; the best they could accomplish doing that would be a reduction of the bulk of the mass. It's growing in such a way right now so as to not fully obstruct her ability to urinate, but long-term, it would likely spread into more of her body and eventually interfere with her bodily functions anyway.

It would be possible to treat it with anti-inflammatories, but from what the vet was telling me, that'd maybe get us a few more months. She wouldn't commit to a solid estimate based on the fact that they hadn't identified the exact nature of the mass, but definitely confirmed that regardless, trying to treat it via medication would simply be prolonging the inevitable.

Because of this I have decided that since I can't afford a major surgical procedure for the cat right now, that this basically makes my choices "deal with this now" or "deal with this in the near future".

So we're dealing with this now. The vet says it would be more merciful to go ahead and deal with it while they have her rather than making her come home and have to be handled by yet another person, so solarbird, risu, spazzkat, and I are going over to the place this afternoon to be with her as they do this.

Hell.

We've had an escalation of Polly behavior: she's now having bloody urinary accidents all over the house, including on housemates. She had a little incident on risu overnight.

This is now on the scale of her behavior prior to her bladder stones incident ten years ago, which concerns the hell out of me, since if she's having a resurgence of this that'll mean surgery that solarbird and I cannot afford. I am also deeply concerned that this just may be indicative of some kind of kidney failure that I won't be able to get dealt with either, just on the grounds that she's old.

Either way, she needs to be seen today. I have gotten an appointment scheduled for her this morning at the Woodinville Veterinary Hospital, recommended by kathrynt. Hopefully they'll be able to clue me in on a course of action to take, and if this is something that could be helped by antibiotics (just a seriously nasty infection of some kind), recommend one that we can get Polly to take without her throwing up.

It should amuse seimaisin, I think, that I have been in a complete and total Carbon Leaf mood lately after purchasing their first three albums on iTunes. I've been trying to hit all their tracks on my iPod over the last day or two, and as a result have gotten myself songvirused by "Home" off Ether-Electrified Porch Music, as well as "American Tale". Now that I've finally fixed the cover art problem on the tracks for Love Loss Hope Repeat, I'll be giving it another run through tomorrow as well.

There are two drawbacks to this, though. One is that the sound mix on the earlier albums is kind of bugging me, since it's very obvious in comparison with the later albums where vocals and instruments are in a much better balance. But I'm not sure what I can do about it yet, since I have not yet mastered the mojo of playing with iTunes' equalizer settings. There's a Vocal Booster setting, but at least on my headphones that doesn't seem to help much, and it sacrifies the fullness of the instruments to boot.

The other drawback is that I think I have regretfully decided that the tracks I snarfed for their performance at the 2004 show at the Moore, which was the one I attended where they opened for GBS, aren't doing it for me. Just something about the energy of that show--it doesn't come close to what I get out of Echo Echo or Indian Summer. I like the sample tracks I have for 5 Alive! a lot better and will have to get that album, I think, to give live Carbon Leaf another fair shake. And of course there's always the option of actually attending one of their shows; they'll be out here again in February!

Meanwhile, as those of you who follow my annathewriter journal know, I'm trying to make a hard press to finish Queen of Souls by the end of the month so that I can make February a Month of Editing--and get both Lament of the Dove and Queen of Souls out the door, at least as partials. This is likely to mean that my attention to my LJ will be erratic at best; those of you who are local, if you need me for anything it'll probably be best to email me. But I will endeavor to post book reviews and BSG commentary--not to mention Dresden Files once that kicks in on the 21st, so keep tuning in!

Other general notes:

I have purchased two pairs of Yaktrax on lyonesse's recommendation, since I found them at REI--one pair for me, one for solarbird. Here's hoping they will serve the purpose next time it ices up around here.

And tomorrow I have to take Polly to the vet. Again. More on this tomorrow.

Thursday through Wednesday miles: 13.15
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1662.2
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 353.2
Miles to Isengard: 130.8

So! Been a few days since I last checked in, thanks to avoiding LJ while at work and trying to write (or otherwise being too brain-dead to write, which also means I'm too brain-dead to post to LJ) once I get home. But there hasn't been anything too terribly fascinating to post about this past week anyway, so y'all haven't missed much in the land of Anna.

Capsule summary: Fairly quiet week at work. Forgot to take my Synthroid again on Thursday, which was very annoying, as I'd been trying to get everything stabilized again Synthroid-wise and that didn't help matters much. But things are clicking back into place in my brain now that I'm taking the 150's regularly again. Also, work improved once I finally buckled in and started bringing cans of diet Mountain Dew from home. The market near the Times building stopped stocking diet Dew for some reason, and the absence of my morning and post-lunch Dew at work was making me cranky! But bringing in my own cans solved that problem nicely, and is significantly cheaper besides.

Polly is in much better shape now that she's had quite a bit of the pink antibiotic goop, enough that she's started getting finicky again about eating her food with the medication in it. I'll have to figure out better ways to get her to eat.

I've finished The Art of Deception, by Ridley Pearson, a book I'd picked up way back when I did the Underground Tour with ravyngyngvar during his visit. They'd been selling this novel in the Underground's gift shop, so I thought what the hell, I'll check it out. It was... meh. Good Seattle-like atmosphere, but it turns out that this was the eighth novel in a series--so here and there I found myself with the usual slight sense of thinking I'd better know what was going on had I read the earlier books. This also caused one very minor but nevertheless present nitpick for me--I don't need much description of a character, but y'know what? I'd like to know before I'm 238 pages into a novel whether a significant character has a distinctive feature like a mustache. A rather bigger nitpick I had with it, too, was the scene where one of the POV characters goes and speaks with an expert on the Underground, and she suddenly starts spewing reams of information at him that read way more like a quote from a lecture or an encyclopedia rather than actual dialogue. I expected it to end with "this description of the Underground brought to you by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. We now return you to your regularly scheduled story, already in progress!" Long story short, if you want to check this out, you might actually want to start with book one in the series.

One little bit of amusement I got out of that novel, though, ties in with another thing I had going on this week. I've been working on a personal quest of trying to listen to everything on my iPod. I've got a huge swath of stuff in my collection that I haven't even listened to even once since ripping it onto the device, so I made a Not Played Yet playlist and have been slowly working my way through it. This week I went through all of my Enya and Loreena McKennitt, my album of various classical works by Grieg, and (and this is where the novel is pertinent) the album Surfacing by Sarah McLachlan. I'd bought that on impulse some time ago, on one of those occasional whims I get to try to expand my musical horizons. And I'd played it before, just not any time recently, so I'd totally forgotten what the album is like. But it was actually mentioned in the novel, which made me go "HEY!" So I had to go ahead and play it.

Next up on the reading queue: Banner of Souls by mevennen, a.k.a. Liz Williams. The next few novels I'll be reading will follow the theme of "Authors Whose LJs I Read". This means karentraviss and matociquala and jimbutcher are all forthcoming. So is The Surgeon's Mate, however. risu has been hungrily devouring my Patrick O'Brian novels lately, having grown ardently fond of Jack and Stephen, and she'll be catching up with me shortly. So I'd better be reading the next one on my To Read shelves soon!

Lost was watched on Thursday, Battlestar Galactica on Friday. More commentary will be forthcoming on the latter.

And last but definitely not least, huge, huge congratulations must go out to kathrynt and llachglin, the proud parents of Lilian Elanor Tewson Heino!

Last Friday miles through Sunday miles: 26.85
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1454.9
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 145.9
Miles to Isengard: 338.1

Left work early today around 2:30 to catch a 2:50 bus and get home by 3:30, which basically gave me enough time to have a glass of diet Mountain Dew and then bundle Polly off into her carrier for a little trip to the vet. Oh joy oh glee!

And it looks like a potential bladder or kidney infection, something similar to what happened early this year. The vet isn't sure whether this means that the prior infection never got properly cleared out, or whether this is a new one. She's also concerned, given Polly's history, about the remote possibility of some form of cancer. But right now she's sounding more inclined to believe an infection. They did get enough of a urine sample out of her carrier ('cause oh my yes she left a stern communique in the box on the way there) to determine that there were quite a few red blood cells in it--which we knew already since we've seen plenty of bloody urine out of the poor creature. The vet's also somewhat concerned at the dilution of the urine, which might be indicative of kidney issues. We'll see what happens with this new antibiotic. It's pink, and it looks a lot like Pepto-Bismol.

So. Not terribly great news, but definitely better than some other possibilities that have been rolling around in my brain this week.

Saturday: I survived the excursion to the vet. So did Polly, even though apparently Saturday was Emergency Day at my vet. They had everything going wrong that could possibly go wrong, with a dog passing out and a cat with a fever of 106. Fortunately Polly merely remained her normal level of cranky rather than being one of the emergencies, but still, she wound up being there for an hour and a half or so. I was able to go get a smoothie and a pretzel and go to Barnes and Noble, even, while I was waiting; I wound up scarfing a copy of Kelley Armstrong's Bitten, since her work's supposed to be hot stuff right now and I had a discount sticker to spend. Saturday afternoon I went out for a walk with solarbird, which was pleasant, though we were both a little bummed to see that there's a bunch of construction going on down at Log Boom Park, so we couldn't really go to the lake shore as we'd planned. But it was nice to get out in the sunshine nonetheless.

Sunday: Dara and spazzkat and I went down to the market, which was a nice getting back to routine sort of thing. Especially when the guy who runs the shave ice booth gave us our shave ice this time for free, once we told him what had happened to Dara. That was incredibly nice of him, so we have to make extra special sure to go and get shave ice from him for the last couple of weeks of the market. And any of you locals on my Friends list who might feel inclined to go to the Lake Forest Park Farmer's Market these last couple of weeks, go. And buy shave ice from that guy. 'Cause he's really cool.

Today: Work was pretty low-key, and the new temp and my lead and I hung out in her office for an hour and a half trying to work out some QA issues we needed to settle, and action items I needed to do as a result. So it was productive even if in a roundabout way, and it was a good chance to clue the temp in on some of our issues with our bug database and getting people to use it right. I have to send out mail as a result of these two action items tomorrow. And, I also get to go in at dark-thirty tomorrow since the woman doing database maintenance work for us is going to add an index to one of our important tables. This is supposed to make it easier to search and speed up one of our CPU-intensive queries. It should impact absolutely no user-facing resources, but I'm going in anyway to run some basic checks on stuff that relies on that table so as to issue the appropriate "Yes, QA has looked at this and we're good" statement once she's done. The bad part is, I have to get up at a quarter to six to get to work by seven. The good part is, I'll probably get to leave early tomorrow. Woot!

Meanwhile, I have read Mariana (big thanks again to chipmunck for sending me the book!) and enjoyed it quite a bit, and will be posting separately about that. I had pledged to read rachelcaine's Firestorm next, so that's next on the queue!

Everybody's been gushing about Heroes, so although we didn't watch it tonight, I did set up the Tivo to scarf the premiere. Dara and risu have already seen it, so it'll just be new to Paul and me, but hopefully it'll be a fun watch.

I am editing like a mad editing thing, and yoinking words out of Lament of the Dove right and left. I am closing in hard on 15,000 words yoinked in total out of the novel, and am hoping to finish off the second draft pass by the end of the month. This'll swing me around to the third draft--and the fourth, since I need fourth draft versions of the first three chapters to send off to Tor. Once the new partial is out, then I'm going to shift gears to write out as much of the rest of the outline of Queen of Souls as I can, and see if I can make a hard push through that book for my "unofficial" Nanowrimo this year. This is my plan. I have planned it.

And I see uniquecrash5 is listening in now, so hiya!

Saturday miles: 2.8
Sunday miles: 2.4
Monday miles: 3.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1395.7
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 86.7
Miles to Isengard: 397.3

Had to take Polly in to the vet today for a followup, since she's had issues lately with her thyroid levels and just being an old lady kitty in general. That went only marginally well, since they were only able to get the blood sample they wanted and couldn't weigh her at all or get a sample for urinalysis--since Polly still isn't too old a kitty to pitch a fit at the vet's. The more interesting vet stuff today actually had to do with a billing problem--it turned out that on that last big appointment she had back in June, I wound up getting somebody else's bill and paid about thirty dollars more than I should have. They didn't figure it out until NOW, when they were going through the computer to send out bills and found that my charge hadn't been paid. So I called them up to ask them WTF, and once I actually got down there with the invoice for what I'd paid and the invoice on the bill they'd sent me (since I was going down there anyway for Polly's appointment, I figured I'd bring the invoices with me), we realized that my paid invoice had somebody else's name on it.

Oops.

So they credited the difference to my account and now will have to contact the other client and explain that that charge hadn't actually gotten paid.

It's been a week for screwups of this nature, too. I realized that the rent check I thought I was missing from one tenant for last month's rent actually was missing from a different tenant entirely, which necessitated me going through the rent books with a fine-toothed comb. We sent apologetic email to the guy who'd actually paid his rent, and asked the other one if he'd please check his records and see if he sent us a check. Here's hoping we can get that straightened out.

Meanwhile, although lameness is keeping me from going to enjoy late-night Big Screen Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight, mamishka and I have mutually pledged to make up for it in two weeks when that theater runs Last Crusade. Which will be the last weekend before solarbird, spazzkat, and I take off for Worldcon and Disneyland, so that'll be a good time to go!

Wednesday miles: 3.2
Thursday miles: 3.6
Friday miles: 3.5
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1278.5
Miles out of Rivendell: 820.5
Miles out of Lothlórien: 358.5
Miles to Rauros Falls: 30.5

Today was another round of Old Lady Kitty exams for my cat, much to her distress and consternation. She was hanging in there pretty well on the ride to the vet's, but once we got there, there was another cat there who was pitching an even louder fit than Polly's prone to pitch--which did not help my poor kitty's peace of mind any. I told the vet tech that Polly's old and doesn't have quite so much fight in her anymore.

But it turned out that Polly's got blood in her urine, and she's also lost another pound and change since the last time I had her looked at. Given that she was about eight pounds the last time I had her looked at, that's a lot. :( So the vet wanted to do some x-rays on her, especially once I mentioned her history of surgery for the stones in her bladder. I told them to go ahead and do the x-rays while I buggered off for about an hour and hung out in the U-Village shopping center, getting a smoothie and a pretzel, wandering around Barnes and Noble, and then getting soda at the QFC on my way back to the car. When I came back, Polly had worked her way up into some good strong hissy fits; she may be old, but she's still feisty!

The vet says that the x-rays don't show any sign of stones, except that she could only really see one kidney; the other was kind of obscured by Polly's innards. They're going to give the sheets to a radiologist and get back to me on Monday with more data. In the meantime I need to figure out what kind of food I can start giving her that might be easier on her Old Lady Kitty system. The doctor really wants her on canned food, except the problem I've been noticing lately is that Polly likes to lick all the moisture off the wet food and not actually eat the wet food. So I've got to experiment some more and see if I can find a brand of wet food that she'll really be happy to eat. The vet gave me a couple cans of this fancy sardine-and-tuna stuff, but Polly doesn't seem too enamored of that. I got some other free cans of stuff to try from Mud Bay, the pet store close to our house. We'll see if she eats any of that.

And I got her a couple new catnip toys on the way home, since she's had a really hard kitty day today! She's shunning them, though. It may be a bit before she forgives me for hauling her off to the Evil Place again.

So according to this useful link provided to me by peregrine_ek (thanks!), my theory that being on my weekend schedule for four straight days at the con might have been just enough to make my system have to adjust back with noticeable effects this week might not be entirely off base. Item #4 on the list of 15 Reasons Why Your TSH May Be Fluctuating is "Timing of When You Take Your Pill". The list talks about various and sundry reasons why efficiency of absorption of the medication into the system might change--and I think that's probably what's going on with me, just a difference of how well the stuff gets absorped into my system. This will be interesting to keep in mind next time I have a noticeable schedule bump.

And continuing the thyroid theme of this post, I got more thyroid meds for Polly yesterday, stopping by that pharmacy on my way home from yesterday's dental appointment on Capitol Hill. This is worth noting mostly because only after I got to work did I realize I did not have that neat little insulated pouch thing that solarbird had hacked together, and Polly's med requires refrigeration. I'm hoping that sticking it in the pocket of my thick down jacket kept it more or less insulated during the rest of the bus ride home, 'cause I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Fingers crossed!

And speaking of cats (see how neatly she segues, folks?), I must go BWAHAHAHAHA! at the latest Cute Overload post, which pretty much requires the caption "GOT YER HEAD!"

Monday evening miles: 2.15
Tuesday miles: 3.4
Wednesday morning miles: 1.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 889.65
Miles out of Rivendell: 431.65
Miles to Lothlórien: 32.35