Things We Have Learned This Month

*  Before giving the free sample of canned kitty food to your finicky cat, best to check the price in case he then decides it's the only canned kitty food to eat.

*  When one spends more time preparing the cat's meal than the human meals, it's time for official Crazy Cat Lady status.

*  If one sees a second crack in the glass and thinks, "Hm, I wonder if it's about to break," a rather brilliant way to find out is to try hand-washing it.........and the answer is "YES."

*  It's easy to forget how quickly one can go from no tomatoes, to a few tomatoes, to "OMG! THE TOMATOES!"

*  When giving a cat liquid medication, it's always best to load the syringe with extra to account for what is going to end up on the walls, floors, windows, and in your hair.  All of it will never end up inside the cat.

*  When giving a cat medication in pill form, it's best to ask the vet for sedatives--for you AND the cat.

*  Giving a cat medication that can be sprinkled on his food is somewhat less stressful than all other options, but one will then spend one's entire day trying to convince the cat to eat the food with the medication.

*  The smellier the canned fish, the easier it is to disguise the smell of the drugs.  It also seems to increase the cat's need to head-bump you in the middle of the night with kitty fish-breath.

*  After a month of following your cat around either trying to get him to eat fish or checking how much he can urinate at any moment, one starts to wonder why one's cat got so stressed about one's absence................

Glad To See This

NPR has a story today about back pain:


http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/07/30/206910829/doctors-increasingly-ignore-evidence-in-treating-back-pain

and I was thrilled to see that it reaffirms everything I've been told by my back specialists.  Having had to endure more than a year of non-medical people telling me that I should have had x-rays or scans or all those expensive procedures that Americans are all now experts on because of watching television, I can understand why doctors have been increasingly performing unnecessary procedures.  Patients believe they need them, and there is nothing that seems so prevalent in today's world than armchair experts.  People who barely passed (or didn't) science classes in high school are suddenly experts on climate change, people who can't even balance their checkbooks are experts on the stock market, economy, or both, and now everyone who has ever seen a medical show on television is a doctor.  And shockingly, the medical armchair experts are completely and utterly wrong........as they always are. 

Ah, Summer.........

I'm sure by October I will be overwhelmed by canning, but I'm still excited that this year I've had enough cucumbers to make pickles.  We were running a bit short..........

Two Steps Forward...........

In the last week, we went to see John Hiatt in concert for Andy's birthday, then went to the Boise Blues Society picnic on Sunday, and I think I can now safely say that my back might be making progress, but really uncomfortable chairs are NOT my friends.  Yesterday I finally had to break down and take the original pain medication they gave me--the stuff I've generally refused to take because it knocks me out.  I have an appointment with a specialist on Monday, so hopefully I'll get this sorted out soon.  It's a physiatrist, which I'd never heard of, but from the description, it sounds exactly like what I need.  I had been resistant to call a specialist because I was afraid they'd want to talk about surgery, which I don't think would help and which I would not discuss until all other options have been explored, but what I do want is someone to look at the original injury, the three subsequent injuries, and either give me new exercises, tell me if I'm approaching it correctly, change my exercises, or tell me I'm on the right track.  And being me, I actually wanted to impress this new doctor with my determination, so I've been picking up the pace in the pool a fair bit--which I think would have been fine without the chair incidents, but still might have caused the newest bout of pain.  I am nothing if not a consistent idiot about these things.

Somewhere.......

There is probably a mathematical equation somewhere to calculate much medication the cat was able to spit out by how high up on the walls he got it. We're thinking the door knob equals about half..................

Canning Season Has Begun!

Thursday the weather was actually below 90, so I broke out the canning equipment and made my first pickles for the year. It has begun!

Andy had to get into the crawl space this weekend, so he had to dig things out of the dwarf closet (closet under the stairs), so I got a chance to do an inventory of what we still have.  I was thrilled to find a few more jars of dilled carrots and some carrot salsa--both of which are REALLY good and which I thought we'd run out of.  I haven't used as many canned tomatoes as I usually do because the last two winters I've been laid up with the back and haven't made nearly as much soup as usual, but we've finished off several "favorite" items.  After the last couple years, I don't mind getting a bit ahead.  With the extreme heat that is the new "norm," one never knows if we'll even have a garden from year to year.