I Am Completely Serious

I dreamed that my dead cat's ghost came to sit on the couch. I saw Nixon curled up in her usual spot, and it took me a minute to remember that that was wrong. I said to her, "Oh, no, honey, you passed away months ago. You shouldn't be here." She heard my voice and came whining towards me, walking across the quilt that thegeekgene was working on next to her.

As I leaned over to pet my ghost cat, who was still very soft and still complaining about nothing, thegeekgene asked me, "What are you doing?"

I said, "Nixon's here. Can't you see her?"

"No."

"Maybe I'm just hallucinating her, then."

I turned around to see if I had any other hallucinations waiting in other parts of the room. I saw Anxiety asleep on the table, and beside him another version of Nixon from earlier in life, very fat and healthy. They seemed to flicker in and out of existence, and I was sad because I felt that this probably meant that either they wouldn't last, or I needed to go to the hospital.

* So Yamamotoyama's website makes you print out a PDF of their mail-order form? It's crazy, it's like the 19th century or something! But the Tokusen Kokyu Sencha is really good and costs almost twice as much from Amazon, so I am willing to do this.

* The freezer is full of kielbasa for reasons that escape me. I'm thinking of turning some of it into some kind of soup.

* When I enter the living room, Anxiety the Cat sits on the back of the couch and mews plaintively at me. He continues doing this until I either give him his allergy tablet - he's decided he loves Pill Pockets, following a lengthy period of hating them - or sit down on the couch so he can roll anxiously around my lap, peering up at me uncertainly to make sure I'm not moving. Anxiety was Nixon's servant; he would sit down on the couch, and she would sit down on top of him and fall asleep, and he wouldn't move until she was ready to get up again.

I'm not sure if what he's doing is some sort of grieving behavior, or if he's decided that he is the primary cat now and must therefore behave as much like her as possible. If that's his goal, it's unfortunate that he's too self-conscious to do the role justice. He only vocalizes when I'm looking directly at him and he knows for sure he's got my attention, and though he's twice Nixon's size, he doesn't feel secure enough in his physical presence to follow me around or headbutt me. He kneads my legs like a kitten when he gets me on the couch. Poor neurotic cat.

Should I be calling him "Ford"?

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Unrelatedly, the deer have for some reason eaten one of Dad's cornstalks - just one! - and Dad nearly killed his own blueberry plants by misapplying weed killer. His Father's Day gift is that I weeded his corn and trimmed off the dead parts of the blueberries.

I mopped in front of my door, then mopped the rest of the hallway and the dining room, then took the mop and bucket outside to their rack. When I came back in, she had pooped in front of my door.

1) She smells really bad.

2) She poops on the floor, and her poop smells astonishingly bad. Mom calls it "distinctive." I can tell from halfway across the house when she's had a bowel movement.

2b) I usually don't need to, because she likes doing it right in front of my door.

3) She is currently taking three different kinds of medicine for the poop problem - thyroid medication and anti-inflammatories for the long term, and a short-term course of antibiotics. This is not presently helping.

4) She has clawed me in almost every conceivable place in protest against this regimen.

5) She'll be old enough to vote in April.

6) She was born in front of a TV on which Richard Nixon's funeral was being broadcast live. I'm not taking her in to get registered. I've read Petshop of Horrors, I know how this shit works.

It crawled back out under the door after me. And my cat jumped it and chewed it up. Aw, cat, look at you taking responsibility for your mistakes like that. Now if only you'd learn to operate the paper towels and bottle of enzymatic spray cleaner, maybe this house wouldn't smell so attractive to bugs in the first place.

The cat in question is a little more than a month from her seventeenth birthday, by the way - I just looked it up. She was born on April 27, 1994; we know this because her mother went into labor on Mom and Dad's bed while Richard Nixon's coffin was going into the ground on Mom and Dad's bedroom TV. I've always assumed that there was some sort of spiritual connection there. I wish I were half as agile as my ancient malevolent Republican president cat.

The apple cider vinegar smell is actually oddly pleasant, actually - I haven't been able to use it on my hair since the surgery. I kind of miss it; I'm just going to leave the cup sitting here.

...I was supposed to go back to work tomorrow, but I think I'm taking another day. My head now really hurts, and I have no idea how I'm going to get to sleep.

Today's is "I may have found a palliative for my elderly cat's chronic diarrhea." I gave her a couple of teaspoons of pumpkin puree with her food today, and I just examined her litter box and found an almost normal-looking little poop in there. We're both very happy about this; or at least, I assume that she's happy. Maybe she likes having diarrhea. Maybe her greatest joy in life is the sound of my melodious voice mumbling curses over the grinding of the steam cleaner. Maybe she doesn't like my slippers. I can understand that, they're Crocs.

I'm now trying to figure out how to make this into an easy-to-follow regimen, if her digestion hasn't gone back to its old ways after a day or two of this. Maybe I could mix up a big batch of pumpkinized cat food and freeze it in portions in an ice cube tray.