April 2005 Archives

I've been sick off and on lately.

It isn't a particularly remarkable state of affairs -- people get sick, right? But I get sick so rarely that when I do, it's suddenly reinforced how much being sick sucks.

I caught a cold or something on Easter weekend. It wouldn't've been so bad, except I had a fever at one point, and felt so icky-groggy-couldn't-do-anything that I just had to stay in bed. The cough that went along with that lingered for a while, especially at night, but eventually, it all went away.

About the time I was finally getting over that, I left work early last Monday because I was feeling sort of nauseous and gross. Sure enough, it was a stomach bug, with all the gastrointestinal loveliness that generally accompanies something like that.

For the record, I generally have a stomach of steel. I'm meant to get stomach bugs only once every five years, but my bout with norovirus was less than a year ago, so this was rather unexpected. I haven't eaten at Chipotle since the last pukefest, so we can't blame them this time, and it's hard to know what caused it, but I missed two days of work and have had more than my share of miserable since then.

After all that sickness, I hadn't really spent much time outdoors lately, except to do some laundry, and I'd been noticing that something smelled a bit off out there. There's a drainage pond on the side of my house that's been full since last fall, and it's finally drying up, so I figured the sludge might be causing the smell, but last night, it occured to me that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and that it was far more sinister than pond sludge. I figured it was a rat or something, caught up in the little washer/dryer closet, and I set out after work this evening to investigate.

If only it were a rat. Turns out a possum had died (he was definitely not playing possum) on my back patio, and was now in an advanced state of decomposition. My neighbor Chris, who deserves sainthood, helped me clean it up, and let me tell you, the foulness of the situation defies description. I have never seen (nor smelled) anything so awful in my entire life. I kept breaking out into dry heaves, even with my shirt over my nose to filter the air before I inhaled it. Chris was a good sport, but it was awful, in the awfulest way possible.

I bought Chris a case of beer, but I think I might owe him my first-born child, as well.

In memory of Marlys (1990-2005), I offer two cat stories.

1) Ani.
Ani Banani has a sink fetish. She loves sitting in the bathroom sink, and she loves drinking water from the sink faucet. There is so much love in her little tortoiseshell heart for the bathroom sink that I didn't think she could find room for more sink love, but... I was wrong.

My mom has a shedding blade just like this one for her long-haired cats that does a remarkably good job of pulling out all the old fur from their undercoats. Almost as much as she loves to sit in the sink, Ani loves to be combed, so I got one of these shedding blades to try out on my cats. So it turns out that the magic combination of the bathroom sink, water dripping, Ani, and the shedding blade is her little peanut-brained equivalent of nirvana. Her eyes nearly roll back into her head in ecstacy.

2) Liam.

Liam is a clown. He always has been, from the time he was a little kitten. If anything goes crashing to the ground, even if I don't see who did it, Liam is the one who gets yelled at. No, I don't feel bad about that -- I'm pretty certain it's justified.

The other day, I was getting ready to take a shower, and Liam was playing between the fabric shower curtain and the clear shower lining. I got into the shower, expecting him to run away when the water came on, but he didn't. He sat on the floor and watched me shower.

There's an old Paula Poundstone routine where she talks about her cats getting really freaked out when she took a shower; they'd look at one another and say, "She must've been really bad to get punished like that." It reminded me a bit of that, Liam watching me in the shower. He just stared, fascinated by the whole process. It was a bit creepy -- I've never been stalked by one of my cats before.