ans99

so here's our new kitty. she's a firecracker, just a year old, and her name is kitsune. i knew the first time i held her what her name would be, and even though we "auditioned" six or so cats on sunday she was the obvious one. loves to be petted, this cat. ye gods, she'll hit her head against anything trying to get a head rub out of it. including a metal file cabinet. yeech.

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the only problem we've run into thus far is that she's way too interested in wilson. so interested, in fact, that we went to watch battlestar galactica for 40 minutes in ken's room and when we came out she'd reached into the rat cage with her paw as far as she could and wilson was just cowering in his house. i guess some rats nip cats, but wilson is apparently far too polite. we squirted her with vinegar twice and she jumped down. we're moving his cage to our bedroom and making it off limits to cats tonight. it's a shame. i'm with wilson right now, in my art room with the door closed, and he is so upset and i feel awful.

i realize i haven't been keeping you all abreast of my animals. that's in part because something happened this weekend that made me feel like a total jerk.

basically we decided dot and dash were far too sick to introduce to wilson, and in fact far too sick to have ever been adopted out in the first place. so we returned them. the waiting room was awful. there was this old couple that came in with their two (or more? i only saw two carriers at the least) cats, and the lady at the front desk basically said 'we have no space for these cats.' i was silently pleading the whole time that they wouldn't just leave them there to be possibly euth'ed anyway, and finally the old couple took the cats away to be brought back at a later date. i'm surprised they weren't directed to another shelter, actually.

the thing is, we did something we shouldn't have done and we adopted rats that were on vet check. someone had seen them "sneezing blood"-- we had no idea what myco was at the time because it just doesn't come up in conversation with friends, seeing as none of them own rats. and i've only dealt with lab rats, which are usually myco-free. so we thought nothing of it, and took them after the swiftest vet check ever. we should have waited, because the entire time with us they kept getting sicker. we waited a week, and then we returned them. if it had been stress i would have expected constant improvement as they adjusted, not one rat already sick then the other.

it's another shame, because i really liked them. it's just we felt they were too big a risk to him in their debilitated state. i'd get them in an instant, again, once they were better and fully checked out and monitored in a stable environment. i guess we'll keep an eye out and see.

we're still going to get wilson a companion, because there is no way in hell he could possibly be myco-free. we carry it in our nasal passages and he's no longer in a barrier facility. so we're going to get back to the shelter, or get in touch with a rat adoption agency, and try again. maybe with buddies he'll toughen up and nip that cat. we'll see, i guess. i hope we find him a suitable buddy soon.

in other news, what have i been up to... hm. the diet is running me ragged and i'm not getting enough sleep, so i haven't really lost anything yet but i feel tired and hungry all the time. last weekend alan and adrienne showed us grand hotel, the movie with the line "i want to be alone." it was pretty funny, unintentionally, and it was telling that even with a murder and attempted suicide, the most disturbing thing for us was not knowing what happened to the deceased's schnauzer. that and the pasted-in-after-the-fact overly dramatic closeups of greta garbo. i want to hang out with them again soon, because it was a really good time. and i want to see more old movies!

i think i did more but i'm so tired i have no idea what it was. time for bed.

i hope kitsune can find the litter box tonight.

yesterday was my birthday, so i had a joint celebration with ken (whose bday was earlier in the month). we went wine tasting in sonoma valley with a few lucky people who could happen to make it. it was a pretty epic time-- i had a mushroom burger with mushrooms, we visited ravenswood and got a bunch of free swag (including a button in french that roughly translated to "no wet chicken wine"-- "wet chicken" is apparently an idiom for "wimpy" in french!), ken made us look even more like tourists with his (sometimes mischievously misleading) tom-tom, several of us trespassed on a piece of machinery, aj and james saw a hummingbird fight, i sang depeche mode's "enjoy the silence" for a cheesemonger, james and i molested marilyn monroe, gretchen got told she looked like she was 12, we bought some truffles, alan almost got raped by some casual wine guys, everyone posed for pictures with odd statues (including a dogdragon, a t-rex and a bronzed redwood tree root), and we tried many, many wines-- among them a zinfandel port that was hands-down honestly the best wine i ever tasted (much like the woman in keswick who had the best chips ever, the guy at the counter did not believe me. i might have looked very drunk at this point, but still, have a little pride and faith in your product yo). i also took many many pictures with the nifty new lens ken got me (a canon 18-55 mm with image stabilization). it garners more light, takes less blurry pictures in the dark, and has a wider angle of view-- all wins for indoor photography, which is the bane of my existence normally).

after all that, we went to kathmandu for dinner where even more people showed up, and i clumsily introduced everyone to each other, and we had a nice meal. then back to our house for the best birthday cake in the world (a two-layer ice cream cake from cold stone, with a koala-guinea pig hybrid drawn on top-- the thing weighed at least 15 pounds). i finally met alan's girlfriend, and anna gave me yarn, and mike gave me a gorilla pod for my camera. james gave me the dianetics book on tape (?) and some sort of sheep knitting needle holders (guess which one i appreciated more, lol). :) sara and karl came up too, yay! and everyone met wilson (karl was constantly being tickled by the little guy walking all over him, and in one case the poor thing made it down the back of his shirt! karl just has bad luck with animals i guess). toward the end of the evening, our party of course degenerated into watching youtube videos, mostly the doctor who fanvids we'd done with james. ken made the apt point that they're sort of like our version of slides-- y'know, the kind that people used pull out when they had unwitting guests.

i had a wonderful day yesterday. my philosophy has long been that there is no point to doing anything if there is not a touch of the absurd involved. thanks for helping me fulfill that, guys, by making the day as unique and fun as possible :)