It's important to keep busy.

Steve has gone away for days on end on a work trip. As always in such circumstances, I am reminded that I am much more resourceful when I have not actually been thrown back on my own resources.

As long as he is around the house somewhere, perhaps plunked on the sofa fiddling with some computer thing all day and night, I might easily decide to bake OWL and TAR cookies, or construct a compost bin, reorganize some cabinets, make a paper yurt, pickle something, draw some otters, maybe even do a spot of work, or roust him so that we might drive to a town three quarters of an hour away to obtain some tasty dosas.

Alone in the house with no one to rally but myself, however, and no witness but the cat to any rallying I might do, there is no barrier to a descent into complete feebleness.

This means that while Steve is filling his evenings with glamorous New York activities, I will be:

• Shopping for pillows online (ooh! feather!)
• Eating monstrous concoctions, such as mystery-flavor Korean ramen with egg mixed in
• Falling asleep at just past dinner o'clock
• Waking up and eating two enormous brownies
• Not being able to generate sufficient motive force to figure out where our illegally downloaded television shows are stored, that I might watch them

This morning was spiced up by a surprise trip to the vet, made livelier by the extra challenge of having but one set of hands with which to torment the cat beforehand. The cat, whose name is Nemo, recently obtained a nice little urinary tract infection. He deserves some sympathy for the fact that he has sharp painful things in his tiny cat penis, and, besides, it adds another activity to my list:

• Watching cat's movements with great suspicion, in anticipation of the likely event that he will attempt to piss somewhere inappropriate

Since we are not monsters, he's already been to the vet about this, so that she could flip him upside down, sample his fluids, provide her assessment, and charge us exciting sums for special food and anti-penis-crystal pills. I thought that this would be the end of it, barring any unexpected reactions to the food and pills.

But about twenty minutes after Steve got on his plane to the land of cocktails, dancing girls, and no cats, the vet called to say that a test had come back positive, indicating that the antibiotics we were giving him were, in fact, what we should be giving him. Super!

And so would I come in the very first thing Tuesday morning to get yet another culture done to make sure that these appropriate antibiotics were now being appropriately effective? And could I please put him in his carrier two hours beforehand to make it easier for them to get a urine sample?

This is all very conscientious of her, I'm sure. Still, I was not at my best this morning as I rose bright and early, two hours before the very first thing, plus extra added time so that I could first ply Nemo with his expensive new food and attempt to insinuate an appropriate pill into his gullet. I did not fully appreciate the experience of wrestling him into his carrier, or the two hours of yowling and flinging himself against the sides that followed. Nor did I take great pleasure in the fact that the vet was running late even though we were the second appointment of the day.

I did, however, enjoy the moment when she exclaimed, "OH! He peed ALL OVER MY HAND."

Comments

[ben wolfson]

The second paragraph sounds pretty close to ideal.

[ben wolfson]

Whereas penis crystals sound horrifying.

[redfox]

Yes, let us all endeavor to avoid penis crystals.