(no subject)

Got the results of the blood testing on Gumdrop today. Her kidneys are fine. Her liver is a bit worse—there's some fat storage in it, as a result of Gumdrop not eating very much lately, and she may be borderline diabetic. Also, her red blood cell count is up from 13% to 17% (it should be 30-40%), and there are signs she's generating red blood cells on her own again. But what the vet thinks the problem is is pancreatitis. The good news is that the treatment she's on already—fluids, food (they put some down a eusophagal tube today, and she was able to keep it down), and tetracyclene—are what is prescribed for that. The vet wanted me to know that some animals make it through pancreatitis and some don't. I'm hoping she's one of the ones who do.

I'm up to $800 in vet bills, and will probably be at least another $100 more—though I have to thank several of my friends (you know who you are) for donating a grand total of almost $500 so far between them. I really appreciate it, guys. Anything anyone else would like to kick in would still not be found amiss.

Wait…what?

"In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about."

—from "AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6", The Register

Metropolis reborn!

Thanks to masonk for calling my attention in chat to this story.

One of cinema's most elusive holy grails, a complete print of the original version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, has been discovered in a museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Up to this point, the only surviving versions of the film have been the recut version that lost about a quarter of the director's original vision.

This is some big news.

RIP Gumdrop

The vet just called me to let me know that my cat is dead.

I guess it was just her time.

Goodbye, Gumdrop.

Evening notes

Well, I've cleared the floor of my living room, thoroughly vacuumed, and sprayed the carpet with Precor 2000 professional-exterminator-grade flea spray. Boom. Living room flea problem gone. (Though I'll need to re-spray in a couple of weeks to catch the fleas that haven't hatched out yet.)

The problem is, I now need to do the same thing for my bedroom. My bedroom floor hasn't been clean in literally years. Since I moved in, easily. I have a lot of junk. But I'm going to need to clean up and be ruthless because I have a bunch of fleas in there too, from the cat sneaking in when I wasn't looking.

Guess I'll get on it tomorrow, after I see the vet about retrieving Gumdrop's remains. I'm not looking forward to that. But at least I had already arranged to have my parents come visit me on Sunday. They can take her body with them back to the farm and when they have a backhoe come in to work on their new house, they can have it dig a hole to bury her in. It feels right to bury her there, in the place where I grew up.

Not wanting to spend too much time alone in the apartment, I'm looking into adopting another cat—a year and a half old male Bengal from a rescue agency near here. He looks gorgeous from the photos. I hope they'll let me. If not, I'll adopt a couple of the kittens that a neighbor's cat had. (Perhaps I should adopt one of them anyway, to keep the Bengal company.)

Well, off to bed.