Secret Pals, Showercap Stoopidity and Sick Pets

I got my Secret Pal package on Thursday!



There's about 450 meters of yarn there, in a gorgeous cranberry color with flecks of blue and yellow that you can barely see:





Thankfully, my macro lens can pick them up.

This is what I know about my Secret Pal:

1. She lives in the Netherlands (check out the cool stamps! My Uncle Henry will be thrilled to get those!)

2. She has beautiful handwriting (well, she printed the card, but her printing is very neat)

3. She picks out awesome yarn to send. I'm trying to figure out what to make with this. There may be a few lace scarf/shawl projects that I could use this yarn on, and the light could pick up the subtle flecks of color nicely. What do y'all think?

4. She has said that we are somewhat similar, except she doesn't share my disdain for "adult alternative" type music (I really don't know what it's called, but it's all that Dave Matthews/Shawn Colvin/whatever whatever that dominated the airwaves for a while). That's really forgivable, because musical tastes really matters when you have to share living or working quarters with a person (I once had three roommates who played the Pixies constantly, and I HATE the Pixies. People seem to think it's really weird that I hate them so much.)

Thank you, Secret Pal!!!!!

I also made an online purchase of some Cherry Tree Hill:





One of these may be a present for my downstream secret pal, but I'm not going to tell you which one!!! If my SP stalks my blog, she'll have to find out when she gets it.

I bought myself a pressie in Sephora yesterday. A shower cap with girls and kitties all over it. I couldn't resist it, plus my shower cap was looking awful and needed to be replaced.

I think buying it gave me a new stage name:



Seriously, if I were a drag queen, I would SO go by Charlotte de Douche. It kind makes me want to get a sex change so I can become a drag queen. Or I can just pull a Victor/Victoria. I did dress up as a drag queen one year for Halloween, and talked in a deep whisper all night. My then-boyfriend didn't want to be seen with me at the party we were at. Humorless jackass. Of course, nobody else's girlfriend gave themselves 5 o'clock shadow with mascara, so can I really blame him?

This is what I look like with my Charlotte de Douche shower cap on:



ZMrK laughed so hard his stomach hurt after he took this picture. I suppose it will be one of the classics, eh?

If you think that's bad, here are the ones that didn't make it:



(Kudos for me for blogstalking Turtlegirl and finding out she used "fd's flickr toys".)

Now on to the less fun and more serious part of my post. . . my little blorange bitch, Solvie, isn't doing well. She recently lost weight again, and started peeing in really inappropriate places -- on the carpet, on my wheel, on me while I was in bed, and today, on ZMrK's bill payments he was about to mail (I've considered doing THAT one myself). We took her to the vet on Thursday, and she is down to 4 lbs., 6 oz. She's lost almost a pound since she was last at the vet in December. A pound is a lot for a cat. I think her top weight was over 7 lbs. Oh yeah, and she's been eating A LOT lately, and always looking for more.

The vet (a different one than the one who saw us in the fall, although at the same practice) took another blood sample, and found some elevated calcium levels. This could point to two things: a cancerous growth (probably lymphoma), or a problem with her parathyroid gland. An additional test could tell us if it is her parathyroid gland, and then surgery could remove the extra growth, although the vet didn't really think it would be in Solvie's best interest to have it removed at this point.

What we are going to do, short-term, is put her on a 2x daily liquid antibiotic to see if it clears up any sort of UTI that might be causing her to have these accidents. We may have the option of keeping them on her long-term.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will remember that lymphoma was the suspect back in the beginning of November. Then the culprit was FIP. Then Cornell's tests discovered it was not FIP, but they had no idea what it was. Then we discovered she was
eating mice, and a round of antibiotics and deworming seemed to help her out. By the beginning of January, she seemed to be feeling much better.

We're not sure what we're supposed to do at this point. Do we bother with the test for her parathyroid gland, opening up the possibility of surgery and whoknows how much longer she'll live after that? Or do we keep feeding her as often as she wants (2 - 3 x a day, lately, plus dry food down for her 24/7), and loving her and making her comfortable until it is time to say goodbye? We've moved the litterbox back into our bedroom, and she's used it. I don't think she can lose much more weight and still live. The docs told us before that, as long as she is eating, there's hope, and she'll "let us know" when it's time by going off her food.

This is why I distract myself by taking stoopid pictures with a showercap and obnoxious pink lipstick.

Our other potential sick pet is our ball python, Sunny. She hasn't eaten in 2007 at all (not the worst thing in the world for a snake, but unusual for her). She hasn't shed either. Right now she looks like she is going to shed (pink belly, cloudy blue eyes). Hopefully, after she sheds, she'll eat. If not, back to the vet she goes.

I only have one pic of Sunny on my flickr account, and it has Zelia in the background (yawning):



Dang, this was a long post that covered lots of ground.

While I'm posting pet pictures, did I ever tell y'all about Velcro?



Velcro passed away in December 2004 at the age of 9. He was a bearded dragon, and was an awesome pet. The first time I met him, he licked my boob (okay, my sweater, but he did try to "taste" everything). He once tried to eat the floral pattern on a pillowcase, and another time, he tried to eat dapples of sunlight on the rug. Bearded dragons aren't terribly smart, but they have their looks.