I’m looking for a diet blog/jounal you had listed in your previous links list. I can’t remember her name or name of the journal. however, I know she lived near ocean city maryland, her daughter was diagnosed with crohns disease, and she has a new baby. The last entry i read she wrote her husband was leaving her…I can’t stop thinking about her and want to know if they got back togther. I hope all is well. I hope you can help me out. I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of Amy. Unfortunately, Amy hasn’t updated since August. Anyone know how she’s doing? Concerned readers want to know… Also from my comments: Show us your christmas tree? Or are you not doing one this year. I can’t remember I posted a picture of the tree (using the nightvision function on my camera) in this entry, toward the bottom. Sounds like you are getting back into your exercise and healthy eating. You mentioned issues that you did not deal with when you first lost weight. What are they? (Feel free to mock me in your diary for being horribly nosy.) Awwww, it’s NO FUN mocking someone when you have their permission. Hmph. No, seriously, it’s a good question and I’ll probably address it in the future (probably after the holidays are over) over in my weight loss journal. Never posted a comment before but just want to start with the fact that I love everything about you and you family. Question – is there something wrong with Meester Boogers’ eye? One of my cats paws his eye to the point that it tends to get swollen shut. The vet said he has OCD – um, yeah, I don’t think so but it could be true. So I guess, my comment is two fold – first I hope all is well with you and your family and cats (as in, I hope nothing is wrong with Booger’s eye) and second, have you ever had one of your vet’s diagnose any of your cats with a personality disorder? Nah, there’s nothing wrong with his eyes. If his eyes look funny in some pictures, that’s probably because the flash gave him redeye or completely erased his pupil, and Fred photoshopped it to look a little more normal. The vet thinks Spot might have OCD, which is why he grooms constantly and all the fur on his back legs and stomach is mostly gone (poor funny-looking cat). We had him on medication for a while but it turned him into a zombie, so we took him off it. We’ve recently started again with a lower dose, so maybe that’ll work. We’ll see! Did you get your Tivo set up? I’m looking into it, but I’m not sure I can do the connections. I have a VCR, DVD player, and cable box hooked up to an older TV now, and I’m not sure if there’s enough room and connections for yet another component. It says a broadband and a ‘one time’ phone connection. Was this difficult? Any pointers you can give? Sorry if this was already posted and I missed it. Y’all are forbidden to give me a hard time about this, understand? We got the TiVo and were setting it up, when we discovered (because we’re stupid and didn’t realize this when we ordered the freakin’ thing) that you can only tape one show at a time with TiVo. What the hell is the point of that? During sweeps months, we’re generally taping two shows at a time and watching something else we’ve taped previously. Taping one show at a time is just no help to us, you know? And yes, I know that we could have bought two TiVos and hooked each one up to a different TV (god KNOWS we have plenty of TVs in this house!), but each TiVo costs $299 for lifetime service or $12.95 a month, and that’s more money than we want to pay, you know? We sent the TiVo back, called the cable company, and they brought out a new DVR box a few days later. So far we’ve had no problems, but when we are having problems and I’m bitching about it, y’all have my full permission to say “You wouldn’t be having these problems if you had a TiVo, dumbass!” So obviously I have no suggestions for you as far as hooking up the TiVo, but I understand that they have a pretty good online support page, you might give it a try. Good luck! I LOVED the stories of how and why you got your kitties. Kitties are the best. Next time, can you also include why/how you choose Mr. Fancypants and Tubby even though they are gone now? And what happened to Spud’s cat PFE? Oh, you’re going to make me really think, huh? Let’s see… Tubby: In the summer of 1997, the spud was in Maine. Her cat PFE had died and she didn’t know, and we thought that having a new cat might distract her from her grief when she got home. Fred wanted a Bengal kitten and there was a guy in Huntsville who bred them. We went to his house and checked out the kittens he had available, but none of the kittens was particularly friendly, and would have cost something like $600, and I just couldn’t see paying that much for a cat when so many good cats needed a home. We went to South Huntsville, where at that time, the no-kill shelter I volunteer for now had a store where they adopted out cats and sold cat toys, food, and litter. We went into the cat room and played with several different cats, then Fred spotted a little black and white kitten sitting off to the side by himself. He petted the kitten and scratched him at the base of his tail, and the kitten purred loudly and raised his ass up in the air. Fred decided he really liked the kitten and I was so tired of looking at cats at that point that I just wanted to get the cat and get out of there. The lady running the store told us that Jack (the kitten’s name) had been part of a feral colony and they didn’t think he was going to be adoptable, that he’d always be feral, but he’d actually turned out pretty friendly. We brought him home and (of course) Spot and Spanky freaked out and the kitten chased them around, trying to cuddle. We went through a bunch of “s” names and finally settled on Snoopy, because he kind of looked like a Snoopy. We found out pretty quickly that he wasn’t much for being held and cuddled, though he’d rub up against Fred and purr loudly. That night after we’d turned the lights off, Fred and I were laying bed talking, and Snoopy jumped up on the bed, got under the covers, and snuggled up against Fred’s back. “Oh, he’s cuddling with me!” Fred said. “He – OUCH!” It seems that the kitten had gotten so overwhelmed with love that he’d felt the need to bite Fred. On his back. Hee! He turned out to be quite a character, with his bitchy talking-back to us and his demanding food (the idea apparently being that if we were eating, he should be, too. When we’d had him about a year it became pretty clear that he wasn’t going to be a skinny cat, and over time we gradually started calling him Tubby. I think Tubby was pretty much the most popular cat amongst you readers; I once took a poll, and if I recall correctly, he was far and away the favorite. He had a lot of character, and I think it showed in the pictures and stories we shared with you. He was the baddest of the bad-asses. Fancypants was all talk, but the time a stray cat came through the cat door and into the house, it was Tubby who kicked the other cat’s ass across the room, back out the cat door, and across the yard. Y’all really know the rest of the story. About a year ago he started peeing outside the litter box – on the floor in our bedroom, in the closet, on the bed. We found out that he had diabetes, and were treating it. Things got better for a while, but he was really never the same after that. In January of this year he started just not really looking right around the eyes. I can’t explain what I mean, exactly, just that I’d look at him, and he just seemed like he was unhappy and in pain. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with him and his blood sugar levels seemed to be okay, but there was an air of not-right about him. It was a shock when he died, but not really a surprise. Tubby and I weren’t the best of friends and there were times when I wanted to smack him, but sometimes I just miss him so much it surprises me. There’s no one like Tubby.
