reading: Hating Valentine’s Day.
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So, we weren’t seriously discussing opening a used book store the other day; we were just talking about how cool it would be. Besides, we’re going to be moving out of Madison in a few years – once the spud has graduated – and wherever we end up, I doubt I’ll want to be driving back to Madison every day to run the store.
Also, there’s that whole pesky “dealing with people” thing, and I don’t like that sort of thing at ALL.
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From reader Lisa:
I read that you don’t have any pet store kitty photos for this week, so here’s a pic of ours.
I wrote in several weeks ago, asking for advice on picking out a cat from a shelter. Thanks for the great suggestions from you and your readers! We brought home a 1 year old female and named her Lavender. She is SO SWEET! Her favorite place to sit is on the dining room table — shown here in the photo — where she has a full view of the backyard to watch the birds and squirrels.
The absolute best, though, is the way she interacts with our 9-month old daughter. Lavender thinks she’s her mommy. When our daughter naps, Lavender licks her and sits next to her with a paw on her back. When she cries, Lavender comes running to check up on the situation. It’s so sweet I could almost cry!
Everyone out there should go rescue a shelter cat!!! They have so much love to give!
I love the way she looks like she’s wearing eyeliner. Adorable, isn’t she?
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Hey, look! Corelle makes
yellow dishes! And we… are in the market for new dishes. And we like Corelle!
I believe it’s kismet, is what it is.
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Would someone take a look around my site and tell me why the holy hell anyone would think this is a BUSINESS site? A few months ago I started getting sales calls from Paypal. They wanted to offer some new program or another, and I was willing to listen, because I thought they were calling me regarding the (now defunct) chunktohunk.com site, which sold (the now almost out-of-print)
Fred’s book. But then I realized they were talking about this site, and I stopped the guy in the middle of his sales pitch and I said “It’s a personal site. I have an online journal. I don’t SELL ANYTHING. What use would this program be to me?” And he stammered and hemmed and hawed and acted like
I was the idiot because I had the nerve to own a site – a PERSONAL site – that doesn’t sell anything.
Fucker.
And then last week I got an email from Google. Google wanted me to know that SOMEHOW – surely it was an ACCIDENT – robots.txt was blocking Google from crawling my site, and they wanted to make it easy for customers to find my site.
CUSTOMERS.
So I deleted the email, thinking it was a one-time thing, but nay. Yesterday, I got yet another email from Google. A FOLLOW-UP email.
I just wanted to follow up with you to confirm that you had received my previous email. If you are not the right person for this, perhaps you could forward it to the appropriate person within your firm.
Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you.
So, they
did hear from me. I emailed them and said “This is a personal site, not a business site. I deliberately inserted robots.txt so that people searching on random terms would not end up on my site, since I HAVE NOTHING TO SELL THEM. Please, for the love of god, remove me from your mailing list.”
And they did.
But I ask you – what about the name “Bitchypoo” screams “professional business site”? It would take, perhaps, a ten-second look at the main page to see that there’s no business – except, perhaps for FUNNY business! Har! – going on here.
Fuckers.
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Miz Poo’s upper lip has swollen up so that it sticks out three inches from her face. For a while we thought we’d solved the problem when Fred took her to another vet for a second opinion. Fred started giving her a steroid pill every night, the lip de-puffed, and we thought we were all set.
Except that in the last month or so, her lip has puffed back up. Fred took her to the vet yesterday, and the vet is absolutely adamant that the puffy lip is behavioral, caused by her licking her lips a lot.
Except that she doesn’t groom any more than any of our other cats, unless she knows enough to hide from us while she’s doing it. Seeing as how we’re talking about a cat who doesn’t get the message even if you push her off your lap 23 times in a row, I have the feeling that hiding so that she can lick herself to her heart’s content without one of us making her stop is something that hasn’t occurred to her.
(Spot’s our incessant groomer – we know what an overgroomer looks and acts like, and Miz Poo ain’t it.)
So anyway, the vet gave her a steroid shot, prescribed an antibiotic for the infection (her lip is apparently infected), and decreed that she needs to have a 12-shot course of Immunoregulin – two shots this week, two shots next, and one shot a week for eight weeks.
Fred also thought that perhaps Miz Poo is allergic to the cat food we’ve been giving the cats, so he picked up a bag of Science Diet Adult Lite. He filled the food bowl last night, and the cats bellied up to the trough as though he’d poured fresh flaky salmon in there.
The Science Diet was a hit, I guess you could say.
With her going off the steroids and eating lite cat food, I’m hoping Miz Poo will lose a little weight. At her low a few years ago she got down to about 9 pounds – which seemed a bit skinny to me – and now she weighs around 12 pounds, which is really too high. I’m afraid that jumping down from the bed to the floor, her front legs will snap under the pressure of that much weight.
Ah, well. We’ll see, won’t we? Ya gotta love the Poo, no matter what she weighs.
“Does this cat bed make me look fat?”]]>
Awww poor Miz poo… *scritches*
She weighs a LOT less than my cat though.. He is starting to pack it on again.. he started out a skinny little thing and he’s just kept getting bigger, and bigger.. Last vet trip he was 18 lbs, now I’m guessing he’s around 21 or so. And this is on Senior weight management food! The poor Vet is stumped. (and the other 3 he’s been too are too! lol) They say he’s just destined to be a monster tubbo kitty.
what is this robots.txt thingy? Is it just a file you upload to your host? Where can I get more info about it?
Oh, I love Corelle!! The ones I use now are horrifically ugly and my boyfriend cannot understand why I refuse to get rid of them. They were my grandma’s everyday dishes. I loved them back then and I love them now. The things don’t break (well, hardly ever)!
I remember a little while back you said that you and Fred found that the Corelle store near you closed. The store near me disappeared recently too… I wonder if they are closing all the Corelle stores?
Sharon: You can read more about it (and there’s a tutorial) here:
http://tinyurl.com/9yot
It’s basically a file that you upload to your server that tells search engines to go away. For the most part it works pretty well for me; the only pain is that I have to remove the robots.txt file to reindex my site (for the site search engine) and then upload it again. But that’s not a big deal.
Kim: That would be too bad if they did, because Corelle is just awesome. Ours are starting to chip, which is why I’d like to replace them. If you go to Corelle.com, there’s a button to search for store locations. The only one in Alabama is way too far away, but there are a couple in Tennessee I’m trying to convince Fred to visit. 🙂
That was so wonderful to read about Lavender. She sounds like a total darling. 🙂
Poor Miz Poo! So much lip trouble!
Whoa!! Miz Poo’s upper lip is out 3 inches from her face?!! I’m rollin trying to envision it! Poor kitty. 🙂
wow! Lavender looks just like my kitty!! Of course mine is a lil fatter…erm…I mean not as slim. heh Sorry bout Miz Poo, hope it was just an allergy thing 🙁
“what about bitchypoo screams professional business site?”…I love it. 😉
Oh, and you are a yellow freak.
Any new bus incidents to tell us about?
Science Diet is the only food our two spoiled cats will eat. We switched them from Purina kitten chow to Science Diet kitten food not long after we brought them home. They loved the Science Diet so much that they picked around the Purina. One great thing too, they have never had a hairball problem since we switched their food.
Hey, Robyn and other kitty people, while we are discussing cat food (my boys are on SD lite as well), anyone heard this new wave of opinion by vets that cats must eat wet, and that dry food only is not good for them?
I’ve fed the boys dry for their whole lives, and they free feed, so setting a meal time and dealing with stinky wet food is not my favorite thing, course, I’ll do what’s best for my kitty-men.
Anyone have any thoughts, or heard about this? My boys are due for their annual, but I heard this from my mom, who takes her boy to the same vet I do.
My over 18 yr old cat ate Science Diet her whole life. The vet said her teeth were perfect. Dry is good for their teeth compared to moist.
I just thought I would pop in and ask (although i’m sure the vets mentioned this!) what kind of food and water bowls are you using? I know we have seen at least two cats where I work with the puffy lip thing going on and once they switched from using plastic bowls to SS or ceramic, it cleared up. If you’ve already heard it, please disregard this bit of assvice!
Robin: Well, that might be a *slight* exaggeration. It just puffs out a little, not actually three inches. 🙂
Kitty: I hadn’t heard anything about that; our cats have always had dry food, and they seem perfectly healthy. 🙂
Elizabeth: We have metal bowls, actually. We used to have ceramic bowls; I think we actually had the ceramic bowls before Miz Poo started having problems with her lip.
Having recently hunted down bright yellow dishes because I’d nearly given up on ever finding chile pepper dinnerware, I have a selection of bookmarks for your perusal, if Corelle is not your first choice (though I like them pretty well for young kids).
Choice A
Choice B
Choice C
Choice D
Hope Miz Poo feels better soon and gets to a “fighting” weight by summer’s end.
Wendy: Those are some cool looking plates! They’re all kind of heavy stoneware, though, aren’t they? We like Corelle because they’re so light (and they smash almost completely to powder when they’re dropped on a stone floor by a teenager. Not that I’d know this, of course!) I particularly like Choice D, I think. I’ll have to keep those in mind; thanks for the links! 🙂
Hi,
I always laughed when you said how portly Miz Poo was. I just could not understand – fat cat at 12 pounds? Well, I now understand. My Kiefer is just over a year old. He weighs 10 pounds and I call him Mr. Portly. He’s got the shorted body and legs I’ve ever seen in a male cat. He wadddles and tends to fall over when trying to reach his hind end for those grooming sessions. OMG I laugh. I’m thinking about lite formula, but I really need the hair ball instead. Mr. Terry is the hair ball king who’s pretty sick right now. We went to the vet on Sunday for an emergency visit and he’s still there on an IV and had oxygen for 2 days. He’s getting better, but boy it was a close one. 🙁 He can come home as soon as he starts eating. I took his favorites to the vet today, but no deal on eating.
I got the same email from google about my robots.txt file. I didn’t bother replying.
I also got two phone calls one day last week (I didn’t answer) but then I tracked down where they were from on google and it turned out to be a hosting company in California. Even if they offered me free hosting I wouldn’t use a company that would call me unsolicited. I changed the registration information on my domain so it’s not my real phone number anymore and added my number to the do-not-call list (how did I not think to do that before?)
I loooove Fiestaware, I don’t know what it is about them. I have Coca-Cola dishes though for my main set.
Wow, I’m a bit wordy tonight.
Yeah, the only ones that didn’t seem heavy were the ones at crate and barrel, but I was looking for stoneware-ish dishes for “dress up.” After being discouraged with the yellows, I ended up finding a set of melamine chile plates for every day (as well as plain white Corelle -gah) and a really nice set of chile stoneware for “dress up” — both made by Clay Art, which happen to go with the platter, pepper-shaped bowls, huge chip bowl, and assorted other chile dishware I’ve collected. If you worry about breakages, I’d check into melamine and keep the breakables away from the hands of the klutz(es) (in my case, the kids did Ok, but the husband chipped a brand new plate and bowl!). I know Target, Kohl’s, and Mervyns all carry decent looking melamine. I think I even saw melamine at the Pfalzgraff website in my travels.
Hey, there! Just a note about Miz Poo’s lip…
My cat had a swollen lip like you are describing when we first moved to our townhouse years ago. My cat’s are house cats and had never been outside until the move, then, turns out the place had fleas. The person who lived there before us never got rid of them. So, Kimba’s swollen lip was an allergic reaction to fleas. Good thing she is a house cat! Once we got rid of the fleas, the lip subsided and all was well. she never had a reoccurance.