Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004 - 2:55 p.m.
Greetings,
What a goddamn busy weekend I just went through. Parts of it were extremely wonderful, transforming and just plain fun, others were adrenalin pumping (not the good way) terrible.
Let’s start off with Friday afternoon when I was playing The Sims merrily in Tom’s Chamber and he came running in to say that Meow was not moving and lying on the floor in a puddle of urine.
Somehow within the span of ten minutes, both of us were dressed, out the door, and at the vet’s on Prytania Street. Complete with squealing tires, zooming onto streets in front of oncoming cars and all that Pulp Fiction sort of escalated terror.
Meow’s glucose level was at 22. It’s supposed to be 200-something. If we had not been home on Friday, I’m pretty certain we would have found her dead on the kitchen floor Friday night.
Friday afternoon at 4:30 I had to bring her to the Emergency Animal Clinic on Veterans for the night. Normally 4:30/5 p.m. on a Friday night wouldn’t mean much, but it was Mardi Gras weekend. Somehow we beat the parades both in New Orleans and in Metairie, although they were busy closing off streets behind us as we went.
Saturday morning I had to get up at 6 a.m. to get back to the Emergency Animal Clinic to pick up Meow before 7:30. I pulled into the drive precisely at 7:30 and that’s when my cell phone went off – it was the clinic making sure I was coming.
105 dollars later, I’m on my way back to Prytania for the day hoping that I do not have to bring Meow back to the clinic at 4:30 Saturday afternoon. More, bigger parades on Saturday night. Luckily, it turned out she could stay overnight at Prytania because she was doing so well.
Monday I picked her up around 4 in the afternoon after dropping Kristen off in the Quarter. Monday night was Lundi Gras – lots of parades. By the time we picked her up Napoleon was closed off at Tchoupitoulas, but we managed to cross it on Annunciation and after that we were home free.
This morning at 8 a.m. I dropped Meow off yet again, but mainly for testing of her glucose levels and to try to figure out how to get her two shots a day to happen at times other than where they are at now – midnight and noon. I can do midnight, but noon every day would be a problem with my job and all. Each two sets of shots we go down by two hours. So I’m imagining she got a shot at 10 this morning and will get one at ten tonight and then hopefully I can give her one at 8 tomorrow and then 8 tomorrow night and then we’re back to 6 and 6 which is where we usually are.
Anyway, that’s a lot of extraneous details about insulin shots. Meow seriously did not look good Friday afternoon, although once we got her to the vet’s and they put a glucose IV into her poor little shaven leg (her two front legs are halfway shaved to the skin and she looks like a poodle), she recovered pretty well. One minute she was lying there unresponsive, the next she went “Meow” and sat up on the table.
While her canned food diet of last week thanks to Mardi Gras didn’t help the situation any, apparently it was not the cause of this attack of hers. It’s probably been slowly coming on for a while. The vet reports she wouldn’t eat dry food when she was there, only canned. But I got her back to eating dry food at home. She didn’t like it at first, but she ate it when she got hungry enough.
I did learn that Meow is habitually high in glucose levels which is the root cause of her peeing all over the puppy pads to the saturation point. Apparently her body is happiest there. Before the attack I was noticing that she was peeing nicely without all the saturation and was actually pleased. I’ll know better from now on.
From Friday until Monday night my house smelled rather fresh and inviting. And I only had to clean the litter box once. Since she’s been home, I’ve been Fabreezing the smell of pee out of every room it seems to have penetrated. But whatever. She’s a good cat.
In between the cat drama, I found the time to hang out at Buddha Belly on Magazine for the Thoth parade where I caught masses of beads and had several pairs of panties thrown at my head, but by the time I turned back around other people had made off with them. And then proceeded to wear them on their heads. Mardi Gras is, um, not very sophisticated.
Bacchus was boring, maddening, crowded, and stingy. Those bastards wouldn’t throw to me or make eye contact with me at all. I caught about 6 pairs of beads in an hour compared to about 60 at Thoth in the same amount of time. Thoth rules. Bacchus sucks. I did get a magical doubloon with Elijah Woods’ head on it – which I promptly gave to Papa Legba along with a Thoth doubloon. (Don’t worry, misterjohn, you get a Thoth doubloon. Unfortunately, they were, you guessed it, stingy at Bacchus and I only got the one doubloon. But you are getting cool Thoth throws!)
Jaye got completely shitfaced between Buddha Belly and his homemade orange/fruit/rum concoctions at Crescentwood. He will never live down calling the “Wrong Kristen” or his “interpretive” dancing at Bacchus which mainly consisted of him pulling up his shirt. He also stole lots of drinks from willing as well as outraged victims. Holy moly. I had to turn my head away from some of his more outrageous antics.
I’ve often wondered if I’m missing out on something since I have lived here for seven Mardi Gras and only been to about 14 parades total. Most of the fourteen parades were attended the first year I lived here. There’s been a couple of years I didn’t even go to one. But Saturday night confirmed for me that parades are overrated. Thoth is a lot of fun and I intend to go every year, but the other parades? Bah. You can have them. If you can’t give me a doubloon and a medallion after 16 floats go by, fuck you.
As you can tell, I was mite bit crabby Sunday night. We left before it was over and came back to Crescentwood around 8 p.m. Jaye and Melissa left and I spent the rest of the night playing Sims and waiting for Kristen to come home from working in the Quarter.
I did play a lot of Sims these past four days. I am getting good. I had my first Sim die (and at night she comes out of her tombstone and haunts this kick ass house I designed.) She and her sister overextended themselves when they bought it and before she could get a job, she passed away. Her sister, however, is married to Chester and living with her brother in law, Charles, in that very house that she had to sell after the death and retreat to a more manageable house. I moved the original occupants (two married couples who started out as two female roomies) into the big house on the hill. Not the BIG big house, but the next one down. They have a Jacuzzi and all kinds of cool things. And balconies.
I even have my own Sim. Her name is Sin and she lives in Michael’s old bachelor pad which then belonged to Amelia (she who has the dead sister) and she has her friend Ken Collinwood over to party a lot. Ken Collinwood has his own bachelor pad with a bedroom that eerily resembles Ken’s own Connecticut Collinwood room where he watches horror movies on a black and white television from his wicker chair.
I’m bored with my married Sims who have children. I never visit the Newbies anymore. This just reaffirms my decision to remain childless. You gotta buy the kids those stupid garish beds and while I can make them clean up the kitchen, I’d rather just spend time with the grown-ups.
Tonight I can’t play because Thomas needs the PC, but tomorrow night I’m making a new “family” of two roommates named Tom and John. I suspect Tom and Sin will eventually get married, but you never know.
However, I’m just about ready for an expansion pack. I hear Sims can go to nightclubs and have sex in later versions. Woo hoo.
Anyway, I am going to bounce back to Friday night now.
It was a caftan night which I desperately needed due to the afternoon’s drama. I soaked in the tub with champagne and then, when Kristen arrived, I ran her a bubble bath, complete with champagne and candles. Then we caftaned up, watched Ab Fab, talked to Ken, did some incredible magic, listened to DCD, ate homemade pizza and watched “April Fool’s Day”. It was 3 a.m. before we even thought about bed.
I can’t even remember Saturday night because it passed in a Sims swirl. Sunday night too, only I came out around midnight to ask Kristen and Tom if they were done playing X-Box and if we could watch a movie, but apparently they were on the last level of Wolfenstein and so two hours later I was still in Sim City. We tried to watch “And Then There Were None” but it was 2 a.m. and I decided And Then There Was Sleep and retreated to bed, clutching my glass of Sambucca. They both followed about an hour later.
At some point during the weekend, I think it was Monday, we ordered lunch from Italian Pie and enjoyed it while talking life, Initiation, and everything before we drove Kristen to the Quarter and then to get Meow at the vet’s.
We drank lots of vanilla flavored coffee, Kristen from her beloved red Pentagram mug, and we talked a lot. Tom played a lot of X-Box and watched some Star Wars movies and I -- well, I drove Meow around a lot and played the Sims (a lot) when I wasn’t sipping champagne, rearranging and relocating Erzulie’s altar, giving lots of red beads and toys to Papa Legba, drinking Abita Amber at the Buddha Belly and bitching about Bacchus.
So that was Mardi Gras weekend.
