NotJustAHatStand

I'm sure I should be doing something other than posting to my blog right now but all that's left on my to do list are things like 'clean bathroom' and 'wash dishes' and I've just had a spray tan so I can't get my hands wet in order to do any of those things (which I am GUTTED about). This means that the Boy will have to do them, especially because he has invited people round to the pigsty that is our flat tonight (but don't even get me started on that).

Roo's results came back from the vet on Saturday, and I am delighted to say that the lump on her leg was not cancer after all, but a mass of fatty tissue (niiice).

So. Everything is arranged, and all there is to worry about now are natural disasters, last minute changes-of-heart, or sudden and drastic weight-gain. I had a dream the other night that I weighed myself and the scales told me I was 17 stone. I had to go and try on my dress immediately to make sure it still fitted (it did).

I'm amazingly calm - I thought I'd be a gibbering mess by now. The ratio of nerves:excitement is leaning towards the latter. I'm super excited to put my dress on and see the Boy's face when I walk down the aisle. I'm looking forward to wearing my wedding ring, and going on honeymoon. I can't wait to finally, after seven and bit years, stand up, make my vows and hear the Boy make his. Because that means I can get fat and he can't escape.

I still can't believe that neither of our dads will be there to see us get married, but I'm sure they will both be looking down on us. And spluttering in horror at the wanton money-spending that has been going on in their absence.

As much as I'm looking forward to the wedding, I'm not going to miss the constant phone calls from people asking me what's happening about the cake/piper/catering/favours/flowers/minister. I'm not normally the most organised person and it's been a bit of a struggle being the person who co-ordinates everyone and everything. But I've managed it and so far there's not been any major disasters (there's still time though).

The thing I am most nervous about is the fact that, against my better judgement, I didn't get my passport renewed. I will have eight months left on my passport at the time we're returning from honeymoon - I know the rule is you have to have six months left on it at the time you're coming home, but I wish I'd got a new one, just in case. Two months doesn't seem like a very big margin of error. What if I counted wrong? What if the rules change on the day we fly out?

Ah well, it's too late now. My next post may be from a Malaysian detention centre.


See you after the jump.

Labels: Cats, dreams, Travel, Wedding

Roo has a cancerous tumour in her leg.

She was looking a bit peaky the day after my hen party - I'd stayed at my mum's house that night and when I got home the following day she was curled up under the desk in our spare room, staring at the wall. She wasn't eating or drinking, and she was holding one of her back paws up off the ground when she walked (which she was avoiding as much as she could). We took her to the vet the next day, and his verdict was that he thought she'd damaged her achilles tendon. There was a swelling on her leg which he said could either be bruising from tendon damage, or 'something more sinister'.

He took a sample and it turns out it was the something more sinister. The vet says her prognosis is quite good, although typically for our cats, it's quite a rare kind of tumour. I forget now what he called it (I was too busy trying not to cry to write it down) but it's basically sending little tendrils of cancer into the surrounding area of her leg. There is some good(ish) news, which is that the tumour isn't the kind that affects the bloodstream and permeates the whole body. Which is something.

She's going in for an operation on Monday. The vet will try and remove the tumour but if it's affecting her achilles tendon or is particularly advanced, he may have to resort to amputating her back leg. The tumour is in an awkward place where there's not much surrounding tissue, and removing enough tissue to get rid of all the nasty stuff will be difficult. It may be that the only way to prevent the cancer from coming back is to amputate her leg. If that's the case, her and Coco are going to look a right pair - one three-legged cat and one gammy-legged cat. But I don't care about that, so long as she comes through it. When I was little I always had a toy hospital on the go for teddy-bears with one ear and no eyes, or dolls with no hair and biro all over their faces. So as long as Roo is ok, I'm totally fine with missing limbs.

I've had a bad feeling about this from the beginning, and I'm totally gutted that I was right. I've been a useless lump all day at work and the Boy and I have to go out tonight, which I couldn't be less enthusiastic about. Hopefully Roo will be on the mend by the time of the wedding and the honeymoon because I don't know if I'll be able to go off to the other side of the globe for two weeks if she's not.

I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think, 'Jeez it's just a cat! Get over it...' but I love my little cats - me, the Boy, Roo and Coco are like a little family (albeit with one half being slightly furrier than the other, and a different species).

I can't imagine Roo not being there, purring like a little machine when I get home from work - happy to see me no matter what. I am keeping all available appendages crossed for her.

Labels: Cats, Illness

My garden seems to have noticed that it's spring, and is growing quite enthusiastically. It was starting to look a bit wildernessy so we went out this afternoon and attacked it with the lawnmower and various other implements that were lurking in the back of the shed (most of them housewarming gifts, all of them untouched since we moved in). Despite our lack of any horticultural skills we managed to beat the triffids into submission, and make it look half decent.


(This is her pitiful, 'deprived cat' pose, the one she adopts whenever someone new comes into the house.)

Labels: Cats, Garden

I made the mistake of buying The Boy Football Manager 2007 for Christmas, and ever since I've had to fight to get access to our PC when he's in the house. He either hovers around, peering over my shoulder, trying to figure out if I'm nearly done yet, or he comes and sits in the spare room with me. Watching me. Waiting until I nip to the loo or go and make a cuppa, so that he can sneak on and check the score.

He's watching me right now - he's just sitting there smoking a fag and (as if that wasn't bad enough) watching me. It's freaking me out because I can feel his eyes boring into the back of my head. He's willing me to hurry up and just let him onto the computer already. I don't know if he can read what I'm typing from his side of the room.

If you can read this Boy? STOP WATCHING ME. You know I can't concentrate when you're just ... HOVERING... Go read a book or something. Oh, and while I've got your attention? The kitchen's a midden, and it's your turn to clean it.

I want a laptop. That way he can manage a fake football team to his heart's content, and I can sit on the sofa and write my post from there in comfort, peace and solitude.

We've got the day off tomorrow. We're not doing anything in particular, other than taking Coco to the vet for her booster. This means I have to wrangle her into her box first thing in the morning, which I am not looking forward to - she may only have three functional paws, but she makes good use of em when she's determined.

However, forcing a small unhappy cat into a confined space is much preferable to going in to my office - the tension I mentioned in yesterday's post escalated today into full blown huffs and histrionics, and I SO can't be arsed with that on a Friday. They can fight it out amongst themselves tomorrow, and I'll tune in for the office bitch-fest on Monday...

Labels: Cats, Computers, Fiance, Office

It seems my cat Coco has been hiding something from me. I've always thought she was a bit daft (her brain can only be about the size of a ping-pong ball judging by the size of her head), but she's proved me wrong, for she has been keeping a stash.

Last night I was watching TV and I saw Coco at the food bowl. Nothing unusual there, but the next minute I heard something rattling along the wooden floor. This normally means she's playing with something she's not supposed to play with (nails, cigarette lighters, earrings etc) so I went over. At first I thought she had been sick, but then I realised I was looking at a pile of fresh cat food, hidden behind the scratching extravaganza (which was a Christmas present for the cats from Fiance's mum).

I had caught Coco in the act of adding to her stash. I don't know how she managed to transport it over there -the only way she could do it is by carrying FOOD in her mouth, and NOT EATING IT. Coco has NEVER, to my knowledge, had anything even vaguely edible in her mouth without eating it. For pete's sake, she eats dust bunnies from the floor if I don't hoover often enough!

So I'm looking at Coco in a whole new light, wondering what else is going on in her wee head. I don't even know if cats are capable of such forward planning as to hide food and keep it for a rainy day, midnight snack or whatever. Maybe she's part squirrel.

I'm also wondering why she's taken to doing this - we feed the cats twice a day and more often than not they also get a DentaBit at some point as well (not to mention the dust bunnies and wood lice she eats off the floor), so it's not like she's underfed. Who knows, but it gave me a laugh last night and if it keeps Coco happy it's fine with me.

I thought this was a good opportunity to make use of the Flickr account I set up about a year ago, so I have made up my very first set, telling the story of my little genius cat and her stash of extra food. Be warned though, it only has three photos in it. It's a short story.

(I'm all better now by the way, still a bit snotty but I don't look or feel quite as hideous as I did yesterday. Which is a good thing, as the boy was starting to recoil from me in horror.)

Labels: Cats

I've written about the Metro and it's less than serious reporting before, but today I thought they were winding me up. I was reading a story about the benefits of male circumcision in relation to contracting HIV/AIDS and actually snorted out loud with laughter, prompting strange looks from my fellow passengers. Obviously AIDS isn't something to laugh about, what made me publicly embarrass myself on the bus was this:

"'It [male circumcision] has the potential to prevent many tens of thousands and perhaps millions of infections over the coming years,' Dr Kevin de Cock of the WHO said."

#double take#

I'm sorry... what? Dr de Cock? Seriously?! Yes, seriously. The BBC don't lie.

I certainly needed cheering up after my disastrous day off yesterday. Fiance and I had both taken a holiday to do some shopping and various other things and it turned into the kind of holiday that makes you wish you were back at work. We had an appointment to meet our wedding photographer in the morning, which was fine, but we came out of his studio to find that we'd been given a parking ticket. Now, Fiance is very careful with his money and it enrages him no end when he has to pay out money unnecessarily so he did not take this news well. Especially given the fact that we had bought a ticket from the machine across the road (the one that said 'Parking Tickets Here') and parked next to LOTS of other cars, none of whom seemed to have been ticketed.

Things didn't get much better for the rest of the day - I had an appointment with our new GP at 3pm, so we had to come home from town in the middle of our [decidedly unsuccessful] Christmas shopping expedition. When I got there the receptionist told me that they didn't have me down for an appointment - the person I'd spoken to that morning hadn't booked me in. And they couldn't fit me in at all that day. So back into town we go, in the howling wind and lashing rain, where we wandered kind of aimlessly for the rest of the day, too disheartened to even argue with each other.

In other news, Fiance's birthday dinner was a success, although slightly marred by the strange behaviour of my little cat Coco. Coco is normally a very active, vocal and friendly cat, so when she sat in the same spot all night* without eating, drinking, climbing into anyone's lap or jumping on Roo, we started to get worried. She was also drooling, which can apparently be a sign of a sore mouth or throat. Just as I was starting to worry that she'd ingested a Christmas bauble (and envision an emergency trip to the v-e-t), she seemed to throw off whatever was making her feel bad, and by the time I went to bed last night she was back to her old self, thankfully. Roo didn't seem quite so relieved however - I think she enjoyed the peace and quiet for the day and a bit that Coco was under the weather, and is now back to having her tail relentlessly pursued by a small, very determined, black Bombay cat.

*In the presence of both her grannies. This is unheard of.

Labels: Cats, randomness

I had a nightmare last night, and woke up at 5.30 in a cold sweat and breathing like I'd just run for the bus. I used to have a recurring dream that disturbed me quite a lot* but I don't often have nightmares (other than strange wedding-related ones about getting married in jeans and a dirty t-shirt - they'll stop once I actually ORGANISE my wedding).

But the dream I had last night was horrible, as I froze to death after getting locked outside overnight and became a ghost. I was see-through and white, and I couldn't see or talk to my family (I watched them all having dinner in a nice restaurant, having a lovely time without me - aiee!) and I had to live in a creepy old haunted house with lots of other ghosts who all had terrible injuries and afflictions. Strangely, the thing I was most upset about was that I couldn't cuddle my cats. I was crying hysterically because I was watching Fiance cuddling Coco and I wanted to give her a cuddle too but couldn't.

I'm quite baffled as to what it could mean though, other than that I'm far too attached to my cats. I suppose the obvious meaning is a fear of losing my family (which I guess isn't surprising given the events of the last couple of years), but that's nothing new - I've always been a worrier and when I was younger I used to lie awake at night thinking about what would happen if I ever lost one of my parents.

Then again, maybe it's better not to think about what it means - it'll probably just give me other things to worry about!

*About being in a forest clearing with my mum and lots of giant pink spiders crawling all over me. Completely inexplicable...

Labels: Cats, dreams, family

Coco is fixed. She had her op yesterday and it was a success - the vet managed to locate and remove all her remaining kitten-making bits. When she first came out of the box she staggered around the room like she was drunk, and her eyes remained all-pupil until approx 10pm last night, which was kind of freaky. She's now just kind of depressed and sulky because she's wearing a buster collar (I would post a picture if BT were able to connect our broadband - bah!) but I'm sure she'll come round and I'll be back in her good books.

Fiance went to the shops on the way home from work last night and came back with a huge bunch of Guilt Flowers (lilies, which I have to admit aren't my favourites, but as he doesn't ever read this website I can safely admit that here), Guilt Pudding (he doesn't normally encourage dessert), and some chicken for poor Coco's dinner (he's a smart cookie, he knows the way to my heart is through my kitties).

The thought was lovely though, and he has now been completely forgiven. The big twonk.

Labels: Cats, Fiance