For all those who are interested, this is what $207.00 ($95 @ the shelter, $112 and counting at the vet) looks like:




I don't mind spending money on the kitties, I just wish it wasn't quite so much....

To begin this story in a round-about-way, my mother is a doctor. Not the crazy rich kind, just the regular kind. While it sucks to have her be gone the majority of the time and to worry about which patient is going to call complaining about something during a movie, there are benefits to this arrangement. All physicals are handled the night before they are needed, with this sentence: "Here Mom, will you fill this out for me?" Similarly, if I need a TB shot, she brings one home from work with her, checks it a few days later, and viola, I am cleared. Any sniffle, hack, headache, and broken bone can be cured with a phone call. But the part I never really thought about until a few years ago is coming back to bite me in the ass.

I never really knew what people were talking about when they complained about the health care system in the US. I've never had a problem with any doctor (perhaps because my mom usually knows them?), so I assumed everyone else was just complaining to complain. It couldn't be that bad.

I took my cat to the vet yesterday to have his first checkup. To spare you the yucky details, he really needed an overall look-see about some smelly side effects, and I thought he might have a fever. I dropped him off in the morning, and called that afternoon to check on him. I was told over the phone that he was ready to go, and would have some medication to pick up. I went to pick him up and planned on talking to the vet when I got there to find out exactly what was going on, and what I needed to do. However, the vet was not there when I arrived, and the tech was more than a little unclear about everything. After looking over the chart for about 15 minutes (yes, I am exaggerating a little), he mumbled something about him having a fever and using a general antibiotic to hopefully fix this. No, he had no idea what was causing the fever. No, they weren't able to get a sample. Yes, they had run some test but wouldn't have the results for a few days. They gave him a muscle relaxer, but never told me what it was for. And then he charged me $112 and that was that. A little perturbed, I took my cat and my empty wallet home whereupon I discovered that there was indeed a very large sample living in the box with my kitty. Far from invisible, this sample was proclaiming its presence with an un-ignorable smell and had apparently been there for awhile.

Now I know how if feels to go the the regular doctor's office. I don't like feeling ignored, unimportant, and woefully uninformed $100 bill walking around. I expect to be treated like a person, maybe even with a little respect and dignity. I want someone, preferably with a "Dr." in front of their name, to sit down and explain to me what is going, and what we can do about it in regular non-medical terms.

I guess this is my way of saying that I've been extremely lucky in the medical field so far, and I have decided that my sister should become/marry a vet. Then I'm covered, and I can deal with the rest of the world.

I think I ran more errands this weekend than I did the entire rest of the month!

On Friday during my lunch break I went with my dad to Best Buy and Target. Then after work I went to 5 different shoes stores at the outlet mall trying to find shoes to go with my little red riding hood costume. I finally found the perfect pair of shoes, and my sister got a bonus pair.

Then Rachel and I went to Target, Bealls, Fashion Bug, and JC Penny trying to find a purse for under $15. I also purchased what I thought was red lipstick at Target earlier, only to find out later that it was in fact hot pink. I don't do hot pink. Even on Halloween. So, I had to try out all the red-ish lipsticks on the back of my hand before we found one that is really red. The back of my hands looked like someone had beaten me with fifteen pink lipsticks.

Finally I gave up on the purse idea, and went home to get ready for a Halloween party. Incidentally, I took a shower, shaved, blow dried my hair, unpainted and then re-painted my toe nails, put on false eyelashes, put on makeup, curled my hair, and got dressed in one hour and twenty minutes.

Saturday I made two more trips to Best Buy, another trip to Target, and bought gas.

Sunday I again went to Target, Best Buy, and my parent's house.

I really do like to run errands, especially if I get to buy stuff. The only problem is that I buy stuff, and thus have no money. It's a viscous cycle.

First of all, you should read the cover story of Rolling Stone magazine.



I'm cheating today, because it is Friday!

Four jobs I’ve had:

camp counselor
run a tourist information center (on the weekends)
daycare teacher/office manager
administrative assistant

Four Movies I can watch over and over:

You've Got Mail
Bridget Jones' Diary
Pirates of the Caribbean
White Christmas

Four Places I’ve Lived:

Portsmouth, New Hampshire
San Marcos, Texas
John Knox World (also known as Fischer, TX)
Banner Elk, North Carolina

Four TV shows I love:

Friends
Sex and the City
Will and Grace/Scrubs (tied)
My current favorites: Gilmore Girls/Studio 60

Four places I’ve vacationed:

Portland, Oregon (my mom's family)/all over the country in the damn RV
San Francisco, California
New York, New York
Most recently: Tallahassee, Florida

Four of my favorite dishes:

Chicken Ranch sandwich @ Chili's (hold the wing sauce, extra ranch)
My parent's chicken and mushroom sauce dish (with rice)
Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner at home (is this cheating?)
Dessert.

Four sites I visit daily:

Internet Movie Database
Open Book
The Superficial
Bloglines

Four places I would rather be right now:

NYC, with tickets for every show on Broadway in my hands
Port A, sitting in my camping chair with something cold in my hand
My parent's house on Christmas morning
The chapel @ JKR, my favorite place on the planet

That's all folks, have a great Halloween weekend!

Confession:

I love putting furniture together.

Near the top of my list of favorite things to do is to sit down in front of a good movie I've seen 12,000 times (You've Got Mail, Bridget Jones' Diary) with a box full of parts to put together. I mean, really, what is NOT fun about that? You totally get to organize something WITH DIRECTIONS, and then when you are done you have a new piece of furniture. It's like a big jigsaw puzzle, except not for old people and is not useless when you are done. Plus, I get to use my tools, which is always fun.

One of the reasons I was so excited to move into my apartment was because I had three bookcases, an entertainment center, and an audio shelf to put together. Although the entertainment center sucked because I couldn't put it together while watching a movie because I couldn't set up the tv without the entertainment center and you get where I am going with this.

And today, I discovered the PERFECT thing to put together.

A massage chair.

Why, you ask? Because although the damn thing is very hard to put together, the illustrations do not match the written instructions, and it is HEAVY, you have a wonderful suprise at the end. After all the pain, sweating, grunting, blot tightening, cursing, blot removing-flipping part over-bolt tighterning is over, you get to turn it on. And did you know that when you sit in a massage chair, turn it on, and close your eyes you can totally fall asleep?

So not only was I able to put together a big puzzle into a piece of furniture, but that piece of furniture then relax and rejuvinated me. How awesome is that???

The night the rains came down

I have class every Wednesday and Thursday night from 6:30 - 9:15pm. I hang around after work two days a week until my class starts, then I walk over to my class around 6:15pm. Last Wednesday as I walked to class, I noticed that it was a beautiful evening. Fall has FINALLY come to central Texas, and the weather was cooling off. Nobody told me that it was supposed to rain.

About 30 minutes after class started, I heard a funny noise outside. Turns out it was raining. And in Texas, rain means a different thing than it does to you Yankees. I've been Oregon, I know that to you guys, a light rain ALL DAY is rain. Here we just call that "humidity." In Texas, when it rains, we don't have cats and dogs falling from the sky, we have cows and steer. It was POURING outside, and we could barely hear each other trying to discuss Beloved over the sound of long-horn-steer-sized rain drops hitting the cement outside.

Fortunately, about 30 minutes before class was supposed to end, the rain let up and I began to hope that I could make it back to my car through a light sprinkle (or what everyone else calls "heavy rain"). At around 9:10pm my professor started wrapping up the discussion.

~ Side Note: Hey you. Yeah, you. That guy. That one guy that when the professor says with five minutes left in the class, "Does anyone have any other questions? Anything else you want to discuss?" you raise you hand. And you do not ask what we are reading next week, or if you can talk to the professor after class. No, you say, "I'm really intrigued by the idea of love in the novel. Blah blah blah, pretentious sounding words, blah." FREAKIN' STOP THAT. ~

Just as we finished hearing from pretentious guy, the sky opened up again and it started pouring. I walked to my office in the pouring rain (with no umbrella, thank you very much sneaky Mother Nature). I collected a few things from my office, locked up, then got to walk to my car in the rain. No, scratch that walking thing...You know when you used to play Oregon Trail and you had to "ford" the river in your wagon and almost everytime you lost an ox? Yeah, I did that. There was a huge rushing river of water traveling down the hill my car was parked on, so I gathered my belongings and forded the mini-Mississippi. Finally I arrived in my car, removed my prairie bonnet, back out into the river, made it down the hill, and headed off home.

So hey, did you know that you can drown your car? It turns out if you get too much water in your car (for instance, when you drive through several puddles the size of your car, a river, and the pouring rain) then it stops working. Huh. I started off the evening not knowing this, and finished up sitting in the right hand lane just over a rail road track in a car with air conditioning, audio, and headlights all working. But the engine, oh the engine...So, I then had to explain in very calm and dulcet tones to my father what was going on - although, come to think of it, I think might have screamed into the phone: "IT ISN'T FUNNY, COME GET ME RIGHT NOW!!!"

My wonderful sister and father did indeed come out in the rain to rescue me, and the three of us pushed and turned the car in a nearby parking lot. The next day, my dad stopped by the car and the engine started just like normal. And now I am terrified to drive my car in the rain. I think next time, I'll just sleep in my office.

On the bright side, look at what I got on Saturday:

Sir Oliver, or as I call him "Ollie stop biting me!"