2004-01-30

mail2web to access my email on the server and delete the offending emails before downloading the non-virused email to my hard drive. For the record, y’all, you really should have McAfee or something similar running on your computer. Also, DON’T FUCKING OPEN a .zip file from someone unless you know it’s coming, and even then? DON’T OPEN IT. If you get an email that looks like it’s from me and has a .zip file attached? It’s not from me. I swear upon all that is holy that I will never ever send you a .zip file.

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I think that the Bean either misses Tubby, or is confused by his absence. Every morning since Tubby died, the Bean runs around making his squeaky-toy noise incessantly, and when I sit up to yell at him (what? I’m trying to sleep!), he jumps up on the bed, sits down, and stares up at me. No coincidence, morning was when the Bean would spend a lot of time harassing Tubby, who would always be laying under my dresser. The Bean would smack and jump and bite and lick Tubby until Tubby had had enough, at which point he’d smack the hell out of the Bean, who would go on to harass other kitties. I think the Bean misses his early morning hijinks. Poor Bean.
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So, this is what my Wednesday was like. Fred woke me up when he was about to leave for work so that I could come downstairs and post my entry about Tubby (we wanted to post our entries simultaneously, because we’re weird like that). I blinked the sleep from my eyes, put on my nightgown, and headed for the stairs. I’d successfully navigated the top stair and was putting my foot on the second stair down, when my foot slipped, and I bumpity-bumpity-bumped down seven or eight stairs. I came to a stop about halfway down the stairs, and sat there, stunned. “Bessie?” Fred said after a moment of silence. “OW!” I said. “I’m okay!” Fred and the spud came to the bottom of the stairs. “Did you fall down the stairs?” Fred asked. The spud stared at me, wide-eyed. “Yeah, on my ASS,” I said. They began laughing hysterically, the bastards. I gave them a dirty look, walked carefully to the bottom of the stairs and went into the computer room. In the kitchen, the spud was weak from laughter. After asking for some more details, Fred finally stopped talking about it. I had fallen more on my right butt cheek than my left, and scraped up the little toe on my right foot, but I was able to move and hadn’t broken anything, so I considered myself lucky. I have an impressive bruise on my right butt cheek (and no, you may NOT see a picture), all purple and blue. I have a less impressive bruise on my left butt cheek, and the entire right side of my body feels like I lifted some really heavy weights. After posting my entry, I went back to bed, where I only dozed a little. I flipped from my right side to my left, and since Miz Poo likes to cuddle up next to me when I’m laying on my left side, she jumped up on the bed next to me. Immediately, the Bean got excited – he gets very excited whenever one of the other cats does anything – and jumped up, swatting at her tail. This startled Miz Poo, who reacted by springboarding off my right boob, leaving a scratch up near my armpit and another one ACROSS MY NIPPLE, before she landed on the other side of the bed and settled on the pillow there. “Ow! Goddamnit!” I yelled, startling the Bean, who made his squeaky-toy noise and ran away. I decided I wasn’t going to get any sleep, so I got up, put some laundry in, and came downstairs to look up the symptoms of a urinary-tract infection, most of which I had. I called to make an appointment with my doctor, and then went out to the garage to exercise. My ass cheek was hurting an awful lot – hey YOU skid 7 or 8 steps on your ass and see how you feel! – so I only exercised for about 5 minutes on the elliptical trainer before giving up and going inside to shower. I spent part of the morning watching Thirteen. Evan Rachel Wood is just amazing, but there’s nothing like that movie to make you appreciate what you’ve got. I mean, the spud gets attitudinous from time to time, but NOTHING like the girls in that movie. I was hoping Holly Hunter would just finally haul off and slap the hell out of that child, to tell the truth. The cats gathered around me, sprawling out in front of the fire and on the blanket on my lap. I got to the doctor’s office about 5 minutes early and ended up cooling my heels for about an hour before I got to see her. She apologized for making me wait so long, but at this stage in life I’ve accepted that unless you get one of the very first appointments of the day, there’s going to be a long-ass wait, and I had my book to keep me occupied, so it was all good. My doctor started asking questions about my symptoms, and after a minute or two, it was pretty clear she was moving away from urinary tract infection questions and toward diabetes questions, the most obvious being “have you been drinking a lot of water lately?” It turned out that when they tested my urine they’d found no sign of a UTI and so she wanted to find out if I had developed diabetes. She sent me to the lab to have my finger pricked, and it came back with a number that indicated that I was pre-diabetic (though later I realized when the lab tech asked when I’d last eaten, I’d told her noon, but I actually ate at 1. Ahem.). She did the diet-and-exercise song and dance (Fred said later, “Did you say ‘Obviously you don’t know who I AM’?” Heh.) and recommended the South Beach Diet before sending me back to the lab to have blood drawn for some other tests. Lab tech: “Are you a hard stick?” Me: “Yes indeedy.” Lab tech: “Let’s just use the butterfly needle to get blood out of this huge throbbing vein on the back of your hand!” Me: “Um, okay. Ouch!” I had had my blood drawn, paid my co-pay and was sitting in the parking lot when the lab tech came out and waved me down, telling me that the doctor wanted to see me again because my white blood cell count was elevated. So I went back into the exam room, and the doctor came back in. “Your white blood cell count is elevated,” she said. “Which means that you have an infection somewhere.” I smiled. “I’m having the lab do a culture on your urine to be sure you don’t have a UTI, but are there any other symptoms of anything? I don’t want to just prescribe antibiotics for you without knowing what the infection is.” She ran down a list of potential symptoms, none of which I had (and none of which I can recall, except diarrhea). She puzzled over it for a few minutes, told me to “be really attuned to your body over the next few days”, and said they’d call when the results on my blood test and urine culture came back. And then I came home. Yesterday I woke up and all the UTI symptoms I’d had Wednesday were gone. Maybe it was just a reaction to stress – who knows? I feel fine, though. I’m sure it’s nothing. Well, probably a brain tumor, but other than that, nothing.
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I looked at the pictures on the camera’s memory stick yesterday and discovered a whole series of Tubby pictures, so here they are. (Picture taken by Fred, who complains when I don’t give him credit for the pictures I use. Yet he has used a million and three pictures that *I* took and didn’t give me credit for them. Bastard.) Getting some Beany love. Is that a look o’ love, or what?]]>