3/23/05

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?”]]>