(How’s that for an interesting and foreshadowing title? Stephen King, eat your heart out.)

A bit of a rundown of various random things on my mind and that for which I have photographic evidence:

My Cat is on Grass

Many moons ago when my mother-in-law was over here visiting from Australia, she bought my cat, Leo, a “cat grass” kit from Wal*Mart. Now, I’ve never seen anything like this before, but it’s a self-contained kit to grow…waaaaaaait for it…GRASS. Yeah, I know. But apparently it’s supposed to be “cat friendly” grass that they’ll want and desire to eat.

And what’s funnier is that he actually does like to eat it — so much that he horked it all over the kitchen floor the other day and then looked up at me as if to say, “Well, it was nice, but the bleu cheese dressing was a bit tangy.”

I trimmed it tonight, thinking that perhaps it had grown a bit hairy, and since we put it up on the cupboard to keep Leo from snarfing it down like a vegan bulemic it has grown considerably. This very well may kill it off, as it appears to be some form of oats or similar — probably something exotic like, “mouse weed”, or similar, that has a flavor like a speeding rodent.

BANG! Thump, thump, thump is not a normal sound effect

The thing that never ceases to amaze me is that once you have a bit of money in your possession, something happens to sap it out of your wallet just as fast as it came to exist there. Really, my bank is just a pass-through for funds, not a stopping grounds, as nothing ever sits there long enough to even cool off.

Saturday as we sped up I-35 to the wedding reception of my cousin, I went to pass a guy in the left-hand lane and loud racket erupted from the rear of my car. Originally, my mind went, “You cut off a biker, you idiot.” and then proceeded towards, “No, you blew out a muffler. Nice.” The reality eventually crept into my head — “It’s a tire, it has to be a tire. Dammit.”

I pulled over to the side of the road and sure enough, the rear driver’s side tire was completely deflated and sitting on the rim. Shit. We tried calling my father, thinking that he might be behind us, but he had turned his cellphone off for the wedding. I tried to find my roadside assistance number, but even though I pay $7/month for the damned thing, I don’t appear to have the number actually on me. It dawned to me that I should probably just bite the bullet and change the tire myself, which I did in about 8 minutes, no problems, and put on the “donut” spare, then proceeded to drive 50mph for the rest of the night (its rated speed limit).

This is on my 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse, which hasn’t even turned over 50,000 miles yet — clearly a lot of tread and wear was killed off in its early life.   The tires are P215/50R17 90Vs and the current ones are Eagle RS-As,which have been great for me when driving, but…

The pictures are not doubles, nor are they pictures of the same damage — the tire blew out in two places, or at least one place and the other ripped once I started driving on it, unknown about that. So I have been searching and I believe I get to drop $260+ on two new tires come Monday. Yay. :P~

Toilet Herbs

Everyone has heard of an herb garden full of pot — but this is a pot full of an herb garden. Perhaps you remember my posting about our old house being destroyed. Well, before it was flattened I went through and stripped tons of useful items from it. One of the very last things I grabbed was our old toilet.

Now, I hear you saying to your computer screen (as your spouse wonders how long you’ve been crazy, and why you don’t take your meds), “Nathan, what in fuck do you want a toilet for???”

Well, I thought since it had been through so much shit with us, it deserved to come along and keep sharing the experience. However, I knew that it was time for a career change for the water closet, and so I have turned it into my herb garden by filling the bowl with dirt and planting some sweet basil and Italian oregano in there.

Think of the advantage — it’s self-watering! You just flush it and voila! Instant wet dirt. Too much water? No problem, it’ll just flow out the trap. I’m planning on eventually redirecting the output of the downspout into it to provide plenty of good rainwater reserve for those dry days of summer.

Think of the humor! You’re cooking for friends and need some spices and so you just say, “I’ll go to the toilet and get some oregano!” The look on their faces will be precious, really. Plus, it should be a great conversation piece once it gets going.

Never say that something can’t be recycled — even if it’s in “crappy” condition!

It is rare that I post a blog entry of little to no worthy intelligence, relevance, thought, or otherwise proving content. However, this is going to be one of those, mostly because the picture on the left is one of The World’s Absolutely Cutest Penguin and I can’t stop the unbelievably horrible feelings of affection rising from my inner cockles at the sight of this little bugger. I have desires to go out and pet bunny rabbits, coo at newborn babies, and tie little pastel bows on every passing car antenna. He’s so terribly cute that I just want to stare at him all day long until my eyeballs dry up and crack.

I know — this is really, really sad.

I am very, very fond of penguins, however, and since I’m a Linux geek, it works out pretty well. (Linux’s mascot is a penguin named Tux, if you didn’t know.) In some ways, this little guy makes me giggle because I’ve had that same sort of expression on my face once or twice, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on my wife’s face, too. I’ve made him my desktop background so I can grin at him on regular occasion.

I wouldn’t feel quite about posting this like a giggling schoolgirl without attempting to justify it in some fashion. You’re going to get an educational experience even if I have to make it amusing for you, so brace yourself:

A penguin’s average speed under water is 15mph. When greased with lard, they can hit speeds upwards of 25mph. One does not want to attempt to catch a lubricated penguin.

A penguin’s normal body temperature is a balmy 100°F. Fish in the neighborhood hold BBQs in between their legs because it’s so comfy.

Penguins have bristles on their tongues that face backwards so food can’t get away. This also makes French kissing in the penguin world an extreme sport.

Penguins drink salt water — they have a special gland that extracts the salt and pushes it back out of their bodies through grooves in their bills. Cracked pepper emits from special bumps behind their ears.

Penguin parents recognize which chick is theirs by the chick’s voice — it’s usually the one that grates on their nerves the most.

There. I feel justified now in sharing my extreme and unnatural love of that group of pixels in the upper left-hand corner. Enjoy the saccharine.

Monday evening, as I’m tripping around the kitchen after returning from gathering groceries and several buckets of fresh sweet corn from my father’s farm, I notice that the cat has taken to frequently going into the little half bath off the kitchen. As this is his feeding/crapping place, this isn’t entirely unusual, but it’s a bit strange to see him frequent it 4 times in 10 minutes, and while he’s not inside, to see him bent nearly double like some sort of Kama Sutra master, licking his happy bits with wild abandon. I started to have the sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t just out for a good night on the town.

After calling Yolanda in and watching him for a while, we decided that our fears were probably confirmed: He was plugged up again.

See, our fuzzy feline friend has this medical condition that has plagued him ever since he marched himself into our house and sat down 2 years ago. We suspect that if he was a house cat before, this may have been the reason that he became a stray, or he got damaged while outside. Every so often (about once every 8 months or so it seems), he gets crystals forming in his urinary tract and they eventually block it darn near solid, disabling him from peeing at all. In the past this required a trip to the vet to have him catheterized to break out the crystals and then flush him clean. If we didn’t catch it in time, or let it go, he proceeded to pee all over the house and chuck everywhere and generally not be in a good condition. So much joy, so little time. <sigh>

Of course, this happens at 9:30pm, the best time to try to go to the vet with a sick pet. We spent a good 15 minutes ‘hrm’ing and ‘haw’ing about whether or not to call someone and eventually elected to call the Sheffield vet. “Thank you for calling *blah blah*, Mike is unavailable until the 20th, if this is an emergency, please call *blah blah* “Oh, LOVELY. The bloody vet is on vacation! Perfect.

So, we look up and call his secretary at home — hey, this is small town Iowa, right? You can do this sort of shit. I could probably call up our doctor at home and get a consultation over the phone. Ring up the school cook and she’d probably lead you through the recipe for something crappy made out of government meat. it’s that sort of place.

Anywho, we got the secretary on the phone and explained the situation and asked for advice, and she recommended calling the emergency vet, so we did. Got him on the phone, explained, and he said to meet him at his office in Allison. Now, Allison is 30 minutes away, or so, so we had some trucking to do.

Thoroughly ticked that we had to shoulder yet another bill for this mouser, I rushed around the house, gathered duct tape, a box, and my keys and so forth. Grabbed the furball and put him in the box, taped it shut, and got on our way. Not having a regular driving habit to Allison (and unsure of the exact time it took to get there), I decided to take back roads and move it along. We settled into a nice, 80mph whiz through the blackened landscape of rural Iowa, hoping to hell that the deer were off playing 500 or something.

It seems that the wildlife (minus the one possum that we gave a horrific, life-shortening swerve around) were indeed occupied with things other than ritualistic, auto-assisted suicide, as we arrived in Allison sans antlers in the grille and blew down into main street to park and wait for 15 minutes while the vet arrived.

The vet arrives after 10 minutes or so and ushers us into his office. He proceeds to poke and prod our cat a bit, trying to feel for his bladder. After a bit, he asks if he’s ever successfully recovered without a cath and we say no, so he gets his equipment ready. We’re curious and we’re there, so we stick around to help and to watch.

He first shoots him up with a half dose of some anesthetic as he busied himself with getting out tools. I petted Leo as he got more and more relaxed. He looked up once or twice and you could just tell that he was going, “Ooooh…. pretty colors….” as his pupils got bigger and bigger. Eventually the cat was face-planting into the surgery table, so we laid him down on his side. The vet came over and squirted some gooey gel into the cat’s eyes so they wouldn’t dry out since they’d be open during most of the surgery.

Then he set up several things and extracted very thin (maybe 1 mm or so) plastic tubing from a package — the catheter. We then flipped the sleepy cat over on his back and as Landa and I held his legs, the vet squeezed his lower section to get his penis to stick out.

All I can say about that is that I am not jealous of my cat. He’s hung like a grain of rice. Really — it’s about that big.

Have you ever tried to find a hole in the middle of a grain of rice?

That’s exactly what the vet had to do — removed his glasses and squinted in the glare of the huge operating light to try to thread the catheter into the cat’s dick, during which Leo, though sedated, was still growling and so forth, so you know it couldn’t have been a very pleasant sensation. I have a feeling that if he tried it while he was awake, we’d all be stripped down to the bones in about a second and he’d be in orbit around Mars.

Eventually he got it started and was stopped several times by crystals that he had to push through — probably 4 times or so. Eventually he got it threaded all the way in, and then it started to weep out a blood and urine mixture. He shot in some saline in after and let that drip out, just to wash out the area.

Then he proceeded to pull a stitching needle (those funky curved ones) and suture thread from the cleaning bowl — I was a bit confused, but then he went and used it to sew the cath to Leo’s skin, essentially. The cath has little wings on either side with holes so he could thread the stitches through and sew it down.

After that, he hooked up an IV and stabbed Leo in the back with it and proceeded to load, subcutaneously, saline into his skin until it expanded out like a big water balloon inside the cat’s back. This was to force tons of fluid into the cat such that his kidneys would have to flush him out violently.

He packed up his stuff and said that he’d keep him overnight at least, maybe for a few days, to make sure that he was opened up properly and flushed and so forth. We talked about antibiotics and so forth and then left.

As of today (Wed), he’s still at the vet’s — the vet thought he’d probably be there through Thursday or so as he wants to observe him and make sure that he’s really cleared out before releasing him.

It’s a bit strange to not have the little furball waiting for me when I wake up or come home from work. It’s a pity he’s such a great cat when he’s here — if he was a shithead and had this problem, I’d probably just have him put down or something, but he’s probably the best housecat I’ve ever met, so I guess we’ll be taking it up the ass for him again. I hope he appreciates it in some sort of manner.