Since Adam got laid off, we’ve both been a little down and have basically been sitting on our asses playing video games. Which doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for work, Adam has to deal through his Union and trust me, he’s been calling. We’ve had some good visitors though, had some more last night, SIL Smut and her fiancée came over to give us some gifts that SIL Saz sent us for Christmas but they were sent to SIL Smut and didn’t arrive on time and so we just got em. Plus because they are both great they made us dinner straight out of a cook book from Pouce Coupe, it was almost like we were UP north.

Because I’ve been talking about them more frequently, I will introduce them to you. SIL Saz is my older SIL though not older than me, Adam is the eldest of the three of them and I’m the oldest of all six of us if you count our spouses which to me is pretty funny because in my family I’m the youngest, youngest cousin, grandchild, only grandchild on the one side BUT my dad has six sisters and one brother so being the youngest is super cool. Back to SILS. SIL Saz you may recognize from my comments, she reads the Greeper. SIL Smut is the younger of the two and has gone through various name changes, first I started to call her SIL Deux. Deux meaning two in French, and then when I got back from Bali I changed it to SIL Dua. Dua meaning two in Indonesian. Even though I know that I meant no insult with the word Dua who the hell wants to be second and technically she was third born anyway which means if I were going to keep it accurate she’d be SIL Tiga. But before Christmas SIL Smut and fiancée came over for a Wii night, Christmas spirits type visit and I didn’t even realize until they left that she had called her Mii for the Wii Smut. I enquired, she gained even MORE has the best kid stories of the three of them points . She got another one the other day, SIL Saz left a comment which begged a story. If I told you stories they’d both kill me, but from the one story I was able to FINALLY solidify a name for Tiga born SIL Smut.

Before we had dinner last night we opened gifts. All we knew was that SIL Saz was excited. This could not ever be a bad thing. I received the best belt buckle on the face of the earth and this belt buckle here is pretty bloody hard to beat. Now I am basically The Scorpion Queen. Adam received a Pan Flute that he is already playing super sweet sounds on that are not in anyway annoying. Not annoying AT ALL. And she gave us a poo calendar a Monthly Doos the 2010 dog poop calendar. It will likely go in the bathroom. WHAT? a poo calendar? Yes, picture an Anne Geddes photo but instead of babies on the leaves there is dog shit. Brilliant.

Some of the time it isn’t like we want to sit on our asses, we’ve been trying to get for photo walks for days and the weather is refusing to cooperate. I do not have a problem going for rainy walks they are rather enjoyable but when you are trying to take photos rain and photo walks don’t mix and I keep forgetting to wear contacts and my glasses get covered in water spots. Even the night walk we’ve been trying to go on has been a no go. We managed to get out one day and I took a couple shots before it started to rain they are nothing special, I like the beehive picture I got and I really like the public art displays all over the city put on by Vancouver Biennale. The red man is one of many sitting in a big circle. When I first saw them I instantly thought of Bali because almost everyone there squats like these statues do.

This one is an older one I took of another display very close to us.

We want to go for walks so bad to catch some of the insane last minute preparation for the Olympics, the energy in this city is crazy simply crazy. I did walk by the art gallery where the Olympic count down clock is and as I walked past and saw the work they were doing on it ALL I could think of was a HUGE flowered moo moo that I wouldn’t even let my mother wear for her 100th birthday. I’m really hoping we get a chance to do a rain free day walk and night walk within the next two weeks here.

While looking for the above photo I realized that I have NOT shown you all a photo of Dr. Vegas in his BRAND SPANKIN’ knew WRESTLING SUIT [from Christmas] made for him by beyond awesome friends, what a seriously killer gift.

Was trying to get cutesy video of Gus acting like a nutter and licking Phaedra’s sock covered feet. Gus, I don’t know why, but she likes to lick things; soap, windows, floors, clothes [clean and dirty]. She’s a licker. You’d think because I like to take a lot of random photos that Gus would be used to the camera but she hates it. It is amusing to watch, she will be doing something cute, I will reach for the camera and she’ll stop, generally she’ll even leave the room. I have learned some tricks with still photos but if she doesn’t want her photo taken that’s it she leaves. No surprise that when I wanted to film her she stopped licking the feet and wanted nothing to do with any of it, she didn’t leave the room, there was TOO MUCH OVER ALL EXCITEMENT happening at that moment. Maybe she was feeling overwhelmed?

C.J had called us on Skype and I didn’t want to get him all excited so I didn’t mention he had caught us within an hour of Phaeds coming over incase she was late or it was one of those just checking in on me five minute chats. Worked out that the three of us were still gabbing away when she arrived. I snatched this video of Gus being Gus I guess, and four people speaking about spicy topics all at the same time. I’m not going to ruin it for you other than to say that Gus is the star and it is cool that Phaeds joined the conversation some of her spicier bits got cut though.

My best little buddy, the kitty I’ve had since I was sixteen with braces still on my teeth, in 1994 there were two kitties left, an adorable ball of fluffy kittiness and the wee grey runt I chose who became Gus, now at fifteen years old has been having some health problems and I finally had to take her to the Vet. We hid the kitty taxi when we brought it up from storage so she wouldn’t see it and on Friday morning when I went to put it on the bed to put her in it, of course she knew instantly where she was going and went mini insane and I ended up feeling like an asshole tryingto get her in the thing because one of her problems is arthritis and here I am trying to push her on already sore paws into a hard cage. Poor little buddy. Once inside, she started to meow at a heartbreaking pitch I had never heard before. Heart breaks some more and I’m not even at the vet’s office yet.

Up until very recently we’ve been able to hold off some of the aging pain with over the counter products designed for aging animals, we had been giving her Zukes, Hip Action for about two years, she seemed to like them except when they’d go hard and weren’t fresh and we noticed an instant improvement in her mobility, we also made the apartment kitty friendly building her an apparatus out of Guitar Hero boxes in the bedroom that she uses as a step up and helper getting down. She also took to that right away. We have the living room arranged so that she can walk from piece to piece while getting progressively closer to the ground as she is doing so and we also pick her up if we she is attempting to jump off something higher up, behaving like the young virile cat she used to be instead of a lovely grey senior citizen.

Gus started to limp and favour her right paw, it made me sad. We tried to up the Hip Action to two a day but it didn’t do anything. She had also started to have these extremely odd and creepy breathing episodes where it sounds like she is wheezing but can’t seem to catch her breath it scares the shit out of me and I get pretty upset it lasts around a minute, you can only monitor something like that before you start to feel like a bad parent for so long, so once the limp started she had to go in.

Things didn’t go real well at the vet. The general examination was fine, meaning her behavior, but apparently she has a heart murmur which I didn’t know, very bad arthritis that I did know about, possibly something simple like Asthma or something serious, and she has sores around her mouth from scratching her face so much, we got her some cream for that.

I had to enable the vet aka give them money so they can find out what to use on her pain-wise for the arthritis and because of her breathing problem and the heart murmur they needed to do blood work, of course they wanted to do xrays that day too but I’m not stupid one step at an overly expensive price first please.

Anyone who knows Gus knows that saying she’s curmudgeon central is putting it rather mildly, I never saw this coming, oddly now I think I should have. They took her into another room to do the blood work and the small area they had to shave off and the blood extraction went fine and then while the assistant was pressing the needle spot to prevent a lump she apparently flipped, I did hear her yelp once fromother room, but not just a regular flip out she flipped so bad they came and got me and I went and tried to get her but she was CRAZY she bit a hole into my finger deeper than any bite I’ve ever had from any animal in my life, thanks for trying to give me rabies little buddy, it looked like a really bad cardboard cut, if you have ever had a cardboard cut as opposed to a regular paper cut. This lead to the veterinarian having to throw actual work gloves on and towel her to get her back in the kitty taxi. I have NEVER in fifteen years seen her that mad and inconsolable.

As of now, she’s on temporary pain killers until they know how bad things are so they don’t make anything worse, but this is it, pain meds for the rest of her life. And there are NO fun ways to try and get her to take the pills. We will likely switch to glucosamine shots that eventually we’ll be able to give her ourselves. We also had to get a urine sample out of her with this special litter, I don’t think she had even gone to the bathroom since Friday (vet day) so today we put the special litter in, it doesn’t absorb, and we waited till around four this afternoon for her to finally pee syringed it and it is now in the fridge.

I’m finding this all pretty hard because she is of course different hasn’t slept with us since Friday and I couldn’t sleep Friday night because she never cam wanted e in acting and this is very overwhelming I didn’t go to therapy on Friday because I couldn’t leave her alone she was flipping out so badly. She won’t eat the pills mixed in her food, we got one down her throat then the second time she no part in it the plastic dissolved so we put that over her food and again she wouldn’t go for it. Awesome two pills and two bowls of food wasted. She’s supposed to take two pills a day but we can only get one in her a day. The pain meds are giving her horrid breath but they are helping. We managed to get another one down her throat yesterday and one today, you can really see the difference in her limp even only getting three of the pills down and to think she is supposed to have taken six of them by now.



This is going to get worse for a bit before it gets better getting her comfortable so I got her a new Petmate carrier so it’ll be easier on all of us getting her back and forth to the vet. In the morning I’m dropping off her pee and picking up some treat pill cover things that are actually cheaper at the vet than at the local pet store, apparently the glucosamine shots are cheaper over time and last longer but we have to wait for her blood and urine to come back before we can take the next steps.



Thank you very much for the Hugs for Gus and I + Adam over Twitter and Facebook it seriously means a lot. I hate seeing my little buddy hurting so much. She is starting to demonstrate affection towards us again as shown by this photo from earlier today.

Normally for a cat Gus is fairly well behaved and feigns listening skillz and she knows how to suck up really well when she has been bad.  Sometimes because she is fifteen I will hold eyes with her and rant that she knows that I know that SHE KNOWS she is being bad so WHY are you being bad? She hits me with her tail normally or puts her butt in my face to acknowledge that she knows that I can‘t do anything about it.  And the funny thing is people just regular people like friends are afraid of her because she’s a straight up bitch and likes almost no one she hisses and bites she doesn’t like being touched past her shoulders, particular to the max like she has taken lessons from some stupid outfit wearing dog on how to be a bigger diva than mommy.

I know where she got the hissing from, the biting, not so much, if she hasn’t stopped attacking you if you get up in her face on say your third meeting with her she hates you, she is a much better judge of character than I am and once she starts only hissing and snapping at you occasionally, you’re in.

One day Adam caught her trying to relax, sleep, take a bath on the router, we’ve had said router for a while now and this was her first attempt at abusing the warmth it exudes. Like, why now it is hot in here, why not in the winter?

Naturally, we got Dr. Vegas on the job right then and there and appointed him a Router Guard.  Of course we don’t want anything on top of it but a black masked sock puppet is lighter and doesn’t envelop the thing. I know that busting out the camera and taking photos of her being bad is hardly going to lead to the correction needed to her behavior but it also isn’t often I  catch her and she ignores my patented scary face, finger snap twist hand back yells get down routine.

These incriminating shots were taken on two different occasions BOTH after we got a router guard who was either pushed off the router or bribed off with bananas, knowing Gus she just pushed poor Dr. Vegas off the router.