EighteenTwelve

Is anyone else getting the Jim Beam Sweet Caroline ad in every single break, or am I just lucky because I live in Boston and the Red Sox adopted that song when they were good?

I'm not prone to that anxiety dream about having to take an exam in a class you never knew existed, but this morning I more or less lived it. My boss is a team lead for a $5M clinical research training grant, and she's traveling this week, so she sent me to the grant leadership Zoom meeting this morning. Thank goodness I've been attending most of the training curriculum meetings as a sort of FYI-in-case-anyone-asks, because I had to present training curriculum status updates to the PI and the three other team leads, all of whom are seriously over my pay grade.

The Sunday before last, I got up to rinse out my favorite coffee mug, tripped over Quirk, who was sprawled out in the hall, and crashed the wrist of the hand holding the mug into my bedroom doorframe. Very impressive bruises ensued, and everything between my wrist and my little finger still hurts. Quirk and the mug are both unharmed. But why did I want cats, again?

When your 17-year-old cat tries to climb up your leg because you're standing at your kitchen counter disassembling a rotisserie chicken, you can be certain she wants chicken more than you do. (Lily turns into a piranha where chicken is concerned. Quirk sits under the kitchen table hoping she doesn't get chomped by accident.)

"I did NOT say I had sardines in my pocket. What I said was, 'I bet you'd like it if I produced a sardine from my pocket, wouldn't you?' I don't have any sardines!"

Happy fourth birthday to the Querulous Quirkus with the Quizzical Expression.

Does anybody have any good tricks to get animal tear stains off fabric? I have a cat with a runny eye who likes to sleep on my cotton quilt, and Google gave me results for removing tear stains from the cat, not from the bedding.

@Suzn, she's actually a very dark orange tuxedo tabby with four white feet.

Never trust a smiling cat, even if she's asleep. And definitely never trust two simultaneously smiling cats.

"What a wonderful bird the frog are. When he stand he sit almost; When he hop he fly almost. He ain't got no sense hardly; He ain't got no tail hardly either. When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got almost." (So does Quirk.)

The Vaseline lotion commercial is driving me insane, because the last thing I want is lotion that makes me feel like I've been "glazed". I want lotion that absorbs as soon as possible (thank you, Gold Bond).

Quirk is a lap cat! It took her two years and two weeks to decide she could do it, but she’s been sitting on me for the last hour with all her feet tucked in. (Picture was half an hour later when she was actually asleep.)

I snuck into their practice session and got a picture of the Union Street Synchronized Sleeping Team. They take their practice time very seriously.

Quirk got a hernia after her spay surgery (before I adopted her), and has a big lump of scar tissue where they had to go back in and fix that. It was her third major surgery after the tail amputation and the spay. No wonder she didn't like humans very much!

I'm working from home today and I had a Zoom meeting this morning. Quirk couldn't figure out who I was talking to, because I wasn't talking to her.

Quirk is the grey one, Lily is the orange one.

This is from June, but it's the best recent picture I've got. I was laughing too hard at the lecture to take pictures.

Quirk gave me a very angry lecture yesterday afternoon about the weather. This morning she toned it down to the usual lecture about how she was STARVING because she hadn't eaten in YEARS (she ate all of her dinner last night when the weather broke, so not buying that one). Meanwhile Lily spent yesterday afternoon sleeping on the side of my desk because she couldn't be in my lap (too hot) but she really wanted human contact. Everybody is much happier today.

Or not…I came home and she immediately followed me into the bathroom, demanding dinner, which she’s putting a serious dent in. I called the vet back and they said let them know how she is on Monday.

I just made Lily's euthanasia appointment for Tuesday. I think her kidneys have finally had enough. Tuesday is her 16th birthday. It was the soonest appointment I could get.

This is the face of an almost-16-year-old cat who had just discovered pepperoni pizza for the first time in her life, and would eat nothing else for the rest of her life if I let her. (The office ordered pizza for lunch and there were leftovers. I don't order pizza at home more than about once a year, and I would rather spend money on toppings other than pepperoni.)

I chipped one of my lower right molars on Monday night (it's true, you really probably shouldn't eat half-popped popcorn kernels) and took a sizable piece of enamel off. But it was wide rather than deep, so it doesn't hurt. And I work for a dental school, so I could have gotten it fixed yesterday if I hadn't been working from home. I'm getting it fixed this afternoon.

I got a new washing machine. The old one was 45 years old (I know because the last time I had it repaired, I found the invoice dated December 1976 in the back of the instructions booklet) and the drum had finally started to rust through. I don't have to take the quilt to the laundromat anymore, and I can wash three heavy sweatshirts in one load. This is going to take some getting used to!

Quirk is awfully cute from certain angles.

I'm going diving in Honduras next spring, and now I have no excuse not to finish my next scuba certification before that. I needed the kick in the pants, so I'm grateful for that.