Bastet

It started early, too; when Chester first joined the family, Bandit was miffed, and took to the bedroom. I think this was about day three (but, to Chester's credit, he always stayed down at the bottom of the other side like this, until Bandit was ready to hang out - it's just that once he got the green light, he never respected another boundary again): I guess I should post a picture of my own cat, huh? (I hope whomever asked for pics still wants some; I could be here all night, but I'll stop now.) Riley likes bay windows too:

Yep; Chester loves the sun. But he also just likes to horn in on anything Bandit is enjoying. If Bandit is in someone's lap, Chester may go sit on another person's lap, or may may jump up and fit himself in there, too. I brought over a bed for Bandit to sleep in out in the garage (he's not banished there; he asks to go out there a lot for a nap on the car), and this promptly happened, even though Chester used to just go out there to use the litter box and then come back in the house:

This is a crappy picture my mom took with her cell phone, but it is illustrative of what Chester does all the time -- Bandit was sprawled out in the bay window, and Chester jumped up there, plopped his tiny body in between Bandit and the window, and settled in.

Mine is 40 Hour Week, but I know absolutely nothing about the Alabama fandom, so I have no idea if that's popular or unpopular. Can you imagine if everyone annoyed by the Urban Cowboy era of country music could have gazed into a crystal ball and seen what popified country would come to sound like decades later? Because that stuff was country as a turnip green by comparison. I like a lot of more traditional country music, but I also like a lot of pop music, so it didn't bother me. I mean, I love Barbara Mandrell's I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool as much as the next person, but I like a lot of those late '70s/early-mid '80s country pop songs, too. The mid '80s to late '90s produced some of my favorite music across all genres.

I wouldn't have picked that episode, either. I'd have to deliberate a fair bit on which one I'd choose, but I know that wouldn't be a contender. That's how I am about the list as a whole, though -- I only watch about ten shows on it, and of those ten, only a few of their episode selections line up with mine.

Take some deep breaths and try not to fret your way into elevated blood sugar. The conflict check is always what they're going to be the most meticulous about, so it takes time. They've made the conditional offer; they want you, which means they want all this stuff to clear just like you do - they don't want to start over with the next candidate on their list any more than you want to start over with the next potential employer. You've said you're sure you're not conflicted out, so you just have to allow the time it takes for them to confirm that. Easier said than done, I know, but just keep in mind the fundamental status here: The job is yours so long as this last thing clears, and you have no reason to believe it won't. It's not just at a "Well, we may want to hire you" stage -- they are going to hire you unless something unanticipated shows up in the routine checks. Which you are 2/3 of the way through. There are no red flags in this timeline; things are proceeding typically. It's coming soon!

I didn't see the episode; did the kids say they wanted separate rooms? My cousin has four kids, and when they moved into a bigger house, the two boys - who were the oldest and the youngest, and I think she popped one out about every two years, so there was an age gap - opted to continue sharing a room even though there were now enough to go around. It was weird as hell to me, and I'm not sure how long it lasted, but that's what they wanted.

She says, "I don't think we need to worry about that" as her final answer in the coded big houses/school districts conversation. Sure, that's not, "No, we don't need to worry about that," but, at their ages, if you're not saying, "Well, I don't think we need to worry about that right now; maybe later," then you're saying no. Especially since it's so much more definitive than she was in season two; if she was saying "not now, but maybe later" then but by now, married (?), a couple years older, and looking to buy a house, she's saying they don't need to take into consideration school district (in Los Angeles, no less) or room for more than the two them, she's saying she's decided in the interim the answer on kids is no. It's something she should state in explicit terms, and something they should have discussed long before they did (and something he should have been able to discern based on, you know, everything about her), but on TV I'll take what I can get, and for TV, it was a refreshing conversation.

That sexist stereotype particularly pissed me off with Elizabeth/Susan, because Elizabeth was not like that. She consistently and deliberately sought out the company of the women she worked with, and was very breezy about who had ties to who. For her to be randomly and irrationally snippy about Mark's friendship with Susan was ridiculous. I mean, Cleo being jealous because Peter and Elizabeth used to date was obviously ridiculous, too, but I didn't know enough about Cleo to say whether or not that was characteristic of her. With Elizabeth, it wasn't just the general annoyance of most women being presented that way in fiction, it was specifically that it didn't work for the character.

Holy crap, yes - Come On Come On was everywhere. Seven singles from one album, released over three years, and all charted (all but one in the top fifteen, and four of them in the top five). And then add in how many artists were recording her songs during that time, and Mary Chapin Carpenter was dominant as hell in the early '90s. I'm surprised He Thinks He'll Keep Her only went to #2, and her version of Lucinda Williams's Passionate Kisses to #4; those both play as number one songs to me. She didn't go #1 until Shut Up and Kiss Me.

I went to my parents' house for dinner tonight, and they'd recorded the episode. Now I can answer my own question about Rocky's delayed treatment: The owners tried to take care of the leg themselves the day it happened (it sounded like, while they knew he'd been bitten by something at some point during the day, they did not see it happen and thus didn't know for sure it was a rattlesnake bite) and then when it was crazy swollen the next day, they took him to another vet clinic where they were quoted $2000 for treatment. (The anti-venom is expensive - Dr. Jeff even said that's one reason they don't stock it [on top of not seeing many snake bites] - but I'm not sure whether the other clinic was proposing to treat that way, or if enough time had already passed that they would have been doing what Dr. Jeff wound up doing.) Unable to afford that, they went to Planned Pethood. Rocky did indeed have an adorable smile. And Sassquatch was so cute during the x-ray, with those little meows.

@peacheslatour, it's a phrase used to describe the sound of the bat hitting the ball in a game of cricket (the wood the bats are made out of comes from willow trees).

I do, too. Not Lee's "let's abandon all technology" idea (although, they had to explain its absence somehow in order to do the "this was Earth, 150,000 years ago" reveal), but on the whole, yes. Sure, it could have ended without the on-the-nose 150,000 years later tag spelling out that Hera was mitochondrial Eve, the planet was Earth, and we humans have been making the same mistakes since the beginning of time, but I don't mind it. It was a great show, and a great ending -- all of this has happened before; is it inevitable that we are on the brink of it happening again?

The apartment fire cat had been in an oxygen chamber at another hospital, because that's all the owner could afford to do for him (and if the other vet clinic did that for free, that's really cool, because you pay for that by the hour and it's not cheap). With Rocky, if they'd taken him someplace else sooner, he would have received anti-venom (unless they didn't have any, although it sounded like Planned Pethood didn't have any, either) -- if they could afford it. I know the set-up for a lot of these cases is that owners can't afford to pay regular price, so they wind up at Planned Pethood, and the anti-venom isn't cheap, so I suspected it was one of those scenarios, but wondered if maybe instead they hadn't found the dog until a while had passed, didn't initially realize it was a rattlesnake bite, or something else.

I need to start recording this; the first airing is too early, I'm watching something else during the second, and then half the time I fall asleep during the midnight one. And last night was one of those times. So I just saw bits and pieces and have a couple of questions: Why did 24 hours pass between Rocky being bitten by the snake and him getting to the vet? Did the cat's eyesight come back?

This is about real life rather than TV, but that ship seems to have sailed long ago, so I'll climb aboard: Seeing that bugs me too, as does some variation of "Yaass" for a particularly enthusiastic "Yes." If an exclamation point somehow won't do, fine, add some repetitive letters for emphasis, but why change the E to an A?

I love Tater in the office, but I don’t like letting him (her? I still don’t know) roaming the waiting room. People are coming in with sick and injured dogs (and other pets, but the dogs are just on a leash and most others are in carriers) who do not want to be there. Add that scared/pained temperament to the fact not all owners have good control over their dogs, and something tragic could happen before anyone could react. The choking dog standing on her head to get cuddles is adorable. Yet practically ugly compared to Binks the kitten – oh my! I missed the intro to that segment; how did they wind up with a bottle baby? Poor Ivy; I didn’t have much hope for her, but was very sad to be right about that. I have a hard time with some of the farmers on this show. I am all about family farms versus factor farms, but not every family farm is using best practices; they’re not automatically humane by virtue of being small. And, while livestock are their livelihood, and thus it’s completely fair to think about the financial impact of an animal’s death, it bothers me when that’s the only consideration. I don’t know enough to know how I feel about breeding reindeer, but that guy cares about his animals as animals, not just as income sources. I like to see that. And, while I don’t like kids, I love seeing kids love their animals. (The kid with the basset hound in the Nightcap, though - I don't care how much she loves that dog, she's still annoying as hell.)

Mine is a tie between Elvis Presley's and Willie Nelson's, but theirs is next in line; I like it a lot.

I keep forgetting to look up who's singing that Africa cover, so thank you. It keeps faking me out - I get several lines into it before I realize it's not the "real" song.

I think there's really something to that. I think one of the reasons behind the increased desire for oversized master suites is an overall "bigger is better"/showing off/keeping up with the Joneses mentality, but I agree the fact it is contemporaneous with the open concept craze isn't just a coincidence, and that probably is indeed another reason. If the only rooms with doors are the bedrooms and bathrooms, then, yeah, I can see the desire (whether explicit or subconscious) to make the master bedroom someplace to "get away" to.

Add me to the crowd annoyed by her - that was a beautiful view, a nice place all around, and a good neighborhood, and she was complaining about it out of some silly superstition.

@smittykins, I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It's just awful, always, to let them go, even though that means we can spare them more suffering. What a lovely picture capturing the cat/person bond in one moment. I empathize - in general, and as mom to a kitty with adorable nose freckles like your sweetie had. Riley and I will hold you in our thoughts tonight as we cuddle up.

I don't know, which is why I ask. She seems the most likely, as his first wife and the mother/grandmother of a good chunk of his spawn, and thus the one he'd be more likely to return to, but she says in the season seven episode in which we meet her that it would have been interesting to see if they'd stuck it out through the tough parts, where they'd be now. So that doesn't suggest taking two cracks at it (especially if, as I remember that Frank the bulldog episode, she refers to something like ten years together - with no indication it was broken up into two marriages - but I'd have to double-check that I'm not just hallucinating); it speaks of a first marriage that ran its course after a decent length of time, produced kids, and then the parties moved on (and one of them went on a marrying spree while the other understood what it is to date). Plus, when differentiating between the many exes Provenza was tossing over the balcony in the form of the dummies, if Liz was the one he married/divorced twice, it seems more likely Buzz et al would say that ("she's the one he married/divorced twice") as the identifier than "she always corrected his grammar" in helping the squad keep things straight (but, then again, the grammar thing was how they recognize her as the first ex-Mrs. Provenza when she turns up in the Murder Room in season seven). So: Of the little bit we learn - as I recall, anyway - of the exes, she's the most-likely candidate, but I can't remember if that was confirmed, and hesitate because the backstory I assumed from season two may have been mostly ignored by season seven; I'm wondering if someone who knows this show like I know Major Crimes can shed any light. Also, Brenda not knowing how to pronounce Sepulveda and Taylor using that as an example of "She doesn't know shit about L.A." ranting amuse me in equal measure.

Some really little, but really nice touches in tonight's marathon of episodes: - Of all the squad members who come bug Brenda when she’s in the bathroom (“What is it with you people and the ladies’ room?!”), Mike Tao is the one who’s uncomfortable about it. He thinks nothing of doing it if he doesn’t want to wait to tell her something, but he is apologetic and cognizant of the intrusion. - The porn star dead but believed by his wife to be working in Head Over Heels is “in Chatsworth today.” Of course he is; that part of the valley is the porn capital. This franchise uses Los Angeles as a character better than most shows set here. Moving to bigger things, I had completely forgotten about Brenda’s pregnancy scare in season two. When I think about my otherwise TV boyfriend Fritz's flaw of continuing to bring up kids after she’d said she doesn’t want them, I think of the “big houses/good schools” coded conversation they have later (in the episode where a dad kills his psycho son) where, between the lines, she asks if he wants kids, he says it would have to be a joint decision, and she says no; I had forgotten they earlier had this more explicit conversation in which she said maybe, but not now. Now I'm going to have to keep an eye out for interim talks. (Not that it ultimately changes anything, since, despite the coded language, she's clear, but I'm curious if that was the only "no," and following a "maybe" at that, or if it came up additional times I'm forgetting.) Also, we get the names of a few of Provenza's many ex-wives in one of tonight's episodes (when he names the dummies being tossed over the balcony in various scenarios after his exes), but not the whole sordid history, and I'm impatient at jogging my memory -- who is the one he marries/divorces twice, so he has one more divorce than he does ex-wife? (I love the continuity in season seven that they all connect the name Liz to the one who corrected his grammar.)

I'm knocking on wood, but the problems I recently mentioned Chester (one of my parents' cats, pictured below) dealing with seem, at this point of diagnostics, to "just" be a progression of his IBD. There's still a possibility it has changed from the benign kind to that caused by small cell lymphoma (that can happen with time, and he's had this for the entire five years they've had him [he was adopted from the shelter as an owner surrender at age eight]), but it's also possible it has just progressed to the point a raw diet is no longer enough to keep symptoms at bay and adding steroid therapy will be enough. We'll see how this plays out a while before doing another colonoscopy/biopsy to see if there is now cancer. But, for now, he is eating very well on his own (without the appetite stimulant we gave him when he got sick) and has put back on 1/2 pound in the two weeks since we put him on the steroid. He has another pound to go to hit the low end of his normal. But he feels great, and his poops are normal. His wonky liver value (the ALT, for those familiar with blood tests) is still a little high (so we're giving Denamarin - a supplement I really like for its cost/benefit analysis), but almost back to normal, so that is almost certainly a secondary effect rather than a separate issue. There are no signs of any other separate issue after extensive blood work, an x-ray, and an ultrasound, so things look positive. He's always been such a healthy little guy other than the IBD; if he had someone else's guts, he'd probably live to be 20. And, compared to many cats with IBD, he has been lucky - other than this recent incident, he's had some diarrhea and cramping (and, yes, we can tell without him speaking), but no vomiting, lack of appetite, dehydration, or just all-around not feeling well. I hope it all works out.