Bastet

Good news about Shlamey, @tiftgirl, and also that Shana's kidney values are holding steady! SubQ fluids are very helpful, and it's good you already have a routine going should the disease progress somewhere down the line to where she needs it more frequently. A reduced-phosphorus diet can also help, either feeding something already low in phosphorus (this chart shows the phosphorus content - among many other things - of a large variety of [canned] foods on the market) or adding a phosphorus binder, such as aluminum hydroxide, to food. When my late cat Maddie had to have four teeth extracted, I had to, well, baby her with baby food to get her to eat at all, but when my parents' cat Chester had to have a couple removed, he was like Shlamey -- bring on the food the minute I get home!

Welcome, @tiftgirl, and I hope you'll soon be back to report that the open incision can heal on its own. If your strong old gal does have to go under anesthesia again, we'll keep fingers and kitty toes crossed here that it will go smoothly for her just as it did during the initial surgery.

I think there's some hope the dining room couple will keep their room clutter-free; with how much kid stuff was visible in the adjacent rooms, they're obviously bad at it, but it's possible that having the work done for them, and being presented with a finished room they love so much, will be the motivation they need to maintain it as a dining room rather than letting so much clutter creep in it reverts to a storage space. The living room will be turned into romper room in a hot minute. But the dining room has a chance at survival. I laughed at that, too. The budget means they use MDF, and it's heavy. When you're sliding a heavy door with only a top track (as opposed to a top and bottom track), that's going to be an issue - especially if you have to lean over two stupid chairs to do it - and the budget constraints probably mean the track system she chose was medium-quality at best.

When Mark invites everyone over to cheer Becky up, and asks them all to come up with something nice to say about the trailer, what is Roseanne's offering?

Yes, it was one of the old ladies. I think Nancy is the one who gave her a certificate to have her baby's zodiac chart done once it was born. But I hate that episode (Roseanne and Darlene are unbearably shitty people in it) - the only things I like are the presence of Original Recipe Becky and the line, "The world's last surviving confederate widow wants another drink" - so I don't know it as well as most others.

I got curious as to whether this Chef John was anyone I'd ever heard of or seen on a cooking show, so I looked him up (answer: no), and here's his note with the written gazpacho recipe: "Only try this recipe if you're going to use some killer, end-of-summer, super-sweet tomatoes. There just isn't any substitute, so happy hunting, and I hope you find some so you give this a try." Nothing wrong with that; it's too bad he decided to be an asshat in the video version.

So you'd get run out of town on a rail if you added beans? (I don't eat chili, so I have no dog in this race, but I know the "there are no beans in chili!" folks are quite serious about it.)

Do these chefs really think most people don't know a dish is only as good as the ingredients it's made out of? It's helpful to note when there's an ingredient it's important not to skimp on and offer suggestions of where to find a good version, certainly, but the snooty attitude is counter-productive -- like @GHScorpiosRule, they're just going to go elsewhere. (Oh, and yeah - soft chocolate chip cookies all the way!)

That was me yesterday, helping at my parents' house. I had folded one set of sheets and had just the flat sheet of the other left to go, when Bandit jumped up on the sofa, discovered dryer-warm sheets, and promptly settled in. About three hours later, I finally got to finish. Oh, well - sheets come out of their linen closet with fur already on them half the time, anyway, because when you open it, one or both cats must check it out to see if anything has changed since they were last in there, and sometimes that requires a thorough inspection of all the shelves.

He was so weird during the reveal. He looked truly befuddled that his room looked completely different than it had when they left. Um, kinda the point of the past two days, dude.

Crystal was pathetic when it came to men (and annoying as hell when it came to just about anything else). And I tried to be sympathetic to her, because there were institutional reasons for that beyond the individual personality traits, but she was exhausting in her neediness; I cannot imagine being friends with someone like that without at some point going Moonstruck on her!

In the pre-reveal chat with Paige, when that bench came up, Laurie said it was perfect because she needed something for that window nook. But she may have just been being nice, rather than saying, "It's a small room and I'd already planned all the furniture it needed, and then from the whole tent they go pick another piece of damn furniture!" She should have just left the chairs out.; it's not just that they looked funny where they were placed, they weren't comfy, have guests sit in chairs to begin with. After she saw her room, and Paige talked to them about heading over to see what the living room couple thought of their room, Red Shirt Woman said they were going to love it. Maybe just wishful thinking in the euphoria of loving her own room, or maybe she genuinely thought that even though her friend has truly terrible taste, once she saw that her beloved TV stand had been incorporated into what was now a styled room instead of a yard sale mishmash with puke green walls, she'd like the result.

I like the storage being on the sides better; they're going to shove it full of a bunch of practical stuff, not attractive stuff you want to look at head-on on open shelves, so this way whether the doors are open or shut, it's a clean-looking unit, rather than being a distracting jumble of toys, blankets, DVDs, whatever when the doors are closed. I've seen several references to the dining room couple's "playroom" -- was it said on the show that's what an adjacent room was? Because it seemed to me that you could see into two rooms from the dining room, and both where cluttered to the hilt with kid stuff. Was one of them indeed a playroom, or does their whole house just sport the daycare center look the living room couple was apparently hoping for?

Those really were excessive in a room that size; that was the type of thing where, when having more people than typical over and using the living room for conversation rather than TV watching, one would drag some small chairs in from elsewhere in the house and have them work okay for that evening in front of the closed unit because of their height and scale, but to have them out as a starting point was ridiculous.

Ha! Yeah, she mentioned being pregnant often enough when she was during the original run, and managed to work reference in again during the reunion that preceded this revival. Oh my stars - you mean not every sharp corner, sheet of glass, hinge, or floor lamp (?) was a death trap that needed to be eradicated from the home until the kids hit puberty? And that parents supervised/corralled when the kids were too young to understand rules and then taught rules once they aged? And that the occasional accident wasn't a disaster? It's a miracle any of the four of you survived to adulthood, never mind all of you.

I love when everyone shifts to Roseanne, as the final insult to poor Jackie: "Do you realize when everybody in this town sees me, they're going to say, 'There goes the sister of the woman who slept with Arnie'?" And, when she first spills her secret, Jackie's great little rant in response to being asked what the hell she was thinking: "I was thinking that I just lost a great guy like Gary, and now he's gone, and I'll never find another great guy. I'm 36 years old, I've got flabby arms and a pelican neck, all my house planets are dead, and no one loves me. But what difference does that make? Everything in my life sucks." With a few exceptions, Jackie was always so much more bearable in her "I need a man!" nonsense than Crystal was. Because, when push came to shove, at least Jackie realized it was better not to be in a relationship than to be in one that wasn't right. But to Crystal, just about any man was better than no man.

There was storage on the left side, at least. I can't remember if the right was flush with the wall; if not, I'm sure there was matching storage (the shelves are accessible from the side - the width of that side of the "upside down U" if you're looking at it straight on, is the depth of the storage with shelves if you're looking at it from the side, so if the right side was up against the perpendicular wall, there wouldn't be any). I like the way the two doors looked when they came together, and that they also looked nice when slid open to reveal the TV and that unit the homeowner just had to keep. I rarely like barn doors, but they worked well in that application. I didn't like the barn door as a divider between the two rooms, but with the time and budget I'm not sure what else she could have done but leave it open like Sabrina did - which meant the dining room had a view of all the kid clutter in the next room. The mirror was a good idea in that it reflected the window, but that was already the wide part of the room so it didn't need it, and it was really big. Me too, especially once she caught herself and imitated the homeowners saying something like, "Shut up, Paige, and let us see our room!"

I don't understand the living room couple's complaints -- it's too formal and where are the kids going to play? It's a living room. In fact, it's the room your front door opens into. When people come over, you want them walking into a damn daycare rather than a nice place to sit, talk, watch TV, etc? It wasn't a small house, so I assume the answer to where the kids are going to play is in their rooms, in the yard, and, yes, in the living room - they could set up a board game on the table, play with toys on the couch, etc. and then, gasp, put their shit away when they're done with it so that in the evening that's an adult room.

Rodbell's also provided better opportunities for other characters to drop by; they go to the mall a lot more often than they go to the hair salon, so if episode after episode some combination of the kids, Jackie, Crystal, Dan, etc. drop by Roseanne's work, it makes a lot more sense than if that keeps happening at the hair salon. It's also easier for her to talk to them while working at Rodbell's than it is at the salon. "Oh, I know what this is all about -- you're trying to scrounge up some dirt on Leon just because he's gay. I ought to call the ACLU, because this is totally un-American. I won't help you in your little witch hunt, no crappy job is worth that. [awkward pause] You did know he was gay, didn't you?" "No." "Well, he's not!" And I like when Dan asks her if she still has a job, and she responds, "What does it matter, I can't ever go back there again ... 'cause I cracked. I turned myself in, and then I ratted out all my friends."

When I was a kid, our cats were only in the car to go to the vet, so obviously they hated it. But we later wound up taking two cats along with us in the motorhome sometimes, and both were always freaked out when we started, and then settled down. When I got Maddie and Baxter, I took them to my parents' house quite a few times, so car trips weren't always to a bad destination. They both loved riding in the car (so long as we weren't going to the vet, and you better believe they knew the route to the vet versus the route to Grandma and Grandpa's). But that matched with their personality; I'm sure I could try a routine with Riley and she'd never stop finding the car frightening. Bandit and Chester, my parents' cats, are only in the car for vet trips, but they enjoy the ride home, so they could be made into road kitties if need be. From my own experience, that of friends who had to move long distance with cats, and from reading various pet forums over the years, I would say odds are good that, yes, you can with time and effort get a cat used to the car, at least to the point a road trip is not unreasonably stressful even if it's not something she/he actually enjoys. It's not a given, certainly; there will be cats that will always be bothered by it to the extent it's not fair to make road trips a regular part of their life. But chances are good.

Well, that's the joke. And 'twas ever thus on sitcoms (or comedic episodes of dramas) - I can't think of one such character who either decided to become a life coach or to hire one where the very concept of a life coach wasn't played for laughs, specifically that the life coach's own life is a mess.

I think the mimeograph/ditto thing is similar to continuing to call modern copiers Xerox machines long after other companies got into the business. It had been mimeograph machines, and then ditto came along, but for a while there many people still called it all mimeo out of habit.

How? There was zero indication Marsha wanted/intended to step back from her duties; in fact, coming into the salon seemed a tremendously important part of her life, between the socialization and her obsession with dead Arthur. She wouldn't be hiring anyone, even Roseanne, to do part of her job any time soon. And, going back to whether it's logical for Roseanne to feel the way she did about the job to begin with, I think the fact that, even in a town like Lanford, Roseanne was the only one who applied for the job, speaks to how shitty a job sweeping up hair (especially the hair of your friends in a small town) is to many people and shows she certainly wasn't alone in feeling that way.

The transformation is nothing short of astounding. Even her mortal enemy, the running washer/dryer, is something she can deal with now (our deal is still that I'll finish laundry before her meal time if at all possible [her bowls are in the laundry room], but on the laundry days when things just get away from me and I've still got one last load in the dryer come dinnertime, she manages to eat despite the beast). She's still very anxious about vet visits - to the point I'm considering a mobile service despite how much I love my usual vet - and doesn't like other people. The latter I understand; Mommy's not that fond of people, either, but has a select list of exceptions and I wish Riley would develop the same for when I'm gone, because she has grandparents and aunties who love her in spite of herself, but she's not afraid of people anymore, and even kinda, sorta, sometimes likes my mom enough not to leave the room. Especially if my mom is getting out the dry food Riley is allowed as a small treat, heh. It's just who she is, and I'm not going to ask for more than that - there's little left in the world that scares her, when it used to be that everything did, and in our little just-the-two-of-us bubble, she is the happiest cat I've ever had. The cuddles, the purring, the rolling, the rubbing, the drooling; all my cats have been strays or from the shelter, and they've been visibly grateful for their loving home, but she's on another level. I shudder to think how bad her six or so years prior to the shelter were, given the condition - physical and emotional - she was at intake and as we slowly worked through her issues when I adopted her after five months there, but I hope it's just a faded memory to her.

I think cats originated the WTF face. We're having an odd overcast snap here, so when Riley trotted off this morning to sun herself as per usual and found no sun, she was back in bed within two minutes with her WTF face on. The she crawled under the blanket, like, "Winter is back! Take cover!" It's her own little apocalypse.