Sugarplum’s weight is beginning to go back up, and she’s eating kibble more eagerly now (though only the special blend of kibble that I have to make from one good bag and two crappy boxes). She’d dipped down to 13.4 pounds for a while, but is now back up to 13.6.
I’ve also managed to shave the nasty food-crusted bits of hair from her chin, so at least she’s cleaner. Tomorrow’s another vet visit, to get the sutures out.
A LTTE from the New York Times:
To the Editor:
I fully agree with Bob Herbert and President-elect Barack Obama that we must fix the infrastructure. But big-muscle construction jobs seem male-oriented. So what about the women? What retooling for jobs is being considered for all those women who have lost their employment?
Alison Goodwin Schiff
New York, Nov. 26, 2008
Yes, what about the women? Are there further plans for economic stimulus that would involve jobs that wouldn’t require women to break into male-dominated fields and all the hassle that entails if they want a piece of the economic-stimulus pie? Are there plans to ensure that a substantial portion of the construction jobs go to women and women-owned businesses? Are there plans to ensure that women don’t face discrimination on the job while employed with these infrastructure projects?
And while we’re asking, what about unions and prevailing-wage laws? Are there plans to ensure that the stimulus plan will strengthen rather than weaken these?
Still not really eating. A few nibbles here and there, but so far I haven’t found a food that she really, really is interested in. So the force-feeding continues apace. Less, though, because I’m supposed to be backing off it to let her get hungry enough to eat something.
Of course, one of my problems is the fact that because I live in a studio now, there’s nowhere to feed her where Frick and Frack can’t get at the food.
And yes, they do get at the food.
Sugarplum’s still losing weight, because she’s not eating enough, but in other ways she seems to be improving. Her bowels are working again, she’s doing a lot more of the stuff she did before she got sick, such as greet me at the door and get into the bathtub to drink from the faucet. She’s also swatting the dog away when she has had enough of the chewing (and the fact that the dog is bugging her is, I feel, a good sign).
She’s just, you know, not eating. Not enough. And to tell you the truth, I’m getting a little tired of feeding her like this. She’s tired of it, too. But she hasn’t quite twigged to the concept that if she would just eat something, we could stop this routine.
Though we’ve gotten the whole force-feeding business down to a science, with the towel and the kneeling-while-pinning and the crankyass growling-while-smacking.
Lambert of Corrente, a good egg, is having a little unexpected problem with his sewer line backing into his house. And this when he’s barely able to pay for heat for a New England winter.
He’s on his own, and while he doesn’t blog with the expectation of payment, consider kicking him a few bucks to help him keep his own personal Big Shitpile at bay.
Of course the US auto industry could have produced greener cars in greener plants. They should have invested more in hybrid, electric vehicle and fuel cell technologies. They might have used their marketing muscle to create demand for smaller cars instead of SUVs. But why should they? Foreign automakers haven’t done much better at any of these things either, especially in the US market. And apart from health care expenses, many foreign and Canadian auto workers are paid as much or more than their US counterparts. So none of these serve to explain why foreign automakers have out-competed the US for a generation.The big difference that establishment politicians turn a blind eye to, and media pundits refuse to mention in print or on the air has always been government-paid universal health care as a human right in Europe and Japan compared to a health care system in the hands of private for-profit insurers in the US. Universal free health care is the secret competitive weapon of the Japanese, Canadian and European auto industries. Unless and until this competitive advantage is equalized, manufacturing automobiles and practically everything else will be far more expensive inside the US than outside it. No amount of money thrown at the auto industry can solve that, and without medical and retirement expenses, foreign automakers are guaranteed to have the extra cash to match and beat anything US automakers invest in innovative green technologies.
Most US politicians omit this vital contextual information because they or their parties take big money from the private insurers. The private health insurance industry eats one third of every health care dollar to finance its executive salaries, its bad investments, its marketing campaigns, and the bureaucratic machinery with which it denies needed care even to the insured. Since they are integral to the our nation’s permanent ruling elite, corporate media shamelessly speak for them and exercise remarkable discipline in keeping nearly all discussion of single-payer medical care away from the eyes and ears of the American public. But thanks in part to the internet, the mainstream media’s conspiracy of silence against single-payer health care is not working as well as it used to.
Not only that, the canard of “socialized medicine” doesn’t have quite the same scare power that it did during the height of the Red Menace. Not to mention, when you are getting charged more and more and more every year for less and less and less coverage, you start to wonder why it is that other countries, other democracies manage to take care of this with less muss and fuss, stories of long waiting times in Canada notwithstanding.
Oh, but surely it’s time for Hope™ and Change™ in Washington? Continue reading ‘Single-payer health care and the economic crisis’
I watch a lot of Discovery Channel shows, and one of the things that’s always bugged me is the dearth of women on them, especially as they indulge their hardon for Manly Men in Manly-Men occupations. Mythbusters has broken my heart by getting rid of Scottie and interns Christine and Jess, a welder and two engineers, and keeping Kari. Who, while she pulls her weight and does a good job blowing things up, seems to have passed the producers’ test because of her looks rather than her skills. The message seems to be that you can be accepted as the exceptional woman in the boys’ club by being hawt.
But now they have a new show, Time Warp, which seems to be quietly challenging that male dominance. The basic premise of the show is to do various things and film them with high-speed cameras so that they can be played back very slowly and you can see what’s going on. They’ve slowed down water droplets, wet dogs shaking off, a pole vaulter, car crashes, etc. I started watching because some of the slo-mo over the credits looked really cool.
The hosts are two guys, Jeff and Matt. Matt’s the high-speed camera guy, and Jeff is some kind of unspecified scientist and artist. The show is based in Boston, and they use a lot of local experts to do various things or explain various things for the cameras.
But here’s the cool part: a lot of those experts are women. The pole vaulter, for example, and two archers (who were actually girls, since they were Junior Olympians), a pool player, a woman who was doing something with nails and steel-toed boots (I just caught the end of it last night). And there are more pictured in the credits, but I haven’t seen all those shows.
I have to say, I’m impressed (I’d be even more impressed if there were more people of color included as well). Given that the default expert is almost always male unless it’s a particularly “female” area of knowledge, the fact that they use women as experts for things that men do as well is very encouraging to me. And they don’t make a big deal of it, either, it’s just, “So-and-so is a nationally ranked pool player who has won this and that title,” “Frick and Frack are archers who compete in the Junior Olympics,” “Thus-and-so is a pole vaulter on the University of Massachusetts track team.”
It’s a small thing, but it matters. It matters because it shows women having skills, being expert at those skills, and being recognized for that expertise. It shows that women can be accepted as authority figures.
And as for Mythbusters, they’ve gone from having a cast that was half female to doing a Kill Bill movie myth that was specifically about a woman (Uma Thurman being buried alive and punching out of the casket) and then using a male martial arts expert to determine whether “you” could punch through the casket and how much force could be generated. Boo.
So, as you know, I’m going to library school in the spring. And there are certain forms to be filled out and whatnot.
One of those forms is a medical evaluation, including an immunization form, required by state law, to show that I’m immune to measles, mumps and rubella.
Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been to the doctor, what with the being uninsured and being generally quite healthy thing. I’ve been to various orthopedic folks to fix my ankle, my back and my knees, but the internals have been humming along quite well, other than the odd sinus infection, so I haven’t ponied up for general medical care.
As for the immunizations, I don’t have any records of those (my pediatrician has been dead for years, as has my mother, and none of my prior schools is required to keep the records quite so long). So my only option was to get my blood drawn to check for serum immunity. Since I couldn’t quite get out of the physical, I made an appointment with a NYC health clinic (part of the City Health & Hospitals Corp.), which is supposed to provide low-cost health care for City residents.
More on that “supposed to” later. Continue reading ‘Surprise!’
And cranky as ever.
I still have to do a little force-feeding if she’s not going to eat on her own, but she is eating the cat treats they sent home with me. Slowly, but she’s eating them.
I don’t even want to think about how much money I just forked over to spring her from the vet. Damn cat should be shitting gold bricks with all that money in her.
I was permitted to sleep in until noon* today, and now (at 3:30) it’s getting dark. Where did the day go?
All I’ve accomplished today is getting out of bed, feeding the pets, and walking down Van Brunt Street to Baked to get my Saturday biscuit, which wasn’t quite as good as it should have been since it was after noon.
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* Well, sort of. I still had to feed Zuzu by 7, but she uncharacteristically let me sleep unmolested until noon.
Kat will get the reference in the title of this post; it’s a family joke. One day our youngest brother Tom, then pre-pubescent, came home from school in a foul mood and screamed, “Where the hell is food?” And Mom, in that exaggeratedly placating way she had* in the face of a tantrum from any of the six cranky little monsters she called her children, said, “Well, there’s haaaam, and turrrrkey?”
Sugarplum’s getting some turrrrkey today. The vet called and said she was doing well, no puking for three days, no fever for two, and she’s beginning to show interest in eating on her own, but they weren’t sure what to feed her that she’d really be interested in. So I suggested baby-food turkey, which is what I feed the beasties when they’ve got diarrhea or what have you. And it’s one of the few things (along with tuna juice) that they all, finicky as the cats are, go for. So much so that when one’s sick, they all eat that so there’s no stealing of the sick one’s food.
And once she starts eating on her own, they want to send her home. I may have to rearrange some furniture so she can get on the bed post-surgically, but I’d like to have her back, even if I have to feed her baby food for a while.
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* She also did this when she answered the phone. It was kind of a marvel how she answered the phone the same exact way no matter what was going on when it rang: “Helllloo-oo.” I mean, she could be screaming at us all one second, and then answering the phone with the same “Hellloo-oo” she used when she was feeling frisky. Compartmentalization.
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