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Here I am, taking the old run at Holidailies again.  Here’s hoping that this year it doesn’t kill a cat.

And saying that (while also being morbid) makes me realize that this year has not really flown by.  It has plodded, more.  It’s been a neutral year, not a lot of highs or lows.  No house-buying, no job loss or change (for me; B made a move last month), same number of animals.  Slightly less sofa, as at least one of the dogs has been Shawshanking their way through the sofa cushions.  It was the Rita Hayworth posters spread out on the couches that gave them away.  These dogs, they’re so derivative.

I took up gardening, kind of by the “seat of the pants” method, which has proved moderately successful and has been a learning experience.

Our big upheaval is actually allegedly occurring right now.  I’ve got a bunch of guys in the front yard scratching their asses in a way that vaguely suggests that the motion will work its way into the ground and dig a trench from the sidewalk to the house to replace our water line.  I am hoping to see that in action, as I would like to adopt a similar methodology for fixing software issues.  Oh, your check format is wrong?  Step aside, I need elbow room for this kind of scratchin’.

And here’s my Public Service Announcement for the day:  if your home was built between about 1978 and 1995ish and your yard service or interior plumbing has not been replaced, you’ve probably got shitty pipe running through your yard and possibly in your house.  It’s called polybutylene (most common brand name is Qest or Quest), and it was supposed to be The Pipe Of The Future(!).  Only it turned out that it corrodes in contact with chlorine.  You know, like you get in city water.  There was a billion dollar fund set up as a result of the Cox vs Shell Oil et al class action lawsuit, which you can find out more about here, but your leak has to be within 11 to 17 years of installation and you have to have owned the home before 2005 – see the rules at that site for more information.  We don’t qualify.  If you don’t, you might want to keep an emergency giant wad of cash hanging around in case you one day find a puddle or your water bill starts getting mysteriously high.

So I’m thinking, once all the work is done and the city has inspected it and everything, I’m going out there with holiday lights and candy cane stakes and decorating the hell out of the scar in the yard.  Happy freakin’ holidays, this is what WE got!

Edited to add photo goodness:

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Now that Kelli’s gone, grep has been as fussy as I had always expected him to be about not having FULL AND TOTAL ACCESS to the house. Yesterday was the first time he made a real fuss that didn’t involve just wanting his wet food, and he made it repeatedly. Interesting.

I got a condolence card from the vet where we took her body. I hadn’t asked B about the details of getting her back until the card reminded me, and he said that along with her ashes we’d be getting an imprint of her paw. I took a moment to be really creeped out, and then decided that was pretty nice.

So, moving on: I’ve had a real grunt of a week.  I did a software install that I stopped halfway through, because there was a conflict I was expecting, and it happened, and I went to follow the instructions to fix it and…you couldn’t follow them.  My settings didn’t look like the instructions’ settings, and that should have been my tip-off, but I was so freaked I opened a trouble ticket and waited.  And waited.  And finally the Borg called me back today and…that conflict was in a previous version of the software.  And the thing I thought I broke turned out to look broken in the first place because of something entirely unrelated.  So it wasn’t broken, and I should be finishing now, but I’ve got rotini with 9-cheese sauce (I had a lot of little bits leftover in the fridge) in the oven and, you know, eh.  I’ll get to it.

We got FiOS TV a couple of weeks ago, and the feature I love the most is On Demand.  What we had from Dish was all pay stuff, but with FiOS we’ve got a boatload of stuff for free from the channels we pay for.  So we’re watching The Tudors (need to hurry, it disappears on the 18th), and I’m watching Tell Me You Love Me experimentally right now.  It appears to be highbrow porn, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t know that I’ll keep watching it except as filler.

I am a little pissed, though.  When we switched, I told them I really liked Dish’s multi-room DVR, which was actually just one DVR but there was some magic switcher in the attic that allowed us to watch the living room DVR in the bedroom.  Verizon encouraged us to get two DVRs and I didn’t really get the spiel why, but it turns out it’s because their multi-room is a pale shadow of what we had before.  All we can do in the bedroom is watch TV or watch recordings from the living room DVR.  Except we CAN’T watch any HD recordings in the bedroom, and we cannot schedule any recordings or pause live TV in the bedroom.  It absolutely blows chunks, but I haven’t decided if I will wait for them to get their act together or get a separate DVR.

Or just buy a couple of TiVos, because no other user interface comes close.  It really is astounding, how much everything else – digital cable, Dish, FiOS – has paled in comparison.  It’s really way too bad that they’ve never gotten the hang of licensing it.  (Actually, BeyondTV was awesome, I really liked it, but I doubt we’ll go there again unless we decide that two good PCs are better than one TiVo Series 3.  I don’t much want to have to sysadmin my DVRs that much.)

And now my dinner is just about ready.

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I realized early this morning that I’d totally forgotten to write anything yesterday, and so after breakfast and errands I sat down this morning and was just about to crack my knuckles and get to work when B came to tell me he’d found Kelli dead in the cat room.

I sort of check for dead cats every time I go in there, or whenever I can’t find one of them.  Kelli’s old and been in poor health for a long stretch now, Jamie’s even older and getting pretty creaky, plus she’s deaf and when I can’t find her calling for her does no good (so I flash the lights on and off and knock on furniture).  grep is only 8 or 9, a relative spring chicken.  So it wasn’t extremely shocking news, and when he asked me to go check and see if she was really dead I wasn’t particularly surprised, but I still feel rotten about it.

I think quality of life went up some when we moved, since the dogs had harassed the cats to the point that they mostly lurked in inaccessible places, but I left them shut in their room here more often than they probably liked.  They have certain times when the dogs get shut out of the back of the house and I let them roam, but it wasn’t daily and I didn’t necessarily spend much time back there with them when they were loose.  Kelli rarely went far when she was loose; she hadn’t felt great for a long time and mostly spent her time laying on the tile in the hallway.

She hadn’t been easy to deal with for a long time.  She’d been crazy for a very long time, but after Dork died and after new puppies came, she started living in strange places, staying in the bathtub or a cabinet, she lived on the roof and in trees for several months after we got Gir.  When she would come see us, she was kind of violent in her affection.

But her crazy was certainly distinct and her personality was much bigger than her little tortie body.  And she loved us (she loooooved B, and would let him carry her around like a baby), and we loved her even when she was hard to love, and the house will be a little quieter without her vast lexicon of weird noises.

I don’t know how the other two cats are taking it.  I spent all day in the bedroom with them (putting off a software upgrade that I’m going to have to do later tonight), throwing pecans for grep to play with and turning on the heating pad for Jamie to lay her creaky bones on (until grep evicted her and she asked to get down to go back to her room).  I picked up some new catnip toys for Jamie and some balls for grep to chase, and treats, and I feel funny putting down their twice-daily wet food because I don’t know how much to give them now.  Kelli was the one who needed it, dry food seemed to give her stomach problems.

I am very grateful to B for stepping in for me.  When I went to see if she was really dead, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up her body.  B handled that, putting her in an Amazon box (is there anything an Amazon box can’t do?) to take her to the emergency vet to arrange for cremation, so she can join Dork in the Creepy Cabinet Pet Sematary.  I will probably find a little tortie figurine like the one I have for Dork (which predated his death and was a dead ringer for him); I prefer my dead pets portable so I don’t feel shitty about moving and leaving them buried in the yard.

So, if you are so inclined, raise a toast to Krazy, Krazy Kelli, with the i dotted with a heart, because hers was big (and very crazy) and she will be missed.

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