Chez Cleo

[cleolinda]

Haven't really written about anything actually going on around here for a while. My medication (Lamictal, day 35) isn't doing so well at the moment. We jumped from 50 mg to 100 mg as of Saturday, as you may recall, and I've spent the entire week itching. Actually, it's not really an itch--it's like my entire scalp is crawling, which happened back when I was on Adderall in college as well. It's kind of a twinging feeling--not twinge-ing; twing-ing. It kind of feels like little atoms of carbonation randomly going off--a different spot every five minutes, arms, legs, back, but pretty constantly all over my scalp and shoulders. And it's pretty much driving me nuts.

Here's what makes it really bad: the poms have been scratching themselves a lot lately. I had Brett the Vet look at some weird patches on the cat's back, and he diagnosed them as "fleas, most likely." I tell my mother. She doesn't want to take the cat to the vet. We spend a lot of money at the vet, for one thing, but it's mostly the problem of taking a cat, any cat, to the vet. I don't think the cat has been to the vet since s/he got fixed (we got confused as to the cat's gender for a few years. It's a long story), so we don't have any procedures in place for taking the cat anywhere, pretty much. And it's not a friendly cat. Due to the gender/name confusion with the cat (okay, here's the story. We thought it was a female kitten. We had it fixed. Hoshit, turns out it's a male cat. We decided not to tell Sister Girl, because we were afraid she'd be upset that the cat wasn't female after all. Look, she was twelve and we weren't thinking very clearly. So we proceed to call the cat "she" for nearly ten years. She named it AJ, after her favorite Backstreet Boy--yes, I'm aware of the irony of her giving a female cat that isn't actually female a unisex name--but the rest of us were not so hot on that, so we started calling the cat Miss Priss, and then, through baby talk, something that I guess you would spell "Misa." Rhymes with Lisa. Then one day a few months ago, I forget exactly what brought it up--my sister may have said something about wanting a male cat--I broke down and said, "You know..." And of course she was not only mad that we didn't tell her but flabbergasted as well. I mean, something she'd taken for granted for literally half her life--"We have a female cat"--has been turned on its head. And she's very insistent now that we use the correct pronouns. But we've been used to "Misa" and "she" for ten years, so... yeah. I'd just been calling the cat Kitty ["Hey, Kitty. S'up"] and Bad Cat ["Hey, Bad AUGH NOT MY ARM BAD CAT BAD CAT"] for a few years now, so I'm just continuing to do so), this is a cat that we call, after all, Bad Cat in lieu of a real name. I still have these two livid white scars diagonally across my right wrist that make it look like I tried to off myself in some particularly inept way, and they're cat scratches, is what they are. So my mother was not too big on the idea of the cat having fleas. So she just... decided the cat didn't have them. This was not, as you might surmise, the most effective treatment plan ever devised. So now, just as I predicted, both the poms have fleas, too. And they scratch themselves all the time. And I'm over here with my constant twings, and--look, I know I don't have fleas. (I die a little inside every time I even have to say that. "I" and "have fleas" should never, ever have to be in the same sentence.) I don't have any flea bites, and I sat there and watched my arm for five minutes and waited for a twing and I'm telling you, even when I had a twing, nothing was there. The twings are completely internal twings ("The twings are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!"). So now I'm just sitting here scratching and twitching like a meth addict who's got bugs, BUGS! under her skin.

I will not be going up to 125 mg tomorrow, is what I'm saying.

On the upside, my mother made an Italian cream cake for Sister Girl's newish boyfriend (I have got to think of a code name for him. Hee! Maybe I should call him Mister Girl), and she was in a hurry, trying to make it before she went to work, and tried to de-pan the three cake layers while they were still too warm. The layers proceeded to break and crumble in a way that you could not just paste them back together with icing (cream cheese), so my poor mother came home at lunch the same day and baked three more layers. The reason this is a good thing is that we now get to eat the other three layers for scrap. I put them in a wide, flat round Tupperware container we call "the cupcake thing," after its most common use, and we've been nibbling on them all week.

Also, next Saturday, we're going to see Dracula. Dracula the ballet. I find this hilarious in its very concept. And the nice thing was, Sister Girl decided we should go because she knows I'm a total Dracula fangirl. Awww.

Also, I went back and read a few season one recaps (no, I didn't do any of season two except the first episode. I know, I'm horrible) to remind myself of all the nicknames and such, and came across this bit from the Jack's Wedding episode:

"Sarah is a beautiful girl," skeeves Jack's dad. "Hell yeah she is," says Jack. Okay then, Captain Emphasis! "You love her?" Jack looks at him like, Asshole. "Absolutely."

Now, think about that in the context of Hulk Jack's whole AA hissyfit this week. I'm just saying.

Elusive, Iconic "Cleopatra Jones" Star Dies.

Regarding the Shooter of Amish: This breaks my heart.

nymphaea_alba: "Hey Cleo. I'm just wondering if in your next link section you might link to this petition I made? It's asking livejournal to create some more privacy features, allowing members to choose whether or not to be included in searches conducted by sponsored community maintainers and anonymous searchers using livejournal (interest search, etc.) to find users. The link is here." Normally I don't put a lot of stock in internet petitions, but Livejournal has been known to respond to user complaints (particularly if they arrive by the thousand on the news entries), so this might actually do something.

morganwolf: "Okay. I was thinking about the Russian WTF today for no reason whatsoever, and I was wondering what might have become of it. Turns out it was just a beluga whale or something. Would've been more fun if it was an UrRu or an ambulocetus, but that's nature for you."

Classic, old-school insults (Groucho Marx: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it").

Hypoallergenic cats?

Remember that jewelry site I linked to a while back, Parrish Relics? The one that does a lot of hand-sculpted Tudor/Renaissance reproductions? Well, Jennifer Parrish made the Ugly Betty Anne Boleyn "B" pendant. I actually saw it on the site months before the show aired, and when someone sent me a picture of it, I remembered the jewelry site. She's also made a pendant and earrings to be worn in Order of the Phoenix (by whom, I don't know, although I have a baseless hunch that it might be Tonks). So, you know, order your replicas now and be fashionable in advance. (God, I wish I could afford her work, because it's gorgeous.) On Livejournal: parrish_relics.

Jolie to Play Smartest Woman Alive. "As if topping the list of interstellar babedom weren't enough, Jolie is now slated to play the smartest woman alive, railroad magnate Dagny Taggart, in the upcoming film adaptation of Ayn Rand's objectivist opus 'Atlas Shrugged.'" Sigh. I think I must be the only person whose life wasn't changed by reading The Fountainhead in school. I mean, I read it. Most of it, anyway--I just do not believe that character speeches should go on for pages at a time. I struggled with the epic Toohey speeches near the end, let me tell you, and I liked Toohey.

Sienna Miller is no match for Pittsburgh.

Portman Poses in Hepburn's Black Dress.

"Whale Rider" Kid Star Preggers. No, you read that right. "Oscar-nominated actress Keisha Castle-Hughes, 16, is reportedly expecting a child with her boyfriend of three years, Bradley Hull, 19." OF THREE YEARS?





October: Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Comments

[leila82.livejournal.com]

*shudders*

Your flea story reminds me of my flea story. Nightmare, more like. When I was...13? My parents bought this house, from this nice old grandmother lady, who had a house full o' pets. And the pets had fleas. And of course, she moved out along with her pets, and I'm sure some of the fleas left with them, but some of them did not; they remained with the house. And we moved in with no pets. Did you know that if there are no pets around, the fleas go after humans? (BTW, you don't have to worry about fleas, as long as they have animals, they don't bite humans almost ever, they don't like people much. We're like a last resort.) Anyway, the fleas came after us. It took us three or four professional bug-bomb-thingies to get rid of them completely, because they kept laying eggs in the carpets, which would manage to outlive the extermination. I think I wandered around with bite marks all over my lower legs (and scars from the scratching) for months. Absolute misery.

[celticwisdom.livejournal.com]

Correction, they don't come after humans unless you're allergic to them. Then you're like an open buffet with tons more surface area than a cat.

[leila82.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry - I take it this is from personal experience?

(I have a similar problem with fire ants).

[celticwisdom.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah. Every summer. No matter how many times we gave the pets medicine or bombed the house they always came back for me. Little bastards. Though I imagine fire ants to be a bit worse. Those seem to leave me alone, but go after my sister.

[msilverstar]

Some people's skins are very attractive to both fleas and mosquitos, even if there are animal targets around. I am one of those people, and omg, the itching! the itching!

[riari.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm beginning to think I am one of those people. Because when my cats have fleas, those fleas like biting me as well. I hate spring because of it.