My bathroom looks like a massacre site.

The baby kitten got bitten by something this week and her paw got all gross and swollen. Rob took her to the vet this morning and they cleaned it out and made it bleed, which is a good thing. But now she's bleeding all over the place so we have her closed up in the bathroom. There are little bloody pawprints all over the place in there.

At least her paw wasn't abcessed so we didn't have to shell out TOO many hundreds of dollars.

I got two delicious surprises today: puddles of cat puke AND a steaming heap of dog shit on my library carpet! Is it my birthday already?

And what the hell do they put in Meow Mix to make it stain the carpet that badly? Seriously, folks, my cats do NOT care if their food is a delightful shade of orange, but I DO care that my carpet ISN'T.

This is awesome:

http://www.vipfibers.com/

I could make a Frieda sweater!

The vet called and said that Baby cat also has an infection of some sort (high white blood cell count). He's on antibiotics now and seems to be doing better. I'm wondering if that was the cause of his symptoms, and the heart thing was just a fluke they discovered because they happened to be looking.

And now the puppy is sick too. She's very warm and lethargic and she hasn't touched a bite of food all day. Bear in mind that this is a dog that thinks cat litter is a tasty treat. If she's not eating, something is dreadfully wrong.

I'm inclined to wait and see if she gets over this without going to the vet, but she has to eat *something* soon. She even spat out a Pupperoni! At least she is still drinking.

I'd really like all my pets to be healthy now. Although Frieda is the calmest she's ever been. I have to admit I'm kind of enjoying that.

So apparently the reason my orange kitty has been coughing lately is that he has feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Basically he has an enlarged heart muscle and there's no cure. You can treat it with basic heart drugs, like beta blockers or ACE inhibitors, but there's no telling whether he'll live another six years or die next week.

Rob took him to the vet and they did about $500 worth of tests on him. The vet says we need to take him to a cardiologist where we can expect to pay another $500, it seems. I'm not really sure why, if this condition isn't curable and there's no treatment beyond drugs. I plan to call them tomorrow and ask more questions.

The orange kitty is my first "real" pet that I've had longer than a couple of months. My parents never let me have cats or dogs when I was a kid, and then as a young adult I moved around too much to have pets. This kitty adopted us about 6 years ago as a tiny kitten. I didn't even *want* a cat, but he grew on me. He waits for me by the front door and outside the bathroom. And when I sit in my rocking chair to read, he always jumps up in my lap. When I'm really sad he always comes to sit on my lap, and if Rob and I are wrestling he always comes running to my defense.

And I hate having to worry about money in all this, but we do. I don't have the greatest job security right now, and we have to take unpaid furlough days already as it is. There will probably be more in the next fiscal year. Today my boss and I ran into a colleague of ours and stopped to say hello. She looked like hell, even though she's someone who always looks put-together and professional. She told us they just laid off 12 people in her department, including someone I've worked with quite a bit over the last 10 years. I thought she was going to burst into tears right in front of us.

I think I'm going to vegetate in front of the TV with potato chips, brownies and beer.