Oven woes

This is my lovely kitchen complete with harvest gold stove/oven and orange Formica countertop, perhaps one of the most beautiful color combinations one has ever seen.

Last week the oven broke. I was so looking forward to eating a cheese crisp when unexpectedly the broil setting stopped working. I turned the oven to bake so that I could eat something, but that just made my cheese crisp have a dry, cracker-like tortilla with barely melted cheese on top. Yuck!

This was the perfect opportunity to get a new stove and get rid of the hideous harvest gold... but instead we tried to fix it.


It was obvious that it was only the top element that was not working, so we unscrewed it and pulled it away from the back of the oven. Sure enough, one of the wires had broken/corroded and was no longer connected to the element.


The wire had pulled back a bit from the opening, so we had to reach in there with some pliers to grab it and pull it back out. Fortunately, we were able to do that and reconnect it to the element.

Sigh. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer before getting a new oven.

Helping around the house

Saturday morning started like this. I said to Paul, "I have 2 choices. Since Monday is a holiday, I can either work all day today (at my transcription job) since I'll be missing work Monday or I can take the day off and get stuff done around the house."

After a brief period of thought, he told me I should probably do my transcription work.

A short time later, I picked up the conversation again and was mentioning all the various things that needed to get done, like vacuuming, mopping, laundry, etc., hoping that he would get the hint that he could help me by doing some of them.

Again, after giving it some thought, he said, "Well, you could work today and then do the vacuuming and mopping on Monday since you have the day off."

Clearly, he didn't get the hint.

Today, I was laughing about the whole conversation again and asked him about it. He said, "I was helping... I was helping you organize your time."

Needless to say, tomorrow he has a list of things to do. You'd think after 23 years of marriage I would know that I have to be specific.

I love you cutie pie!

Goony and the vet

I seem to be spending a lot of time (and money) at the veterinary hospital lately. The latest saga involves Goony.


Last Friday night Goony was in a fight. This is very unusual since he stays very close to home, and he has not been in a fight in years. We hear cats fighting pretty often at night, but this time we didn't hear anything. The picture above is what Goony looked like on Saturday morning. We could tell that his eye had been scratched and there was the blood on his forehead. He spent the day sleeping and pretty much keeping his eye shut.


By the next day, the eye was not getting any better. So being the kind of people we are, we decided to treat his eye ourselves instead of going to the vet. We did some reading online about eye infections and brewed up some concoctions. We were using boric acid drops and colloidal silver drops in the eye, and actually his eye got better over the next couple days.

The problem was that we didn't deal with the bite on his head. We could obviously see the puncture wound and scab, but it looked okay. Around Wednesday, though, it started to form an abscess. By Thursday, he had a rather large bump on the right side of his head that was full of pus. So this morning we took him to the vet.

The vet, a different one than the one who treated Chani, took a look at Goony and started pulling the scab off and pushing on his head and checking Goony all over. Goony was quite calm through the whole thing. Even when he pulled off the scab, though, the wound was still closed and wouldn't drain. Well, he started talking about how we could give Goony some antibiotics and eventually the body were absorb the pus. We explained about how we have an aversion to giving cats antibiotics since the incident with BD.

For those who don't know this story, Paul ended up in the emergency room with a hematoma in his arm when BD, our other cat, bit into his arm when he was trying to give her an antibiotic pill.

The vet assured us that this would be in liquid form and have a good flavor. I wasn't getting a good feeling about the big lump in his head being able to be absorbed, and apparently the vet was rethinking that as well because after a few minutes he decided to open up the bite wound. Thankfully, he took Goony to the back room so we didn't have to watch.


A couple minutes later, Goony came back with a nice little hole in his head and no lump. The vet said it had drained 2 ounces of pus. Disgusting!!


This is Goony back home and recuperating. He was pretty wiped out by the whole ordeal of driving in the car and getting treated. He pretty much slept the whole day, but he is up and about this evening and feeling a lot better.

Chani update

Atypical Addison's Disease -- adrenal insufficiency. That's what Chani has. Have you ever heard of such a thing in a dog??

To update the story on our poor little doggie, she ended up not eating for 10 days. So we took her back to the vet who took some x-rays and did some more blood tests. They also gave her a steroid injection. That perked her right up, and she started eating again. This made them think that perhaps she had an adrenal gland problem, so we were to take Chani back to the vet and have a specific test for this. Finally, they let us give Chani a tranquilizer. Apparently, the tranquilizers would not affect this test... or maybe they got tired of muzzling her. In any case, we gave her a tranquilizer before taking her in on Tuesday.

The above picture is what she looked like that day. It's a pretty horrid sight, but it didn't seem to bother her much. You can see what they call the "third eyelid" and of course the droopy lids, but really she was okay. She was walking around but not very coordinated, slipping on the tile floor a little. The funniest thing, though, was that she became incontinent of urine. At first I didn't notice, but after she laid down for a while and then got up, I noticed that there was a puddle and her hind end was all wet. So I went to clean her up, and while I was washing her off I noticed that a drop of pee would form and then drop off and immediately another drop of pee would begin to form and then drop off -- like a leaky faucet. And then I accidentally pressed too hard somewhere (not sure where) and this stream of pee came shooting out. I have never seen anything like that in my whole life. Needless to say, she was sleeping on a blanket with plastic underneath for the rest of the night. Thankfully, all was back to normal the next day.