The Litterbox

Odds and ends and bits and pieces, all bundled together with flushable clay.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 , terribly early in the morning

Meet the Statistics

I’ve needed to write this entry for a long time.  I stalled a bit by trying to figure out if I could write song lyrics for “Meet the Statistics” to the theme of “Meet the Flintstones”, but the syllables just weren’t right.  Anything to try to cheer the entry up… now I’ll just rely on self-deprecating humour.

Flippy and I became one of the national numbers back in August of last year when we received a foreclosure notice from the bank.  I think Vegas holds the national record for most foreclosures in the population… it’s something like one in every five houses in Vegas is behind on payments and in trouble with the lender.  Unlike many newspaper stories and letters to the editor imply, this did not happen because we were greedy and bought “more house than we could afford”.  In fact, we live in the same house we’ve been in since 2001, and when we first moved in, our mortgage was barely higher than our apartment rental rate.  We ended up in this situation because of self-employment problems and medical bills.  We know we’re not alone… we live on a tiny street, and there are two other houses in the same situation.  The difference is that both those families have already moved out, but we’re still scratching and clawing, trying to hang on.

This past weekend I had to do our 2007 tax return, print a copy of our 2006 return, and write up a profit/loss statement for the first seven weeks of 2008.  That all could have been avoided Flippy could have produced a paystub, but she’s a contract worker like me.  So, the lender insisted that it instead had to be taxes and Schedule C and a lot of fuss and bother.  There’s apparently an “investor” who perhaps might “sponsor” our mortgage via our current lender, but we had to prove that if the mortgage was adjusted, we’d be able to pay it. I really don’t know if we’ll be able to pay it… it depends what the “adjustments” are going to be.  Right now our mortgage is for an amount about $100K more than the current value of our house, so I really hope the overall loan is adjusted downward, and our payment is reduced by about $1000.  That will still be a challenge for us, but at least it will be feasible.  Our last refinance was about a 18 months ago, and it was for an ARM, and if I could go back in time and change one big mistake, that would be the one!  At the time I still didn’t have my Green card so I couldn’t go and get a job, and Flippy had just had back surgery and was also housebound.  We had bills for $60,000+ arriving from various doctors and outpatient centers, and we figured that with one last loan, we could pay the medical bills and put some money into our Internet businesses and try to make them profitable again.  What we should have done was to just not pay the medical bills, but hey, our parents taught us to be responsible, so we did an irresponsible thing (in retrospect) while trying to do a responsible thing.  The medical bills were paid, but the Internet businesses never regained the success they once had.  We did have some savings from when times were better, but when you have a “rainy day fund”, it’s there to spend when it starts to, well, rain.  It’s been raining for us for a couple of years.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2002, I think, but with some pretty basic medication I could feel really good, even “normal”.  Now that I’m under incessant stress, I never feel anything close to normal.  I’m either in terrible pain or I have terrible fatigue.  Some days I’m too weak to walk up the stairs.  I stopped being able to do yardwork a couple of years ago.  I love reading, but have trouble doing it because I can’t stay awake.  I haven’t blogged much because I can’t concentrate.  If I listened to myself and was an outsider, I’d think that I lacked willpower and focus.  I’m a driven, ambitious, Type-A personality, though… no one hates the state I’m in more than me, and no one’s more frustated about it than I am.  No amount of willpower changes anything.  In fact, when I beat myself up over how beaten down I am, my symptoms just get worse.  Sometimes I think I can feel stress hormones literally eating me alive from the inside.

The one bright spot in the past couple of years has been the pets.  If I didn’t have the pets, I wouldn’t even bother to get out of bed.  I don’t know if I’d ever laugh without them, but instead I laugh every day.  I think I’m in a bad state, but can’t imagine how much worse it would be if I wasn’t surrounded by furry things (and I don’t just mean the dustballs).  While the pets add to our financial challenges when they’re sick, the day-to-day expenses have always been affordable.  We do get a lot of free food for both the dogs and cats, as well as free cat litter, so they really don’t cost us much at all.  We’ve also been so lucky to have received a few donations via Wee Paws, so we’ve been able to take in strays like Dobby, and know we’ll be able to pay for their vaccines, spays, and neuters.  The pets are cared for as well as any pets could be cared for, and that’s the biggest, scariest part for me when I consider the possibility of foreclosure.  I’d of course take them wherever we go, but I don’t know where that will be.  Maybe we’d end up at our old pet-friendly apartment complex, but even that is complicated.  How do two broke and somewhat handicapped people move a houseful of furniture and animals someplace new… and how do you fit 2100 sq. ft. of belongings (and a quarter-acre yard) into an 1100 sq. ft apartment with a balcony?  I’m too old to keep going backwards, and running an animal rescue has been a dream I’ve had my entire life.  Now that I have it, and love it, I don’t want to let it go.

I wanted to write about this for a couple of reasons.  I wanted to put a face on the foreclosure problem, other than the face of the couple who bought a 4 million dollar mansion with a stated income loan when they really only earn a combined $60000 a year.  If we were like those people, we’d be in danger of losing a 4000 sq. ft. single-storey house on a golf course right now.  I’ve always wanted to live on a golf course… they’ve got bunnies.  I also wanted to explain why I’ve had some trouble blogging since last December.  I had a “stress crescendo” over the holidays, and I think part of me is broken.  I don’t know what to do to feel well again, but I know that a small lottery winning ( or a donation of about $100,000 from Rosie O’Donnell) would go a long way towards giving me some relief.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/27 at 03:29 AM
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Saturday, February 23, 2008 , evening

Eli and the tooth fairy

I’m pretty happy that when my elderly dog decided to have a problem, it was a pretty basic one.  The lump that suddenly appeared on Eli’s face last week was from an abscessed molar, so treatment was tooth extraction and antibiotics.  While we had her in the office for her tooth, we also got meds for her bladder, so she’s been fixed up and is good for another 10,000 miles.  We had ZERO money to deal with this situation, and I was proven correct for all the times I’ve said that the best pet “insurance” is a good relationship with your veterinarian.  We went in and told the vet that we needed an inexpensive, temporary solution until we were able to pay for something more, but instead of just putting Eli on antibiotics to buy time, she insisted on doing the surgery that very day, and told us to just pay when we were able.  That meant permanent relief for Eli, and at least some temporary relief for us!

As for Eli’s bladder, we decided to try her on PRN because the potential negative side-effect (rapid heart beat) would be easy for us to detect, and completely reversable.  It looks as though she’s helped by just two pills per day, and so far there have been no side-effects.  It’s been so nice to get up in the morning and know I’m not going to greated by a soggy dog bed and a bunch of towels needing to be washed.  It’s nice for Dante, too… the poor guy often slept on the floor because it was the only place that wasn’t wet.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/23 at 09:43 PM
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Thursday, February 21, 2008 , lunch time

I got out of bed for this?

- our fabulous pain management doctor, who gives us free medication, and who we just started to see two months ago, has taken an indefinite leave of absence
- the company that has been giving me free food to feed the cats for the last year can’t afford to send any more food
- Eli has a golf ball-sized lump under her eye and we’re off the vet.  Wheeee!

Shoot me now.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/21 at 01:47 PM
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Friday, February 15, 2008 , evening

ASPCA’s poison plants list

This always bears repeating:  Be sure to read the latest version of the ASPCA’s list of toxic plants.  It includes small houseplants and large shubbery that you’d plant outside. Eli is a chronic eater of all sorts of crap — rocks, cat toys, other dog’s poop, tree branches, etc. — and I wish our neighbours didn’t have a yard surrounded by oleander hedges.  I like the oleander, and wish we could plant it, but it’s poisonous to dogs and cats.  When our neighbours trim their hedges, they slice them horizontally along the top of the wall which divides our yards, and all the excess trimmings come falling into our yard.  Then I grab a trash bag and run out to clean up, as I don’t want to invite disaster.  It really can’t be helped that the excess trimmings fall into our yard, but I sure wish the plants were safer.  Even if you don’t have pets, (looking at my sister), read the list and be a good neighbour!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/15 at 08:36 AM
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Vertexhost - 100% perfect website hosting

I should have posted this on Valentine’s Day, because it’s my love letter to Vertexhost.com.  Flippy and I have been hosting websites since 1998, and we’ve been through a lot of hosting companies, and Vertexhost has just been amazing.  In the last year and a half, we’ve had merely one “crash” which made our sites unavailable, and that happened this morning.  When I submitted a support ticket about it, I found out that an alarm had gone off at the Vertexhost office when our sites went down, and that they’d been working on fixing it ever since.  It took them about 30 minutes to rectify a pretty big problem (we’d maxed out a hard drive on our server), and now we’re up and running again.

Another thing I have to say about Vertexhost is that they’re the only hosting company I know of who made a specific effort to support pet owners, and animal rescue groups.  If you just want to host one website/blog, they offer special prices at website hosting for pet lovers, and they donate a portion of the proceeds to the Nevada SPCA.  It costs $7.95 per month, which is an excellent price when you factor in all the customer support.  If you want to transfer a site from another host, they’ll even do that for you for free to help you get started, and that will ensure that your transfer is seamless, with no down-time.  This is a great way for people with Wordpress or Blogger blogs to have their blogs hosted on their own domain names.  It’s the first step to fame, fortune, and t-shirts with MyBlog.com on them!

We really have had some terrible hosting companies in the past (email me… I’ll name them).  Vertexhost has been so great that I hope you’ll try them if you’re looking for website hosting (or even a dedicated server).  It’s incredible peace of mind to know that friendly, reliable people are making sure that your sites don’t crash!  Oh, one more thing—if you have any interest in running your own message board, they’ll give you a very powerful, very secure installation of message board software called FusionBB at a cost of $10 per month.  Again, no fussing with installations, upgrades, security issues, etc.

I apologize for the technical interruption smile

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/15 at 07:27 AM
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008 , evening

Eli turns 12

(I feel silly… I wrote this on the 12th but forgot to upload it… duh).

My German shepherd Eli turned 12 today, on the 12th.  In previous years I’ve been a bit melancholy on her big day because I could see her aging, but she’s had a great past year and she’s really in good shape.  I think the switch from Cosequin to Dasuquin has helped… if you have a dog who takes Cosequin, you might want to ask your vet about switching to the new Dasuquin supplement.  They’re both manufactured by the same company, but Dasuquin has a few new ingredients, and they’ve helped Eli so much that I’ve taken her off Rimadyl.  She’s not limping and doesn’t seem especially stiff when she gets out of bed, or rises from the floor.

Eli’s eyes are also doing well, and her pannus hasn’t progressed, and is completely under control with just Optimmune.  She’s supposedly getting some cataract development, but it’s nothing which I can see, and her vision seems perfect.  Of all her senses, the only one to be affected by old age is her hearing, and she’s been close to deaf for the last couple of years.  Except for the annoyance of not being able to easily get her attention, the deafness has eliminated her fear of fireworks and thunder.  She responds well to hand commands, and generally knows what is expected of her, so we don’t have trouble communicating.

There’s been one negative change in the past three or four months—she has leaky bladder.  It started with just some leaking while she slept, but it’s getting worse, and now she’ll leak when she’s awake and lying down.  If I take her outside and get her to pee, then she doesn’t leak, so I wonder if she has some hip pain which makes her want to avoid peeing?  It has seemed rather damp and cold in the time since this problem started, and perhaps the Rimadyl will be back in her future.  I know the bladder leakage can be common in older, spayed dogs, so we’ll get her into the vet and hopefully get it taken care of.  It’s been tough to find the money for such things with Bunny’s problems, illness with our two foster cats, and Dobby’s spay, but I’m working on it.

There’s one positive side to Eli being a senior citizen.  She’s no longer a high-strung, dominant, snappy dog.  She was sometimes possessive around food, and I worried that she’d try to bite a bold cat who tried to eat from her food dish.  However, Eli has become a bit senile, and she’s a bit doddering and batty in a really lovable way.  She loves the cats!  She’s never moody!  She likes to act silly and still wants to play outside!  She was always affectionate and sweet to me, but wasn’t always truthworthy around other animals.  She’s been in a few dog brawls in her life.  Now, she’s becoming a sweetheart who lies down with cats and touches noses with kittens.  The mellowing-with-age is a really good thing for our household.

I know my time with Eli is limited, and she’s been my constant companion since she was six weeks old.  Still, I’m glad that her senior years are being spent in relative comfort and happiness, and that she’s surrounded by people and pets who love her.  I just want her to be happy, and I think she is.

Sorry about the weird yellow eyes… this photo was taken with the cheap cell phone camera:

Eli_with_TJ

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/12 at 08:00 AM
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Sunday, February 10, 2008 , terribly early in the morning

Sabrina gets adopted

I don’t think I ever wrote about Sabrina (and I’m too lazy to look and see, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself).  Sabrina was taken to the vet to be euthanized because she wasn’t using the litterbox.  She wasn’t using the litterbox because her owners had freaked her out by moving to a new house, acquiring a new cat and dog, and allowing her to get 15 pounds overweight.  The vet offered to try and rehome her, rather than put her to sleep, and she’s been living at the clinic for the past few weeks while I posted her listing on Petfinder.  Today she was adopted by a nice couple who are going to keep her on a diet. That’s one less cat to come and live in our guest bedroom or bathroom or other nook/cranny, so three cheers for a happy ending.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/10 at 06:54 AM
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Saturday, February 09, 2008 , terribly early in the morning

Missy Mae’s Mom

Hi!  Don’t ever let me go on vacation again, because apparently I have a terrible time get back into my routine.  I am feeling better, and I think the cold virus is completely gone.  I was able to stop taking one of my medications, ("Lyrica"), after checking with my doctor this past Monday, and I’m almost rid of that horrible pseudo-narcolepsy problem I was having.  What a relief it is to be able to stay awake for more than 30 seconds at a time.  Now I just need to try to get my head back into a day-to-day work pattern, especially a writing pattern. 

I don’t know if any of you remember the story of how we ended up with our semi-feral kitten foster mom, Missy Mae.  She was a stray, living down near one of the casinos, and she was fed by a woman who resided in a nearby apartment complex.  The woman, Carol, fed Missy Mae, but couldn’t bring her inside because her significant other was allergic to cats.  When Carol was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago, I reluctantly agreed to catch Missy Mae and bring her home, but I had no idea what I was going to do with her.  She ended up quarantined in our bathroom, and spent a lot of time hiding behind the toilet bowl.  When I had to stick a litter of foster kittens in that same bathroom, Missy Mae became a reluctant foster mother.  She begrudgingly gave a lot of love and affection to quite a few kittens, and even now, a year and a half later, TJ still lavishes her with affection as if she’s his real mom.  Missy Mae still isn’t an active cat, and her entire home range comprises the bathroom and the kitchen, but she has a steady stream of younger cat visitors, and she’s grown to be calm around us.  She even lets us rub her stomach, which is the ultimate cat compliment.

I tried to keep in touch with Carol as much as I could, and I called her every few months to let her know that Missy Mae was doing well.  She said that her biggest concern about her illness had been Missy Mae, and that it had been such a weight off her shoulders to know that the cat was being cared for.  I totally understood how that would feel!  I sent her photos of Missy Mae “mothering” all the different kittens, which was fun, and it made me feel good to know that I was giving someone else peace of mind.  Carol didn’t have email, which would have made things so much easier—I’m not much of a “phone talker”, and when someone is sick, you don’t want to be calling and waking them up or bothering them.  I told her to phone me as often as she wanted, as I really enjoyed talking to her, but she never did… I think she worried she was being a bother.  And knowing how sick she was, I worried about calling her if I’d let a couple of months pass… what if she’d died, how awful would I feel phoning her mother and asking for her?  I don’t know what the etiquette is regarding situations like that (and I hope I’m not in the situation often enough to figure it out). 

Last week, I got a letter from Carol’s mother, saying that Carol had died on December 9th.  To be honest, I had assumed she’d passed away long before that, because the entire two and half years I’d known her, she’d been so terribly ill.  I wish I’d called on a few of the occasions I’d thought of her, although I know my role had been completed just by giving Missy Mae a permanent home.  The note from her mother talked about how much Carol loved Missy Mae, and thanked us for helping Carol when she was in need.  I know that at that time, I felt a bit overwhelmed and in over my head, but now Missy Mae is such a normal part of our home that I can’t imagine her not being here.  And she’s full of surprises, too:  she had a fairly big personality change around the end of December, and she’s been very active and a lot more sociable in the past few weeks.  I think it coincided with me going away, but whatever the reason, Missy Mae is exploring and wandering and it wouldn’t surprise me if she came upstairs one day.  She has a lot of arthritis in her back legs, but she’s exercising so much that she’s practically limber.  I’m sorry Carol was never well enough to come back to Las Vegas to visit, because she really wanted to see Missy Mae again, but I’m really glad she knew that the cat was loved and cared for.  I’d be thrilled to have as much when I’m on my way out. 

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/09 at 05:36 AM
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Saturday, February 02, 2008 , the wee hours

The cat ate my Sennheisers

I obviously shouldn’t make promises I can’t keep, for example, promising I was going to get back to posting normally.  While my everlasting head cold really does seem to be gone, I’ve been stricken with amazing fatigue.  I think it’s a medication problem, and I hope to fix it at the doctor next week, but wow… I’ve fallen asleep standing at the kitchen counter, in the middle of typing a sentence, in the middle of writing a sentence with a pen in my hand… I’ve never been like this before.  Thank goodness I’m not out driving, you can be thankful for that.

I want to roll back the clock a bit, because I never fully explained all the drama of my trip to Canada for Christmas.  I was so close to a nervous breakdown before leaving I think Flippy may have had the guys in white coats hiding in the garage, “just in case”.  I felt overwhelmed by work (prepping all the pet food for my absence, doing laundry and packing, trying to fit all the gifts I wanted to take into my luggage, etc.).  The day of my flight (Dec. 23rd), I got up early to grind the 30 pounds of chicken I needed for homemade cat food.  I opened the first package and quickly went on to discover that all the chicken had spoiled, so I had to send Flippy to the store at 5am to buy me 30 more pounds of chicken thighs.  A few hours later, I went upstairs to get my passport and permanent resident card to take with me to the airport, and I realized (to my HORROR) that my passport had expired.  That meant I could get into Canada, but could not get back into the US at the end of my trip!  Luckily my sister in Canada came to the rescue—she figured out that she could pick me up at the airport on the morning of the 24th, and then we could go get my passport photo taken and drop my application off directly at the passport office in Ottawa that same day, and pay for a rush application.  My new passport would be ready by the 28th, so I’d have it with me to get back in to the US.  Even with my problems fixed, it was far too much drama right before a long trip.  I had no problems with my red-eye flight to Canada (and was mostly just relieved to be on the plane), but I did miss my connection to Ottawa in Toronto.  Happily, they had flights to Ottawa every hour, so I was just one hour late.

Now I’ll jump ahead to the day before I was to leave Canada and come back to Las Vegas.  I was a bit concerned because I only had about 90 minutes to make my connecting flight to Vegas in Toronto, so I called the airline I was flying (WestJet), to ask them what would happen if the connection was missed.  The customer service rep assured me they would hold the plane for me.  She said that the Ottawa to Vegas run was very popular, and they would just hold the plane to Vegas while they waited for any passengers from connecting flights to to catch up.  I felt relieved to hear that, because I was flying on New Year’s eve, and really wanted to be out of the airport, and far away from the Vegas strip, before the night’s festivities.  I also knew WestJet didn’t offer hourly flights to Vegas, so I couldn’t afford to miss my connection!

Enter Murphy’s Law.  It was snowing heavily on the day I was flying home, Dec. 31st, and there was a big delay leaving Ottawa because my plane needed to be de-iced.  I love the safety, hated the terrible wait, but felt good that I’d called the airline the day before and knew I wouldn’t miss my connection.  When the plane landed in Toronto, four passengers on the flight, including me, were told that we’d missed our connection to Las Vegas.  They didn’t hold the plane!  Then, instead of putting us on an Air Canada flight to Las Vegas, WestJet decided to send the four of us to Calgary, where we could catch a flight to Las Vegas.  Yep, they wanted to reroute us over 2000 miles!  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up with the head cold that lasted almost a month.  The flight to Calgary was also delayed (about two hours) because of the weather problems.  When I got to Calgary, I had to kill four hours in the airport before I could catch my flight to Vegas.  Even that flight was delayed (but not by weather), so by the time I arrived home in Las Vegas, it was 9pm.  Originally, I should have arrived home at 11am.  Given that I’d been up at 4am to catch my plane, I’d been on the go for 20 germ-ridden hours.

I’ve been bitching about the experience to WestJet ever since I got home.  I missed my connections on both ends of my flights, and they didn’t offer to let me wait in Toronto for their “later in the day” flight to Las Vegas.  In fact, I didn’t even know that second Vegas flight existed until I researched it myself.  Instead of sending me on a four hour flight to Calgary, WestJet could have allowed me to wait in the Toronto airport for their next flight to Las Vegas.  What made everything worse that day was that I had to keep collecting my very heavy luggage off the baggage carousel and rechecking it (I had to do this in Toronto and in Calgary) because I hadn’t cleared US customs and immigration yet.  It was a terrible nightmare, and I’m so conflicted about flying Westjet in the future.  They have cheap airfares, free cable TV on a seatback screen, and the staff are nice, but I’m screwed if any of my flights with them are delayed.

That’s pretty much the tale of how I lost the month of January to illness.  I absolutely loved my time in Canada and want to start going home a few times each year, but I don’t want to drag my immune system through the gutter every time I do.  I consumed that “Airborne” stuff daily from Christmas eve until mid-January, and carried my own hand sanitizer around with me, but I was hit with a whopper of a virus anyway.  Now I need to dig up one of those personal air cleaners (the kind you wear around your neck), and perhaps I’ll wear a giant surgical mask while flying. too. 

On an unrelated note, Scampi the cat really did eat through the cord of my Sennheiser earuds.  The little monster!  That’s the second set of earbuds the cats have destroyed, and I try to be so careful and protective of them, too.  I’m going to have to revert to the crappy 99 cent kind of earbuds from eBay.

I almost fell asleep about a dozen times while writing this.  I have got to get this problem fixed so I can have a life again.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/02 at 12:00 AM
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 , terribly early in the morning

Cow say what?!

From the Toronto Star, an article to update you on what animals around the world are saying.  Not what they’re saying about you, of course… that part’s still a secret.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 01/29 at 04:22 AM
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