I’m truly not doing much these last couple of days except watching the packers stuff all of our things into boxes, and wishing that it was over and I was back to quilting in my new studio. IOW, nothing much quilting related to discuss, unless you count dreams, and I’m so tired and preoccupied that I don’t remember those anyway. I did work on these Inchies on my birthday though, just like I wanted to do.

In my head, these are the “Music Inchies” because the fabric has instruments and music notes on it, but I suppose they’ve now become just black and white after cutting them up, with a little red, grey and slate blue in the mix. The Inchies here are half of three sets of twelve, one for each of my musical girls, and one for myself. I probably won’t finish up the other 18 Inchies in these sets until after the move at this point.

The packers have packed nearly all of three of the four floors in the house, so all there is for us to do is climb over boxes, surf on the Internet, or read. We’re surrounded by cardboard. They’re coming back tomorrow for another go, to pack up the kitchen and finish in the basement room where most of my quilting stuff is, along with the computers and such. Not that I’m letting them pack my computer; that goes in my car thank you very much.

So mostly what I’ve been doing is reading books. Lots of books. And trying to keep the cats from being too stressed out, but Patches is having a calicivirus outbreak anyway. Calicivirus in cats is very like herpes and cold sores in humans; when there’s too much stress, the immune system weakens and sores appear. He has sores in his mouth now, but so far they don’t appear to be affecting him too much or causing him so much pain that he can’t eat.

So, I’m off to read and think about quilting even though I can’t do it right now!

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Why?? Because that’s what I’m feeling like today. And these probably have nothing to do with quilting, unfortunately. I’d even be happy to be working on some quilting project that wasn’t going well, as opposed to not quilting at all, which is how it is right now. Anyway,

Rant #1: Six weeks ago or so, in preparation for the move, ITMan cleaned out the storage room. Um, let me rephrase that so that it actually fits with reality: Six weeks ago, in preparation for the move, ITMan was supposed to have cleaned out the storage room. Okay, that’s better. I had planned to be around for this big event which was likely to take the better part of two days, because I knew there was stuff in there that I would need to a) prompt him to GET RID OF, and/or b) look through myself and decide what to do with it.

Somehow I wasn’t around for a good portion of that first day, though I have no idea why at this point. When I came home and he said he was done ( ) with the whole storage room project and he’d cleaned out and gotten rid of everything that needed to go, I was very skeptical, especially when the only things that needed my attention and decision making abilities were two little bags of stray Christmas decorations that he didn’t know what to do with for some reason.

Even under close, repeated questioning, he swore that the job was done. Flash forward to last Saturday. He went into the storage room to locate the old ceiling lamp that was hanging in the dining room when we moved in, so that we can replace it and take the one we installed with us when we move. He didn’t even think it was in there, though I KNEW it was, and I couldn’t understand why he was so confused about it since he’d just been in there a few weeks before cleaning and sorting, right?

Right. He starts pulling stuff out to try to find the lamp, and I start seeing things that shouldn’t even still be here. Many, many things, all of which should have gone bye-bye six weeks ago when he supposedly cleaned the storage room out. Two SUV loads left the house yesterday, most of which was from the storage room, and we only got through half of it. What exactly did he do six weeks ago? Got me! Read the rest of this entry »

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Monday wasn’t pretty. The rest of the week hasn’t been quite as bad, but it’s not been a picnic either. But back to Monday’s issues: I took Patches and Shadow to the American vet on the Army post to have their shots. Now I usually (at least for the last year or so) don’t even do this because they don’t ever go outside, and they only see each other, and I’m still not completely convinced that it wasn’t a vaccination a couple of years ago that made Patches so sick and nearly caused his death. Yes, he was THAT sick. The vet says the vaccination was probably not the cause, but probably isn’t certainly.

This year, because of the move, I decided that vaccinations would probably be a good idea, despite my misgivings about Patches. There will be a lot of people wandering in and out of the house, so you never know what could happen with a cat getting out the door, and the house we’re moving into has been home to at least one dog for many years and who knows what kinds of germs or whatnot are there in the new house. So off to the vet we went.

After waiting over an hour to get seen, the staff then tried to tell me that the reason for the wait was because they had a military working dog come in to be seen. Um, right, would that be the one I saw walk through the door, unassisted and obviously not in need of any emergency care, about 15 minutes ago? Such great service we get here from the Army.

We finally saw the vet, and we chit-chatted about general health issues like teeth and weight and the like. Yes, Patches is still the fat boy at 17.5 lbs., but Shadow has finally outgrown his baby fat and is perfectly sized at 10.5 lbs, just like I figured he would be, though the German vet kept telling me he was too fat as well.

The vet gave them their shots and away we went toward home. Now remember that they’ve been in the cages for, hmmm, let’s see, over 2.5 hours at this point and are stressed. We arrived at home only to find that Shadow had used the cage as a litter box, and that was only the beginning of his symptoms over the next couple of hours, which included vomiting and diarrhea all over the house, and hives and facial swelling. He was having a severe reaction to one of the shots, probably the rabies vaccination, and going into anaphylactic shock. Read the rest of this entry »

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