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Good idea: Remembering to worm the cat tonight as per our vet’s instructions.

Bad idea: Thinking this could be easily accomplished.
Bad idea #2: Getting the syringe-with-goo stuff instead of the tablet.
Bad idea #3: “Okay Snookums, you wrap her up in a towel and hold her still while I squirt it in her mouth.”

As you might expect, this led to her clamping her jaw, freaking out, and whipping her head around so that what little goo I managed to squeeze out ended up all over her chin.

Not-so-good idea: Giving up.
Not-so-good idea #2: Mixing the remaining goo with some food and putting it in her bowl, trusting that even though she’d already eaten dinner, she’s a gluttonous little pig and she’d eat it anyway.

She ate it anyway. We felt smug and smart. Fifteen minutes later she puked everything up. We felt stupid. Now we have to do it all over again tomorrow.

“Donnie Darko”
Here’s what you should never do when you’re at home by yourself, sick, on a rainy Monday afternoon: watch that Donnie Darko movie everybody’s always raving about. Good grief. I was having paracetamol-enhanced psycho bunny dreams all night. Seriously though, what the hell was up with that film? I can’t stop thinking about it. The performances were all great, and I can finally see why folks rave about Jake Gyllenhaal. (He would have made a great replacement for Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2.) The music was fantastic. Even real 80’s movies didn’t have such great period soundtracks. Patrick Swayze was suitably sleazy in his small role. I’m just not sure I understand what actually happened in the film. Judging by the reviews I’ve read, not a lot of other people do either. Have you seen it? Do you have a theory?At first I thought maybe the whole film was a dream that Donnie had while the engine was smashing down on him, but there were bits of the film that didn’t fit that theory so well (like the random scenes focussing on Drew Barrymore). My new theory is that the whole film is a time travel paradox. Donnie escapes death from above only to be warned about his impending doom, which will result from the engine of his mother’s plane falling through a time rip… thus killing him in the past and negating her ever taking the journey in the first place. Does that make any sense? I mean, I know it doesn’t make a lot, but as near as I can tell it mostly explains what happens. I may have to watch it again. The Snook needs to weigh in on this.

Hee hee. Joy of Tech made fun of Wil Wheaton’s blog.

Total and complete laryngitis. I can’t talk at all. Well, I can, but the sound makes small children cry and I run the risk of ruining my vocal cords completely. So for all intents and purposes, consider Kris’s mute button now pressed. As my job pretty much relies on my ability to communicate, I’ll be rockin’ the sofa yet again today. I’m in the process of trying various home remedies but nothing seems to work very well. I’ve tried drinking hot tea with lemon, inhaling steam with eucalyptus oil, and overloading on Vitamin C (though I have no idea what my “bowel saturation” level is). Today I’m going to go get a humidifier and see if that makes any difference. Otherwise… it looks like a prescription for a couple days of “shut the hell up.” I’ll go mad. It’s worse than the bloody famine.

Sick Kris = Festival of Carbs. Seriously. I baked an apricot and macadamia cheesecake Monday “for Snookums” and I’ve been plowing through it ever since. It makes me feel better. (Link courtesy of awful cufflinks.)

I’m still sick… It’s moved from my nose down into my throat and lungs. My voice started out rather husky this morning and got progressively raspier all day. The last time this happened was when I spent all night camping out for Phantom Menace tickets. (For those of you that have seen the news footage, I sound exactly like I did that morning when I started croaking and raving like a psychopath about Han and Leia.) Snookums is now experiencing the extremely rare and rather unsettling phenomenon of Non-Talking Kris, as I’m going mute in the hopes of preserving a little voice for work tomorrow.

But in somewhat brighter news, my legs and feet are finally adjusting to standing all day. I took Amy’s advice last week and got myself a pair of Kumfs. They’re not the sexiest shoes in the world but they make a world of difference.

“On Sunday NASCAR car racing champion Dale Earnhardt said that he had taken his buddies to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and that ‘it’s a good thing as an American to go see’.” Wow. I’ve never been a big fan of NASCAR myself, but Earnhardt Jr. sounds like an intelligent guy. Maybe it’s time to rethink the stereotypes.

Ker-CHUNK.
Apologies for the lite blogging of late… My computer hardware woes continue. Boudicca froze up on me a few days ago so I did a hard reboot. Within seconds loud clicking noises were emitting from the hard drive. Crap. I couldn’t get her to boot up properly, not even off the OS X CD. In rode the Snook to the rescue. He downloaded and burned some sort of “Linux rescue disk” and was able to boot me up from that. He then proceeded to back all my crap up over the network. (I’m the worst backer-upper ever.) Then he performed some computer voodoo that resuscitated my OS from the dead. Apparently the problem only occurs when the hard drive starts up, which is why I was getting the problem on booting up and waking from sleep. So now I’ve got it set to never let the hard drive sleep. As I understand it though, it’s only a matter of time before the drive dies altogether. I’m strangely ambivalent. It’s been a good run. The iBook has lasted nearly three years, so my Apple Care (if I had it) would be running out soon anyway. I’ve given some serious thought to having the Snook fit me out with a kickass Linux machine, but there are still a few things holding me back. Despite all the problems and frustrations, there are still so many things on the Mac that “just work.” I like how easy it is to transfer my photos and make movies and scan pictures. I know I can do all those things in Linux, but it wouldn’t be so seamless. Not to mention the fact that we’d have to do some serious tinkering to get my iPod – which is still going strong – to work with it. So it looks like a new Mac is in my future. I wonder if the new iMacs will be headless…? Hmmm.

Amy pointed me to this hilarious list of cat quotes. Some of them struck me as particularly applicable for life with Dr. Amy Jones:

• Anything not nailed down is a cat toy. Everything else is a scratching post.
• A cat is always on the wrong side of the door.
• I don’t mind a cat in its place, but its place is not in the middle of my back at 4AM.
• I want a cat with a snooze button.
• IT’s HARd to tYpe wHILe holdINf a Cat.
• To a cat, “NO!” means “not while I’m looking”.

I’m dreading the day this week when we have to try to worm her for the first time. (The vet’s done it every time before.) We’ve got this syringe of goo that we’re supposed to squirt down her throat. It’s gonna be a bloodbath.

Sick and tired.
Just finished my second week at the new job… and I’m sick as a dog. I started getting a sore throat yesterday at work and now it’s turning into a full blown illness of some kind. I’m all hot and muddle-headed. I’m terrified that my wicked tonsilitis from last year will return and I’ll have to have them removed. Anybody have any good home remedies for warding off a throat infection? Bonus points if it doesn’t involve me gargling anything particularly nasty.