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Warren
A little update. Sorry for all the cat-blogging.
It’s been 2 days and I can’t tell if Warren’s really getting better. I didn’t notice him walking around, looking like he ha to pee last night or this morning, but SOMEONE peed in my bathtub last night, and I don’t think it was me.
He seems lethargic. He splays out in the center of the floor. He doesn’t fight me when I try to give him medicine. Doesn’t follow me around. Just doesn’t seem well yet.
Maybe I’m rushing it. Maybe it’ll take time to get him back to his old self. Maybe I’m imagining it. Tonight will be the big test. We’ll get out his favorite toy and see if he takes the bait.
Stop Peeing!
When it starts getting late, one of my cats, Warren, will go lie down on the bed and wait for me to join him. When I show up and turn the lights off, not matter how late or early, he takes that as his cue to go eat his dinner. Then sometimes he comes back and sleeps at my feet, and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s a little ritual we have.
So last night I wasn’t concerned to see Warren jump up on the bed around midnight. Instead of lying down, though, he started sniffing some pants I had put there. Then the crouch, and the look on his face. He looked right past me with that “really concentrating on taking a shit” look. I understood immedietly what was happening. This was inter-species communication at it’s finest.
I swatted him off the bed, and he finds another spot. I picked him up and brought him in to the litter box, but he wanted nothing to do with that. 5 minutes later I notice him peeing on a couple papers I had on the floor next to my desk. There was no need to stop him at that point. He was obviously determined to pee in that room at some point.
Something was wrong.The next morning I was getting ready for work, and saw him in a cardboard box trying to go. He didn’t look in distress or pain, but he seemed like he constantly had to pee, like a barfly who’s been drinking Coors Light all night and can’t hold it in for more than 5 minutes.
Luckily the vet was able to take him on such short notice. I had to leave work in the middle of the day, drive into Asbury to get my pet carrier out of storage, try to coax Warren into it quickly, then shoot down to Neptune. He was quiet most of the way. He’s not trouble, really, which is why I’m being so calm about this. I know he doesn’t really mean any harm.
Anyway, the doctor poked and prodded him for a few minutes, and the verdict is he should be okay. Probably a bladder infection, and we caught it early. Antibiotics for a couple of weeks and he’ll be fine. That does mean he can’t participate in margarita night on Thursday, but so be it.
Still, I’ve spent most of tonight chasing him around the house. You can see that look in his eye where he finds a little corner or a piece of cardboard on the floor, and realizes that he has to pee right then, right there. I still love the guy, but he’s not winning any Roommate of the Year awards.
I don’t mind spending a bunch of money taking him to the vet. He’d do the same for me. And I don’t resent having to miss work. I don’t even particularly get angry about the peeing, because it’s not his fault they don’t make Feline Depends. However, I am not looking forward to waking up early every day for the next couple of weeks and trying to contain a cat and then pour two (2!!!) medicines down a cat’s throat before work. Florence Nightingale I ain’t.
New York Was Amazing Until 5 Minutes Before You Got There
Went to see Midnight In Paris tonight. I don’t want to give away too much, but the gist is that many people spend their lives wishing for a past that never really existed. Or if it did, it wasn’t any more special than where they are now.
Paris has seen a lot of midnights, and they have probably looked pretty similar, whether you were stumbling out of a bar with Hemingway or hold up in a flat with Verlaine. Pick your favorite era, and you probably can imagine strolling the boulevards as they were meant to be, not the diluted version you see now.
People say this about other cities. New York is an obvious one. Also music scenes, art scenes, movies, toaster ovens, you name it. They don’t make ’em like they used to, huh?
Romantics especially tend to live in the past. When you look back, you can filter out all consequences, and be left with only possibilities. Seeing all the choices collapse into history is tough to watch. We tend to say “if only”, and then have another drink.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked to get drunk with Dali, but if you can imagine a perfect world, isn’t it your responsibility to make what you see around you more like it? Your goal should be to make kids 50 years from now look back at your lifetime and say “I wish I could have lived then.”
Deep, Dark
After a week of mid August weather, we seem to have gone back to March, for some reason. Fine by me. It gave me a chance to go all out on tonight’s dinner.
The plan was gumbo. First we needed a roux, so I put Erin to work on that. Cajun roux’s are a different breed from the kind I grew up with. First off, I was always told that a roux should cook for about 10 minutes and have a light brown color. A cajun roux cooks for almost an hour, and turns a dark, burnt umber tone. Secondly, I was always taught that a roux was equal parts fat and flour, but the recipes I looked up had varying amounts of flour, and the textures were probably all over the place as a result.
So we went to about a 1.5:1 flour to oil ratio and I left Erin to stir. Then I started making the chicken stock cause it’s shitty out and I’m on vacation and what the fuck else am I going to do with myself? So in go all the chicken backs and various other parts I’d been saving, along with some aromatics and herbs.
Those issues being taken care of, we just needed to figure out exactly what kind of gumbo this was going to be. Gumbo is one of those great dishes that has no canonical version. It’s a grab bag. Traditionally there’s a few different types of meat and/or seafood. This being vacation, we decided to splurge, and picked up crawfish, chicken, N’awlins style andouille sausage, and a hand full of shrimp.
I don’t really have a recipe to share, but you can get a good idea here. Gumbocooking.com seemed to be the best resource for gumbo tips and techniques and recipes I could find. If you’re interested in making gumbo, look at a few recipes from this site and you’ll get the idea. Most of them have pretty much the same base, then they just add falvors in on tip of it.
The final product came out great. Tons of layers of flavor, and totally worth spending all Saturday working on it.
Blowout
Holy shit. When I left the bar, with 9 minutes left in the game, Boston was winning 5-1. In the last 8 minutes, though, it became a blowout. Final score 8-1.
Nothing Was Delivered 