Friday, July 30, 2010

Odds and Ends

Don't feel very focused lately, so here's just a lot of random...

Swift-kitty is not doing so awesome lately, which sucks.  She's 15, which is old, but she's kinda supposed to live forever, right?  Around January, her she got really skinny and her fur was greasy looking, so I took her to a new vet.  She was diagnosed with high blood pressure - so now we get to give her 1/4 of a very crumbly pill daily.  Before Boise, I didn't want to saddle our house-sitter with force-feeding a crumbly pill to our cat (who actually takes pills well), so I got tuna flavored custom compounded medicine treats.  Well, I think Swift decided that she liked the medicine treats a bit too much, and she went on a hunger strike.  In her 15 years, she's never been picky.  And now she is.  My daily life is governed by my cat's eating habits.  She'll like something for a while, long enough for me to decide its safe to buy a bunch of that variety, only to have her flat out snub it completely right after I buy 10 cans.  I'm now afraid to buy lots of any kind of kitty food, so I'm running to the store 2x a week for food.  2 weeks ago, she still wasn't eating much and even Will got concerned, so we took her back to the vet.  Bloodwork showed that she likely has either one or a combination of IBS, lymphoma, or pancreatitis.  Only way to tell for sure is surgical biopsy.  And there's no cure, only treatment, which involves chemo.  None of which are super fun for a 15 year old cat.  Sucky.  Fortunately (?) my vet's own cat is having the same health issues, so she's well versed on how to handle this.  We're trying weekly B-12 shots for 6 weeks and see if that doesn't help perk her up.  And we're trying to feed her 2-3 times a day to try and get her weight up.  She's actually eating ok-ish but she's not that perky.  Normally Swift is glued to me 24-7.  She's my nap buddy, tv watching buddy, sleep buddy.  Now she just hangs out on the cat stand on the other side of the room.  Barely even cuddles with me.  Its almost like she's trying to prepare me.  Not cool.  She's my nap buddy and I need her for all my recovery naps for IMTX training.  Ugh.  So yeah, daily happiness is directly related to if Swift will eat nasty-smelling fish cat food, while my other kitty is very unhappy to be locked in the spare bathroom, away from the food he so very much wants to eat.

Will's job is not awesome.  Will is mostly not that awesome, but I can't fix it.  He's stressed and working too much, not really having time or desire to do much else.  He may have a way out soon..... I hope so for his sake and mine.  Boo.

I really try not to blog too much about work, but this is probably safe.  For the past year, I basically have been officed in a cubicle area that I refer to as "siberia".  (I purposely wanted to be in siberia, so this is a good thing).  The other cubicles were empty, it was quiet, and I was happy.  Our office is growing and now siberia is populated with loud people.  Including a whistler.  Today I had enough of the whistling (as did my friend), so it was up to me to put an end of it.  Slightly comical, as he'd whistle and I'd stand up to figure out who the hell was doing it, only to have him stop.  This went on for ~10 minutes until I just said screw it and made a broadcast announcement asking for the whistling to end.  I then sat back down and the whistling started back up.  Turns out this guy had headphones on and didn't hear me.  He had no idea he was whistling or that it was becoming very disruptive.  He's been quiet for the rest of the day - we'll see if this sticks.

I'm the activities coordinator for the office, and since work is a bit slow, I've got time to do some fun things.  My main "fun" project is a food collection drive, where I've split the office into 6 teams and we compete against eachother for the longest linear distance of food donated.  The winning team will get a prize (no idea what the prize is yet, probably a lunch or something).  Contest is for a month and we'll be doing weekly updates to keep the buzz going.  I'm very curious to see what sort of turn out we get.

I was told yesterday by our office manager that our "fun" budget has drastically increased, which means I have 6 months to spend $$ for morale and fun things.  We have problems getting volunteers to coordinate "events", so I'm mainly going the gift certificate route.  GCs to a nice chain of restaurants (Pappas), smaller $ GCs to Starbucks, company logo swag (bags, leatherman, etc).  This will be given away at meetings or random drawings.  The trick is to find something easy to do (since we're all busy) that reaches people regardless of how often they are in the office or attend meetings.  Random name drawings isn't very creative, but its easy.  I think we're also going to do monthly breakfasts, but make each business group be responsible for a month (we'll pay but they have to buy and organize).  Anyone have any other ideas that are easy to implement?

My "non-training" is going well.  I'm swimming 2x a week, running 2-3 x a week, doing yoga once a week, fitting in pilates occasionally, and randomly riding my bike.  Its nice to not have a set schedule or feel like I HAVE to get my training time in.  I'm doing the Lazy-Hazy-Crazy 5k on Aug 7th for Team Jamba Juice and TriGirl sprint August 15th - neither of which require very much training.  Actually, TriGirl might hurt, but that's fine.  I can handle 75 minutes of hurt.  Especially since most of my workouts are at least that long. 

I have my very first purple toenail.  Got it from the century ride 2 weeks ago, which is actually pretty strange.  I'm actually surprised that this is the first toenail issue I've had.  Purple toenails are *awesome*.

Oh, and I chopped 7 inches of my hair off - its now to my jawline.  I now have earrings longer than my hair.  That's a bit strange.  Still trying to figure out if I like it and what to do with it.  Still having issues using way too much styling product.  General concensus is that its cute and looks good.  I don't recognize myself and occasionally I get flashes of my mom in the mirror.  I will say, however, that its awesome to have "intentionally messy" hair.  Honestly, the messier it is, the better it seems to look.  That's pretty cool.

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