My Cat Is A Republican

Today was my favorite holiday of the year. Since I no longer work nights, I have to say Fall Back Sunday, or the end of Daylight Saving Time, is custom-made for me. I can sleep a whole hour late and no one could possibly care. Except the cat. Her reaction to my sluggishness led to a groggy epiphany.
My cat is a Republican.
I've got one living here in the house.
Proofs:
She does not believe in time change or climate change or hope and change or any change. She frowns on all matters of change.
She looks out for her own interests with fierce intensity; her food wants are paramount and must be attended to. However, when she has been nicely fed with my resources, she then turns her eye to my own meal. She obstructs my ability to feed myself by throwing herself into my legs, then once I have overcome her opposition and prepared a meal, she demands to see if mine is nicer than hers, and wants a portion.
Her behavior is generally environmentally unfriendly, as she declines to poop and pee outside where it is biodegradable. If I take the catbox away so she will go outside, she merrily proceeds to spoil my belongings to suit her preference.
She is automatically afraid of and hostile to anyone who wears anything on his or her head.
Although she brings foreign lizards into the house for her pleasure, she outsources most of the spider killing to the wild rangy outside cat.
She is, as Teddy Roosevelt put it so succinctly, a fat cat.
I don't think my TV gets Fox News but I am going to have to watch where I leave the remote.

Cheering

I just completed my first week at the job I've been on for a year that entailed just doing the basic job description; no covering for other people, no teaching new people, no endless meetings for projects that never start.
It was a pretty sweet gig, actually. My fledglings call me for database type questions but I don't mind that. The other person they are designated to call, the "Educator", is completely clueless and calling her would just be frustrating to both of them.
The lady at the Credit Union said my refi went through but the assessor didn't call me this week and the CU lady didn't return my call of inquiry. I am going to keep on her, though, this house might fall in if I don't get some shit fixed. I am dreading cleaning up for window installation but it will be nice to not have actual wind blow through the house in the winter.
I have lost 14 pounds. The "saggy fat suit over muscle" look is what I am going for and I am ignoring the folds of skin sliding down my midsection. Excelsior!
I wonder if I should get one of those compression garments they have you wear after lipo and wear it. You can get anything on Amazon.

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 3

I stopped in the manager's office today at the gym. She was sitting at her computer looking sadly at the screen. I asked her if she had heard about the hot tub follies over the weekend. Indeed she had, and was about to handle that situation as soon as she solved the problem in front of her. Oddly, it also had to do with the ladies' locker room. She seemed mournful and without hope.
"What else could be going on in the ladies' locker room? My word!" was my inquiry.
"Nudity," she said hopelessly. "Someone was offended because the ladies in there have nudity when they are changing and it makes this person feel uncomfortable."
Wait, what?
"Hold on a minute. A woman is complaining that the women who are changing clothes in the clothes-changing area make her feel uncomfortable?"
"Yes," she sighed sadly. "And I can't think of a thing to tell her."
I pondered briefly and a helpful thought came to me.
"Tell her if she thinks those naked women are bad, just take a look in the hot tub of a Saturday and she will really get an eyeful. Those naked old ladies will look positively tame."
We both hooted like old Southern ladies love to do.  Then she grew sad again.
"I can't tell her that."

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 2

Squick also ewwwww also WTF.
My Catholic friends used to say, "Shit Marie" when something was too bad for mere profanity and needed true blasphemy to convey their emotions.
Shit Marie.
I saw Towel Freak Woman leaving the gym today as I was coming in late. She was wearing workout gear and her hair was not wet so I thought I'd dodged a bullet and they had told her ack rite or don show up.
How wrong can one old lady be?
Very wrong.
I got out of the pool, padded into the shower room, and SHIT MARIE there she is, towel tied over boobs, kneeling over the STRONGEST nozzle in the Jacuzzi.  I turned around and padded, dripping, to the front desk and complained my ass off in no uncertain terms: "I told Angela last week there was a woman masturbating in the whirlpool over a nozzle, she said she'd get Cathy on it, and the woman is in there right now doing it again, and it's disgusting on so many levels!"
The clerk's response? "Oh my god. She needs to buy a shower massage." She had seen Towel Freak woman come to the desk as if leaving, then turn around and go back in. She apologized profusely that it hadn't been stopped last week, and promised it would not happen again. Then she said, crossly, "There is a toy store right down the street, she needs to go there instead."
I know, right?
Shit Marie, what has happened to the world. I expect this kind of craziness at work; we actually seem to have a drug ring that operates out of our driveway, where the security guards are never visible. We also have somewhere that prostitutes who are patients seem to be plying their trade, and if you walk in on most of our male patients and they are not masturbating it's because they just finished.
 I go to this high-end fitness club to get away from people like that!

Squick of the year

I've had a wicked muscle spasm in my neck for, hmmm, forever so I haven't felt like typing once I get home. But I'm still plugging along at the horrible job, like the hamster on its eternal wheel. One good thing for the month: I now weigh eight pounds less than I did at the start of last month. I am taking the adrenal and thyroid supplements and not eating fruit, sugar, or starch. Boring but effective.
The squicky icky omg grossssss gross gross thing that happened today? Well, that is the story. At the gym there is a woman who tends to come on Saturday and hog the whirlpool. It's a big one, but she gets in it and talks so loudly on her cell or plays such loud music on her phone that I generally avoid her. She also decorates the floor in the hot tub room with, no kidding, eight or ten towels in various stages of dampness. So it's like being around someone else's badly raised teen on a good day. Anyway, last week when I got out of the pool there were two other ladies in the whirlpool and the messy teen grown damn towel freak woman was perched nearby on a shower bench. I could not help but notice that she was not wearing a suit as per the four signs that read "Whirlpool Rules: Swimsuit must be worn, and don't shave your disgusting legs for Christ's sake either" but was wearing a towel tied in front over her boobs, another twisted over her hair, and nothing else but eyeliner. Yark. She stayed out while we hottubbed. As I was leaving, I could have sworn she got back in once the pool was cleared and was leaning on her elbows facing out of it. A little buzz alarm went off in my mind: was she cozying up to the jacuzzi nozzle with her towel open in front? Gross, I decided, and went off to shower and change.
Today my neck was just a little stiff, so I wanted to whirlpool it into submission after my swim and walk in the saltwater pool. I cruised into the whirlpool room and sans music was towel freak woman, leaning on her elbows  facing out of the whirlpool. She was holding a book whose pages she was not turning, and was kneeling with her legs straddled and the bubbles aimed right between them. Her superfreak towel was billowing out behind her. There was actually another woman sitting on the corner of the tub with her lower legs in the pool!
How nasty. There is not enough Clorox on the planet to clean that water. It's just a thousand gallons of douchewater, bubbling around the perverted freak who is hosing down her cooter with the jacuzzi nozzle. Ew, ew, ew. Also, fucking freak killed my chances of working on my neck.
I got dressed and skibbled out to the front desk. Sometimes the manager works on Saturdays, but she was not there today. The clerk knew exactly who I was talking about, towel freak woman comes at opening time on Saturdays and they have to ask her to leave at closing time and pick up all the towels she throws around. I used the words "unacceptable" and "disgusting" and she and I both agreed that towel freak woman needs to buy her own damn toys on the Internet and use them at home like all the other girls.  She said she'd be glad to tell the manager to ask towel freak woman to just stay home for jolly time.

Time for Voodoo, Woo, and anything else with oo that is not ow

So it took me about ten hours in phone calls, faxing, walking to his office to sign yet another medical records release, and driving to get my medical records to the high holy best diagnostician in town. He is a rheumatologist, and my doc wants me to go to Mayo for answers on whatever the fuck this syndrome is, but thought it would be good to see him first. He is supposed to be able to figure out any autoimmune thing in the universe.
A, he did not read any of that shit.
B, he had me come to clinic for a 1200 appointment; I saw him at 4 and got out of there at ten of five.
C, he has no fuckin idea what the hell this is. He says it's not lupus and not RA, RA eaten and removed joints notwithstanding.
He basically agrees with the endocrinologist, that I had too much iodine from all the CTs and MRIs and it made the Hashimoto's antibodies attack like crazy. Not just my thyroid but muscles, brain, and guts too. He says that's so unusual that no one knows just why it happens and how long it takes for the antibodies to get off your case. He did point out that the flares are shorter and less outrageous, so there's a decent chance I will start having them more seldom.  My goiter is already gone, and the endocrinologist doesn't believe in natural thyroid and is uninterested in changing my meds now that my TSH is below 1.
So I gave up on medicine and doctors and got on the Internet. Several seriously woo articles later and some typing on Amazon, I acquired dried thyroid and adrenal cortex pills. Oddly, they do not stink as you think they might. I have been taking them ten days.
I have lost five pounds.
The horrendous neck and back pain that showed up during the four hour wait for the rheumatologist is not receding as I would wish, but having my pants fit looser almost makes up for it. The one pain relief I have seen is that the fascia on my muscles is not exquisitely tender, which is nice.
Five down, forty-five to go.

Drugged Hamster Escapes Wheel

So the gold tooth on the molar way in back came off and the dentist took an xray and shook her head; the molar had broken from some extremely poorly executed prosthodontia twenty-odd years ago and was now shattered and inflamed, with severe bone loss in the underlying jaw. So an appointment with the oral surgeon it was.
Yesterday at the actual appointment does not bear a lot of reviewing; he was a very skilled guy but that tooth had disintegrated into more than seven pieces under the gum. So, yeah, I had taken 1/2 a Xanaflex before I went and could have used a bunch more pills of various types. But the surgeon was very quick and strong, it definitely could have been worse. He was very interested in my horrid immune system history, even when I assured him I'd been extensively tested and had nothing he could catch. He asked a lot of questions about the RSD and was sympathetic, which is unusual. Most docs hate anything they can't help with, and he seemed interested that all I took for it was Neurontin and Xanaflex, and that I would wean off them between flares. After the surgery, he asked what type of pain medicine I was used to and I couldn't think of any. So he said, "Lortab all right?" and I was all, "Yeah, sure."
I went to the front to get the scripts from the printer and he came and signed them, then cheerily said bye. I drove off all shellshocked to the drugstore and handed them in. When I picked them up, I almost fell out. He had given me 25 of the 7.5's. Day-um. That is a boatload of hydrocodone. Then I got a little worried; I was still numb but how bad was this going to hurt?
He must have thought I was lying about my drug history and would be calling needing more meds because I had a huge tolerance. Ha, not. I took them one at a time until bedtime and was maintaining, just a little sleepy. I took two at bedtime and regretted it in an hour; I was super groggy but the extra hydrocodone made me itch! I finally got up and took a Benadryl, which made talking to my boss when calling in super sloppy. Gained a lot of sympathy votes, though. So I have had a lovely groggy day hanging out with ginger kitty; rainbows on the floor in the kitchen from the prisms, and it's so nice to not be at that job. I haven't taken my noon dose of Lortab, and so far nothing has exploded. I'm going to take some Ibuprofen, hang on to the Lortab for other bad days, and think about going to walk in the pool all afternoon like a lady of leisure. It's better than thinking about how long it's going to take me to pay off this one disaster tooth.