Aaaand... she's not better.

Little Girl has been on antibiotics a day and a half now, and while she's no longer throwing up or having diarrhea (symptoms that started while she was at the vet on Tuesday) she's still not any happier peeing. She's still confined to the bathroom; it's still very difficult to get in and out of that room to feed and medicate her; her appetite is low; the room is still not usable as a bathroom.

( Here there be whining )

I figured the worst of this would be a day or two, but she's not better, and the vet said to start her on pain meds (O joy, another errand to pick that up, and another chore twice a day) and hopefully tomorrow they'll have time to take X-rays for stones (O joy, another errand). You can tell how tired I'm feeling when the news that my cat may have kidney stones evokes only a dull annoyance at another drive to the vet's, not, oh, EMPATHY FOR THE CAT WHO IS IN PAIN. And work (where I can relax) is heating up these days, and I'm quite simply running out of cope.

( edit: ideas, some of them even mine, for improving things )

Some things make my problems seem small.

Just found out that my cousin's son has leukemia -- AML, the aggressive form.

PS: If ever you feel like signing up for the marrow-donor registry, information is available at http://www.marrow.org. This is not a guilt trip: the chances of matching any *specific* patient, this boy included, are incredibly small, and it's not yet certain he's a marrow transplant candidate anyway. But in case you're motivated, there's the link. Joining requires giving a small blood sample a cheek swab sample and paying a tax-deductible fee of around $50. Various medical things may disqualify a donor (active Lyme, for example, sigh).

I love working in startup land.

Just now the CEO of my company, the VP of Sales, and a handful of engineers gathered a bunch of cell phones to test the ol' popcorn-popping thing. Nobody burst the bubble by mentioning that it had already been thoroughly Snopesed, even though at least one of us knew. We had a grand time trying it. Eight or nine people in a conference room at 6:30 on a Thursday night, fooling around with cell phones and popcorn.

"Do we need CDMA phones?"
"I think they were GSM. The video I saw looked like it was in Japan or Korea or something."
"This one has no SIM card. Hang on, let me go get one."
"You don't want to know what microwave popcorn looks like inside that bag, guys."
"Put another phone down! Get them closer together."
"Just let them ring. They weren't talking, just calling them."
"YOU call the Treo. I'M calling the Wafer."
"As soon as you get voice mail, redial."
"This is a cute little ringtone chorus we're getting here."

(No, of course it didn't work. How long does it take popcorn to start popping in a microwave? How many watts is your microwave? How many watts is your cell phone? How much does a cell phone transmit when no one is talking on it? But don't let the obvious get in the way of something fun. I mean, why not? This is how science is done, after all: make a hypothesis and no matter what you think the result will be, GO TEST IT. So we did.)