peed off

Thank you so much, everyone, for your very sweet comments... Gretch was my first independently-owned animal after leaving my parents' house. Losing her is already devastating and she isn't gone yet....

She's still not unhappy as best as I can tell, but increasingly demented and unable to move very well, and unable to be placated. She is hungry but doesn't want to eat. She's needy but doesn't want to be held. She wants to be on the bed, but doesn't want to stay still. I wish I could make her feel better, but nothing I can do will change the fact that she is dying. It is probably much harder for me to face than for her.. She's probably just thinking, "Damn! I wish they'd stop stabbing me with needles and find me some decent food!"

Also, she also pees wherever she happens to think about it.

In fact, we’ve been living in pee hell.

Speedy's horrible little dog (as I call him, with some distant relative of affection), Milo, also pees everywhere these days, and because he makes small mostly non-smelly puddles (his kidneys are not working well, and his pee is very dilute) they sometimes dry and we don’t discover them for who-knows-how-long until the light hits a suspiciously shiny spot on the floor in a particular way. And then you’re like, “FERCHRISSAKES, how many times have I walked over that!? ISN’T THAT WHERE I JUST DROPPED MY COOKIE THEN PICKED IT UP AND ATE IT ANYWAY?!”

Unauthorized pee is such a regular feature in our lives that we have dedicated pee rags to cut down on our use of paper towels.

But the latest incident was by far the worst:

Because it was so stinkin’ hot for a week, and because of the fact that we are pretty much constantly cooking up steamy, hot, stinky, beefy batches of homemade dog food in the crock pot, and because we live like primitives- a complete gut reno and not an a/c in the place- Speedy took pity on us and went out and bought these amazing, industrial strength fans (the kind they used to have at the gym until some idiot decided to put those stupid ineffectual little slits into the control panel of treadmills that do nothing but blow recycled towel lint and microscopic sweat particles from the last user directly into your face.)

Anyway, she got one for the kitchen counter, THANK GOD, and one for the living room. So, the yesterday morning I get up and I am like “Whooo-HOO! Circulating air is GREAT! And, boy does that dog food STINK!” then went about making coffee and kvetching and complaining as I do every morning. It was not until I went to turn on the fan on the kitchen counter that I realized that the whole thing, including the motor, was drenched in extremely potent cat urine. NOT Gretchen's. Sven's. He has no excuse other than pure spite.

You ever have those moments when you're like, I would, I really would trade lives with practically ANYONE else right now? I was so mad I couldn't even write a coherent text to let Speedy know what had happened. You try typing out "SVEN" on a numeric keypad when you are shaking with rage, cat piss still burning in your nasal passages! I had to go walk the dogs before I was tempted to throw Sven in the crock pot.

Fortunately, Ex came over later to deliver some mail and drop off a batch of her own homemade dog food (part of shared custody), and we completely disassembled the fan and put all the non-electrical parts through the dishwasher and I sterilized the innards as well as I could using a couple hundred q-tips, a few rols of paper towels and roughly 8 gallons of cleaner. The pee rags were just not up to the task.

Despite all my pissed-offness about the piss situation, though, I know it's just displaced emotion about Gretchen mixed with pure exhaustion. Piss happens. Most days, I deal.