Seriously, I don't even know where to begin. Things have been crazy busy and this last week was the worst of the year. I'm not even joking - even when things were at their worst with WarMan, I didn't feel as bad as I did this past week. Holy fuck.
Rather than try to list out all the crazy, I'll just start my narrative and bump around, stream-of-conscious like, as always.
The Minions Christmas Fund went really, really well. We had four people total shopping last Friday, including myself and my youngest daughter. I thought this would have us finished by 1 pm, but we went until 4 pm. This was an issue because our holiday party was at 6:30! I literally finished shopping, ran my daughter over to spend the night with her cousins, and then went to my moms, unloaded all the gifts, made a list of what gift went to which kiddo so I could be sure that the kids all had an equal number, and then ran out the door to the party.
After the shopping, I still had $120 left to spend on this family, for grocery and gas gift cards. I arrived at the party to find out that we had last minute donations totaling $210 extra. I wanted to cry. This is wonderful in that, yay, more presents, but hello, I had no time to shop! My best friend had gotten really ill, however, and canceled our Saturday lunch, so I spent all of Saturday morning purchasing things and then coming back and taking pictures of the haul, posting them on the facebook page, and then delivering! (My best friend ended up in the ER but is out now. I haven't had time to catch up with her yet, and I feel like shit about this.)
Oh, the good thing was that at the party, we actually acquired a second family to sponsor - a mom, dad and a 5 month old baby. So The extra donations went toward buying them a crap ton of diapers, formula and gift cards. I left the delivery points feeling very positive and upbeat about the program, and even more committed to participating every year, even if I am two states away.
THAT said, I am no longer committed to transporting my son (27 years old) to his birth family during the holidays. I was MAJORLY stressed out leading up to our trip, and the drive out to his grandmother's was treacherous and dangerous and put me way behind schedule, just as it does every year. Now, she is finally moving out of her remote farmhouse and into the city later this month, but it doesn't really matter to me. Either my son will visit in the summer, or I am not doing the transporting. If they wish to visit with him, they will coordinate and pick him up where I will be traveling to, you know? It was seriously a terrible time, I got blown into a snowbank and stuck on a remote country road, and it was only luck that allowed me to finally be able to free myself and get back to civilization. Even with AAA, it is too much to keep doing this sort of trip every year when I am already booked up to the max.
And seriously, FUCK MY EX HUSBAND WITH A CHAINSAW. He was unresponsive when trying to schedule the visit, not only with me, but with my oldest daughter AND my son. My kids were both frustrated and my daughter had to run herself ragged to make the visit with him happen. Then when he showed up, apparently he was under the impression that my son was sleeping over, which was not set up because he never got back to me. So overall, he only got to visit for a couple of hours and he was upset about it. Fuck him. I am no longer going to facilitate this either. If my son wants to make it happen, he can work it out. I was relatively hands off this year with that scheduling, but it was still a bunch of anxiety for my kids. Gah!
I managed to get two more transcripts completed for my Astronomy class today, out and into the mailbox. Only 7 more to go. Two I can't complete because the last quizzes aren't here. I'm not complaining. I am going to try to focus and send out two a day and have them all finished before Christmas. The Biology class specimens arrived the day I left for New York, and I got them unpacked and slapped into a big Rubbermaid tote when I got home. It's now sitting in my game room against the wall, all ready for the first week of class in Janauary. I have to order sheep brains still, and some squid. I have two kids coming next week for their safety class intro. Oh, and I freaking forgot to print out lab sheets earlier, so that needs to get onto my to do list.
I am still salty about my brother blowing off Christmas. We got some really wonderful photos of all the grandkids EXCEPT for his baby. So fucking frustrating. I left his daughter's present with my mom, but I brought his gift back to Maryland with me. I might send it to him (it's a Walmart gift card) eventually, but maybe not. It's kinda making me feel like there's a bad aura surrounding it now, and I don't know what to do with it.
My neighbor sent me a really nice Christmas card - this is the one we didn't know too well until our carbon monoxide detector went off at 2 am and we had to hang out in his living room until we got the all clear from the fire department. So I am going to send one back to him as well, and maybe get my daughter to make some of her famous zucchini bread too. I am not above just buying some store made cookies and putting them on a plate either. Depends on scheduling. lol
I took the two FeLV kittens in to the clinic today and they received another distemper shot. They are scheduled to go back in on January 5. We are going to keep them sequestered for now (they have been living in DarkKnight's bedroom) and then have them take another SNAP test on January 26. Some cats are able to fight off the infection and later test negative for FeLV. I really hope this happens - these boys are adorable. Anyway, if the SNAP test is negative, we'll pay out of pocket for the bloodwork to confirm things. Hopefully it all comes back clear and they can be adopted out.
If it comes back positive, then we are going to set up part of our new house to be just for FeLV cats. We were always discussing something like this, and now it has been cemented. I talked with my friend at the shelter, and we are going to work out an arrangement. For these two kitties, if they stay positive, they will be housed with us in "fospice" care until they eventually get ill and have to be euthanized. So the shelter will pay for all of their shots and routine care, but if they get pneumonia or something, they will not pay for extra treatments. I think that is more than fair. Moving forward with other kitties with FeLV, we are going to have a meeting later next Spring with the board and see about setting up a situation where we will take on all kittens with this diagnosis. Right now it doesn't happen often, but when it does, we want to be a resource, since our county doesn't do anything other than put them all to sleep. Ideally we would like to have a fospice situation for all of these kittens, but we're not sure if the county will be willing to do that. It may be just something we can offer for kittens that are already in foster homes and receiving care - not for drop offs.
However, we would like to be a resource for older cat surrenders who test positive. Again, fospice would be the best outcome, but again the shelter doesn't do that now and has no funds allocated. So we will have to see. It may be we only take on cats that are FeLV positive but are already spay/neutered, so the county doesn't have to pay for that. Or maybe we will pay for that out of pocket, if the cat is otherwise friendly and could live in our home amiably with the other positive cats.
That said, we are not going to have a ginormous space available to devote to these guys, but it will be more than the shelter has now - which is nothing. We're having lots of discussions here at home about the layout of the new place and how best to set things up. Right now the plan is out of the three bedrooms upstairs, when my daughter moves out in the summer, that room will be designated as the FeLV cat playroom. We are nixing the idea of a secret door between DarkKnight's office and his bedroom, and instead having the cat playroom linked to his office. That way, the FeLV cats will have two spaces to travel between in the house. We are going to do a secret door, but it will be a secret cat door.
We are going to make it small, but still decorated and trimmed out as a Tardis. lol We will probably connect a porthole up near the ceiling too.
We also will connect the playroom to the other room, which will be DarkKnight's bedroom. That will have a single closed clear tunnel running along the hallway up on the ceiling. That way, the FeLV cats have 3 rooms to spread out in, and they can have snuggles at night and attention during the day. However, all these spaces can also be closed off, if we need to isolate the populations to just one room. Since the playroom will be on the back side of the house, eventually we could build a catio out of the one window, and connect it to DarkKnight's office from the outside as well. That's a longer way off, however.
