At work we have a small kitchen/lunchroom where I eat most days. It’s nice because there’s a refrigerator and two microwaves so I can bring whatever leftovers my kids think they're too good for and roll the dice by choking them down over the hour I take for my lunch. In case you don’t know I’m a human garbage disposal. I have only three rules about leftovers:
1) If meat has turned green I will not eat it. Gray is acceptable.
2) If it’s growing, it’s going…to the trash. This is why I always throw away bleu cheese.
3) If it stinks, me thinks…it’s going to the trash. This is why I always throw away bleu cheese.
Outside of those simple rules I will eat pretty much anything. I don’t have a time limit (yes, week old gray meat is fine by me). The people I eat with often get confused about my rules. Sue, who is likely to say just about anything, often says I eat moldy food. I don’t. I will, however, argue til I’m blue in the face that you can eat refrigerated eggs months and MONTHS after their printed expiration date.
Well, there are a few rules in the lunch room that are loose and sometimes broken. One rule is that you are not to microwave fish. I get it. Fish stinks. But sometimes it’s Thursday and your wife made a tuna casserole on Sunday so you’re running out of opportunties to eat this stuff before it starts violating rules 1-3 above. Sorry but my rules supercede your community rules, lunch room.
One of the ladies I work and eat with, we’ll call her “Jan O.” because that’s her name, has some idiosyncrasies. One of her quirks is that she literally gags at the thought of peanut butter and jelly together. She claims she has been like this since she was a little girl. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. She doesn’t like the smell of peanut butter mixed with jelly, she hates the idea that someone markets the peanut butter and jelly swirl in a single jar. It’s weird, but we like “Jan O.” so we have fun with it and we don’t make her puke by swirling the two together right in front of her.
Speaking of jelly…and “Kristina Solberg” this is where you might not want to read any further…my wife’s cat started looking weird a few weeks ago. She is an outdoor cat named Scout who has access to the laundry room and garage so it’s not like we’re petting her every day and hearing her stories about the dramas in the backyard. Well I looked at her a few weeks ago and there in the middle of her forehead right above her eyes was this swirled, flattened mass of fur. I touched it and it was hard. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. Taela looked at her and we were just stumped. It was very hard and all the fur in that area was kind of glued into this flat mat.
Well, we didn’t do anything about it. I hypothesized that, because she is friendly and because the Russians that share part of a fence with us have really weird, sometimes cruel, kids, maybe someone had intentionally glued her fur…for coming into their yard? I don’t know. Well, about a week ago I noticed the flap of fur had peeled up a bit so I pulled it off. Under it was short fur that I figured was regrowing to fill in the spot that had been affected. Great. All better. I did examine the fur I had extricated and found that it looked like cowhide and smelled funky.
Well, two nights ago I went to the garage to get something (beer) and looked down. There was a pinkish spot where the hard mass had been. Huh? Yeah, pinkish. Kind of like the filling in a cherry pie. I picked up the cat and called Taela over. The kids came running too. I said something like “it looks like jelly, do you think someone is really messing with her and put jelly on her fur?” Caleb, my 7 year old, said “yeah, that does look like jelly.” I was about to bury my nose in and smell it when Taela (being the nurse that she is) pushed on the forehead right next to the “jelly”. More jelly started squishing out of the jelly hole! Imagine taking a jelly donut and squeezing it in your hand. I’m talking gooey, pinkish jelly glopping out of this cat’s face. Scout! Why do you have so much jelly in your face?
Well, it turned out the veterinarian didn’t think the jelly was jelly at all. It wasn’t jam either. No, it wasn’t preserves of any kind. It was blood mixed with pus. How glad am I that I didn’t dive in to smell it? Very. $260 later the cat has a drain in her face and a cone on her neck. Poor Scout. Poor us! Feline facial drains ain’t free!
The moral of the story is when your cat comes to you and looks like its face has been hit with a hammer, it’s likely that a raccoon has buried its claw in there and it’s going to get infected. Don’t wait for the jelly filling to tell you something’s wrong.
3 comments:
This was awesome. You're getting really, really good at this.
I agree with Tod. Nicely done. Also, I hope folks go back and read your previous post "The Chive", because it was very funny indeed. Becky H
What can I say? My muse is pus-blood squirting out of my pet's forehead.
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