the cats have been given new names. au revoir to wonderkitty and batcat, and hi how are ya to Squinty McOneEye and The Goat.

it is the days of the injured eyeball in our house. miss fergusson the guinea pig was first. she bonked her eyeball on something or other (piece of hay? her own foot?) and has a corneal ulcer. that of course we only noticed on friday night at 8pm. so we were off to a minimum $97 trip to the penn vet school's ER where we had to wait 2.5 hours and see the poor piggy manhandled by the triage nurse. she got an eye stain and two bottles of eye drops, and we were out of there $140 poorer.

exactly a week later, we notice that wonderkitty's left eye is all squinty. we capture her and take a closer look. don't see any scratches or ulcers, so decide she can wait a few days, and hey, if she looses her eye because of the wait, we'll get her a jaunty eye-patch. by sunday there was green gunk coming draining out, so on monday night we drive her to the vets, with her meowing pitifully and shivering all the way.

he can't see what could have caused it, but agrees that the green gunk is not a good sign, and sends us off with a bottle of eyedrops for her. so now we've got two animals that get eye drops 3x/day.

batcat has gotten her new name because she eats absolutely everything. we've known for a while that she has a tendency to chew on plastic, but i didn't think she was actually *swallowing* it til sunday, when i discovered a pile of kitty throw-up that contained: 2 pieces of clear plastic, as might be found wrapped around a new jar of mustard; 1 piece of red plastic wrap from the engagement gift my mom gave us; 2 pieces of yellow ribbon from the same gift; one small bit of bubblewrap.

field field field

19 May 2005 - 5:43 pm

today's perfectly normal and harmless word that suddenly looks foreign and like it can't possibly mean anything: field.

does this happen to anyone else? when you look at a word too much and suddenly it doesn't look at all like a word of english, and you can't fathom that that combination of letters could possibly mean anything, much less what it actually does mean? this happens to me periodically, and is always caused by having to type/read/otherwise think about a particular word too much. today's weirdness was due to some issues i was having trying to format the page numbers and figure captions in the tiny sliver of my dissertation that i've written thus far. for some reason, instead of seeing the actual page numbers, i was seeing {PAGE}. no matter what i did, cut, paste, open, close, undo, redo, pray, curse, i couldn't get the actual page number to appear. finally i did what i should have done from the beginning and right-clicked on it and discovered "toggle field codes." clicked that and voila! all is well and i have my page numbers back.

anyhow, before i discovered this toggle magic, i was searching through micr0s0ft's help pages for help on fields (in vain, of course), and had to read the word 'field' too many times. in fact, it's still all wonky: field field field. it's like i've forgotten how to read.

ok, enough of my brain not working. onto wedding plans. like you care. karl and i have decided to get married in august (yes, of this year). click back one entry for reasons why. anyway, this means that we have a LOT TO DO and VERY LITTLE TIME to do it in. and all in a summer when i'm supposed to be writing that pesky little dissertation. and see above for how that's going.

one thing we did get done is pick and order a new engagement ring. again, click back for why there's a new one at all. we had basically picked it last week, but had to go back this week to size my finger and to officially order it. i had psyched myself up for them to say it would be a 10 day or 2 week wait, so was disappointed when they said 4-6 weeks. sigh... i know that's not that long in the scheme of things, but in the tradition of newly engaged ladies all over, i want to wear it! so that i'm publicly engaged, if you know what i mean.

of course, i have issues about the ring, in the same way that i had issues about getting married at all. did i even want a ring? i mean, an engagement ring is pretty much the ultimate in unnecessary extravagance. and we certainly have better things to spend the money on. like, say, our house? but on the other hand, i am very much like, what are those birds that like shiny things? magpies? very much like a magpie, and can't resist shiny sparkly things. so as much as i try to talk myself out of wanting a diamond ring, i'm mesmerized by sparkle. so sum me.

in non wedding, non dissertation news (is there any such thing these days?) there was a crazy shirtless homeless guy on steps of the house next door when i got back from the barn today. he was carefully arranging his blanket and shoes on the sidewalk in front of him, and talking crazy to himself. i was a bit wary of him, especially when he got up off his step and wandered a bit closer to my house, and faced the fence that's between my house and the house he was camping out at. it looked for all the world like he was going to whip it out and use the fence as a toilet, and i was not looking forward to having to either pretend to ignore him peeing in totally not secluded public in broad daylight, or to say something to him along the lines of "dude, not so much with the peeing by my house, yeah?"

i was wondering whether i should call the police and get him hauled away, but as i left for school, i thought better of it and decided that while he couldn't be making a permanent home on the steps of the ambiguously abandoned* house next door, that he could certainly be allowed to enjoy the kickass spring day that was today, and who the hell am i that i should think of denying him a nice afternoon of sunning himself on a west philadelphia sidewalk?

*this house has many features of one that is abandoned: no obvious inhabitants entering or leaving, property not in the best of shape, etc. but it also has some mysterious features of a house that is *not* abandoned: without fail each night a light comes on in one of the 2nd floor rooms, and a few months ago when some graffiti appeared on the front facade, it was only a few weeks til it was removed. but, the light that comes on is always the same one. and there are never any others that come on. so, it is unclear. and like a small-town child who is afraid to go into the yard of the big scary house on the outskirts of town, i don't particularly want to knock on the front door and see if i have neighbors to befriend.