HARD TIMES

"He put hard times on Dusty Rhodes and his family. You don't know what hard times are daddy! Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work. They got four or five kids and can't pay their wages, can't buy their food. Hard times are when the auto workers are out of work and they tell em' go home. And hard times, are when a man works on a job thirty years, THIRTY YEARS! They give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say hey a computer took your place, Daddy! That's hard times! That's hard times! And Ric Flair, you put hard times on this country by taking Dusty Rhodes out. THAT'S HARD TIMES!!"

- Dusty Rhodes (the wrestler)

Hard times are when Dusty Rhodes has to seemingly pee out half his body weight out to get rid of all the excess glucose, but the urinary tract infection keeps it from happening so easily.

Seems like ever since we took in this cat, all I've been hearing from people is how sweet a cat he is. "Oh, isn't he a sweetie" and such. And I suppose this is true, in the definition generally used to describe Feline Americans. Dusty is pretty much the most laid-back, loving cat I've ever been around; he doesn't mind being picked up, he runs to the door when he hears it opening, and he even comes running when you call his name. It's always seemed that he is a creature born into the diabolical and devious body of a cat, but with the pure soul of a dog. Doesn't matter who or what you are, to Dusty the cat, you're all pretty much alright by him.
Thing is, the more scientific reasoning for him to be termed a "sweet" cat is because his bloodstream has so goddamn much sugar running through it. It all started kind of innocently. One day you notice little things, all, "say that cat sure does eat a lot." "Say, he sure drinks a lot of water." "Wow, that's the second time we've had to buy litter this month." At first, you chalk it up as some weird character flaw or some cute little thing he does. Then, you wonder if he hasn't stopped growing yet, and that you might have some sort of 75 pound cat-beast on your hands someday. But once we found out what the deal was, it wasn't weird, or cute, or funny. It fucking sucked. Dusty started lazing around a lot more, even by cat standards, and the intake and output of fluids escalated from curious to impressive, and finally to absolutely frightening. After things progressed to rapid weight loss, we finally figured out that something bad was going on and took him to the vet. And on August 28th, right around the same time another Dusty, Dvoracek, was being pronounced out for the year for the fourth straight season, Dusty Rhodes (the cat) was officially diagnosed with feline diabetes.
As of right now, we're a little over a week in, and it's been an uphill struggle, to say the least. Dusty's been up and down, behaving almost like the July 2009 version of himself for a while, then laying down under the table for an hour with a sad look on his face, followed by drinking water as though such a thing were about to be made illegal. We've had our own struggles as well, fudging up his first insulin injection and going through about five of the little lancet thingies you use to poke a hole in his ear to get one little blood sample. (For use on a glucometer, by the way, which was provided for basically nothing by some fine folks who have made it their thing to help out broke-asses like us who have found ourselves as the owners of sugarcats.) But we're getting the hang of it, (Or to be more accurate, Sarah is, because she's been doing most of the work relating to cat illness. I did do the dishes the other day, though.) and Dusty's in relatively good hands, I would say.
On the other hand, I'm really starting to lose faith in our vet. My inner cheapskate already had doubts when the neutering bill came to $280-something, (It only cost about $70 to spay my other cat at a different vet, and that's a wayyyy more invasive operation) but lately, i think my problem is this weird pathological thing the people up there have with always having to be right, while we always have to be wrong. When Sarah first took Dusty in and inquired about the diabeetus, the immediate response was "well, I had suspected that," I guess hoping that no one would think to go, "then why didn't you test him a month ago, asshole?" Today, after a pretty scary episode last night where Dusty's blood glucose reading was 440 before his shot and 360 after (what you want is something in the 100-200 range, and there shouldn't be that huge a difference within an hour or so) and Dusty seriously squatted down and peed for over five minutes, until the litter actually couldn't hold anymore liquid and the stuff just pooled up around him, the vet was called again. And rather than concern, Sarah was greeted more with hostility, being all but condemned as a charlatan and a fiend for such a sin as home blood testing, and the machine itself was immediately deemed "wonky" and inaccurate. Mind you, this is a week after they sent us home with about six photocopied pages about why it's important for people with diabetic cats to test at home, but why should they let a detail like that get in the way of a good opportunity to make someone feel bad? And when Sarah raised concerns that Dusty's insulin dose was too low, the vet seemed to immediately suggest that such an idea was so wrong, so insane, that they'd more than likely end up actually decreasing his dosage when all was said and done. Furthermore, the excessive peeing was attributed to excessive drinking, which was attributed to diarrhea, which was in no way related to insulin or glucose, so we were wrong again. You know, aside from that whole thing where diarrhea is pretty much a basic symptom of feline diabetes getting out of hand, which I guess they figured we didn't know, because they had just assumed we don't have the internet or can't read or something like that. Needless to say, we were sent home with instructions to increase his dosage of insulin, and with the vet kind of looking like an ass.
Anyway, Dusty's got a ways to go before he gets back to something truly resembling normal, but he's relatively fine now, and he was kicking it on the corner of the bed behind me, but he took off somewhere, because he actually moves around now that his shots have been closer to what he's actually needed. I'll update you, the internet, on any future developments, and someday, I might even update this damn thing with something other than an update on all the dang animals around here. We did just get a hamster though, so I promise nothing.

R.I.P. Dusty's Rhodes's Balls

So yeah, yesterday, we took the new cat to the shop to get his sexy parts removed. It came in at a cost of roughly $231 more than any previous cat neuterings I had known of had cost, but eh, Dusty's a good cat, and worthy of only the finest in ball-removal. He was pretty much wiped out for most of the day yesterday, but he's back to normal now, albeit a few grams lighter.



Meanwhile, Crackhouse still don't cotton to him none, so she's getting the run of the rest of the house, while Dusty stays locked up in here. We gotta try to get her claws capped pretty soon, but that's a terrifying proposal, so we're dragging the shit out of our feet on that one.



Meanwhile, there's fish-related goings-on, but first, a horrifying look into the world of the currently fishless 14-gallon tank. (Once again, R.I.P., two nameless otocinclus catfish) The other day, along with pulling out two fairly large Argentine swords (or were they Amazon swords? Or was one Amazon and another Argentine? God damn it.) for use in other tanks, (more on that in a second) I trimmed out this much dead plant material, plus a few handfuls more that went either in the kitchen or bathroom garbage cans:



And after all that, the damn thing still looks like this:



Off the top of my head, that's got one (massive) Amazon sword, one Argentine sword, three dwarf lillies, one absolutely goddamn gigantically huge aponegeton, (when I pulled it out to trim it, it was a good three feet from root to leaf tips) and an assortment of aponegetons and an anubias (I think that's what it is) tossed in as reclamation projects from other tanks, past and present, that don't have whatever sort of voodoo plant-growing magic that this tank has. Gotta be something in the water.

But yeah, the big stuff. Sarah finally got a couple of her underwater friends over here from the old homestead in Ada.


First, there's this five-gallon tank, featuring Boris the crowntail betta:



This picture doesn't really do him justice, because he is the goddamn craziest-looking fish I ever saw. He looks like something from one of those old 80's heavy metal album covers, all flying through the sky with lightning around him. Like he's something Dio would have to sword to death in a music video.



Yeeeeah. But anyway, he pretty much acts like he looks. He is like GODDAMMIT: The Fish. Like all he does is thrash around and eat worms and HATE. It is insane.

But the real coolness is this; a scheme that Sarah hatched months before we were all chillin' up in the same crib, but has finally come to fruition, with the addition of her two gallon tank and my shelves:



THE BETTA SHELF. Constructed from a bookshelf, three two-gallon tanks, one of those grow light things from Walmart, a handful of screws and tacks, and a chunk of that black cardboard backing that used to be attached to the back of the bookshelf. A finely tuned engine of animal husbandry if ever there was one.



On the left is Picasso, my damn-near year-old regular veil-tail betta, who's shown up in a few posts before; just scroll down, because I update like once a year, so if I last spoke of him in September, it should still be on the page. He has a little bulldog-face and is awesome.



On the right is Maurice, (The Fightin' Frenchy) Sarah's half-moon betta she picked up here a while back. He's awesome and looks like a watermelon under certain conditions.



In the middle is a brand-goddamn-new fish that Sarah got me as an early birfday present, Rufus. That's not a really good picture of him, because he's turned hella-pink ever since we got him out of that cup he was in, but I'm tired of messing with fish photos, so that's what you people will have to live with. But yeah, you better listen to this dude, because he knows what he's talking about. And remember to wind your watch.



In other news, I got an absolute shitload of photos and happenings over the last few decades that I've been meaning to throw up here, but never have. If I can ever figure out how to add one of those "click to read the rest" links to a post, I'll do some sort of massive clearinghouse sort of thing. Until then, I'll leave this with no explanation: