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12/29/04 -- 2:18 a.m.

Not sure what the context of this image is (click here), or where it came from originally, but it was described to me as "What Calvin would be like in the medication-happy year of 2004." Simple, hard-hitting, and well worth thinking about.

12/29/04 -- 1:56 a.m.

For those who are interested in such things, I've listed my fave albums of 2004 on the Music page.

12/06/04 -- 9:58 p.m.

Well, thankfully M's quickie bath of Axel yesterday did the trick, cleaning things up enough for Axel to finish the job. When I got home from work today, the house didn't smell like poop, and neither did the cat. So we've spent an enjoyable evening watching them skulk around the house, getting used to their new surroundings. Yay!!!!

12/05/04 -- 7:16 p.m.

Well, we moved the cats to the new house last night...(if anyone was wondering why there hasn't been a post in a month -- and I doubt there's anyone who's really wondering that, we've been moving into a new spread).

Hooboy...

Getting them in the cages was bad enough. Even with my sister's patented "drop them into the cat carriers on their butts" technique (which I had wrong, by the way -- they're supposed to go head-first), Axel managed to gash me about four times in the belly (which, yes, I know, sticks out too far and was just asking for it), and wrap every claw on his body around my left arm. Rose, for her part, went for the surgical strike, a nice single gash on my finger that bled for hours and hours. In retrospect, sedation would have been a fine idea, a fine idea, but I'm a trusting sort who thinks our cats can handle a little car ride. So in the end, it was my hubris that brought this foul fate down upon us...

We were prepared for the yowling and moaning during the drive, but we were in fear of one possibility: Axel, during his last visit to the vet, had proven himself a little ... weak in the bowels when the fear got too much for him. So we get about ten minutes into a thirty minute trip and the telltale stench of ... fear ... fills the car. Yep, Axel had used the bathroom in the cat carrier.

So there we are, with the windows down, cold air rushing in, and thoroughly unsedated cats hollerin' up a storm as we barrel up I-85 to their new home for roughly twenty minutes or so. We didn't know what else to do. We could just see ourselves stopping to take care of it then and watching Axel run into the woods or onto the road...

Finally we get too the new house and inspect the situation. Axel is just covered in his own filth -- literally, the entire bottom part of his body is just rancid. So we keep him out on the screened-in porch for a while, taking paper towels to him and nearly gagging, hoping he'd eventually clean himself a little, and finally once the cold got to be too much for us, we brought them inside. I grabbed Axel under his front arms, holding him away from me, and tried to make it inside. I accidentally kicked an empty paint bucket and sent it rattling off into the darkness. Axel, skittish in even the best of times despite his imposing size, immediately panicked and dug a rancid claw into my already shredded arm (needless to say, rubbing alcohol was used in vast quantities on the cuts shortly after).

So, out of better ideas, we constructed an elaborate fort of the laundry room involving bookshelves, boxes, and anything else we could find to keep the cats locked up -- it looked like the last line of defense against zombies trying to get into the house. All in the hope that Axel would get himself clean. It wasn't to be. Axel basically spent the night slinking around the laundry room, leaving kitty poop footprints wherever he could. The stench is just unbearable.

M has the day off today, so she tried putting Axel in an inch or two of water in the tub, but things had gotten caked on pretty good, like a good cement. In retrospect, we realized that we should have tried the tub thing last night, before he dried up. So we have a brand new house that smells like cat poop, and a cat that we can't let out of the laundry room, who -- understandably, really -- won't clean himself.

Who's ready to come over for a nice supper?

sigh.