who's the bad kitty now?

Last day of vacation and we're pretty ready to be home. We're tired, we're hot, we're grouchy and we all want to sleep in our own beds, for a change.

Nevermind that we ALMOST RAN OUT OF GAS on our last leg of the roadtrip...

We pull up in front of our still newish-to-us townhouse and we're all delighted to see our Edward Scissorhands-ish abode. J was talking about how much she missed our kitties and how she was looking forward to seeing them. She jumped out of the car and ran to our front door. I tried to grab a couple of random items, figuring it'd be less to lug in later.

The smiles of excitement on our faces, as our key was unlocking our front door, turned to utter disgust as we stepped into our home and took a big whiff of the hot, muggy, cat-urine infested air.

What the fuh...?

Our cats had sitters and were well fed and paid attention to while we were away but, somehow, this was not sufficient for them and they were angry. They were pissed. They pissed!

All over our dining room carpet.

And our living room carpet.

And our kitchen wood laminate flooring.

It was utterly disgusting. They'd never done this before.

We busted out the Nature's Miracle. We lit scented candles. We opened the windows and turned up the fans. After a few hours of cleaning and wiping down surfaces, our home smelled like Pineapple Cilantro candle. AND cat pee.

We'd been considering tearing up our carpet and installing wood laminate flooring on the entire downstairs living area, but that was to be next year's home improvement project. Should we consider doing that now? Or just borrow a friend's carpet shampooer? Or call a professional cleaner for the carpets?

We opted for the latter and selected a gay-friendly, environmentally-conscious carpet cleaning service to do the job. Karen found the concept of gay-friendly carpet cleaning to be a hoot, but hey, I don't want negative angry energy directed at me in my home, so we use gay-friendly services whenever possible. Besides, this way the money that we pay them won't later be used against us politically.

Well, the carpet cleaners came yesterday and -even though it smelled 100% better when our carpets were saturated with their nontoxic chemicals- the smell came back as soon as the carpets dried. Turns out that the angry urine invasion was pretty pervasive, plummetting deep below the carpet surface and through the pad underneath, then onto (into?) the sub-floor. This is a larger problem, we are told. This will require a tearing up of the carpet, discarding the pad beneath it, painting the affected area with a product called "KILLZ" (something every aspiring Buddhist should use, no doubt), then re-covering the floor. It looks like our wood laminate remodel will be happening much sooner than we'd originally intended.

In the meantime, the enviro-friendly carpet folks gave me some volcanic ash to sprinkle around and then vacuum up after several hours. Yes, volcanic ash. Who knows if this will help rid our home of the odor in the meantime. I do not understand at all how volcanic ash of all things will be plucking each and every odor particle from the air and taking it away forever.

We shall see.

insomniacs anonymous

I have insomnia.

Fierce, vicious insomnia.

I've had it on and off for years since high school (so, about 25 years) and, for the most part, I've learned to live with it. During the school year, I make the most of it and typically get a LOT of studying done between the hours of midnight and 4am. Sometimes people think I'm crazy. Which is fine, I guess, but the insomnia has become so normalized for me by now.

Sometimes I am completely incapable of making sleep happen until 6 or 7 am.

When I embark upon a group project at school, I have made it a habit of letting my groupmates know that they ought not be alarmed if they receive email from me at three in the morning or so. I learned the hard way that that sort of thing tends to freak some people out a little.

Here is a list of things I have tried in an attempt to rid myself of said insomnia (either permanently or temporarily - ya gotta take what you can get):

• warm bath
• hot tea, milk, and other warm beverages (without alcohol)
• alcohol (in varying quantities and temperatures)
• Chammomile
• Lavender
• Melatonin
• Valerian
• St. John's Wort
• reading
• thinking about something peaceful
• thinking about something boring
• several over-the-counter sleep aids, none of which worked
• Trazedone (kinda works, but takes too long to kick in)
• Ellavil (did not work AT ALL)
• one other lame Rx that did nothing Restoril
• Sonata (worked well most of the time)
• Valium (kinda worked)
• Ambien (got me to sleep, just didn't keep me there)
• Morphine (this worked!)

So, you see the problem. And even though I go to my doc and say that I wanna try this Lunestra stuff that I see advertised in my New Yorker or that I did okay with Sonata, or alternating Sonata and Ambien, they tell me no and write me a prescription for Trazedone. When I first picked this prescription up from the pharmacy, the pharmacist told me that I should be really careful if I get up in the middle of the night because this drug will make me so drowsy that it'll be dangerous for me to be at large! In my own home even!!!

This was so exciting for me to hear, I cannot even begin to describe. Hooray! Finally a drug that will conk me out completely so that I can have a peaceful night's sleep like the normal people do! I simply could not wait for evening to fall so that I could battle my insomnia - kapow, right in the kisser!

The kind pharmacist even suggested that I cut the pill in half and begin with a mere half dosage! It's that powerful, he tells me! I consider the possibilities. I so cannot wait to try this and I'm gonna take a whole one because I have a high tolerance and I hate cutting pills in half - they never divide perfectly evenly and this drives me crazy. I do not tell the pharmacist any of this, though. It is my own little secret.

I was nearly giddy with joy when I popped my first Trazedone at around 11pm. I crawled into bed and found a somewhat comfortable position while I waited for the magic drug to whisk me away into a wondrous sleep.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Some grueling two hours later, sleep finally remembered me and claimed me as one of her own. I did not feel like crap the next day and for that I am grateful. In two and a half weeks, I see my new doctor. Perhaps she will agree with me that perhaps a different, better, more effective sleeping pill is in my best interest.

I don't understand why they won't just give me Morphine to take for insomnia. The motherfucker works. And how.