Friday Morning, 6 am

Isn't there a song named something like that? Did the cat shuttle routine, and later saw tha an FB friend pointed out there is a 24-hour vet closer to home than the overnight clinic. Pumpkin would probably have been much better off there. I'm guessing that my vet did not refer me there because they are his competition.

The reason I did not go to the 24 hour clinic in the first place is:
1. It was the first vet I went to when I moved to CA, and they ripped me off for $400 in needless tests when I had no money.
2. I didn't know they were now a hugely expanded, fully staffed 24-hour hospital and the people who ripped me off are long gone.

I am not feeling good about this.

Also not feeling good about not taking out the pet insurance for $1200 a year, thinking I would never spend that much on the cats. So far Pumpkin has cost more than $5k since October.

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One more test to run at work, but I need IT again because their video streamer is not working for me. A video streamer is a device which takes a movie file and plays it over the network. You tune into it by IP address. The stream I need to use contains 16 programs in the one file. The device I'm testing takes each program and assigns it to a separate TV channel.

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Komen has reversed its decision and will continue funding Planned Parenthood cancer screenings. But it's too late to reverse the bad image, and in my case it opened my eyes to the fact that there are few people on the planet who are more pillars of conservatism than Komen chaircritter/fonder Nancy Brinker. The daughter of a real estate tycoon, her first husband was a Neiman Marcus exec who got her into an NM management training program, and she became a marketing exec for them. Three years after her divorce she married Norman Brinker, whose bio reads like a Type A+++ - a poor farm boy who built up a horse trading business, became an Olympic equestrian and polo player, and after serving in the Navy, he went into the restaurant business, working his way up to CEO of Jack in the Box. He sold his interest in that, founded Steak & Ale, which he built into a chain, which he sold to Pillsbury. He was VP of of their restaurant division, founded Bennigan's, and became head of Burger King. He left Pillsbury to take over Chili's. He is credited with inventing many major restaurant innovations, including the salad bar. Nancy was his 3rd wife, while they were married they were among George W Bush's top campaign contributors. They founded Komen together, and though divorced in 2003 and remarried, he remained on the board until his death in 2009. It was his money which funded Komen's start-up.

Nancy became Bush's ambassador to Hungary in 2001 until her divorce, and in 2007 Bush appointed her to the ambassador-level position Chief of Protocol, where she served until Obama took office.

There is no doubt she did wonders to raise awareness of breast cancer issues, she is a cancer survivor herself while her sister Susan Komen was not so lucky. But she is first and foremost a marketing genius, and I would call her the Steve Jobs of breast cancer. It would be interesting to see how much she has profited from the pink campaigns.

And this raises a question for me. Why do people donate $ per mile for their friends to walk in a crowd of pink, when the same $ would go a lot further directly donated to Planned Parenthood and the local cancer research facility?

Indian Dancers, and what they led me to

The anecdote starts with 16-year-old me on a stage at the Seattle Center in front of about 2,000 people. I was saying "Are the Indian dancers ready?" and getting a laugh. But I was serious.

I was MC of the second annual International Youth Friendship Festival, the brainchild of Ruth and Cliff Leisey of Seward Park, an affluent south Seattle neighborhood. My older sister was supposed to be up there, she had MCed the first festival, but she had won a scholarship to spend a year in Israel, and had mentioned that I had some stage experience, was reasonably articulate, and would not be nervous in front of a big audience. I had acted, sung and played in concert bands in front of big audiences since I was about 7. But I had never been a master of ceremonies.

The stage show part of the festival had started with the usual speeches, and it was my turn. I started to introduce the first act, but they were not ready. Nor was the second act. Third on the list was a troupe of Native American dancers, hence the laugh line which was not meant to be a laugh line.

I filled for maybe 3 minutes, and the first act was ready. I don't remember much about the program, except that one of the groups was about half a dozen singers and players of instruments who were very energetic, and had some catchy tunes and lyrics, some of which were written by one of the group members and a few were from the national organization they were part of: Up With People. I was impressed. I asked if they needed a trumpet player. They did. I joined the group. I was still in the group when I went to college that fall, and had been dating one of its members, a stunning redhead named Kitty Hepokowski.

We had performed at her church in the U district, after the event was over we got into an argument, she threw her keys at me, and I held onto them. The priest came in, and she told him I had her keys, he asked me to give them back so I did. And that was the end of my relationship with Kitty.

The next time I saw her, I was in a journalism class where we went to Olympia once or twice a week and were the actual state capitol reporters for newspapers which were either too far away or too poor (or both) to have someone on site. I was assigned the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin because the professor thought a city boy ought to learn how to report for a farm town paper. And because both the speaker of the house and the president pro-tem of the senate were from there. I did not have a car, so I bummed a ride with a classmate. Kitty was in the car too - she had become a volunteer for the handsome and charming Sen. Pete Francis, who proudly wore a vasectomy pin on his lapel.

I also was on the staff of the campus paper, and was assigned to cover U district affairs. One story was a continuing saga of some students, businessmen and neighbors who bought a house up around 52nd and University and turned it into a community center. One of the volunteers, Bob Schupe, I did not like at all, but he had done a lot of the plumbing and grunt work, and was named by the board to be the center's director. I went to do a formal interview (which was not all that formal, since we knew each other and I'd worked on the center quite a bit myself), and sitting on his lap when I arrived was Kitty. It turns out she had done a lot of volunteering, and was Sen. Pete's liaison to the project. She and Bob were engaged. She showed me the ring.

After about six months, I ran into her on the street, asked how Bob was, and she said he had dumped her. He was now engaged to another, slightly older, redhead named Colleen. The next time I saw Bob, he told me her name was Colleen Howard.

Yes, it was the same Colleen Howard I had gone to high school with, she was a year older than me, played the sax, and had helped me get into the UW concert band. I'd had a massive crush on her, but she always seemed to have a boyfriend. I was amazed she had hooked up with Bob, she was much more classy than that. I think they did actually get married.

I never saw Bob, Colleen or Kitty again.

But I did see the Leiseys.

They attended the oldest Protestant church in the city, on First Hill, and their pastor had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. When he gave his first sermon after recovering, they invited me to come with them. I remember the service well. The hymns were beautiful, but the congregation sang them without hearing the words. The church was very impressive, but the congregation was used to it, it had no impact on them. The sermon was not memorable, the pastor had not recovered his former zeal yet. I understand it took him a year.

A few years later I was in Seward Park, at the lakeside beach, swimming. When I went to the bath house to take a shower, there was no shower. The bath house had been converted into an art studio for kids, and Mrs. Leisey was the person who accomplished this. She was in there teaching kids how to spin pots and make ceramic coffee cups. She invited me to come home with her for lunch, and her husband Cliff gave me some home made cider. He told me that all I had to do to make my own was pour half a gallon of apple juice into a container, add a packet of yeast, and let it set in a cool place for 3 days.

And I think that was the last time I saw them.

I think that's enough for now.

State of the Cat

Pumpkin is home. He has nibbled some food, managed to get to the litterbox, but when he was done he just lied down in there. I extracted him.

They sent me home with insulin, he gets 2 shots a day, and an IV bag and a contraption for giving him 100ml of liquid subcutaneously every so often. He has an appointment for Tuesday.

I need to feed him by syringe if he doesn't eat on his own.

After an initial moment of curiosity, Domino has left him alone.

He started out lying in front of the food/water, with his head up. Then he ducked into the closet to lay down where it was dark. He has done this when he wasn't sick.

I am stressed.