Category: life

Last October, I bought a piano.

Attentive visitors to our house might have observed that certain of my dining room chairs and the underside of the dining room tablehave markings suspiciously similar in shape and size to the dentition of my beloved cat, Gjetost. Those of you who haven’t met her yet need to know that Gjetost is a snowshoe Siamese in a big way.

On the eve of the new piano’s delivery, I sat Gjetost down for a talk. I said, “Now, Gjetost, a piano is being delivered tomorrow. Pianos are made of wood, just like the dining room table that you sometimes enjoy nibbling. However, pianos are VERY expensive, so you’re not allowed to chew on it.”

She looked unimpressed, so I stressed, “Pianos are VERY, VERY expensive. Pianos cost more than cats.” Still uncertain that I was getting through to her, I continued, “This piano cost more than thirty cats. In fact, it cost more than three hundred cats.”

At that, Gjetost marched off in a huff. Her message was clear: I had stepped way over the line.

She was right, of course, so when she finally was willing to be addressed again, I groveled my apologies and said that of course I hadn’t meant to imply that value and cost were related, promising her that I knew she was an extraordinary bargain and was in fact worth more than three hundred pianos.

She seemed to have forgiven me within a few days, no bite marks have appeared on the piano so far, and I occasionally remind her that she’s worth more than three hundred pianos.

* * *In July, I took Gjetost and her big grey brother Norton to the vet for their annual checkups. Both were in apparent good health, except that Gjetost sometimes made a weird furball-alert sound that sounded like she was trying to clear something out of her nose or throat, and she’d been drooling a lot lately while napping. So, Dr. Benfatto opened her mouth to look for indications of trouble, and we both immediately saw something very, very wrong: she had angry-looking bumpiness on the back of her tongue, starting about an inch from the tip and going back as far as we could see.

Dr. B explained that weird lumps like this could be a number of things, including an auto-immune problem, an inflammatory disease, or allergies; or they could be tumors. She said from the look of the lumpiness, if it were anywhere else on her body, she would be almost certain it was cancer, but that tongues are weird. Diagnostic options were limited and lousy, so she took a blood sample, which didn’t tell us anything, put her on antibiotics for two weeks, hoping to either cure or rule out any kind of treatable infection. She also put her on Advantage, with the theory that perhaps it was flea-bite or -allergy related. Then she told me to talk over with Victoria how we would want to handle cancer, which is untreatable, barely manageable, and grim.

The antibiotics didn’t seem to do her any good, so the odds of this thing being cancer had gone up. As you can imagine, the anxiety level around here had also gone way up.

Biopsies on cat tongues are really difficult, painful, bloody messes. They often don’t yield useful information, and cancer in cats isn’t particularly treatable anyway. If it is cancer, the thing to do is manage it with prednisone and prepare for the end. Prednisone is also one of the first things to try for some of those other possible causes, unless it’s squamous cell carcinoma, in which case a different anti-inflammatory is sometimes helpful. However, squamous cell carcinoma is as horrible a diagnosis for a cat as it is for a human, and that drug is less likely to help the other possibilities, so we decided that the optimistic next step was to start her on prednisone and switch her to the other thing later if it didn’t help.

Two weeks later, Gjetost seemed to be a bit more energetic, and I thought her tongue might be looking a little better. Although the lumpy area didn’t seem to be any smaller, it was at least tongue-colored and much less angry looking. We continued the prednisone.

A week after that, I would have sworn that the lumpy area was looking smaller, but cat’s tongues are REALLY hard to examine, and I worried that I was seeing what I wanted to see. However, she also seemed to be gaining weight and energy, and my little burly girl was even showing renewed interest in crunchy treats. Also, the eye-goobers and butt-crumbs she’d had all her life had suddenly cleared up. Dr. B thought that all this made her think more and more that it was an allergy thing, and she suggested that we keep going with prednisone and bring her in a week later for a recheck, when it should be even more clear whether she was getting better.

Her recheck was Tuesday, and as soon as Dr. B opened her mouth, we both could see that Gjetost is doing WAY better. The lumpy area was considerably smaller, about the size of a dime, and for the first time, we could see that the rest of her tongue going back to her throat was normal, healthy tissue. Sure enough, she’s also gained half a pound, and she seems generally healthier and happier.

Dr. B was very pleased with her progress. She thinks it’s probably some kind of weird allergy thing, because none of the possible cancers would have responded as well as that. We’ll keep going with the prednisone until the lumps are either completely gone or the progress appears to plateau, then taper her off and see what happens next. Meanwhile, please keep doing whatever you’ve been doing for her, because she’s not completely out of the woods yet, but SOMETHING is helping.

And that is news worth three hundred pianos.

Blog mom Kimberly has tagged me with a meme. Memes, for those of you who don’t speak bloggish, are themes for blog-posts that get passed around among bloggers.

Now herewith the meme:

Total number of books I have owned: I cannot even begin to guess. Erma Bombeck once said that garage sales are for people who don’t move often enough. (Bear with me, this will all come together eventually.) Since I was born in 1965, I’ve had eleven addresses, and seven of them have been since college, which as for me as for many was when I switched from a library habit to a bookstore habit. Each time you move, if you pack yourself and pay for your own moving van (or make your own zillions of trips or whatever), you become more inspired than most people you know to get rid of your crap. Suddenly the clothes you haven’t worn for a few years but haven’t had the heart to toss, when they’re something you’d have to pack, move, and unpack, are easy to toss. The books that you’re pretty sure you’ll never reread or need for reference are a little harder to toss, but after you’ve lugged one or two U-Haul book boxes of them down several flights of stairs and begun to contemplate lugging them back up several more flights of stairs into the next dorm/apartment/whatever, you realize that pruning the collection is the moral thing to do.

Let’s not even try to figure out books I owned before college. Many.

Figure that I’ve gotten rid of at least three boxes of books each time I’ve moved, so I’ve probably owned about two dozen more boxes of books than currently share my home.

My collection at present is about 9 shelf-feet of novels, 3′ of poetry, 6′ of math and stats, 6′ of stats software and other software manuals, 6′ of music and music history (not counting scores and parts), 3′ of religion, 4′ of reference (mostly English and other languages), 2′ of humor, a foot of games/puzzles/misc, a foot of hymnals, a foot of DIY (“do it yourself” for non-UKers), 5′ of history (mainly political history of the last century), 12′ of cookbooks, 6′ of miscellaneous business topics like leadership, project management, facilitation, and international business customs, and a foot of whatever’s heaped next to my bed in quasi-active circulation.

So have I moved often enough or not? You be the judge.

The last book I bought: I’m not sure. I think it was a pair of books in March that had just been mentioned in the New York Times Sunday Magazine: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami in the context of a review of his most recent novel, which is something else I can’t remember; and A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, a memoir about growing up in a small Mennonite community in rural Manitoba (within a few hours’ drive of where I lived from third grade until college) and instead wanting desperately to be normal, whatever that is. I haven’t opened either of them yet because…

The last book I read: Hmmm…. isn’t that past tense? I can’t remember what I finished most recently. Children of God Go Bowling by fellow St. Olaf alumna Shannon Olsen, Pat Conroy’s My Losing Season (yes, Dad, you can have it back now), Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs, and Terry Gross’s All I Did Was Ask are in the heap to be reshelved, so it was probably one of those.

All of them were good, fun reads, except for Conroy’s, which was good reading but rather more of a project than his books usually are, at least for those of us who don’t much care for sports. I couldn’t make much sense of most of the endless basketball play-by-plays, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been for a book about basketball.

I’m currently reading something my hornist friend Alicia just lent me: The Fifth Woman, a murder mystery set in Sweden and Africa, translated from Swedish, by Henning Mankell. I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s quite good so far. Mankell’s mysteries are the latest rage in a certain set of freelancers in the Freeway Philharmonic. The books that musicians lend each other at gigs become a meme of sorts. A few years ago, Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan was all the rage, and I commend it to you, also.

I tend to read a bunch of books at once. Next to my bed is a Chinese novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, a book on political linguistics called Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, and a couple more I can’t think of just now.

For work, I’m slowly plowing through several books on leadership and project management. Ugh. I’m also currently reading several books in the Culture Shock series: China and Beijing. I just finished Great Britain and USA: The South. These are fantastic books on the differences among cultures, not travel guides as much as guides to appreciating the countless things that you will not understand and ways you will be oblivious when you take your own expectations abroad. The first one I read, years ago, was Culture Shock: Norway, and I was struck while reading it by two things: how where I grew up bore more resemblance to Norway than probably the rest of America, in terms of cultural expectations at least, and how the Singaporean author was teaching me more about Singapore than Norway by which things Norwegian struck her as meriting explanation.

Kimberly, to answer your unasked question, I don’t usually read cookbooks. I flip through them, look things up in them, and usually pluck them from the shelf at random and choose something for dinner almost at random. The cookbooks I have read, and would recommend for reading, are China Moon Cookbook and The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking by Barbara Tropp (unless you’re Chinese, this is not the Chinese food you know), The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen, which didn’t convert me permanently to vegetarianism but did change my concept of what a meal is, and The New Basics from the Silver Palate women.

Five books that mean a lot to me: An impossible question. Books themselves mean a lot to me. Novels you probably haven’t read that I would recommend without hesitation are O.E. Rølvåg’s Giants in the Earth, everything by Margaret Laurence, Fools Crow and anything else by James Welch. Among the better known works I’d recommend everything by Jane Austen and almost anything by Margaret Atwood, Madeleine L’Engle, and Willa Cather.

I would be lost without my American Heritage Dictionary; I have editions 2, 3, and 4. 2 is at my office, 3 is in the bedroom, and 4 has pride of place in the living room.

Lots of people have been influenced by the diary of Anne Frank, but have you read the complete edition, without all the editorial meddling by her father? It’s a different book entirely; many things that were cryptic or unbelievable in the famous edition make much more sense.

For incredibly controlled writing and powerful language, see Written on the Body and Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson, better known for the less impressive coming-out novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I have issues with her larger body of work, but these two are brilliant, meant not in the British sense of “groovy” but the American sense of “intellectually astonishing.”

Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their blogs: I’m supposed to tag other bloggers, but as I don’t know of any of my readership having blogs of your own, you’re going to have to tag yourselves. So here it is, a self-tagging kit to be used on the honor system:

If you read my blog, and you have a blog of your own, please ‘fess up in a comment below, include a link to your blog, consider yourself tagged, and meme away.