Amy’s Gripping Commentary

The first couple months of 2012 have been quite the ride… long story short I am single after almost eight years, resulting in being mostly homeless, haven’t felt too great and accidentally lost a bunch of weight during the anxiety of work and relationship woes, and now I’ve come out the other side. To get there I consumed a lot of drinks at bars and met up with some interesting people along the way, my work project was completed successfully, I bought a new wardrobe, and I found myself living with my best friend and also dating someone new and really enjoying myself. No idea how long the latter will last but it’s pretty fun for now! It’s looking good at least. Oh and I started drinking coffee.

I have had the rehab house for nearly two months now and so far it’s been gutted down to studs and now is being rebuilt. The new electric is nearly done, but everything else is pending… plumbing, HVAC, insulation, walls, floors, appliances, furnishings… all those things that make the house more than a shell. I’m glad I have a great place to stay in the interim because it’ll be awhile until it’s time to move in!

The animals are in flux. I hope to have Arliss and Clover move with me this week. The fosters are being scattered about to other homes. I see the dogs when I go feed the buns, but it’s hard not to sleep with a greyhound or Mr. Sensitive Walter-pup hogging the bed.

Today I’m relatively happy and I have hope. Most days have been trying but always still hopeful. A lot of friends, family, and coworkers have really come to my aid (seriously… even my boss offered to have me move in with her!) and I think that has made all the difference.

Here’s to a new house, coffee, first dates, and Manhattans!

Welcome to 2012!

First, Arliss let us live to see another year.

And now it’s her 12th birthday!

I had another request for my vegetarian crock pot chili recipe, so I thought I’d post it here:

2 small to medium onions, coarsely chopped
1 pkg Boca “ground beef” soy crumbles (14 oz)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small can chopped green chiles OR 4 tsp diced chiles in adobo sauce OR 3/4 cup finely diced green peppers
28 oz canned diced tomatoes
28+ oz canned black, kidney, great northern, or whatever beans
8 oz can tomato sauce
1 tsp ground cumin
1+ tbsp chili powder
salt and pepper to taste
Worcestershire and paprika… I just kind of throw it in, never really measured it!

Combine all ingredients in slow cooker on high for 4 hrs or low for 8 hrs. (The crock pot is forgiving so feel free to cook longer.) You can also pre-saute the onions, garlic, and spices and then put them in the crock pot. I think the recipe is great without the Boca crumbles too, but might call for more beans that way.

I like to serve with cornbread!

The pups are lined up head-to-butt on the couch twitching in their sleep. I heard a report at work this week from David that speedy Emmy finally caught that squirrel in the back yard… with bad results for the squirrel. Her face is a little scratched up too. Walter and David were rather disturbed by the scene!

Thanksgiving has come and gone (and it was tasty). Now we’re solidly in the holiday season. I feel like purchasing zero gifts and I don’t want anything, which is generally a good thing when it comes to saving money and not indulging in consumerism. I suppose there’s some element of economic crash if we all stopped shopping, but I think it would be a good move in this country at least. I didn’t share in the outrage many people online expressed about Black Friday shopping starting early or even about holiday decor going up too early in stores. I really don’t care if there are decorations before Thanksgiving. If you feel retail is pushing you, don’t open your wallet. Big deal.

I think I’d like to put up a tree this year, especially since I collected so many ornaments while I was abroad last year, but I’m not sure we have room. There’s a foster rabbit in the usual tree spot and clutter tries to take over any leftover real estate around here.

Just heard the unemployment rate is down to 8.6%, the lowest in 2.5 years. Seems somewhat positive.

Bit of a PSA: here’s where you can opt out of receiving telephone books. My bunnies eat them but they can’t keep up with the supply.

Cute link of “grammar” gifts like air quote mittens and punctuation mark lamps. (But don’t buy me anything.

I made a tortilla soup last week that was yummy, based on two other recipes. My version:

Tortilla Soup

vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 teaspoons chili powder
1-2 tablespoons ground cumin
2 tablespoons canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, minced
14 oz can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
1 can black beans, undrained
2 quarts vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste
1 can whole kernel corn
2 avocados, peeled/pitted/cut into chunks or slices

Saute the onion in oil in a large soup pot. Stir in garlic, chili powder and cumin, and chili peppers, cooking until onions are tender and spices are fragrant. Mix in the tomatoes, pour in broth and black beans, and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer 30 minutes.
Mix corn and avocado chunks into the soup, and continue cooking 5-10 minutes. Serve in bowls over tortilla chips, topping with cheese.

Ms. Arliss knows how to sleep without regard to her prey status. Either she figures Clover will protect her, or she’s too deaf and blind to know what’s going on around her, or more likely, she just doesn’t give a shit anymore. (That’s her approach to litterbox use now, too, though I’ve been scolded for not Photoshopping out her poops!)

This was my first time washing a dog! I always had a groomer take care of Casper’s fluffs.

Emmy wasn’t thrilled but she liked the treats that came with the bath bucket.

I am in a mood for which I don’t really have a good source. Probably just working too much and dealing with too many @ssholes. (Note my mood is cranky enough that I tolerate incomplete sentences.) Anyway, this picture is the truth and I’m glad it came up in my search. I haven’t seen it in awhile. Isn’t today supposed to be lucky or something? Should I buy 11 lottery tickets? I’m more likely to clean 11 litterboxes.

From NatalieDee.com.

Also: Emmy is still wearing her voting sticker from Tuesday.

This frosty morning deserves a cute lil foster bunny to give us warm fuzzy feelings. Meet Perry Ellis, a wobbly little guy who has come a long way after being saved from an animal cruelty case a few months ago! He was named for his smart accessorizing.

I am impressed with this year’s I Vote stickers. I wore it on my sweater all day yesterday and stuck it to Emmy when I got home, and it’s still there this morning.

Clover’s belly is looking great! I couldn’t really see what was going on with all the fluffy new fur, so the vet shaved it again today. More cleaning and SSD for now, then monitor for future abscesses.

Went on vacation a couple weeks ago with my mom and Emmy. Emmy likes hotel beds and condo couches just fine. I got a sunburn.

I’m also putting my name on the NaBloPoMo list again, though it’s a shadow of its former self with a new hosting location and no categories and prizes that, well, seem more promotional for authors (blogs over books! this month at least) than community-donated. I need some way to weed out total vapidity, and being on BlogHer doesn’t really excite me in the first place. In years past I enjoyed finding other blogs by writers who shared my Myers-Briggs type or took pictures of the contents of their refrigerators. Anyway, I don’t have as much time to read the webz anymore but hopefully it’ll get me to post more often this month. November starts a depressing winter season so I need something to look forward to! I will try not to rant about work every day.

Note: Emmy fell down the back steps yesterday and re-injured her leg that just had us at the emergency vet last weekend. Well, all her legs this time. She’s trotting about normally now but her collection of bloody cuts and bruises has increased significantly. She is kind of like a giraffe: leggy, awkward, and not meant to use stairs.

I spent five or six hours at the emergency vet today with Emmy, who hurt her foot/leg yesterday while on squirrel patrol in the yard. It’s not broken (unless the radiologist sees more than the emergency vet did), but her foot is swollen and she’s limping. She scrapes up her feet and legs a lot in the yard, but this is the first time her limping lasted more than an hour. It’s been over 24 now. She has a slight fever and is resting a lot. I’m glad it’s not worse!

Meanwhile, I had planned to go to work all day but those plans were scuttled. I did some work at the vet during the long waits and now I’m still plugging away at reports here at home. Last week I was in a four-day project at work that did not allow me to get normal work done, and the previous week I was on vacation, so I feel VERY behind. Someday I’ll catch up. (I’ve been saying that for years.)

My mom had a scary medical incident a few days ago and we are all grateful she’s home and feeling good now!!

Not much else to report. I rode my bike to the Irvington Halloween Festival this weekend (funnel cake!! Did you know there is different batter for an elephant ear, which has cinnamon sugar, while the funnel cake gets powdered sugar?) and I’m working working working. Clover continues to heal. Happy Halloween tomorrow! I haven’t busted into the candy yet.

I went on vacation last week (hooray sunshine) and Clover and Arliss’ former staff took charge of the dynamic duo. Arliss apparently held audience with several worshippers. Clover continued his healing, and he had a checkup with a vet in the Cincy area. (Note: Arliss charged the clinic cat and put him in his place.) The vet said she thought Clover had been bitten by a brown recluse spider, based on having seen similar wounds in a couple of small, fat dogs. She thought his extra fat may have protected his organs and saved him.

The wound is healing extremely well, especially along the bottom. The top margin still has some pus forming but my vet saw him again today and said he’s doing excellent and decided not to surgically repair anything after all.

Pic from Oct 23:

I’m not sure my vet thinks it was a brown recluse, but in any case I saw a sudden influx of brown spiders in our crawlspace/finished basement area around the time Clover became ill. Now that we were on the hunt for what might have hurt him, we put out some glue traps and I found a couple dead spiders to examine:

It’s now looking like it’s a wolf spider, which is great in that it’s not an infestation of brown recluses (!), but that doesn’t mean it’s all fun and games because 1. we’re still not sure what injured Clover and there could still be a renegade creature in the house, and 2. wolf spiders aren’t a whole lot better. The ones I’ve seen haven’t been big or hairy, so I didn’t consider that’s what they were. Except… they’re probably all babies and look out when the rest of them grow up. UGHHHH. Also, apparently they bite and are poisonous too… maybe not so bad for humans, but certainly a problem for a little bunny.

Side note: David placed spider glue traps in the bunny area while the bunnies and I were gone, and when I brought them home, Clover promptly got stuck in the trap. Olive oil works great to free bunnies from glue traps, in case you wondered.

So I guess it’s time to call an exterminator. I hesitated when we thought it might be brown recluses, because I read that when you spray you just kill their food and then they become more aggressive! But if it’s truly an infestation we have to do something. And it better be before any wolf spiders grow up to full, hairy size. I remember them from camp when I was a kid and OH MY GOD you may as well let a thousand tarantulas loose in my house.

As described earlier, Clover had a big cleanup of his huge abscess at the vet on Monday. I don’t know WHY he’s doing so well, but he’s (mostly) eating and seems to be pretty comfortable. He and Arliss came home yesterday. He’s on penicillin injections and I need to clean the belly area daily, but otherwise we just wait and see and let him heal. It seems like he should be in shock or dead to look at this, but the vet (and let me give a shout out here to her, Angela Lennox of Avian and Exotic Animal Clinic in NW Indy) says the nerve endings at the periphery died off when the tissue necrotized, so he doesn’t seem to notice all this drama. He is messing with the drain a little bit (the tubing that holds open the hole near his elbow) but we’ll be removing that soon.

Barring more pus forming, we can either let all this granulate in over the next several weeks, or go in after a week or so to surgically help it along with the loose skin he has after losing some weight. It’s likely to need surgical help to encourage it to heal anyway where the edges are not well connected. For now, let’s hope he continues to feel good and eat well and be a good patient.

He’s not even on pain meds right now! But he’s been squinting his eyes a bit, so I think I’m going to put him back on an NSAID for discomfort.

This is how it looked yesterday when I picked him up at the vet:

In a previous post I showed Clover bunny’s belly with a large painful bruise appearance that went necrotic. He’s also been limping on one front leg. He started eating again last Thursday (he’s been on meds and syringe feeding for awhile now) and as of this weekend was feeling himself again, even running to greet me when I came in the room, although his front left elbow swelled up to golf ball size. And while he lost a lot of weight, he needed to lose weight after pigging out on his pal Arliss’ food the last several months, so he’s actually back to an appropriate size for a mini-rex (I used to call him maxi-rex).

He’s been back to the vet several times and I was happy that the edges of the bizarre wound were finally defined–no more dying tissue, which left us with an area we could treat or work with. One plan was to surgically remove the large dead area and stitch the skin closed, and due to losing a sixth of his weight since May, he needed a bit of a tummy tuck anyway so there was extra skin to work with. Others suggested letting it be a ‘natural bandage’ and have it heal on its own.

Several rabbit experts and vets have seen the pictures over the past couple of weeks and possible causes were posited as a burn, squeezing too hard during recent bladder expression, pooling/contaminated sub-q fluids that killed the vascular supply to the area, or a traumatic injury like being kicked. None of these seemed to fit well and some were basically impossible.

This is how it looked Sunday morning, which is gross but an improvement since it seemed to have stopped getting worse and he felt so much better. The mess at his mouth is because he needs a napkin when I give him meds and food!

But today he saw the vet and we found out what it was… a giant abscess. Squeezing on the ‘swollen’ elbow causes pus to come out his belly area. It’s a big awful mess and now he has a giant open area on the belly which can’t really be stitched shut because of how extensive the abscess is. Nor can it all be excised because it’s so large. He has a drain in it but he’s likely to chew it out.

Clover needs lots of good wishes. The aftercare is going to be hard and the prognosis is difficult for any abscess that can’t be adequately removed and flushed. He also did poorly with anesthesia and had a really traumatic day on top of this horrible injury.

Ms. Arliss will tell him to buck up, I’m sure.

Updated picture 06 Oct 11: have been back to the vet a couple times. Still up in the air about surgery but as it opens I am finding it harder to feel like I’m helping him (and experiencing a weak stomach too). He’s not eating anything but greens so several times a day I am syringing food and several medicines. I worry about hurting him, though at least he’s getting around better now. I wish he would eat.

Also last night my little piggy buddy Frisco died. He’s been sick a long time but had a lot of good days. He passed relatively peacefully on a day when he woke up squeaky and enjoyed his greens.

I think this might be the first time in twenty years I didn’t have a guinea pig.
——————————————
02 Oct 11

Poor Clover (Arliss’ buddy) was in the hospital two weeks ago for bladder sludge (minerals in the urine that accumulate as crystals and cause him to “pee sand”) and then last week went in for this horrible bruise thing on his belly that has turned into dead tissue. I’m mostly posting it so I can link to it from another bunny list to get some opinions, but please keep him in your thoughts because it looks like he’ll need surgery this week to excise the necrotic portion. Also he is barely eating, poor little guy.