Tofurkey, Cats, and a Kidney Stone – Thoughts from January 7, 2024

January 7, 2024

We’re already seven days into 2024 and this is my first Thoughts paper of the year. I have many things to talk about, but I just haven’t done it. Christmas and New Year were interesting. Patti and I were going to have tofurkey on Christmas Day but we were too sick. We had it on New Year’s Day instead. We ate it with other things that counteracted the vegan-ness of the tofurkey. I liked it. I think Patti tolerated it. It’s kind of like eating a diet version of something. Everything has way more salt than I normally eat. For the price we paid to get it, I was hoping for better. Once again, trying to recreate the meat experience is not as good as letting vegetables shine as they are.

One gift I got Patti years ago was a lion’s mane we could put on the cats’ heads. For some reason, we brought it out on Christmas Day. I would call it a gift for the cats, but it definitely was not. Patti put it on Willow’s head and she immediately tried to get it off. She shook her head and only shifted it so it covered half her face. Scout was the next victim. As soon as the thing was on her head, she tried to back away from it. When this didn’t work, she pawed at it until it came off. Patti tried to put it on Beatrix, but she was having none of it. She never actually ran away. She simply dodged every attempt to put it on her head.

On New Year’s Day, something else happened that hasn’t happened in years. Luckily, this time it wasn’t as severe as before. I was using the toilet in the middle of the night. Standing over the toilet, I thought I saw something sinking to the bottom. Just like I did years ago, I reached into the bowl and pulled out a small pebble. I must have felt it coming out, but I don’t remember it. For the second time in my life (or possibly the third), a kidney stone came out of my body in the only way it could. I took a picture, pointing at it for perspective. It was small compared to the first time. That’s probably why I didn’t really feel it. It just reminds me to drink more water. We should all be drinking more water.

I worked on organizing my office during my days off. This involved organizing all the toys I had stacked up in several areas. I bought these cubes on Amazon with my gift card from Patti. Gift cards are one of my favorite gifts. The cube stacks allowed me to stack much higher than I could before. I also got clear plastic shelves to put on the wall for things that don’t stack well. Those will go up on my next days off. It’s nice to walk into my office and not see piles of toys everywhere. Once I get the toys out of the way, I can organize my electronics, cords, and other non-toy things.

We had an unpleasant incidence with Luna “the love cat” recently. I first noticed it in and around the litter boxes, but it eventually was happening everywhere. Without beating around the bush, I’ll just tell you it was squirty poops. My grammar checker doesn’t want to acknowledge squirty poops, but I forced it into this paragraph. How do I know it was Luna? At first, I didn’t know who it was. As soon as I saw Luna’s butt, I knew she was the only suspect. The hardest part of dealing with them was the splattered nature of them. Unlike a regular poo, they cover a wide area with random blotches of crap. We eventually realized it was the new food we bought that was the culprit. We went back to their older and more expensive food.