Holy shit, I'm back!

Y'all probably thought I fell off a cliff or something, but I'm back! Lots of shit has been happening around the house!

Erick is going to be getting his CDL soon and will probably be on the road by December.



My abs would be fantastic though

I'm currently working two part time jobs and only sleeping 5 nights a week. To avoid waking up as Tyler Durden I'm turning in my two week notice tomorrow for my day job and scraping and begging extra days on my night CNA gig to make up for it. This way I will be able to sleep every night like a normal human again!

I've still been writing for Persephone magazine on the side every week, so hopefully if y'all have missed me you've been keeping up on that.

So, what else?

The wedding is currently on hold. Due to our finances and time we had to put it together we weren't going to get what we wanted. We decided instead to wait until the house gets paid off and go somewhere swank to do it.

We've abandoned all hope of owning chickens in DeKalb. And I am a bitter grumpy bitch about it.

Our yard is undergoing a bit of an overhaul, we had to cut down the mighty maple that loomed menacingly over our home and we're in the process of breaking it down into manageable logs that will keep us snuggly warm in our hopefully soon to be woodstove this fall. A girl can dream right?

The garden was just plowed and we have about half of it planted. Once I find wherever the fuck Erick lost the camera you'll get to see all the magic!

I'VE MISSED YOU ALL SO MUCH. WHO ELSE IS EXCITED?

Fall preperations

So things are starting to wind down here as Winter approaches. For those of you who don't read my weekly P-Mag article (shame on you!) I recently got a fig tree.It's so wee and cute! I have to protect it in the Winter since for some odd reason figs don't lose their fucking minds with joy at the sight of snow. Mr. Figglesworth is now nice and cozy in his winter pillowcase/garbage bag ensemble until Spring rolls around.

Inchelium Red

My other project this morning was garlic. I'd ordered three varieties from D Landreth Seed Co. (the oldest seed house in the US) Rose Du Val (a pink silverskin)

Inchelium Red (a large bulbed artichoke variety)

Rose

Gross. 

And another that wasn't in stock so they substituted  German Red. I have to say that the German Red didn't keep well at all, I hadn't had this garlic very long before I peeled off the outer skins to get at the cloves and found most of them were off and some even moldy. (I planted them anyway, we'll see if they grow)

It was also crazy foggy out today

I dug four trenches in my front raised bed, two for the Rose because the bulbs are full of small but plentiful cloves, and one for each other variety.
I dug down a few inches and spaced the cloves a few inches apart, then covered them back up. I plan on mulching a few inches with hay later on today. Hopefully when Spring rolls around I'll have an assload of garlic and figs. ONLY TIME SHALL TELL.

HEEE'S ALLIIIVVVE

Atticus that is. He's in the spare bedroom so we can monitor his urine output *just like at work! Only no I+O sheets!* We're all still gleeful and mildly baffled he's still with us, I still cannot say enough good things about our vet.

The kicker? 

The whole five day ordeal only cost us 400 bucks. 

I KNOW RIGHT. 

If I ever get hit by a bus I want them to take me there instead! At least I know that way someone will sit through the night with me and I won't be charged limbs.

I've also been looking up new things to forage, and this weekend I'm going to try my hand at cattails to make bread with. I wrote an article for P-Mag  this week about it and it's kind of amazing. There's an article on eattheweeds.com that I read much of the info for my article from that's superb, and I plan on using to wade into some wet areas around town this weekend. It's win win! Erick can play disc golf and I can nerd out over edible plants! 

The Amazing Atticus

So this week I noticed Atticus puking a little and straining to use the bathroom, and thinking it was nothing more than some constipation I dropped him off at the vet first thing in the morning.

Holy shit was I wrong.

It turns out he's had a blocked urethra and his bladder was completely full of bloody urine, to the point where his kidneys were shutting down. The cause? His run of the mill dry cat food. Our vet told us like, 80% of the cat foods on the market will cause things like this and play a direct role in why so many cats face kidney problems.

When I left work early to see him he was literally on death's doorstep, I had come to say goodbye because he was that far gone. He was on oxygen and totally unresponsive when I arrived, but after sitting for two hours just talking and petting him he started to come out of it a bit and respond. The amazing vet staff then cathed him and put him on IV fluids to flush the toxins that had been building in his teeny body. These people are like, serious. One woman stayed 5 hours overtime TOTALLY UNPAID to be there for him. They took shifts coming in at night to make sure he was okay.  I have never seen a group of people bust their ass so hard and care so much for an animal. Seriously. If I could plaster their logo on the side of my truck and tattoo it on my face I would.

They told me they thought he kept fighting because I was there, and that if I hadn't of come when I did he very well could have given up. He was fighting for us, to come home to us.

They had done all they could do for the night, so we put him in a kennel and said goodbye, not knowing if he'd even be alive in the morning.

He was. 

 I stopped at the vet after work to find him awake and upright. When I got there they'd told me he'd eaten just a little bit and offered to let me try feeding him. When he saw me he started purring and I spoon fed him wet food until the aid told me he actually needed to stop eating. He was still on IV fluids and a catheter, but they said he's doing better. At the absolute earliest

 he may come home sunday, but that's only if he can pee on his own when the catheter comes out. They said if I hadn't of shown up the other night at the vet he probably wouldn't have made it, and the aid thinks he held on through the night because I was there. She asked me to come back in the evenings to feed him. They told me when they got there in the morning they were expecting to find him dead and the woman who came in said she actually had to text a photo of him to the other aid so she'd believe her.

So while all this was going on I was sharing it with my friends on facebook, and something amazing started happening: 

People started flooding us with get well soon cards for him. 

People who didn't even have animals started doing it:

There were so many it was absolutely amazing:

*Update* They just keep coming! 

Her mom told me she called from a sleepover
to make sure we saw this. MY HEART, SHE MELTS. 

These are people I know in person. These are people who live across the country that I've never met in real life. The absolute outpouring of love and support has been overwhelming. There are times in life where bad things happen, things even worse than this; but having people circle the wagons and show nothing but pure kindness and love, it's too much. MY EYES ARE SWEATING SO MUCH. And you know what? It's helping. He's eating and alert and his blood work is back to normal. He's off his IV fluids and while he's not out of the woods yet, death collected one less cat this week. 

FUCK YEAH.