Protected: Now Kitty is Ignoring Me
Okay, I took a little tiny bit of creative license with the title of my post. My cat, Ollie, is actually male and he is neutered, not spayed. “Neutered” just doesn’t have the right sound. Fortunately, I am not planning to apply to veterinary school any time soon. Or any time for that matter. I’ve had enough advanced education in my life. I absolutely love my job. It’s a good thing I didn’t fully know what I was getting into with graduate school because if I’d known, I probably would have skipped getting a Ph.D.
But back to another infertile member of the family, Oliie the cat. Ollie has been seeking a LOT of attention from me lately. He climbs up on me to purr and sleep, several times a morning, and what I mean by the morning is any time followed by the letters “am.” Ollie is exacerbating my sleep problems by waking me up a lot. He is also warm, which compounds my hot flashes.
Since Ollie has treated John as his favorite for years, I have been perplexed by this change in his habits. At first, I thought it was because he is getting older and has a number of ailments. I thought that maybe he is just needing more attention from every body. This is true, to a certain extent as he has been asking for more attention from John as well. John thinks Ollie is actually feeling better from his liver medicine (he has a liver disease, pancreatitis, and hyperthyroidism) so he has been seeking more attention. The hyperthyroidism also makes him hungrier so he is bugging us for food more frequently. (And yes, there is a treatment for hyperthyroidism but we tried the cheap route, twice daily medication, and he was unable to tolerate it. The alternative treatment costs $1000. We just paid $1500 in diagnostic tests to find out about all of these ailments so we need a couple of weeks to recover.)
I have another hypothesis as to why I have become Ollie’s favorite. You know how cats love to be warm? How they lie in the sun in the summer and on the heater vents in the winter? I think the cat is seeking me out because of my hot flashes!
I do love my kitty but perhaps I will start sleeping with an ice pack on my chest to discourage him.
Another time I tried to turn Ollie into a girl. I put a tiara on him to try to submit a photo to the site, “Cute Overload.” Then I never sent it in because I was embarrassed about trying to take a funny cat picture.
Yesterday, I attended the Mass of All Souls at the St. James Cathedral Cathedral. My mom is a member of the choir and they sang Mozart’s Requiem, along with a small orchestra. Joanna, a commenter on this blog and good friend of my mom’s, is also in the choir. My friend, Lisa accompanied me. We had a nice dinner before hand and then went off to church. The mass was beautiful and the incense was tolerable. Usually it sends me into a spasm of coughing but this time, I just coughed a little. I also had to admit that the swirling smoke emitted from the incense holder as Father Ryan swung it back and forth was mesmerizing.
Lisa and I both come from musical families. We both played classical flute when we were younger but went on to other pursuits. Lisa stayed in the arts, though. She is an author of books for children and youth. I don’t know how she felt during the mass, but while I was listening to the beautiful and powerful music, I remembered how exciting it was to perform music in an orchestra. I kind of missed it but it was mostly just a very positive feeling of nostalgia.
I had a wonderful evening but it went pretty late, at least for me, even for a Friday night. So I’m a bit brain dead today but there’s still space in my brain for happy memories of a lovely evening.
My family gets home later than usual tonight. I decided to use the time to make room in the vegetable bin by cooking a bunch of vegetables. My original plan was to serve all of them with the main entree tonight (Italian chicken sausages). I roasted cauliflower and semi circles of delicata squash with a drizzle of olive oil and a little salt. I also sauteed some chard with shallots.
I still have the chard with shallots. They are untouched. The rest of the vegetables are in my stomach. It started by my looking at one of those little cooked crescents of squash. My massage therapist, Jann grew it and gave it to me. Heaven, every crescent of it. Then I thought, “That cauliflower looks pretty good. It was a small head and I’m really the only one in the family who likes it anyway.” So I ate that.
Now I’m a little full but I still have 45 minutes to get hungry again for a sausage and some chard. Somehow I think I will work up an adequate appetite.
Also ravenous, but not just today, is my cat, Ollie. He has hyperthyroidism and we are still trying to get it treated successfully. This gives him a large appetite and also makes him run around the house at times, in a seemingly manic state. This morning, he climbed into bed with me. He was sweet and snuggly. I gave him a lot of attention. Then he put his paw on my breast and put out his claws slightly, like he does when he wants to play. I thought, “I wonder if he could get through my nightgown, my skin, and the plastic tissue expander? I thought that he probably couldn’t but was not entirely thrilled with the idea of springing a leak in the expander. So I shifted my weight a little and remonstrated, “Kitty!”
You will not believe what he did next. He took a playful bite at my breast, not just once but twice! He’s never done that before in the 11 years he’s lived with us. I wondered why this was the first time. Maybe this is crazy, but I think when he reached out his paw, he was confused by how hard my temporary breast is. It’s a bag full of saltwater, under my skin, after all. Maybe he thought it was my elbow or something.
Now Ollie’s eating greenery from a vase of flowers on the table. Now that’s something he’s done many times before. But a fake breast? Maybe he has another illness. With humans, habitually eating items that are not food is called, “pica.” Maybe he has pica. I’d leave you on this note, but I have a funny pica story.
When I was on internship (a one year clinical position that was required to finish my Ph.D. in clinical psychology), we had a morning meeting one day to assign cases to the interns. This was a normal thing that we did every time we had clinic duty. The referral questions were written down on a phone message by the clinic secretary, along with the patient’s name and age. There was a 4 year-old coming in for an evaluation. The supervising psychologist read the secretary’s notes aloud, “Eats couch.” I said, “I’ll take the couch eater!” No one else in the group liked preschool aged children like I do, so my preference was uncontested. Yes, it was my first and only pica case.
Chew on that.
Protected: Family Photo Session
Protected: Spooky!
Protected: Why I Wear Heels
This is my new soup recipe. It is super good, I think. John and my father-in-law, Don agree. In fact it is so good that it cured my fear of orange caused by the Oompa Loompa hair dying incident and the Wonky Wonka boob that resulted from surgery #5.
Note: Unless otherwise described, I use a fairly large dice because I like to be both rustic and lazy.
Soup stock (adapted from Tom Colicchio’s turkey stock recipe)
1-2 tablespoons butter
2 onions, diced
1 cup carrots, peeled and diced
2 quarts chicken stock
1 chicken carcass (I bought a whole chicken from the store. If you follow a low sodium diet, you should probably use low sodium chicken broth unless you prepare your own chicken.)
(Note: I threw in the onion peels because they were a beautiful brown color.)
1. Saute vegetables in butter over medium heat 15-30 minutes, until deeply browned. Add chicken carcass either at beginning or after it’s cooked for awhile depending on whether it’s going to get in your way or not. Browning it a little will add flavor.
2. Add 1/2 cup of chicken stock and deglaze the pan so you can loosen all of the yummy bits from the bottom of the pan.
3. Add the rest of the stock, raise heat to a boil then lower to a simmer for 45 minutes.
4. Strain the broth and set aside.
The soup
8-12 slices of bacon, cut into small pieces
1 head cauliflower, sliced into large bite-sized pieces.
2 onions, diced
2 sugar pie pumpkins, seeds and “guts” removed, peeled and diced into 1-2 inch pieces
cooked chicken, torn into small pieces (about 1-2 cups worth.)
2-3 tablespoons curry powder
Black pepper to taste
1.Roast cauliflower, drizzled lightly in olive oil for 25 minutes at 450 degrees. Set to side.
2. Cook bacon pieces until beginning to brown in a large soup pot. Remove with slotted spoon and reserve.
3. Add onions and cook until brown and carmelized, over medium low heat for about 15-20 minutes.
4. Add chicken stock, pumpkin chunks, curry, and ground pepper. Cook, over medium heat until pumpkin is tender, about 20-25 minutes.
5. Add cooked chicken, bacon, and cauliflower. Cook until heated.
Note: I know that bacon is a bit odd in a curry dish. I had actually planned for another kind of soup and then discovered that I didn’t have all of the ingredients I thought I did. By the time I changed my plan to a curry flavored dish, the bacon was already cooked. As it turns out, bacon tastes darned good in curry.
It’s a normal Sunday and that means that I am cooking! I am using some leftover chicken to make a soup, this time with some pumpkin chunks in it. Actually, it may end up being a curry. As you can imagine, I am not following a recipe.
Wish me luck!
My Eyes Are Up Here 