"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Friday, October 19, 2012

I'm starting to understand why people get hospitalized for "exhaustion"
Posted by Jill | 4:59 AM
Last night after I turned my laptop off at 9 PM, I realized that there was one more critical e-mail I had to send, so I turned it back on, connected to the VPN, composed the e-mail, attached the file, and only then could I turn in, accompanied by what used to be my plump little cat Maggie, who in the last six months has been diagnosed as hyperthyroid and medicated in various ways for it, and in the last month has largely stopped eating entirely. I love this kitteh with all my heart and soul, and $1000 into various tests and diagnostics and ultrasounds, we have found that Maggie, who has lost about a third of her body weight in the last month, has either Inflammatory Bowel Disease or cancer -- and the only way to find out definitively is via a surgical biopsy, which requires general anesthesia. We decided this was far too risky for a hyper-T kitty with a heart murmur and a generally diminished condition, so we are treating it as IBD with prednisolone, and hoping that tis particular crapshoot comes out double-sixes, or whatever is a good throw in craps.

We regard our pets as our children, particularly those of us who decided a long time ago that the world would be a much better place if our famiy neuroses ended with this generation, thank you very much -- and yet, they are different. We know in our minds when we excitedly bring home a new pet that this is a relationship with an expiration date, one that will come far sooner than we want. And yet we do it again, and again, and again, because of the hole in our lives that they leave when they depart.

It still doesn't make it any easier.

So I continue to buy the fine canned foods (and now even Bravo raw diet, which she hasn't touched either) purveyed by the nice man at the locally-owned Pet Stuff, trying valiantly to find something that will tempt a formerly-gluttonous cat who yesterday threw up the only thing she ate. And then when I get home from a thirteen-hour workday (including the driving), and I crawl into bed exhausted, and pet her and see exactly what she has become, I then have to get up and go down to the basement and cry my guts out for a half-hour until I'm even more exhausted, because Maggie is very bonded to me and gets very upset if I'm upset.

This is on top of the Project That Has Utterly Consumed My Life Since Early July, which if all goes well will finally, miraculously, be released today, after which I will have to catch up on all my OTHER work, so the idea that I can exhale now is a foolish one. I was working on the Project remotely for two weeks from my sister's house in Chapel Hill, NC; after my mother had a brief sojourn with the Grim Reaper before bodyslamming him, beating the crap out of him, and then sending him back to the Ingmar Bergman movie where he belongs. She has made as astounding a recovery as someone with advanced COPD and emphysema can, and I am now back home, where I have every intention to get up tomorrow morning, go get my hair cut and colored, because I am starting to bear an alarming resemblance to Willard Rmoney, and then collapse in a fetal position in the corner.

So if you want to know why I haven't been around, that's why. I want to thank my stalwart compatriots, especially jurassicpork, for picking up the slack without even asking if I needed help. I'll be back soon, as soon as I can work an eight hour day and get through it without crying over Maggie.

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Saturday, September 08, 2012

Caturday: It's not too soon to think about 2016
Posted by Jill | 6:13 AM
She's female, she has an equally awesome significant other, she's already known nationwide, and she's from a flyover state. Behold the perfect candidate for 2016:



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Saturday, August 11, 2012

Caturday
Posted by Jill | 8:02 AM
Lest you, like me, are in danger of succumbing to despair, there's this (via Digby):



Few medical treatments are as grueling as bone marrow transplantation, which can require months of isolation while patients have their own marrow destroyed to allow the transplanted cells to take over. The risk of infection during this period is so great that even an ordinary touch from a loved one could introduce deadly germs.

And so it’s no wonder that Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem, a 16-year-old cancer patient who spent seven months in isolation at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2011 waiting for a bone marrow donor, before returning this year for another month, found herself missing her pet kitty, Merry. Maga wasn’t allowed to bring Merry into her sterile room safely, so the staff at Children’s went to Facebook for help. On the hospital’s Facebook page, they asked fans to post pictures of their cats for Maga to see: 3,000 cat photos later, the Cat Immersion Project was born.

Using sheets, projectors and the photos sent in by fans, the Children’s staff built a virtual cat cocoon around Maga’s bed, so she could be surrounded by images of playful kitties.

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Sunday, November 13, 2011

This is your brain on cats.
Posted by Jill | 3:48 PM


Any questions?

(via)

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Saturday, August 28, 2010

Caturday
Posted by Jill | 6:19 AM
Because we haven't had any Maron around here in a while, and because this is a nice photo of the B@B official stand-up comic with Monkey:



We likes us some Monkey:


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