Well we certainly had a day full of adventure yesterday.

For a couple of days, we’d noticed some fleas on the cats. I have no idea how on earth these two got them, since they’re 99% indoor, and the only outdoor exposure they get is on our 2nd-floor deck. I suppose either this apartment came with fleas already installed, or my one friend with indoor/outdoor cats brought some over when she visited.

Anyway, we kept an eye on the cats and didn’t notice any more scratching than usual. But then yesterday we suddenly saw that Commie had gnawed a little sore spot on his back. And going through his fur, he was loaded with fleas and flea dirt.

We figured that we’d need to treat the cats and the house both. So off to the pet store we went, to check out our options.

We ended up getting those fine-toothed flea combs and some flea-killing shampoo. I decided against a bomb-fogger or boric acid on the carpets for now (I’m going to try the salt method first, since it’s so very harmless to us and the cats). And we opted to come home and research whether we wanted to go with flea collars or liquid treatments.

We combed the cats (Commie wasn’t a fan, but Trouble put up with it well) and dunked all of the fleas we found into a bowl of warm water. They drowned pretty quickly. Then we moved on to the bath.

Scott did this comic in 2006. Which was well after the last time we gave the cats a bath. So it’s been at least 5 years.

The cats did not deal with it well.

We did Trouble first; she moaned and writhed and meowed quite a bit, but then seemed resigned to her fate by the end. And when we let go of her after the rinsing was done, she actually sat there and let us towel her off a bit. Which was quite civil of her.

Then it was Commie’s turn. And he was way, WAY worse about the whole thing. And he’s also WAY stronger than Trouble. He was hard to hold, and very wriggly, and VERY pissed. So he did was any sensible cat would do when being held down and tortured; he lashed out with his teeth. And bit my finger. Twice.

For those of you who haven’t been bitten by a cat, their teeth are like little needles. And they go WAY in. And you need to wait for them to let go. And it hurts like hell.

We got the bath done, and set him free, where he proceeded to sit on the bathroom floor and tolerate a toweling-off. So at least neither of them made a beeline for the dusty under-bed. Scott did the toweling, while I cleaned my finger and doused it in hydrogen peroxide. I put on some antibiotic ointment, some gauze, wrapped a Band-Aid around it all, then went straight to visit Dr. Internet.

Dr. Internet said that a LOT of cat bites get infected, specifically because they’re so small and deep, and a cat can be a total Yuck Mouth. And oh, hey, Dr. Internet also said that if you’re a child or an oldster or don’t have the best immune system, you should totally visit an actual doctor immediately and start on some antibiotics.

Trouble tried to be helpful, in that she hopped right up on the desk and got her wet fur near the electronics. And then did some glaring.

Anyhoo, the tip of my finger was numb, and I’m immune-compromised, and even though I felt like the biggest hypochondriac in the world, we went to the emergency room (which we only seem to ever visit at 11 at night). I didn’t want to wait until this afternoon to go see my regular doctor and get antibiotics. So off we went, to the same ER we visited when I had the mysterious chest pain (which turned out to be a panic attack brought on by a vicious inner ear infection). At least they didn’t treat me like a hypochondriac. Everyone agreed that since I’m immune-compromised, it was absolutely the right move to get checked out and started on antibiotics right away.

Even when it’s a small thing, a trip to the ER takes 3 hours. First a trip to the triage room, where they took my vitals. And where I got to watch a baby throw up right outside the room. Poor kiddo. Back to the waiting room, then a trip down the hall to sit on a bed for an hour and a half. They looked at my finger, had me pay, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me home. Of course, all of those steps had at least 15 or 20 minutes in between.

And if you haven’t had a tetanus shot lately (I don’t think I’d had one since stepping on a rusty nail as a kid), it’s a classic pinching-then-burning injection in the arm. What you don’t expect is how much it hurts the next day. At least rabies isn’t a concern, since we took the kids in last year for their 3-year booster.

They didn’t even cut away the skin flaps over the punctures (I did remove one, the big one in the middle, because it was hanging by a thread). So the big one looks worse than the rest, but the flap is covering a nice puncture near the top, and there are two other skinflaps covering holes on either side of the big one.

At least it took so long at the ER, I got the feeling back in the tip of my finger. So no nerves were severed, yay! It was swollen and warm, but that’s to be expected when you’re deeply stabbed with a needle-like object.

By the time we got home, the cats were more dry, and perfectly pleasant. And my worries about late-night retribution were for naught — they were actually more affectionate than normal, probably because they were delighted to have survived such a harrowing experience.

Today I treated them both with Advantage, combed more fleas out of Commie (he was totally up for it today, go figure), and did five loads of laundry, including all-new bedding. Tomorrow we’ll start with Project Carpet Salt, and hopefully tomorrow we’ll also start seeing more dead fleas than living fleas, since Advantage is supposed to really start kicking in around 12 hours after application.

Oh, and today the finger is all bruisey inside. But the swelling and pain have gone down.

At least I’ll finally have something to say when I’m asked, “Did you do anything interesting this weekend?”

(Besides, of course, starting Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, which is lovely so far.)

(This post’s title gleefully mooched from the classic internet video “Charlie Bit Me“.)

(A tiny idiotic part of my mind is worried now that Commie has had a taste of delicious human blood.)

It’s been a busy little month at the House of Meyer. We took our first ever cruise near the beginning of the month, which was awesome. But then we also had visitors come to us!

Scott’s mom and younger brother came to town for a few days, so we showed them a good time. That good time included visiting Disney parks:

I took this with a HDR camera app for my phone. The results aren’t as good as real HDR work, but it still comes out pretty cool. The colors seem more vivid, and everything is super-sharp.

I was also able to take the four of us on a surprise voyage — a fireworks-watching cruise out on the lake in front of the Magic Kingdom. I, a person who never wins anything, won it! It’s part of the “magic backstage” program, which provides nice little thank-yous for cast members. We set sail from the Contemporary Resort.

The weather was a bit drizzly, and there were a lot of pesky bugs down at the Contemporary marina, so the pool wasn’t being used by any people. Good thing, because a dozen or so ducks made it their home base.

We headed out on the water, and we were given drinks and snacks.

Neither Scott nor his Mickey-shaped “crispy cereal bar” are actually that creepy.

The fireworks show wasn’t the usual Wishes, but a special Halloween presentation. Awesome as always.

Our little boat had the soundtrack piped in. It was a load of fun!

At one point in our Disney-goings, we went to a cast-specific store. It used to be just merchandise, but now they have a section where you can shop from a limited selection of groceries. The prices were great! I just don’t need a restaurant-sized can of marinara sauce. But I did get some produce, because the Granny Smiths looked excellent.

And indeed they were. Fresh and tart, as opposed to a lot of the cold-storage stuff the groceries have at this time of year.

You know what else is delicious?

IKEA chocolate. I’ve never been much of a dark chocolate person (really, the bulk of my experience has been the miniature Hershey’s Special Dark bars that come in the Xmas assortment), but I’ve heard that it’s good for you, so I tried out IKEA’s Choklad Mörk. And it’s surprisingly tasty!

Also apparently delicious: grass.

I planted a little patch of grass for the cats to enjoy, since their main outdoorsy time is on our 2nd floor deck. So far Commie is still scared to come out on the deck, but shy Trouble loves it. And she loves to eat her greens. It’s surprising how fast this Bermuda grass grows.

My lemon trees are doing well as well. The Eureka still hasn’t bloomed, but the Meyer went through a lovely bloom (and those flowers smelled fantastic). I’ve been warned to not expect lemons right off the bat, but it sure looks like I have almost a dozen little guys growing. They’re tiny so far, but making nice progress.

They’re just adorable!

Now that I’ve sidetracked like crazy, back to the visiting Meyers. We also went to Sea World! It was my first time, but everyone else had already been a couple of years ago. Still, we three young’uns got to ride Manta for the first time together.

I really loved that coaster. You kind of dangle downward on your belly, so there’s none of that bashing and smashing of my head like I get from a lot of looping coasters. Compared to Manta, the old Kraken coaster was painful and kind of boring.

Had a surprisingly good gluten-free meal (roasted chicken) there, and I was also impressed at the upkeep of the park. Everything was neatly maintained, freshly painted, and very clean. I went in with Unversal-level expectations, so Sea World kind of blew me away.

Except the penguin exhibit was kind of eerie. They just stood around in groups, staring at each other. (This is another picture from the HDR app.)

All in all, it’s been a great fun month!

I’ll leave you with this warning sign that appeared one day at a busy intersection in our neigborhood. Simple, but a message that motorcyclists would love more drivers to keep in mind.

First off, the domesticated animals. Our cats.

These two are total barf machines.

They’ve always been barfers, these two. Trouble gets crazy big hairballs, while Commie is merely a food glutton. Besides which, they’re both elderly cats. And of course, all dry cat food seems to come in either brown, or orange, or a mix of brown and orange. Which is never good for apartment-dwellers, since all apartments seem to have the same standard ecru carpeting.

We’ve tried scrubbing by hand, and various spray bottles of pet-specific cleaner, but the barf stains remained. So we finally bit the bullet and got the Bissel Little Green:

A cute little squirter/scrubber/vacuum affair. We also got a jug of pet-stain-specific cleaning fluid.

(Also pictured: two of Trouble’s favorite toys. That little catnip Xmas stocking is from probably 3 years ago, but it’s still one of the first things she’ll pull out of the toy box. The brown thing is a face-down plush hedgehoggy thing.)

The setup wasn’t that tough — fill one chamber with warm water and cleaning fluid, spray and scrub and vacuum, then empty the resulting orange water afterward. As you can see here, one of the more vibrant stains isn’t completely gone, but it’s certainly much better than it was:

I don’t think any of the stains are 100% gone, but they’re all a lot better than they were. We’re not terribly concerned about our deposit here, since they didn’t change out the carpets before we moved in. They’d have to swap them out when we move out anyway. We’re just delighted that the spots don’t stand out as much.

Hopefully in the future, we can catch the barfs when they’re fresher, and those might clean up more thoroughly.

Now, on to the wild animals! We’re totally plagued by frogs lately. I posted recently about the tiny baby frogs, but some nights we also have larger models.

This guy is almost as large as my fist (although I do have smallish fists). And his coloring is so weird, it’s like I used the watercolor filter in Photoshop. But this is all him. All hail the hypnotoad!

The weirdest part about these frogs is that when I come home late at night, they’re all turned facing the wall. This guy was the one weird exception. The rest were all like something out of a froggy Blair Witch Project. Which made my walk to the apartment in the dead of night a little more eerie.

We also have ducks galore at our ponds. Here’s a whole crew, all almost as large as mom:

They don’t seem worried about the alligator warning sign. Which all of our ponds have, by the way. I’ve yet to see a gator in the apartment complex, but you never know. Here in Florida, you just have to assume that all bodies of water have reptiles in them that want to kill you.

Last but not least, there’s also insect life galore in the summer.

This is a mud dauber wasp. They look terrifying and gigantic, but apparently they’re harmless. They build these weird little pods out of mud, then lay their eggs inside. This one is kindly making its mud pods on my catnip plant growing out on the balcony. I will confess, after the mama wasp left later, I removed the pods and chucked them down toward the pond. I’ll let the alligators deal with them.

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted. Ack! It’s been a hustle-bustle fortnight here at the House of Meyer.

Workwise, I’ve just finished a week of training for my actual job. If you’ll recall, I’ve been doing some basic greeting and luggage-hefting until they had a classroom session available. I only had to wait a month and a half to start my actual training, which is apparently fairly fast. The five days of training consisted of one day of learning the two software programs, then four days of doing the job while under supervision. I’m sure I’ll still have lots of little questions here and there, but I have the gist down. I start doing the actual job tonight, although I don’t get to do the classroom learning until tomorrow, so I may only have half of the software I need available tonight. We’ll see. Three people do the job at the same time, so at least I’m not being thrown in all alone.

Since I have no seniority, it looks like I’ll be mostly working nights. I don’t mind it so much, except that Scott works mornings. We get to re-bid for schedules every 6 months, and I just missed the bids when I started, so hopefully in 4 months or so we’ll be able to figure out a way to see more of each other and maybe share a day off.

Medically, I’ve been down with a cough and some stuffiness. I’m also going next week to a brand-new gastroenterologist, hopefully one who actually listens to me and doesn’t treat me like an idiot. With any luck, he’ll agree to let me stop the double-dose of immunosuppresants, and go down to one for maintenance. Also with luck, he won’t make me wait two hours to be seen or make me cry or tell his staff what a pain in the ass I am when I’m standing right around the corner, like the old guy.

Scott’s getting ready for some medical whatnot of his own, although I don’t know for sure if he’s said anything to the general public yet. I’ll just say that he’s going to have a procedure done soon that I had done when I was five, and after he has it done, he’ll be able to eat all the ice cream and popsicles he wants.

Commie’s eye is doing great. A little weepy now and then, but for the most part back to normal. Here he is on top of the safety and side-effects sheet for Cimzia, one of the medications I take for Crohn’s. Mind you, it’s also printed on the back side. In fairly small type. This stuff packs some serious yuck.

In the world of little animals, we’re seeing a ton of baby frogs lately. When a friend was over visiting, she just had to pick one up. You can see how totally tiny they are.

Believe it or not, this was one of the larger tiny frogs. Later that week I saw some that were less than half this guy’s size. I’m making sure to step gently when I see them.

Here’s a question for you Oregonians and Portlanders. I saw this car in our apartment complex lot, and while I understand the two Oregon-related stickers, I don’t quite get how the “TURD” sticker fits in.

Perhaps it’s just another of this Portland-loving person’s fixations. Portland and poop, two great tastes that taste great together.

Lastly, we met up with some friends for dinner and mini-golf last week. First we went to Putting Edge, which is an indoor glow-in-the-dark place located at Festival Bay. For those of you who don’t know, Festival Bay is a relatively new-ish but spookily deserted mall. Over half of the stores are vacant, and the occupied spots are filled with weird stores like Black Market Minerals or the several memorabilia stores. When your mall’s biggest stores are Bass Pro Shop and Shepler’s Western Wear, you know you’re in trouble.

We peeked in at Putting Edge and decided that it looked cheap and cruddy, like a traveling carnival’s spooky dark ride. Everything looked like badly-painted plywood. Their price was the same as all of the other area mini-golf joints, so we just toodled over to the nearest Congo River Golf location. Same price, but far less creepy.

See? Much more civilized. The course was good, but it was mostly creative greens. I prefer a mini-golf course with stuff like windmills and buildings and other weirdness. I may be spoiled, since I grew up really close to a Putt-Putt that I loved.

It appears that Universal is building a pair of ’50s B-movie themed mini-golf courses, set to open in early 2012. Fingers crossed that they’re awesome, because the theme is right up my alley.

Well, for the love of pete.

Commie the cat is the kind of guy who’s very into people food. He’ll get up in your face and try to sample whatever it is you’re eating, no matter what it is. He’ll even try to get close and smell your breath if you’ve been eating. Trouble, however, doesn’t care one bit about the foods we eat.

Clearly, it’s because she’s more into the plants that grow the foods we eat.

I brought home and planted some houseplants the other day. Basil, banana peppers, and strawberries. Trouble found her way onto the kitchen counter and checked them out up close.

No amount of shooing, hissing, or physically removing her from the counter helped — she’d just hop back up when she thought we weren’t looking. She also started doing most of her dirty work at night while we slept. First, she went for the banana peppers in the little container. The next day, it was the banana peppers in the larger container. She didn’t eat the leaves; she nibbled just enough to separate the leaves from the stalks, then left everything sittng there. It was a slow decapitation process.

I figured when she was done with the banana peppers, she’d leave the rest alone.

Then, the strawberry leaves started showing up separated from their stalks. Over the course of a couple of days, she stripped that plant too. Except for the one sad green strawberry that came with the plant.

At least it appears she’s not interested in the basil at all. Which is the main reason I grow houseplants, because it’s my favorite fresh herb.

I guess I’ll dig out the pepper and strawberry plants and try a couple of other herbs. The internets tell me that cats don’t like things with a citrus or mint taste (Which is perplexing, since catnip is part of the mint family, isn’t it?), so I’ll have to see what there is at the store. Maybe some lemon thyme? Cats apparently don’t like rosemary, but I really don’t like it all that much either. But maybe I’ll throw some in there to keep her away from the whole planter. Any advice, those of you with edible plants and cats?

Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news:

In this new apartment, our bathroom is probably half the size of the bathroom in the old apartment. And the old apartment had this kind of nook in the corner, where I’d presume you put your chair to make it into sort of a vanity where you’d sit and do your hair and apply your makeup. But for us, it was the perfect spot to put the cats’ litterbox where it would be out of the way.

The options are made extra-few because this new bathroom has two doors: one that leads to the front hallway, and one that leads to the bedroom. So here’s our new tiny bathroom, from the hallway doorway:

Small, right? And look in the mirror! The door to the bathroom is right there.

Our first thought was to put the litterbox on the floor next to the toilet. But then you’re either dripping shower water into the litterbox while reaching for a towel, or you’re accidentally unspooling the toilet paper into the litterbox. And either way, litter gets everywhere. We tried it for a week or so, and were disappointed.

Thought number two was to close the door to the bedroom and leave it closed, and put the litterbox in that corner. But that bedroom-pointing door is very handy when you’re up for a pee in the middle of the night. Who wants to go out into the living room, around the corner past the kitchen, then around the corner again into the bathroom? You’d be wide awake at the end of that voyage!

So you may have figured out idea number three from this picture, because there’s something missing.

That’s right, the litterbox is under the sink.

We measured the space, and it’s a perfect fit for IKEA’s 20″x16″ Slugis storage box.

I lined the floor of the cabinet with cardboard, for easy cleanup later. We also tossed an old doormat in there, and put the litterbox behind the closed door so they’d always have to walk on the doormat before coming out. Another little rug at the exit picks up the bulk of tracked-out litter granules.

They actually have a ton of room in there — the pipes for the sink are pretty much in the middle of the cabinet, so once they pass those by, it’s a high-ceilinged poop palace. We used to have a litterbox with a cover on it, and it’s a WAY bigger space than that.

We also store the poop scoop inside the cabinet. Handy! The mostly-enclosed space also does a great job at keeping the dust down.

Oh, and for those who might wonder about this picture:

I got this at a thrift store, years and years ago. For something really pricey like 59¢. I don’t know who they are, or what organization or club or workplace they’re from. But this picture is always hung in our bathroom, so they can collectively watch over us.

Especially the one guy in the front row who stares directly into your soul.

I’ve learned how to get Commie to hold his head still long enough to take a picture. Or at least, to get one or two good shots out of a dozen.

Hold the camera in one hand, twisted around at an awkward angle to keep a finger on the shutter. And use the other hand to shine a laser pointer on your own forehead.

(But don’t shine it in your eye. I think we can all agree, that’s bad.)

Here you can see that the eye is still a wee bit gunky in the corner (just a wee), and you can see the veiny-looking reddish-brown scarring on his cornea. The vets put some sort of stain on the cornea, to see if it was active infection (which there isn’t).

So it may clear up, or it may stay that way. Either way, he’s a pretty boy!

So tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Not a holiday I choose to celebrate, because I don’t eat candy and I don’t like flowers. Live plants are cool — I just don’t like a big handful of dying things.

Although there’s always a cupcake cake …

I think it’s supposed to be a heart. Covered with bon-bons. Which are made out of poop-colored frosting. It’s too late in the season to send this over to our friends at CakeWrecks, so here it is. This was at our nearest Target, where the bakery always makes things that look a little weird.

I’ll have you know, friends, it’s not Valentine’s Day everywhere. Especially over at the nearest Winn-Dixie grocery store, where they still have really sparse and sad Christmas decorations up in the parking lot. All of the light posts were as ugly as this one. The store was pretty crap, as well. I’ll stick with Publix and Target.

Onward to the cats! Trouble was splayed oddly, so I took a picture before I poked her in the hock. Poor dear, she’s much lesser-known because Commie’s been a spotlight-hogger, what with his medical issues. He’s doing great, by the way. Still just a tiny bit of cloudiness on the lens of his eye, which the vets suspect is scarring. Otherwise, he’s seeing well and the swelling is gone.

Trouble also likes the “garden tub” at the new apartment. Because she’s always had a thing for sitting on the ledge and meowing at me when I take a bath.

This tub has nice, wide ledges. So she can really settle in comfortably to bitch me out.

The first time I tried to take a bath here, I only got it filled up about a third before the water got cold. Turns out that when this complex was built, all of the water heaters were put on the absolute lowest setting. And nobody who’d been in this unit minded. Not surprising; there are probably very few of us in Florida who want a scalding-hot shower. The maintenance guy turned it up, so now I can have a luxurious hot bath. Complete with cat.

The cats are digging the pond that we can see from our deck. There are almost always birds to chatter at. Here in Florida, most ponds have a fountain feature (that’s the concrete ring thingy) to keep the water from becoming stagnant. And in the last year or so, I’ve seen a number of ponds with fake birds in them. Fake ducks, fake geese, and fake … whatever these cement-gray things are. I don’t know their exact purpose — probably to scare away some other bird or predator or something. But you’ll frequently see actual birds sitting or standing on top of the fake birds. It’s hard to see because of the colors, but there are two fake birds pictured here, and there’s a long-legged craney herony bird standing on the top of each.

Last but not least, I hear that Words with Friends should be coming out for the Android platform this month. I currently play WordFeud (and if you’re on Android, I’m always up for a match) but once WWF comes out, I’ll gladly play both games. One can never have enough pseudoScrabble!

(By the way, “Whorini” used to be the name of my stripper-magician act.)

In order of importance, I’ll start with the cat. We took Commie to the vet yesterday, where both vets came in to visit us, because they were both completely flabbergasted that his eye is almost back to normal. Shocked, they were! His eye still has a little bit of a cloudy spot on it, which may be permanent damage from the month or so that it was completely hidden by swelling.

The vets have no idea what happened. Or why it fixed itself. I believe both of them used the phrase “miracle cat”. For the cloudy spot, we were given some steroid drops (which are so much easier than pills or oral liquids, so I’m very glad) and we’re going back in a week to see if it clears up. But he seems to be seeing out of both eyes. At least both eyes track us. Which is great.

The kids look a bit grumpy in this picture, but they’re just a bit tuckered. I found where I’d packed the laser pointer, so I made them do some laps around the living room.

Next up, gluten. Since January is now over, so is Gluten-Free January. I stayed the course the whole time, and discovered that I could eat other carbohydrate foods in moderation (potatoes, rice, corn) and still not gain weight. In fact, my maintenance zone had been 130-133 pounds for the last year, and for most of January, I stayed in the 129s.

But to complete the experiment, it meant having some gluten. So we headed out to Costco, because I love their cheap pizza. I mean, look at this monster slice!

Greasy, gooey, awesome. 700 or so calories of pizza magic. Although I didn’t eat the big puffy end crust. I wasn’t against it — I was just too full.

I didn’t get the stomach cramps or bloating that others have reported from adding gluten back after a long break. But I did find myself hungry all evening long, and nothing could stop the munchies. Haven’t felt that way in a long while. I didn’t gain any water weight, which is good, but I think I’m going to stick with mostly gluten-free from now on anyway. But I will continue experimenting with other carby foods, to see how far I can expand my choices.

On that note, I sallied forth to Whole Foods, where I knew they had some gluten-free beers. Just the other day on the Facebook, someone wrote that all of our local Whole Foods employees seem like they hate the world. And I have to say, they weren’t the friendliest bunch. I don’t know about hating the world, but nobody was full of good cheer, that’s for sure.

Spotted the following GF option:

Of course, the gluten-free rice noodles make it twice the price of other macaroni & cheese dinners. And since it’s fancybrand, that means it’s like six times the price of a box of Kraft dinner. Boy howdy, did I love Kraft dinner. Maybe I’ll buy a box sometime, just to get the powdery cheese packet. Although that’s probably loaded with gluten too. I wonder if I could put powdered Kraft cheese on some spaghetti squash?

I got one bottle of gluten-free beer (New Grist, which is both an awesome name and a terrible name) and a hard cider I haven’t tried yet. They had three or four gluten-free beer options, which is great. Surprisingly, our local Publix grocery store had a wider variety of ciders (although they didn’t have the brand that I got at WF). Much to sample!

Lastly, I got these chips from the vending machine at the courthouse, when I did my jury duty. What I want to know is, what’s the creamy part? The chips weren’t creamy, they were crispy. And I sure hope dill pickles aren’t creamy. Also, what do dill pickle potato chips have to do with DJing and turntables?

All that aside, the chips were delicious. I love a good dill pickle chip, creamy or not.

So you may remember that when we visited the vet last time, he proclaimed that, looking at the swelling around Commie’s eye (which was unresponsive to anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and steroids), he was “90% sure it’s cancer”. Here’s how Commie’s eye looked back on the 9th:

His eye wasn’t visible anymore behind the swelling and growths. So we watched, and waited, and cuddled, and loved him up good. And he stayed the same for a while. Then, a week ago, we noticed some changes.

Good changes.

REALLY good changes.

This is Commie today:

I mean, seriously, look at that gorgeous eye! On that gorgeous boy! The swelling has been decreasing significantly every day for the last week, and we’re cautiously hopeful that it wasn’t ever cancer at all, but some mysterious irritation or something. Either that, or he’s a miracle cat who went into spontaneous remission.

Although if it’s the second, he’ll never let us hear the end of it. He already has a god complex around this house.

At any rate, he’s looking so much better, it’s amazing. And the times of more sleeping and resting are done — he’s being his old butthead self, pestering us and swatting at Trouble and behaving totally normally.

Of course, he still had to be a booger during the photography.

So thanks for all of your thoughts and kind words, everyone. It’s really meant a lot to us. And for who knows what reason, this cat is, for now, awesome!