I think this item stuck to the fridge describes my January perfectly:

That’s right. The week before I lose my job, I get to go do jury duty. And it’s not even on a workday, so it’s stealing away one of my weekend days. I’ve been called for JD four times in my life, while Scott’s never been called. Where’s the fairness, I ask you?

So yeah, I’m losing my job. You may already know that the game show I host at Disney was on a three-year contract with the corporate sponsor, and that contract expires on February 5th. Right now there’s nothing else in the acting/entertainment areas available for me, so as of the 6th I’ll be unemployed. I have an appointment to interview with a casting rep, to see what other Disney jobs I might like, but that’s not until the 10th. So hopefully my unemployment period will be a short one (if you’re rehired within 30 days, you don’t lose benefits and seniority). Cross those fingers!

We’re all moved out of the old apartment, and turned in the keys yesterday.

I documented all of the clean-ness. I shouldn’t have to do that, but a previous landlord back in Seattle has made us a bit gun-shy about trusting apartment management. We’ll see if we get our deposits back — the cat deposit is pretty much toast, because of the barf stains on the carpet. Why do all cat foods have to be dyed in such crazy colors? Can’t they make cat food in the color “apartment carpet beige” so the barf is easier to clean?

Meanwhile at the new place, I was able to sit out on the deck in the mid-70s weather yesterday. (Of course, today it’s raining all day. I feel bad for the vacationers. But at least it’s mid-60s and rainy, instead of Seattle’s mid-40s and rainy.) Trouble came out to join me, while Commie just sat in the doorway and sniffed the air.

He’s still doing all right, by the way. No significant changes.

The new apartment is coming along. We still have a few boxes to unpack, but most of the boxes are empty and ready to be broken down. Wall art still needs to be hung. With luck, I’ll only have to do one day of jury duty, and can spend the next day getting most of the rest of this crap squared away.

I’m in a reading void right now — I still have a list of 10 or so books from December that I need to write up. The library warned that an address change would take a week or so, so I waited that out before ordering some new stuff. Nothing’s been delivered yet. I think on my way to work today I’ll scout out our new library building, which is apparently over on the other side of Unversal. Maybe I can pick up a couple of things there.

I’m also doing great with Gluten-Free January. I’m staying low-carb for the most part, although I’m not avoiding French fries if they come my way. I also bought a single-serve bag of these:

But haven’t eaten them yet. I’m kind of scared to. Although Archer Farms (a Target house brand) made a really kick-ass lemon-pepper potato chip a few years ago, so I should trust in their flavorings. Any snack food that needs both yellow #5 and yellow #6 must be a delicious orgy of yellowness.

So the cats are settling in to the new apartment really well. They’re such great cats.

The little deck is apparently fascinating as heck, but it’s been breezy here the last few days. So they’re anxious to go explore, but neither one likes being out in the wind. Hopefully we’ll have a still day soon, so they can really explore and enjoy all of the outdoor smells.

As for poor Commie, he’s doing pretty well. Still eating, drinking, purring, cuddling. His eye continues to look worse every day, and he had some bleeding a couple of days ago. But it doesn’t seem to be hurting him at all.

We had some couch-cuddling time earlier today, and he held still long enough for a picture:

I know, right? The front half is sealed shut and grown over, and kind of scab-encrusted. The back half is massively swollen and leaking some pus (the pus is something new today). We haven’t seen his actual eye for at least a week. What you can’t see from this front-on angle is the swelling all around, up on the brow ridge and below the eye.

So onward with the watching and the cuddling and the loving. The vet guessed “a few weeks”, and we’re at just about four weeks since that visit. Here’s hoping “a few” becomes at least “several”.

What a way to start 2011 — moving the house. Or, well, the apartment. At any rate, we moved all of our stuff from one off-white box to another off-white box.

Our reasons for moving were manyfold, but the primary one was the fact that we were paying too much at the old apartment. The market is soft here in Orlando, and everyone everywhere was lowering their prices. Our complex, however, offered to generously keep our too-(damn)high rent the same for another year, so we generously decided to move elsewhere.

Here’s the new living room, pre-move. We hit IKEA first and got a new couch, since our old one was old and hurtin’. Guess that’s what you get for buying a $180 loveseat. Although we loved that loveseat, so we just replaced it with a fresh $180 loveseat. For the record, it’s the Klippan with a discontinued zebra-print cover. I’m glad we bought an extra cover when they were closing them out, because it’s all solids and one weird cross-stitchy pattern right now.

We moved a ton of stuff on Thursday, with help from our fantastic friend John. Between him and Scott, it was like having two powerful gorillas hauling most of our stuff. Of course, I mean “gorilla” in the nicest possible way. We’ve been really gung-ho about throwing out or Goodwill-donating as much as we possibly can, because we’re total packrats who live in a thrift store in a Russian submarine. We left even more stuff at the old place, which will be sorted through during next weekend’s cleaningfest.

The last step was bringing the cats. They mewed pitifully all the way, then found a dark place to hide immediately. I anticipated their yearning for a dark place, so I cracked open the door of the linen closet for them. The first night, they were pretty disruptive, what with the meowing and scratching at boxes and constantly hopping up and down on the bed, but last night they settled in pretty well.

Most of the living room is now set up, as well as our desks. IKEA again, here’s my Expedit desk. I’ll fill the cubbyholes with books and such as we unpack them, but I’m guessing someone will insist that I leave one cubby open for her. And yes, that’s a screenshot of Bioshock as my desktop background. Bloody splicers.

I’m still going strong with gluten free January, and even though we ate out for several meals, there was always a great option. Here’s what I had at the always-tasty Fuddrucker’s. The lettuce is hiding the truly embarassing number of pickles I piled on the plate. They have some really good pickles.

Our moving-mate John introduced us to a new place, Greens & Grille, and I’m seriously sorry that you probably don’t have one in your neighborhood. It’s like a salad place meets a Mongolian grill — you pick what salad veggies you want, from carrots to artichoke hearts and anything in between. Then they toss it, grill up some fresh meat of your choosing, and it’s totes delicious.

We’re headed back to work today, after a 3-day break, so it’ll be interesting figuring out our new routes to and from Disney. Already it looks like I have three exits to choose from when coming home, so there will be some experimenting.

It’s been an eventful December.

We’re packing to move house these days. We’re just going about 10 miles away from where we are now, and we’ll be paying less money for a little larger space. Win/win.

We’ve known that we would be moving with the expiration of our current lease, but it’s as if our apartment is telling us over and over again to get out. First it was the new neighbors across the hall, who moved in a few months ago and haven’t learned that you don’t need to slam the door every time. They also like to prop their front door open and have loud conversations. Then last month the apartment next door, which we thought was vacant but was actually being paid for but left unoccupied, finally got an occupant. He likes loud music, thumping on the walls, and jogging. Which involves grunting stretches outside his door. Lots of grunting stretches.

Then there’s been the December FireAlarmPalooza. Last week, just as we were going to take a load of stuff off to the thrift store, the fire alarm went off. We dilly-dallied in gathering ourselves together, because it’s never an actual fire. Except this time … it was an actual fire. Two apartments below, the occupants had some sort of kitchen grease fire, with billowing grey smoke pouring out their door. Fortunately, the sprinklers didn’t get triggered in our apartment. And it was kind of entertaining watching this really doddering old lady who also lives on the 1st floor asking everyone what was going on.

Then last night, the fire alarm went off again. No smoke from anywhere, just the shrilling (which got us out of bed). The same doddering old lady came out of her apartment on the phone to 911, shouting that the alarm was going off in her apartment, and she hadn’t done anything! Why was this happening? She didn’t touch anything!

The dozen-plus of us from this building stood around in the parking lot, waiting. Our roaming security guy came over, and the old lady dragged him down the hall into her apartment. Because the alarm was going off in there, and she didn’t touch anything! She came back out to the parking lot while the guy looked around to see if any of the alarm boxes had been pulled. She then looked out at all of us and said, “The alarm is going off in MY apartment! I didn’t do anything!”

I couldn’t take it any more. “It’s going off in ALL of our apartments.”

“Really?” She asked.

“Yes. That’s why we’re ALL STANDING OUT HERE, ma’am.”

“Oh!” She gasped.

I think I blew her mind with that one. And I honestly don’t think she realized that the entire building’s alarms were going off. I wonder why she thought we were all standing out there.

In other news, for those who want an update about Commie, his eye looks a little worse every day. The mass keeps growing, and you can’t see his eye in there anymore. But he still seems happy, purring and cuddling and eating and pooping and having little smackfights with Trouble, so that’s good. He sleeps a little more than usual, but that’s the only real sign (other than the eye) that anything’s wrong.

He’s also helping immensely with packing, by placing himself in, on, and around boxes as much as possible. He’s a huge fan of the lids to these office document boxes, the corner of one which you can barely see under his loafy form. He’s a good, good boy, and we tell him so many times a day.

First off, a cat update. The swelling around Commie’s eye is steadily worse, and the eye looks more nasty every day. Plus, yesterday he started having more sneezing fits than ever before. Still, we watch and wait and cuddle.

As you can see, his eye is barely visible anymore, and it looks even more like the eye is sealing itself up. Poor kid!

We’re in the middle of packing and sorting right now, because the House of Meyer is moving in January. We came across an old film camera with a roll of film inside. I can’t remember the last time I used the camera, so we took the film out and took it to the Costco. Did you know that they still develop film? Did you also know that the ONLY option is 1-hour processing? I think the last time I got film developed at Costco, it was a 2-day turnaround, and that seemed fast.

There were several pictures of shoes (clearly, one night a lot of the members of Jet City Improv were wearing Chuck Taylors, so we all put our feet together for a snappie) and some of the cats as kittens. From the location in the pictures, it was in our first six months with the cats, and they were both under a year old. Look at their size compared to the remote controls! The pictures are all dark and blurry, but since the film sat in the camera for 12 years, I’m amazed anything came out at all. A little adjustment or two in Photoshop, and this one came out pretty well.

Scott had family in town last week, so we hit the parks. We even went over to Universal, where we watched the sad and limp Macy’s parade. We got to see the bottoms of several underinflated balloons:

Almost all of the balloon-holders looked like they wanted to stab themselves.

Just this evening, we braved the holiday shoppers to get some grocery shopping done at Target. Carts were few and far between, so we ended up with a dud with a shrill squeak. Scott figured out how to stop the squeaking, but he got a few strange looks.

And as a final note, to celebrate the awesome article in the L.A. Times about how it’s carbs that make us fat, not fat, here’s some bacon that looks like a pair of seahorses.

They were delicious little seahorses.

So we went back to the vet yesterday.

The week of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories didn’t help, and in fact the eye got worse. Here’s what Commie looks like as of a few minutes ago:

Not pretty. The eye itself still looks clear … in there. It’s the swelling around the eye that’s making everything so horrible. Look at this top view, and you can see how much his little brow is protruding:

They weighed Commie first, and he’s lost three pounds in the last two weeks. That, combined with the speed and untouchability of the swelling, led the vet to tell us that he’s 90% sure it’s cancer.

He could do a biopsy, but they’d have to knock Commie out, and he’d then have a wound we’d have to take care of. But even if the vet could bump his 90% up to 100%, the thing is that with cancers in the eye/nose region, whichever it is, there’s really no effective treatment. Especially with this growth rate.

So we’re not doing the biopsy. I worry about losing him under anaesthesia, and that a wound would hurt him more than anything he’s already feeling. It’s pretty clear already what we’re dealing with. We’ve got some steroids, which should hopefully slow the growth a little bit, and also ease any pain that Commie’s feeling. The vet’s prognosis was “maybe a few weeks.”

For right now, he’s still active, still eating (despite that three pounds), still playing, and still purring. He just seems more irritated with the sniffling and mono-vision than in any pain. So we’re going to smother him with love, and keep watch, and he’ll let us know when he’s ready.

He’s also still a butt about sitting still for a picture. And as usual, you-know-who had to get in on the action.

I’ve been a massive blog slacker, I see. Over a fortnight since a post! I’ve had posts rolling around in my head, including another couple of top sevens, but life. She gets in the way.

This last couple of weeks in particular have been harrowing as far as pet health goes. About three weeks ago, our big fat tabby started having a little goo around one eye. He has, in the past, had a knack for getting hairs stuck in his eyes and getting winky for a couple of days, so we figured it wasn’t a big deal. But over the course of a week, his eye got wetter and wetter. And then one day, it was all swollen around the eye. So it was off to the vet with us!

We took both cats, since they were due for a checkup anyway. As you can see, our little tortoiseshell clearly didn’t remember the trauma that comes with riding in the kitty duffel bags.

The vet took a look at Commie’s eye, listened to his snuffling, and figured that it was just a kitty cold, with swelling in the sinuses that was creating the swelling around the eye. Especially since the goo/tears were clear, and there was no redness around the eye. We were given a bottle of antihistamine pills, a squeeze bottle of saline solution to go up his nose, and some antibiotic ointment to go in the eye.

I now know for a fact that this cat doesn’t do pills well.

The eye goo was slightly easier, though not especially easy. Ditto the saline. But over the course of last week, the eye just got worse. And the third eyelid started sticking out, and it got red. And the swelling was so strong that it looked like his eye was sealing up. So Scott took him back to the vet (I was working that day, so I just got text updates throughout). They x-rayed Commie’s head:

The good: there are no bone-related growths in there. The bones look fine. The bad: this is mystery swelling. It could be an infection from a trapped hair, or even from an infected tooth. Or it could be a soft-tissue growth, which would mean a tumor. A very fast-growing tumor, which is never good. So this week, the medications have changed. Now we’re doing steroids every other day, and antibiotics twice a day. Both are liquids, so they can be squirted in his mouth with an eyedropper with very little struggle. Thank goodness.

We go back next Wednesday to see if these meds have made progress. I’m not seeing much change so far, to be honest. But the swollen areas around the eye don’t seem to hurt him, and he’s eating and purring — except for the grossness that is his eye, and some snuffling from the snot and/or tears in his nose, he’s fairly normal. Although probably irritated at being monocular-vision cat.

I told you, it’s gross.

Also, it’s very hard to get a picture of this cat. Especially when Trouble the tortie needs to get into the shot too. You think they’re looking at you, hit the shutter button, and they look away. I have a couple of dozen other shots that are blur city.

Anyhoo, we’re hoping for the best, but steeling ourselves for the worst. We’ve had these cats 12 years, and while parents would tell you that there’s no comparison between pets and kids, we don’t have the frame of reference to know what it’s like to have a child. These cats ARE our kids.

SO, what else! We visited the dentist, where they do digital x-rays. Here are my teeth:

I get to go back in Jaunary for a filling. There isn’t a cavity … yet. But this dentist is pretty gung-ho about catching pre-cavity soft areas and filling them. She also recommended that fancy Invisalign system, because my bottom teeth are crowded. The first step is apparently “expanding the jaw”, which just sounds terrifying. The next step is paying five thousand dollars, which is even MORE terrifying. I think I’ll pass for now. We may need to save that five grand for the cat.

We recently got rid of an old, crappy, beat-down couch. We replaced it with a matching chair and footstool, and it now lives right next to some loaded bookshelves in a sort of reading nook.

One of the cats has claimed this setup as his own. He’ll spend some time on the chair, then loll a bit on the footstool, then it’s back to the chair. And if you want to sit on the chair, sometimes he’ll try to squeeze in there with you. Of our two cats, one who sheds mountains and has no hairballs and one who barely sheds but is a hairball queen, it’s the shedder who’s claimed this chair.

As you can see, he finds the chair terribly uncomfortable. And also as you may be able to see, he’s coated the chair with a fine layer of hair. Orange, brown, and the off-white of his fluffy undercoat. I’ve tried a giant lint roller to get the hair up, but it takes a long time and a LOT of sticky sheets to get even close to all the hair.

In looking around the internets, however, I discovered the Pet Hair Magnet. Which appeared to be nothing more than a common rubber squeegee. So on our grocery trip today, we spent less than half the price of the Pet Hair Magnet on a common rubber squeegee. And my friends, it totally works!

Look at the difference! The right side of the footstool is nice and clean. Of course, I had a small, furry supervisor watching over the entire project. After squeeging, I did a quick once-over with the lint roller to get rid of some stray hairs, and the chair and footstool look shiny and new again.

Of course, now the cat is agitated and mewing at me. Because I took away his protective coating of hair. He was building a nest there, I guess.

Here’s a LOLcat that actually made me laugh out loud. Which rarely happens.

Of all of you out there watching Dancing with the Stars, is there anyone else who dislikes Cloris Leachman? I feel like I’m in the minority here — the reality round-up I read has an author who’s all, Cloris is still in it! Yay! I just find her irritating, and desperately trying to amuse us, and there’s just no joy in her for me whatsover.

I’m meeting up with some Comedy Warehouse folk this afternoon at the Epcot Food & Wine Festival. Most countries also have beer, however. Which is good for us wine-haters.

We took a videogame break from shooting people in Venezuela (yay, Mercenaries 2!) so that I could go shoot people in Rapture (yay, Bioshock!) for a while. I upped the difficulty to medium, which is a first for me in FPS games. Usually I’m all about the easy. The game is awesome as ever, and even more awesome with all the lights out. If I finish up Rapture too quickly, I may then go run around Whispering Rock Summer Camp (yay, Psychonauts!) for a while.

More worrisome things have been tackled, causing the excitement v. terror balance to swing even more toward excitement.

Our “ReloCube” is reserved, and we have the OK from the apartment building to put it in a parking spot next to the building over the last weekend of the month.

I checked with our car insurance (Allstate), and we’re well-covered on the new car. Also, even though we’ll need to switch to another agent when we move, our coverage is good to go for the long drive and the time it takes to set up residency.

Scott’s heart is lighter, because I found out that there are approximately 3500 open jobs right now at WDW (with current full-time openings in Attractions [ride operators], Monorail, Downtown Disney Ticketing and much more), and tons of apartments to be had. Heck, one lady I contacted wanted me to fill out and fax back an application without even seeing an apartment — they want new tenants that desperately. So we shouldn’t have a problem when we go a-hunting.

After their terrifying vet ordeal yesterday, where they each shed a ton of hair, the cats are incredibly soft and smell really good. Weird how that works.