Kitty stories

Kitty has arrived. The day she was scheduled to come, I packed up a lot of Penelope's things into a smaller box and missed her so bad I cried.

We talked over prospective cat names for a couple of days and settled on "Ada," after Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and possibly the world's first computer programmer. Here are some cute things if you're interested in reading further about her. I also considered "George" after George Sands and George Eliot, who were both awesome historical babes, or, as Ben elegantly phrased it, "misbehaving women."

Ada is slowly settling in, I think; she wanders around making meows and meeps and wants attention. She has been eating the food we bought for her--say what ye will about its exorbitant price, but the stuff we put her on means smaller and less smelly poops so I think it's worth the $$.

Sadly, the stress has made her a little sick, I think--the cat lady told us she'd been adopted out previously and returned because she got a kitty cold. What she has is basically kitty herpes, and it's like the canker sores I get in that it flares up when I'm stressed or sick. She had a few sneezes and then today has a sad goopy eye that is essentially kitty pinkeye. After chatting with the cat lady on the phone, we got some eye ointment from the pharmacy and I smeared it at least in the general vicinity of the eye. As you can imagine, Ada was not amused, but she was gracious enough to not hold it against us and immediately wanted to get pets and purr afterwards.

On Saturday, Ben and I went up to the Plateau to check out a meet-and-greet that the local greyhound rescue was holding. We are still thinking of getting another dog, and I'm considering a greyhound because they are 1) ridiculously lazy and enjoy living in apartments and 2) ridiculously healthy and can live to 12 or 14, which is insane for a big dog. Unlike a lot of other dog breeds, they still do what they were created to do, which means that there's no room for hip dysplasia. Their main disadvantage for us is that they can have a very strong prey drive, which means kitties could be in danger. We spoke a bit to the rescue people and were told that maybe 10% of greyhounds could never live with a cat, while the rest of them seem to be able to distinguish between a cat in the house and a cat outside of the house. Cat in the house is not for eating or chasing, but cats outside are apparently free game.

I still don't know what to do about getting a dog. Penelope proved to us that mutts can be just as unhealthy as purebreds, and I don't want something that's going to be a cancer factory or a refugee from a puppy mill with distemper and who knows what else. Those dogs need homes, don't get me wrong, but as I tried to explain to the cat lady when we discussed potential animals with FIV (kitty AIDS), we'd be maybe interested in a compassionate adoption further down the line--an older animal, or one with a treatable disease or disability--but right now, my heart just can't handle it.

pets & neighborhood stuff

I have had a grand total of two job interviews while I was here, both for http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwriting-related positions, and hopefully I'll hear back from some of the other places I've sent feelers. Ben continues to do well at work; the game he's working on was shown last week at the big industry trade show, and looked pretty good!

Ben and I have started looking into getting a cat and a dog, now that we are settled in and feeling more secure here in Montreal. Last weekend, we walked along Rue Sherbrooke to a local pet store who was having an adoption event. The cat people were running late, so we spent a couple of hours walking around.

Rue Sherbrooke is one of the main east-west streets in Montreal. Sherbrooke runs through Westmount and into Notre-Dame-de-Grace (NDG); a nice shopping district with a grocery store starts on the other side of the park from us. There are lots of little boutiques and coffee shops and such--Westmount is a pretty bougie neighborhood, so most of it is pretty high end. There are a couple of boulangeries --bakeries, patisseries--sandwich/deli-type shops, and even a poissonnerie--fishmonger (a poissonerie is not the same as a poisonerie, which is what I typed initially and I guess is where you go for poisons).

One thing that every neighborhood here in Montreal has is a depanneur. There are different assortments of depanneurs, but they're somewhere between a New York City boedga and a convenience store. We have one across the street from us, which we go to if, like, we are halfway through cooking something and realize we don't have any pasta/eggs/milk/bread/canned peas. If it's a staple, there's a good chance it's at the dep. And yes, we do call it "the dep."

Anyway our walk down Sherbrooke was fun because there was some sort of sidewalk festival going on, so there was lots of street food and stuff on sale and people to watch. There was even a bouncy castle/slide, and anyone who knows anything will tell you that a bouncy castle = a party. The whole day was cloudy with some small drizzles now and then, but the weather really held until maybe 4 or 5. Ben theorizes that since the winters are so harsh here, that Montrealers feel they really have to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts, which might be an explanation for why there are so many festivals and such here during the summer. It might also be because the weather isn't super hot so it's a nice place for everyone else to visit.

So finally the cat lady showed up and we looked at cats. There are a surprising number of polydactyl cats here in Montreal, which is just kind of strange. Did Earnest Hemingway come through and not tell anyone? Or is there a Quebecois author I've never heard of who had an enclave of chats up here? Who can tell.

Long story short, we're getting a cat! Her name is currently Sara but it will be changed when she arrives, as we know and are related to far too many Sara/hs for us to keep the name. Yay!

I've never had a cat that wasn't a barn cat, so I am still totally freaked out when someone tries to hand me a cat. I feel like...a 24-year-old male asked to hold a baby. Like, "What am I supposed to do with this?" You don't go around picking up barn cats; it's just a bad idea because they are working cats, not housepets. I like the idea of a cat coming and sitting on me or wanting attention, but the thought of picking one up feels disrespectful AND foolish. I am also not as used to the idea that having a cat means you have a box of poop in your house (or a box of delicious treats if you're a dog), so I am going to have to establish some new habits, as well as do some general research on good cat products.

boring update

We're having our first set of visitors come up towards the end of this week, which hopefully means that we'll be more motivated to go and do things out in Montreal. And, you know, set up our futon...

Tomorrow I have a job interview to look forward to. A couple of ladies I've met have connected me with this place, and while they don't have any actual positions available now, something might open up before the beginning of the fall semester--it's academia, so sometimes a job that is a sure thing just evaporates because of funding, and sometimes money is found in a closet and a job materializes. The goal is to go in tomorrow and make a good impression--it looks like it will be the same kinds of things I've done in face-to-face tutoring, with things like study skills and note-taking thrown in for good measure (which is fine because I was already working those things in with the kids I tutored).

I got an application out for some online tutoring last week, which involved having to edit 3 sample student papers. I took a couple days and worked on them on-and-off until they were finished and I was okay with the work I'd done. The day I needed to mail them out, my computer did some kind of system restore and ate them, so I had to redo all three in the span of about 4 or 5 hours.

It's funny how things are all relative--I was stressed about applying for this job, I was stressed about losing all of my careful work, I was stressed about re-doing them in time. About half an hour before my self-imposed deadline, I got a message from my aunt telling me that my father's health had taken a turn for the worse, and that I needed to get in touch with him. And suddenly, all of this job stuff was a piece of cake. I finished the papers up and emailed them back, and I haven't stressed about it since.

Changes

I checked the mail last night when Ben and I got back from hanging out with some friends; I got a letter from the City of Westmount. I figured, oh, it's just a reminder that I got a ticket or something, but no.

The city finally had gotten around to mailing me Penelope's dog license.

We moved to another country and left our friends behind and Ben got a new job, but our dog being gone is still the biggest upheaval of all.

This morning I woke up and my computer had done some sort of system restore that meant I lost all of the work I'd done on a few sample essays for a prospective job. As soon as I realized this, a jackhammer started right outside of my open window.

The good news is, it started raining so I guess they went away. I know better to go outside because at this rate my umbrella would turn inside-out and I'd get splashed by a car.

So anyhoo, I'm at 2/3 papers and my brain is pretty darn fried at the moment.

In more cheerful news, B and I are maybe going to play some board games this evening. We took a nice walk last weekend that I'll post about, but a friend took some nice pictures so I thought I'd wait until then.

Spring!

The weather has improved! Our last bit of snow was in early April, but spring in Montreal is coming a lot later than I'm used to. To illustrate, the tree outside our window has just gotten enough leaves to be able to block the sun from coming in. It's a maple, and the leaves are still sort of droopy and soft-looking, like when a butterfly is waiting for its wings to dry out.

Healthcare-related post

Last Thursday, I started feeling...not right. My nose was doing that thing and the back of my throat was all that way--I presume that you probably have those personal warning signs that your body sends you when you are potentially going to get sick. That's what was going on with me. So some friends were having people over for board games but I let them know I wasn't coming because I felt like I might have a cold.

Over the next two days I first lost my voice and then developed an incredibly painful sore throat. By Sunday, it hadn't gotten better, so I hauled myself up and Ben and I walked over to the local Urgent Care-type clinic in Westmount. It turns out that their doctor had called in sick, so we had to hoof it further downtown to another clinic.

We walked in and this place was totally packed and blasting a radio station playing what I presume were the best hits of the 70's, 80's, and early 90's. The line to the counter was so long that it kind of blocked off the entranceway, so the sick people coming in had to squeeze by the sick people who were already in line. It wasn't a disaster area, but it looked like a crowded non-emergency waiting room, the kind of place that if you walked into in the States you'd know you could be there upwards of 4 or 5 hours.

"Okay," I thought, "if this is terrible I have to be honest about it and tell people on the blog in the interests of semi-journalistic semi-integrity."

As you're probably aware, one thing I was interested in checking out while I was in Canada was the healthcare system. I'm in favor of single-payer healthcare, where doctors and hospitals and such do their thing and the government takes the role of the insurance company and takes on the part of the bill that they're responsible for, as well as negotiating rates and all that.

Have you ever NOT had health insurance? Do you know what that's like?

I wrote a big long bit here describing what it's like to not have health insurance, but then I erased it because a) I'm not going to convince you of anything new and b) if you ever didn't have health insurance, you probably don't want to think about what that was/is like. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Anyway, because I didn't have health insurance for a particularly desperate portion of my life, I think that the world would be a better place if people did have health insurance. I'm willing to entertain something less-than-fabulous, or something half-broken, or something with death panels; I don't care.

So here I am, sitting in this germy waiting room in some of the worst pain I can remember, and I think, "Yeah, this might end up being terrible."So we sat there and paid our $120 cash (we're not on the gov't insurance just yet so we have to use Ben's work insurance, which means getting reimbursed after the fact). Ben went across the street and got me a smoothie from a Tim Horton's. I wrote him little sad notes on the back of a pap smear pamphlet they had lying around.

To my surprise, we were really only there for maybe half an hour before my name was called. I went back, hopped up on the bench, he took my temperature, asked me a few basic questions, wrote me a prescription, and I was on my way. Took maybehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif...4 minutes?

I went back out--Ben was surprised to see me so soon!--and we got the prescription and caught a cab home because we'd already done so much running around.

In retrospect, now that I'm not deathly ill, I am okay with the experience I had at the clinic. Doctor didn't actually tell me what he thought I was sick with, he just gave me some antibiotics and got me out the door. This isn't particularly awesome healthcare, but I also didn't have to sit in the waiting room for a good 4 hours until he saw me. All in all, it got the job done and that was good enough for me.

We went home and Ben made me lasagne the way I like, with bechamel sauce. Hasn't been until today, really, that I've felt human again, which means I was out for nearly a week. Of course since Ben was taking care of me and I wasn't doing my usual around-the-house stuff, there may or may not still be a bit of evidence lying around...

On a more positive note:

It's useful to remember, I think, that no matter how screwed up my country is (possibly because of how screwed up we are), we make AWESOME art. I was feeling kind of alienated there for a second, but then I remembered that we're also responsible for Angels in America and jazz.

Here are some daffodils I arranged last weekend in NYC at my friend Rose's place.