One-Eyed Cats and Other (Good) Excuses

Posts on this blog went from infrequent at the beginning of the year to just plain absent these past weeks. I have a good excuse. In fact, many good excuses. Mostly, 2012 has been a doozy, and I'm afraid it's going to continue in that fashion.

The entire month of January was spent taking my cat back and forth from my vet and the Veterinarian Hospital University of Pennsylvania to confirm that my cat had an iris melanoma (she did), and try to determine if cancer had spread to the rest of her body (it appears not!).

After many weeks and vet visits, her left eye was removed. She spent four days recovering on hardcore kitty cat morphine. For those four days when she was completely out of it, she was sequestered in my bathroom for her own safety. I camped out in the bathroom with her 24-hours a day to make sure she was eating and drinking, and to keep her company. I'd do just about anything for my sweet kitty, even sleep with my head next to a toilet.

I'm happy to report that kitty recovered very well. Also, animals are amazingly unselfconscious creatures, and really don't give a hoot if they only have one eye. It's back to normal kitty activities around here, like, napping!

About the same time I started sleeping in the bathroom with my cat, I caught a cold (not from the bathroom, but from my partner). It was the worst cold I can remember having in quite some time. I was sick for three weeks. I then had a four or five day reprieve, and promptly caught another cold. I cried in frustration. From the start of one cold to finish of the next, I was sick for more than a month. That was how I spent February.

How can a normally healthy person's immune system be so amazingly poor? Mine was compromised, because, holy crap, I was pregnant!! (Not by accident, mind you. I'm not an irresponsible teenager.)

The heightened sense of smell that comes with pregnancy seems like an awesome superpower to have, but really it just takes the fun out of eating. There were a couple of months there where food and I did not get along. Thankfully, I completely bypassed the nausea and vomiting part of early pregnancy that afflicts some, but I could only tolerate bland foods. Garlic especially was my nemesis, and, to a lesser extent, onions and herbs.

Just scrolling through my RSS feed with pictures from recipes and restaurant reviews from all the blogs I'm subscribe to was unappetizing, and I most definitely wasn't up to eating out. Try finding food without garlic, onions, or herbs! I painfully squeaked out one last post at the beginning of March that I had been sitting on for a while, and then I couldn't even think about food or blogging.

I am now firmly in my second trimester, and, hooray!, food tastes good again. I may post sporadically, but, honestly, there are a lot of other things on my mind, like, "Why are there so many different kinds of cloth diapers that a seemingly smart person like myself must turn to YouTube videos for answers?" But mostly, my time is occupied with sitting around in a stupor thinking, "Whoa, I'm bringing a little person into the world!"

So, those are my excuses. They are pretty good, don't you think?