Bill-Induced Boil Near Miss

After work on Tuesday, I went to the pet store at 18^th and Valencia and bought a selection of canned cat foods and some dry Science Diet Sensitive Stomach, which my father says Nigel likes a lot.

I told the store employee I was planning to make Thelonious scrambled eggs with tuna and he said she’d refuse to eat anything else after that. We agreed that cats are constantly seeking to upgrade.

I obtained and mixed one egg with tuna and scrambled it, and, pretending it was for me, put it on the table. Since Thelonious always wants to eat whatever I’m eating, I thought it would probably be the high point of her entire life to get to finish this off, but in fact, she didn’t like it. I put out some plain tuna and she did eat all of that. The compost bin is filling up with spurned cat cuisine.

As I was arriving home from work the other day, I ran into my building manager’s roommate of several months.

“So I hear you had another problem,” he started.

I didn’t offer any definite response to this, as the “another” made it sound like the kind of thing where the next sentence could be, “Trouble-maker, eh?” or “What a complainer!”

But he went on to say that sometimes he’s in his bedroom and finds it filling with smoke, which he doesn’t like. (So the “another” must have referred to the dust-up with the other smoker a couple of months ago.) Finally, he looked out the window and saw cigarette butts on the ground and realized the neighbors to the north were using the shared space as an ashtray. (This is on the other side of the building from the trash area.)

We discussed the case of the smoking wedding guests and he said he figures they were probably drinking, which he also doesn’t like. Why, this guy dislikes everything! A person after my own heart.

He said if such a thing happens again, I should feel free to fetch him. He said, “I’m not the building manager or anything, but I’ll help out. I’m trying to say I’ve got your back.”

I gave Thelonious some of the new food selections, and found that she really liked Science Diet Savory Seafood.

At about 3 a.m., I was awakened by the sound of some sort of marine adventure, and went into the bathroom to see a colossal pile of food on my poor rug and a veritable sea of diarrhea in the litter box. My fault: I shouldn’t have let her eat a whole can of a brand-new food.

Several years ago I developed a skin allergy when a hair gel I’d been using changed formula. Since then, I’ve been unable to use any shampoo, conditioner or hair gel, even those for people with allergies. The only thing I can wash my hair with is Ivory bar soap.

Yesterday I went to have a patch test to find out what exactly I’m allergic to, not that it really matters, since evidently there is no product on earth made without it. I probably wouldn’t even be able to use Ivory soap if I hadn’t been using it all my life. I’d better write to them and tell them never to stop making it, so I don’t have to adopt a bald-type coiffure permanently.

The allergy doctor came in with three students trailing behind him and asked me some questions. It turned out that we were merely having the pre-testing conversation and that the actual testing will be at their earliest convenience, two months from now.

It involves three more appointments. They apply patches on Monday, evaluate on Wednesday, and re-evaluate on Friday, the latter being the only time the actual doctor will be present. You have to keep your back, where the patches are, dry from Monday until Friday. I’ve been known to miss a shower now and then, but not four days in a row.

I was almost hoping it would turn out that my insurance doesn’t cover this, but it evidently does. Each little square is treated as a separate test, so if it’s code 1234, the insurance company considers you to be having 120 code 1234s. I have been rather thorough in confirming that this is covered, as I could picture them sending me a bill for $50 times 120. Imagine how much itching that would have caused. It might have even caused a boil.