Cat Scratch Fever

$744.12

That's how much my cancer kitty cost me today. Sheesh. And she didn't even have chemo.

China hasn't been eating right since she stopped Sucralfate two weeks ago, which she was taking to coat her esophagus three times a day after taking Vibramycin twice a day and possibly getting some erosion of the esophagus or ulcers somewhere else in her digestive system. She seems to be hungry but she eats a few bites of food and then seems to find it hard to get down, and she has started up her habit of carrying food around in her mouth and dropping it places she likes to sleep (like, my bed.)

So, I called the oncologist hoping to be able to renew her Sucralfate prescription over the phone, but was instead referred to internal medicine to make an appointment to bring her in ASAP. Drat! I knew that would probably mean some expensive tests, but I was HOPING that maybe I'd get out of there for $200 or something.

Nope, $744.12.

One cool thing today, the doctor came in with China's file...the thing is the size of a big hardcover dictionary! It sounded like this woman had never seen a file so large for a cat. Heck, I have my own file on China and it's not THAT big. She was like "well, I started looking over China's file but there's too much information for me to go over everything." Haha yeah...considering she'd probably charge me for her time if she did. The consultation was $120...imagine if she'd had to read a whole dictionary of info first?

Anyway, they suspect that China may have Bartonella henselae, a bacteria that isn't usually tested for because it doesn't seem to affect cats in any way, it only means that they could perhaps give a human Cat Scratch Fever if they scratch you or lick an open sore you have or something and THAT isn't even very risky unless you have an auto-immune disease like HIV/Aids. So, it's not that likely and the test is expensive , and cats don't usually seem to be affected by having it, therefore it isn't usually tested for. However, more recently it has been found that cats CAN be negatively affected by Bartonella henselae if they have some sort of thing wrong with them like oh...say....cancer????!!! And if maybe they are taking oh...chemo drugs and different antibiotics and steroids that may weaken their immune system? Gee...I wonder what very expensive cancer kitty that sounds like...

And I also wonder...I get scratched by China when trying to give her medication ALL THE TIME. Could I have Cat Scratch Fever????

TED NUGENT - Cat Scratch Fever , 1978

Ermmm...does Ted Nugent have a TAIL????

I'm all a-twitter part two

Last time I posted was about how I signed up for twitter to better keep people abreast of when I have ThereBucks in stock. I also sent emails out to all my tbux club members and past purchasers of ThereBucks that contained specific instructions on how to use twitter for ThereBucks updates, but for those who may not have received the email...for instance for future members/purchasers, as well as for those with over-enthusiastic spam filters or WhereMail problems, here are the instructions again...
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Tired of spending your time searching for discounted ThereBucks? Just want to know when they are in stock without wasting your time? Sign up for twitter.com (if you don't already have an account) and then add "therebucks" (that's me!) as someone you are "following". http://twitter.com/therebucks

In case you are unfamiliar with how twitter works, I'll explain it a little along with giving you instructions for getting alerts as to when I'm selling via your favorite IM client OR via your cellphone!

Once you are signed up for twitter and you are following "therebucks", you should go into your account settings, click on "devices" and from there you can set up your IM and/or your Cell phone to receive alerts (and you can set a few more options like to not send you alerts in the middle of the night, etc). Once you've done that and confimed it with twitter, you still aren't going to get any mobile alerts until you go to the page of someone you are following (http://twitter.com/therebucks) and click on "device updates off" to turn device updates "on".

Once you've set it to start getting alerts on the IM client or cellular phone of your choice, you can always go to http://twitter.com/therebucks to stop receiving the alerts (like maybe you don't want to know several times a day that ThereBucks are in stock once you've purchased a pile of them) and if you are getting alerts via text message you can just text twitter the message "off" and you will stop getting them. Then, once you've spent all your ThereBucks, you can text "on" and you will get the alerts again. Pretty cool, huh?

I just figured no-one wants to waste a bunch of time trying to find discounted ThereBucks in stock if they don't have to. Why not let twitter do the work for you? Plus sometimes someone visits http://jinx.tv and if I'm not selling seems to get the idea that I just simply don't sell ThereBucks any more when ACTUALLY I tend to get ThereBucks in stock several times a day, and now I can prove it! If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. I'm pretty new to twitter myself, but I will certainly try to help.

I'm all a-twitter

I've known about twitter.com for a while but couldn't really think of a good reason to use it until now.

Then, after using twitter to track when Wiis are in stock at various Internet stores I thought "EUREKA! I can use twitter to help people find out when ThereBucks are in stock!"

This isn't something I've been too concerned about for a while, I have had Therebucks in stock since December...haven't sold out once during that time and even carried a tbux balance as high as 12 million. Now that's all changed, the economy has evened out and even though I am buying/selling more Therebucks than ever, the demand is back to its normal state of being greater than the supply.

So, if you're looking for discounted ThereBucks on my site, http://jinx.tv, and I seem to be sold out all the time, try following me on Twitter...get alerts via cellular text, IM or email about when I am in stock and be the first one there to snag 'em!

http://twitter.com/therebucks

The China Study

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts from Compassionate Cooks lately, and I must say that it's really made me stare my own vegetarianism in the face. I've been a vegetarian for about 20 years, and the main reason is because I don't want animals to suffer because of me and I don't want to eat them. Still, I buy leather shoes, I eat eggs and dairy (and you know by eating dairy products you are supporting the veal industry, right?) and I haven't given much thought for quite a while to the fact that worcestershire sauce and ceasar dressing contain anchovies and have just in general been very lax in paying attention to whether what I am doing is causing animal suffering or not.

The truth is, it's pretty hard to be vegan. It's an inconvenience to those around you in this meat-obsessed culture we live in, people tend to regard you with suspicion or perhaps fear you're going to judge them or maybe that you belong to some weird cult or something. Also, while it's somewhat challenging to find something to eat at some restaurants as a vegetarian, it's ever-so-much-more challenging as a vegan.

My boyfriend has known from the time he met me that I was vegetarian, and he's always been very supportive about it. We go to restaurants and I order something vegetarian and he...sometimes orders vegetarian as well, but he sometimes orders the lamb or the duck or some seafood. He made me feel so comfortable that, along with a little reading of Michael Pollan his proposal to fly a friend of his in from Texas to cook us some barbeque (made from whatever meat I liked, raised in any way that appealed to me...grass-fed, humanely slaughtered, organic, etc) if I would actually eat some of it sounded appealing to me for a while and I was incredibly close to saying "yes, let's do it."

Or at least I was incredibly close except for these podcasts I had somewhat randomly subscribed to on iTunes. Once I subscribed, I ended up with quite a few of them on my iPod and when I'd set it to shuffle it seems like they came up a rather disproportionate amount of the time in relation to the amount of content actually on this device.

Colleen from Compassionate Cooks talks about every reason under the sun to become vegan. Really, she has a reason for everyone, ranging from compassion (of course) to world hunger to health. She also teaches cooking classes right in the Bay Area, and has a vegan baking book and a vegan cooking dvd. The first time I said the word "vegan" to my bf, he visibly flinched, but he has enjoyed other cooking classes we have taken so much that when I mentioned these classes he said "I'd love to!" I also got him a copy of her baking book and he said he'd love to make us some of the recipes.

Still, for all his enthusiasm for baking, whether vegan or not, my bf seemed terrified that I might stop eating cheese.

Noooooo...not...cheeeeese!!!!!!

When he found out that I was eating vegan when I was cooking for myself at home, and realized that everything I had been making for him to take to work for his lunch was vegan as well, he was rather unsettled, but somewhat reassured that I WAS still eating cheese and butter and eggs in other situations. However, when I refused to order anything with dairy or eggs in a local restaurant and then burst out crying when he said he was going to be barbecuing not just beef but also pig and lamb at his daughter's birthday party, it looked like we might be headed for a major conflict.

Now, I don't know what was going through his head at that time, but I do know what was going through mine. I was wondering if there was some way to convince my bf that a vegan diet was a GOOD thing. I knew he wasn't going to switch the way he ate because some animals were suffering. He might be persuaded to seek out more humane sources, and he might be persuaded to eat less meat, but compassion wasn't going to be enough. Now, health on the other hand...I knew he cared about health. I knew he worried about one day getting heart disease or kidney disease and I knew (know) that he cares a lot about his health and that of his loved ones. I took a stab at throwing some facts his way...like, today's factory farmed chickens contain more fat than they do protein, stuff like that. It was too random, though.


professor T. Colin Campbell (author of "The China Study") discusses his decades of NIH-funded research which show that meat and dairy promote cancer growth and a plant-based (vegan) diet can prevent and even reverse cancer.

Finally, I found my perfect weapon. The China Study. This book explains in a clear and very detailed and carefully researched way exactly why you should remove animal protein and fat from your diet. How animal fat and protein CAUSE cancer, heart disease, diabetes and a lot of other diseases known to afflict mostly those in affluent nations. It's a scary book and a very eye opening book, and it's very persuasive, too. After relaying the facts presented in the book to my boyfriend, miracle of miracles he has gone from flinching at the very word "vegan" to agreeing to try and become a vegan! Really I don't know how anyone could read the facts presented in this book and NOT become vegan. I wish they would...if more people were vegan not only would national health care costs go way down but it would make it a lot easier to find a great restaurant to eat delicious vegan food at.

Of course after agreeing to become vegan and then telling some of his customers and business associates about it, he went out to dinner with them and had a steak.

Baby steps...

Life behind bars

Review of Ubuntu

I don't remember Yelp having a 5000 character limit to reviews before (wasn't it 5000 words?) Whatever. I'm posting my entire Ubuntu review here:

My mom read an article in the New York Times about this restaurant and wondered, since my bf and I like to visit wine country, we like to go out to eat, and I'm a vegetarian, if we'd been here or not. We hadn't but almost immediately made a reservation once we'd read the article, which names Ubuntu as the #2 current up and coming restaurant in the country.

Reservations for the number two up and coming restaurant in the country weren't that hard to get, but there wasn't anything available before 7:30. This is a minor hassle in Napa because most wine tasting rooms close by 5pm and even the few exceptions are closed by 6, so since we had a little time to kill between tasting dozens of wines and eating dinner, we ended up a few blocks down from Ubuntu at Tuscany, a very inviting and comfortable restaurant where we quaffed a superb half bottle of wine and had possibly the best scallop dish ever. I rarely eat seafood but am occasionally tempted by scallops, and the bartender's description of the scallops in a chunky mushroom broth won me over. He was very knowledgeable about their wines and everything on their menu, rattling off everything they had that was vegetarian and everything that wasn't that could be made vegetarian as well as giving us tips about when we can walk in without a reservation and how we can get a fabulous seat overlooking the kitchen on a busy Saturday night. We are definitely going back to Tuscany, but the warm atmosphere, delicious food and wine and outstanding bartender weren't enough to tempt us away from our rendevouz with Ubuntu.

Just as we arrived at Ubuntu and were seated, our eyes caught sight of the communal table in the middle of the room. We immediately felt a strong desire to sit there, but we were told that they were expecting a party of three that was going to be seated there so it was best if we stayed where we were. I had a perfect view of this table our entire time there, and not only did this phantom party of three never show up, there were actually FIVE spots open at the table. I have photographic proof (check for my photo of this restaurant if you don't believe me) and last time I checked, three plus two equaled um...wait, let me get out my fingers and add this up...one...two...three...four...um....five! See? The party of three plus the two of us equaled there is room for us at the communal table.

Since we were forbidden a seat at the communal table, we compensated by treating the people at the next table over as if we WERE at a communal table, sharing with them our opinions about how the drinking age should be 18 or maybe even 16, at least for having a glass of wine at your meal. How wrong it is for famous kitchens and big name chefs to have people working for them for months at a time FOR FREE, how unfair it was that we couldn't sit at the communal table as well as a sprinkling of commentary on their choices of food and wine. I hope they weren't trying to have a romantic evening.

Normally when we eat at a restaurant featuring meat, I'm scanning the menu to find the few meatless dishes and possibly making do with the wood fired pizza. For once it was my bf scanning over the menu for something he might like and ordering the pizza. His pizza was actually really good but he ordered it with a duck egg on top. I think he just did it because he could. Put it on the menu as an option, and somebody is sure to order it. That duck egg REALLY did not add anything to the pizza. Myself I ordered some cauliflower dish. I'm not a big fan of cauliflower but I had this fantasy going on in my head that the dish would be so good I'd suddenly be a total "cauliflower is great" convert. That didn't happen, but the dish was okay.

After we were finished with our salad and our entrees, the server came by to say "you never got your soup. Do you still want it?" No apology or anything, she acted like while soup was supposed to be coming out, she was in some parallel universe, actually delivering a bowl of soup to the table, it's not her fault that we got our alternate realities mixed up so that in OUR timeline the soup never appeared. That was her basic attitude throughout the meal, and I'd say that Ubuntu suffers what a lot of restaurants around Napa and Sonoma suffer: a lack of qualified, experienced waitstaff. Put this restaurant down in the center of San Francisco and they would probably have a cadre of overqualified applicants, but in wine country it's an overabundance of good food, good cheese (yes, cheese around these parts gets it's own category separate from food because it's THAT GOOD) and good wine with a lack of experienced people to serve it to you. There was another server who was just circling the room like a shark, smiling at everyone and everything. She made eye contact with me and smiled at me just at a moment when I wanted something and I thought "oh great, I've got her attention" but then she just floated on by, as if she were a phantom, just like the party of three that was going to sit at that communal table and magically take up the five open spots.

This place has a yoga studio right above the restaurant. Well, right above the kitchen really. It's kind of this big THING just sitting atop the kitchen going "hi, I'm an empty yoga studio that you can kind of see into". It reminds me of Blake's (Robert Downey Jr) place in the movie "Two Girls and A Guy", where Blake has an uber cool apartment with this upstairs loft kind of thing enclosed with rice paper walls and sliding doors that are translucent and while Heather Graham and Robert Downey Jr are pleasuring each other behind the rice paper, Blake's OTHER girlfriend is moping down below and downing shots of tequila or something. I just think it looks weird plopped down right there, but on the other hand, if there were an actual yoga class going on with people doing their asanas or maybe if you could just barely make out Heather Graham and Robert Downey Jr getting it on, it might actually add to the atmosphere the way a totally boring and empty box of ricepaper overshadowing the room below does not. My bf doesn't know anything about that though, since he just had a view of the parking lot across the street.

But anyway, I was talking about the soup wayyyyy back up there somewhere...heck yes we wanted our yellow eye bean soup, and it turned out to be the star of the whole meal. We ended up fighting over this delicious bowl of deliciousness, with its smoky, smooth, creamy beans, like navy beans only better, and some delicious soft yet firm and chewy mystery ingredient. We fought over it a little bit, and it would have been much easier to share if we'd been sitting side by side at the communal table.

In the process of extracting the life stories of those poor people at the table next to us, we found out one of them had a brother who used to work with Jeremy Fox, the chef at Ubuntu, and he pointed him out to us. Not that he really needed pointing out, not only is his picture on the Ubuntu website but he was right there where the food comes out, expediting it and talking to person after person who came up to shake his hand and (I assume) express their pleasure in the meal they just ate. He accepted each person with grace and good humor.

I hope I was as gracious as Jeremy Fox was when I went up to express MY thanks for the meal. It was that time of night when my bf starts passing his half full wine glasses to me because he has to drive us home and I may have been a weeeee bit tipsy. Plus my real motive was to extract the recipe for that yellow eye bean soup out of him, and I can be a little disingenuous when it comes to these things. He was soooo nice. He wrote the ingredients for the soup out for me, gave me the website for the place they get their yellow eye beans from (www.ranchogordo.com, which is actually a great site full of recipes and ideas plus loads of exotic beans and a few other interesting things. I spent $70 there today.) and he even gave me his email address in case I had any questions.

I guess I give Ubuntu about three stars for service and ambiance, although if I'd been sitting at the communal table I might have rated it higher. Jeremy Fox, however, gets five stars as a chef and all around great human being. I'm not sure if we'll be back to Ubuntu or not, but we will for sure remember the chef and if/when he goes somewhere else, we'll be watching, forks (or soup spoons) ready.

Why buy virtual goods?

We, as a society, and by society I mean basically everyone in a developed nation with discretionary income, buy loads of crap. We may complain about the economy of our country or our own personal economic state and how things have gotten so expensive and we can't afford all the stuff we want to buy, but for all that complaining we certainly accumulate a lot of stuff.

Every time we buy a new pair of shoes, a new electronic gadget, or that thing we just HAD to have that we saw on eBay or Craigslist or when we were out running errands and made a few impulse purchases, we are adding to our huge collections of "stuff". Not only can we not possibly use it all, I think most of us are running out of places to put it all.

If we already have more stuff than we can reasonably use (the clothes in your closet that you've never even worn that are now a few years old, that motorcycle you were going to ride every weekend that you take out maybe once a year, the books you bought but never read, all that stuff you bought for your "new" hobby that you never quite got around to starting...) then why do we keep buying and buying? It seems like a a compulsion. We are descended from hunters and gatherers and we find it quite difficult not to keep hunting and gathering every chance we get. It makes us FEEL good and advertisers don't make it any easier, always trying to sell, sell, sell and convince you that you HAVE to have the latest gadget to dust your blinds with or a free extra set of knives with every set you purchase.

What are we supposed to do? We are living in a world of plenty. If we don't always feel like that is so, it may be because our expectations are so much higher now. We don't expect to buy only one pair of shoes (if we're lucky) a year or share a phone with everyone in our house (much less everyone in our little town.) Most people in developed nations have soooo much more discretionary income than even one or two hundred years ago...it's a new development that we are perhaps by nature somewhat unable to deal with.

How many people now have storage sheds out behind their homes to hold all the surplus stuff that they just *had* to have and now may have even forgotten they own? Oh how I envy people with attics and basements, or even just more closets than I have. My solution is sometimes to move and simply don't take all the STUFF to the new location. This technique produces a very managable amount of stuff for a while, but a few years later I am right back to TOO MUCH STUFF. People see me carrying a Whole Foods cloth shopping bag toward them and they just run the other way...they just assume I'm going to try and unload some of my extra stuff on them, and they're probably right.

So, if we have discretionary income, and we don't need to pack our homes until we can't even walk through them and can't seem to stop ourselves from buying way more stuff than we need, why not buy things that take up no space at all? Isn't that the logical next step? Forget just getting a better closet organizer or buying some more shelves, instead switch to things you can store on a computer hard drive...which, by the way, stay the same size as they continue to hold more and more data.

Why not buy a virtual pair of shoes instead of a real one? Fits perfect every time and you can probably buy a few hundred pairs for the same price as that pair of Jimmy Choos or those Manolo Blahniks. Or...a new car. You could buy a new virtual car every day. A new home! Heck, you could buy a certain style of home in a virtual world and it might help you decide if you'd really like that style of home in the real world. Or try painting the (virtual) walls a new color to help you decide if that color is right for you.

In a virtual world, you can shop 'til you drop and not only will you get more for your money than in the real world, but you don't have to worry about where to put your purchases or whether they will fit. Your car won't break down, your shoes won't wear out. I have sold virtual currency since 2003 and I have seen many of my customers get just as much pleasure from virtual world shopping as from real world shopping. I think it fulfills a basic need we have (the hunting and gathering instinct) and yet in a way that is less harmful to your wallet, the planet and your living space.

As the world as a whole becomes more and more affluent, we need to find ways to entertain ourselves and satisfy deep primal (shopping) urges without destroying the planet. So, why not try going virtual?