:: Casa De Morrill ::

A couple of weeks ago, my car hit a major milepost. As most of you know, my car is my baby. It’s a 1997 Mazda Miata M-Edition. It was the last year they made the first generation Miatas. It’s a fun little car to drive around. In the 5 years that I’ve owned it now, I’ve never once regretted buying. It makes my hour long commute into work at least a little more fun to drive.

Sean and I had been noticing that my car was getting up there in the mileage recently, so instead of letting the odometer hit the big 100,000 on my way into work one morning, we decided it was time to escape the heat of Phoenix for a day and drive up to Flagstaff. We figured the twisty roads would also be a great way to celebrate how much we love driving the Miata on twisty roads. On our way back into town, the odometer finally rolled. I’d carried my camera with my all day in anticipation of this. So, here are a couple pictures of me with my car and the official odometer reading of 100,000.

Okay, everyone can now continue with the assumption that Sean and I are completely crazy when it comes to cars (as if any of you ever doubted).

So the good news is that we are back to being a two kitty household. Kudzu had her scan and she was determined to be a good candidate for having the radiation therapy and we went ahead and scheduled it for last Monday. The procedure is just an injection, but they keep the patient in a special area after the injection, Kudzu was officially radioactive and needed time to come down to a safe level before she could come home. I picked her up this past Friday and she explained to me all the way home how happy she was to be in the car. It makes me wonder why I ever thought driving in a car with a cat was a good idea. Luckily this time it was only 45 minutes, not 3 days like when I drove with Weaver out to Phoenix.

But regardless she is getting back to her normal self once she had some time to sniff around. Her one big rule right now has to deal with sleeping with us. Since she still has some of the radioactive material in her system she is not allowed to sit/sleep on us for an extended period of time. Honestly we don’t need a new post entitled “My Cat Gave me Cancer” anytime soon.

In Other news Kat has spent the last 2 weeks up in Denver for business, and so I took the opportunity to fly up to Denver for the weekend. She finally got to show me around the city she has been going to for the past 5 years. The last time I went there was during college for a snowboarding trip, and even then it was from a bus window.

We went up to Arapahoe Basin since they were still open for late season skiing/snowboarding. I finally convinced Kat that she should try snowboarding, especially since she has had problems with her ACL in the past. I also decided that I was not going to teach her myself, we tried that once, for 20 minutes and decided that marriage was more important than snowboarding.

We got her first-timber lessons and rental stuff and I gladly sent her off to class. I also decided that lessons would be a good option for me. Especially since I am self taught for snowboarding and it was only about 20 bucks more for the lessons. It ended up being great for me, I was the only one in my class (blue/black slopes) so I essentially got a private lesson. The lessons were great and I really improved my technique. I had two big spills for the day, the first one with me landing right on my tailbone, how do I know? Well I think I cracked/bruised/broke it since as of today, it still hurts. No mom, I did not go to the doctor since it’s not like they can put my butt in a cast.

I also had an incident with a bamboo pole, luckily I did not have a good hat I could take with me anymore. It was quite windy that morning so I decided to pony up an extra 5 bucks to rent a helmet and in this case it did more than keep me warm. I caught the tail of my board on another bamboo pole in a really skinny area my instructor was leading me through. It launched me into the next pole headfirst and if I did not have that helmet I am pretty sure I would have gotten a ride behind a snowmobile. Luckily no ill effects besides a dented helmet and bruised ego.

The rest of the trip was great, the weather was wonderful and it was nice seeing Kat, and for once it was me who was going back and forth to the airport.

I’ve been waiting on posting about this until Sean and I really had something to report. A couple weeks ago, we noticed that Kudzu had a chunk of fur missing along her back. That worried us, so we scheduled a visit with her vet and Sean took her in one morning. The vet did some blood work on Kudzu and checked out a few other vitals. The diagnosis was feline hyperthyroidism. The illness is pretty much the same thing as what happens in humans. In fact, the treatment options are pretty much the same as well. The options that we were given were 1) shove a pill down Kudzu’s throat twice a day, 2) have Kudzu’s thyroid gland surgically removed or 3) have Kudzu undergo radiation treatment that targets the “sick” cells and kills them while leaving the “healthy” cells.

After doing a lot of research on the illness, it wasn’t a very hard decision for Sean and me to make. The first two options have a lot of risk involved and aren’t really cures. The third option, on the other hand, is a cure with low risk and very low potential for recurrence. We’re really lucky being in Phoenix, because we had two choices of locations to take Kudzu for treatment. Our vet specifically recommended one location, Arizona Veterinary Specialists. Today, we took Kudzu in for her initial scan and so that we could talk to the oncologist who would be caring for her. I have to admit that I immediately loved the technician and the oncologist. They were incredibly friendly and very informative. I honestly left Kudzu for her first stay with a lighter heart.

So, tonight, we are a single cat family. Kudzu has to stay overnight after her first scan because of the chemicals they have to use to scan her thyroid. After tonight, she’ll go back on a Monday and stay for the whole week. She’ll get injected with Iodine-131 on Monday and spend the rest of the week in isolation while the radioactive material leaves her system. After that, we’ll have to take her back to our vet at 1 month and 3 months for blood work to make sure her thyroid has responded to the treatment as expected. All of the doctors are very optimistic right now. No one seems to believe that Kudzu is 16 years old. So, please keep us and her in your thoughts over the coming weeks. I’ll keep everyone posted on how things go.

I’ve had my office chair for a while. It’s one of those standard executive-style chairs (whatever that really means). It’s a pretty comfy chair, but it’s cloth and Weaver loves to sleep in my chair when I’m not sitting in it. The result of an uber-fuzzy cat sleeping in my office chair means that I get fuzz butt really easily. I can’t check my e-mail in the morning if I’m wearing dress slacks.

My chair has started to show it’s age a little bit and I’m tired of having to constantly use a cat brush on my chair (a lint brush doesn’t even start picking up Weaver’s fur). We’ve been looking at various different new chairs for me, but haven’t wanted to spend the money on it. This weekend we found my office chair. So far it’s actually proven pretty comfy and I’d like to just see Weaver attempt to sit on this chair.

This week has been a week of opposites in our household.

Sean’s illness has not gotten much better. After calling in sick to work for two days, he woke up this morning and told me that he was coughing up a little blood with everything else. That cinched it for me. No ifs, ands or buts, his butt went straight to the urgent care this morning. Don’t worry. He’s not dying of consumption. He’s fine. In the style of the Barrett/Morrill family, when he gets sick, he gets a doozie. The doctor diagnosed him with both bronchitis and sinusitis. He’s now on antibiotics, apparently very tasty prescription-strength cough syrup, and Mucinex. He was also told that work is out of the question until Monday. With doctor’s excuse in hand, he headed home and vegged on the couch for the rest of the day. He’s been Mr. Couch Potato this week. Then again, I’ve been the one telling him to keep his butt on the couch and no, I’ll take care of things. I will give him credit, though. In trying to make up for me taking care of him all week, he made up ribs for dinner tonight and they were definitely finger-licking delicious.

On my side, I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off this week. We’re going through formal testing of our software product this week and we’ll just leave it at that things could have gone a lot smoother the past couple of days. Today, my pager has been blissfully quiet and I think the test set gnomes feel satisfied that they’ve caused their mischief for this round of testing. Note to self, sacrifice two chickens to the test set gnomes next time. One apparently wasn’t enough. I also don’t think they appreciated that it came pre-fried with secret seasonings on it.

That’s where we are this week. Me at the office for the vast majority of the day. When I’m not at the office, my pager is glued to my hip in case something goes wrong. Sean on the couch either watching TV, movies or playing Burnout on the PS3. Here’s to hoping that next week is a little quieter.