A Farewell to my Stevie Cat (and an important PSA)

After five and a half years of being my best friend, our kitty, Señor Stevie Nicks, succumbed to heart disease*.

If I had known it was coming I would have taken the time to have a few more days with him to do all the lovey things people do:

Chasing butterflies

Spinning in a field of flowers

 

Drinking milkshakes together

Going for boat rides in Central Park

Snuggling at home

   

But he was sick... and scared, and we lost him so suddenly. He was barely showing any signs of illness, still eating and playful, sleeping with his butt in our faces, drinking milkshakes, and rowing boats, but then he was gone just moments after getting him to the vet, leaving me and Mike shocked and devastated. I don't know how I have managed my whole life to avoid the up-close death of a pet with as many as I've had. It's a really horrible concept and I don't know who came up with it but I would like to unsubscribe, RIGHT NOW.  In the end, I am glad he chose us and we did everything we could to give him the best life possible. I love him so much and I will never forget my sweet Stevie cat.

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*Stevie died of cardiac arrest from an enlarged heart. He had a grain allergy, to the point that he couldn't even eat poultry that was fed grain or he would itch terribly and barf/poop/gain lots of weight. We found him a grain-free food that had all the nutrition he needed to keep him healthy, in theory. Unfortunately, I am finding now, much too late, that grain-free pet food currently on the market seems to contain some ingredient that might interfere with taurine uptake, which cats (and dogs) need to avoid heart damage. The FDA is investigating this, but there are things you can do in the meantime.

Please, if you are feeding your pet a grain-free diet have their taurine levels tested IMMEDIATELY (or as soon as you can afford to).

If they don't have allergies, stop feeding them a commercial grain-free diet. If they do, please, get their taurine tested and consult with a vet on how best to proceed. Once they have symptoms, which, in Stevie's case was only abdominal breathing, it is often too late, but the damage can be reversed if it is caught early enough with taurine supplementation. No one should go through what we're going through now, losing our pet so young, so please, share this information so every cat lives long enough to replace us as the dominant species on the planet.

It's not me, it's you, @Dell!

I have been a loyal Dell consumer since 2003. My first Dell computer was a desktop named Lola.

This is what I imagined she would look like as a person. 

I killed Lola in only a few months by accidentally pouring a ginger ale in the back of her while trying to fix my router. That was totally my fault. I immediately purchased a replacement Dell, a standard tower, no frills, and I salvaged what I could from Lola and pieced together my new computer, Frankenlola.

Personification of Frankenlola. I was doing a lot of pinups at the time. 

Frankenlola lasted for many years with no incidents. I eventually passed her down to my husband and bought my first Dell laptop for $1400 with money I earned as a research assistant at the University of Florida in 2005. Her name was Lucille. I played a lot of Sims 2 on Lucille, and when I replaced her in 2009, she was literally falling apart. Unfortunately, Lucille’s replacement, whose name I can’t recall, likely because of the trouble I had with her, was the beginning of a downward trend. On November 16, 2010, less than a year old, the hard drive on that laptop died.

http://cheeseblarg.blogspot.com/2010/11/ill-be-back.html 

After much arguing and complaining, Dell honored their warranty and replaced the hard drive in their depot.

A few months later, to treat my husband, since Frankenlola was getting mighty slow, I bought him a new Dell desktop (he doesn’t bother to name his possessions).

After the fight I had then with getting the hard drive replaced (because it was close to the end of the warranty period), the computer only lasted 2.5 years, until July 5, 2013.

On Feb, 8th, 2014, I bought yet another Dell laptop. This one was named the S.S. Lil’ Mare after my friend Mary who worked at Dell and helped me pick out the system.


In May of 2017, I bought another Dell (this time refurbished) for my husband when the hard drive on his desktop failed right before finals, and 2 months later we had to replace the replacement, when its hard drive also failed. Thankfully, the seller of that computer on Amazon happily refunded the price and another Dell desktop was purchased for an additional fee. When the Lil’ Mare died on July 11th of last year, having had to buy 2 computers for my husband, leaving us no extra funds, I saved up until November to buy my current computer, Ernestine, on Thanksgiving morning. My saga with Ernestine has been so horrific that I really never want to deal with Dell, ever again.

When Ernestine broke two weeks into my ownership, I asked Dell to replace it. They insisted on trying to fix it. Fixing it was a whole ordeal. I asked them, please, I’ve only had this for two weeks, just replace the computer. At one point, as I waited with no word from the repairman, they agreed to replace the computer over the phone, but were only willing to offer a refurbished unit. For some reason, they didn’t think I deserved a new one. Desperate, I agreed. Moments later they rescinded, saying the repairman would be there shortly.

The hard drive was replaced on my kitchen table as my cat looked on and it worked poorly for January and February, and then died again, with a catastrophic hard drive failure yet again on March 8th. I asked them to replace the computer once again. They insisted it be repaired and sent a repairman to my home again when I refused to send it in to their depot. Being a writer by trade, I am not pleased with losing my computer for weeks at a time and wanted it done in a timely manner. Forty-five minutes after the repairman left, the computer broke again, this time shutting itself off moments after booting it, repeatedly. After complaining bitterly on Twitter, Dell called me and attempted the third repair, which did, to use a colorful turn of phrase, fuck all.

As a person with processing issues from a chronic illness, talking on the phone is difficult. I can hear but I can’t process speech in real time, often times. I watch TV with subtitles because my brain can’t keep up with the sounds I hear. Having to follow directions from a person with a heavily accented voice in a noisy environment on a staticy phone when I was stressed to begin with was absolute torture, and I was not willing to try again when, predictably, my computer was still broken and I was told I was not eligible to have the unit replaced. After expressing my dismay on Twitter, completely distraught, they convinced me to send the computer into their depot, where it would be fixed once and for all, completely perfect and in tip top shape. I was told the turn around would be very quick. It took 5 days just to get there. And then there was a 5 day wait to get parts to fix it.

After 15 days, I was pleased as punch to have my computer back. I am in the middle of a manuscript for a novel I am excited about that I started in May of 2017, right before the S.S. Lil’ Mare died and am anxious to get back to writing, which I cannot do on my smartphone. Imagine my dismay, reading the documentation that came with my computer explaining that my computer had been carefully fixed and tested, when my newly “repaired” computer, shut itself off within 2 minutes of booting the system to Windows.

I am absolutely livid with Dell. The computer should have been replaced the very first time that there was a problem in the first two weeks I had it. Their bait and switch behavior feels like a scam, and it is making me physically sick. That previously mentioned chronic illness is an autoimmune disease and it is highly reactive to stress. I am currently on a month long course of steroids because my immune system was attacking my joints and internal organs to the point that the low dose chemotherapy I regularly take couldn’t do the job of suppressing it as it should, and my liver was being damaged by the attack.

Over the past day, Dell has offered to send another repairman to “fix my computer right in front of me,” as if this was some sort of treat. If they couldn’t fix it in their depot that is presumably a clean room, how in the hell were they going to fix it in my cat hair filled home? Upon asking that question, they thoughtfully offered to have me send it back to the depot if I didn’t want it fixed in my home. And for that matter, what the hell were they doing with it while it was in the depot in the first place? It was supposedly tested, and yet, Windows wasn’t reinstalled when I turned it on fresh out of the box, and it persisted in the behavior the moment it was fully booted. It seems clear that they didn’t test it and that the computer cannot be fixed.

What I would really like is to be able to buy a different brand of computer so I never have to deal with Dell again, but unfortunately, I am chronically ill and my husband and I depend upon student loans and my writing and art to survive. When I don’t have my computer, I don’t have a way to work, and his loans are solely for his education and must be carefully budgeted to get us through each semester. I would love to have an i Mac or anything, actually, reliable and sturdy enough for process intensive digital art and film making. But regardless, I honestly believe that Dell needs to make this right and that seems very far off.

As it stands, they have passed my case on to an escalation specialist. I was told they would call within 24-36 hours. They called way sooner while I was out assisting my husband with a photography project for his semester final. I was told there would be a call back number direct to the specialist should they be unable to reach me. Predictably, there wasn’t a direct line. I had to answer 20 questions to be patched through to a number where I was promptly hung up on. Mr. Christopher’s phone doesn’t have voicemail, and while he assured me he would be available until 6 pm, their system wouldn’t put the call through because it shuts down at 5 pm.

Over the past 15 years, I have been incredibly loyal to Dell. As the family computer specialist, I have instructed all of my family members to purchase Dells. I have told coworkers and students and friends. I want my computer replaced. I want a machine that works and that I can work with, with the same or better specs and I don’t want another damned platitude where I am told that being frustrated is understandable but their hands are tied. This is a shitty way to do business and it would take a monumental response to rectify the damage done to the relationship. At this point, I’m just assuming even if I am able to harangue a replacement computer out of them, I will forever be disappointed and will spend the rest of my excess energy warning people away from the brand because the treatment I have received and the difficulty I have faced is something no paying customer should ever subject themselves to.

Self-Affirmations from the Neural Network

I can't help but be inspired by Janelle Shane's work with neural networks. Last time, she trained her AI to create recipes that looked absolutely mouthwatering, in that way that your mouth waters when you're about to hurk, actually, but today, she has trained her AI to generate titles for positive self-talk courses.

From her site, AIWeirdness.com:

There’s a self-affirmation talk on Spotify where a voice says things like “I am confident” over a synthesized choir. It has been rather vigorously marketed, not just for general self-confidence skills, but also under titles like:

I Will Win the Lottery
I Will Improve My Meteorology Skills
Attract Your Dream Car
Lord Help Me to Improve My Trainspotting Skills
Improve Your Ear Health
Lord Help Me to Improve My Bongo Skills
Improve Your Beekeeping Skills
Learn Welsh

Apparently, there are 4,510 different titles for this sort of self-affirmation program. She fed all of these titles to her network and asked for its own suggestions.

It came up with some great and also horrifying results like:

I Will Improve Otter Skills
Improve Your Handsoming Skills
Become More Dirty
I Will Find Headaches
Improve Your Scab

Being ever so helpful, I have made posters for a few of them that really spoke to me.

Be More Of Mice

Improve Your Kite Faith.

I Will Attract Human

And I really think that this is good advice for anyone, especially Roy Moore.

Go check out the rest of Janelle's results with her AI (including some upcoming knitting patterns that are immensely cool) and sign up for her newsletter to get cool inside stuff. She's not paying me to say that, it's just really nerdy cool fun I think most people would enjoy.

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PAY ATTENTION TO ME!

There’s this weird thing that people do that baffles me. As an artist, it has happened to me but it clearly isn't just confined to art, but the puzzling phenomenon of people taking credit for things that they obviously didn't do.

That is not to say that I don’t get the general idea of lying to get attention...

But the chances of it backfiring and looking like a total jackhole when you are figured out totally skews the risk vs. reward ratio way too far into the TOO RISKY category for me and I think, most reasonable people. So much so that I have never actually considered such a ridiculous idea.

Part of the real confusion I experience with this is this "flying to close to the sun" urge that seems to come with the urge to lie about your achievements. Instead of lying in a small way that might give a small boost, it seems to be a huge ridiculous lie that is just so obvious it's kind of insulting. *cough Trump cough*

But there is another way.

For all the flack that millennials get, there’s this beautiful thing I have seen happening in the current generation that would totally satiate these low effort attention seekers without resulting in them needing to delete their Facebook account when their artist friends call out the fact that they have claimed to paint a picture that was painted by a really well-known artist…

It’s called… ASKING FOR COMPLIMENTS.

Honestly, it is the coolest thing about people now. When you’re having a bad day, if you’re friends with leftist millennials or similarly positive nice people, you can just ask for the attention you need and (if you don’t do this on a daily basis and you’re not a total asshole) they’ll totally say nice things about you to make you happy.

This also works with asking for a gif of kittens and pictures of hybrid corgi mixes, I've found. But seriously, have you looked up corgi mixes?



Anyway, if you find yourself in need of emotional support sometimes and claiming you painted the Mona Lisa starts looking tempting, I urge you to try asking for a compliment to get the ego boost you need. Just say, "Hey friends, I'm having a hard time. Could you say something nice about me to cheer me up?"


And there’s the added bonus of knowing who to unfriend if anyone tries to make you feel bad about having emotional needs that are met by receiving external validations sometimes, 'cause you deserve to be happy and feel loved and people who try to shit on that don't deserve corgis AT ALL.

Lessons Learned

I've learned a couple things in the past few days that I thought I should probably share with you all.

I've talked about the first one in the past, but apparently, it is still a lesson I need to learn as I lay here in buttloads of pain because my brain still hasn't learned the lesson that catching yourself when you're falling is often nearly as painful as just letting yourself fall.
This time, I was freezing so I very gracefully stepped out of my shower for a second to turn off the light which I forgot to turn off (see my last post), but the floor mat wasn't where it was supposed to be so I tried to scoot my foot over to it and pull it towards me so I didn't make as much of a puddly mess, but when I did that, I slid on the pool of water that was forming under my foot. I tried to catch myself with the towel bar, which wasn't happy with my antics and pulled completely off the wall.
At this point, I was doing a naked wet split, half in and half out of my bathtub, and I was falling forward with a pointy metal stick in my hand. Flailing, I tipped forward and was saved by a giant package of Costco toilet paper that was sitting underneath the towel rack, and I ended up planking on the toilet paper, to keep from breaking my leg on the edge of the bathtub. It was all pretty humiliating, and my husband slept through the entire ordeal, including me repairing the towel bar.
I keep having to remind myself when I am in awe of my pain levels that my shower acrobatics are entirely to blame.

I'm not gonna draw it. Feel free to submit your own artist's rendering.




And then I learned that sometimes, it's best to make a comment aloud into your empty house instead of commenting on the internet.
Usually, I keep my political commentary on my own Twitter page. I like to couple humor with fair points, but lately, I've been getting way too bold and when comments on safer accounts didn't blow up in my face, I branched out, and guys, I flew way too close to the sun.

I should have known better. It was a Bernie tweet. It's like MAGA jerkholes are just trolling his tweets all hours of the day and night waiting for some poor sap to comment so they can tell them that they're an asshole who needs to read a book and who has no idea of anything that has ever happened in the history of the world.  In fact, I'm kinda sure that that is exactly what they do.
When you see a comment section with absolutely NO comments that agree with the original post's point, THERE IS A REASON. Other people who agree already know this lesson, that's why they're not commenting. They know that these people will take any semi-valid point you make and purposefully misunderstand it so they can berate you because they need more love and understanding in their life and their moms should have hugged them more.

I just have to say, thank all the fluffy kittens in the world for Twitter's conversation mute option. There was just one guy trying to school me when I muted it, on the ridiculous notion that the current administration might consider cutting safety net provisions and that rich people might not want to just donate money to the government willy-nilly until some of those programs are enhanced. A masochistic curiosity brought me back to find that at least 15 people had joined in after I left to tell me that I was the stupidest person who ever existed and I should be ashamed to use words. I have no idea how many more people are going to join in, but it inspired me to take details about myself and my location off of the page, in case people decide to harass me for my humorously made point.
But lesson learned. Don't comment on Bernie Sander's twitter unless I have some sort of deep desire to be verbally abused.
I wish I had had something like that paper clip dude in Word that had stopped me in the first place.

I should have looked at kittens instead.

I'm A Meat Popsicle.

I prefer to shower at night, or in the afternoon. That way I can put off sitting around with my head damp and freezing for as long as possible. During the winter, in this little house we've moved into, I have found that showering at night is a problem. The fan in our bathroom that's activated by our light switch is a conduit directly to outside, so turning the switch on means I am pumping fast moving sub-arctic air into a room where a fine mist of water is supposed to be warming me up (and cleaning me, yadda yadda). So until I get fed up and buy a lamp for the bathroom, my solution currently is just showering in the dark. My husband thought I did this because I'm a goth or something. I really have no idea what he thinks I'm doing half the time because he never asks, really, he just dutifully turns off the light for me and goes away, probably wondering why the hell he married such a weirdo.

And, in other news, the brand new computer I bought... it died... two weeks after getting it. The hard drive has been replaced after much complaining and flailing. They kindly sent out an awesome nerd tech named Nic who talked to me about fun nerd topics while we waited for it to actually install.

And I am working hard on a new novel, writing at least an hour every day. It deals with current affairs and is an R rated vigilante thriller. Becoming a patron on patreon with the button below can get you access to excerpts weekly with a pledge of just 3 dollars a post (with no more than 4 posts a month- so a minimum of 12 bucks a month maximum! Wait, that was confusing. it could be 3-12 bucks for access to good stuff). There are also art bonuses for higher levels of patronage.

My Summer from Hell- Part Two: She's Going To Die

While I was waiting this summer to find out if I had cancer, the night after my cat got the cat equivalent of heat stroke, I got a call from my sister letting me know that she was in the ER with our mother who was about to be flown in a helicopter across Montana to a hospital in my city because she was having a cardiac event that was giving her trouble breathing. The next morning at 5:30 am, I got a call from the ICU doctor telling me to get my ass to the hospital to say goodbye because my mom was about to die.

Thankfully, the hospital is about 8 minutes from my house so I threw on clothes and booked it to the ICU where my mom was absolutely dying. Her lungs had filled with fluid and she was drowning, but she had refused intubation so they couldn't do much to help her.

I entered the room with a crowd of people around her, she was fighting them and was almost unrecognizable with a CPAP mask over her face, out of her mind from the lack of oxygen that was making its way into her blood.

They sort of pushed me forward and told me to talk to her. My mother and her mother didn't get along at all and it just so happened that it was my grandmother's yahrtzeit (that's Jewish for deathaversary, which I always thought was "yard side" as that's how it's pronounced). I grabbed my mom's hand and made her look at me, "It's 7-11, you're not allowed to die today! I'm sorry, but if you insist on dying, you're going to have to put it off so you don't share your death day with grandma."

And my mother is so spiteful that she immediately stopped dying. She did have to go have heart surgery immediately afterward to sustain the whole living deal, but as soon as I got there and reminded her to breathe and fight, she cleared her lungs and was able to be transported across Montana yet again to go to another hospital for her surgery.

It was that night when I got home from the hospital, that my computer died.

And then my husband's computer died, having just died and been replaced two months earlier.

And then I had a hysterectomy.

And then I had weird side effects from my hysterectomy like white-hot leg pain, and 96 hours of full body itching, and phantom uterine cramping that felt like it was tearing me in half.

And then my car died. Twice. (It was the alternator, and then the starter, in a week's time).

And then I found out my neutered cat was an attempted rapist when we let in a cute little neighborhood cat who'd been meowing at our door, then immediately put her out because my cat is horrible and gross, but then she stalked us for five whole nights, howling like she was using a bullhorn outside our windows which, of course, made Stevie howl inside at the top of his lungs for 5 whole nights.

And my state elected a reporter-slamming jerk.

And then I was diagnosed with a breast tumor which probably isn't cancer but might still be cancer.

And then my camera died.

And I was turned down for disability because I have a good attitude which, of course, precludes actually being sick.

And the jerks in our government spent the summer trying like hell to take away my health insurance, which would have meant that I wouldn't be able to be treated for all the Schrodinger cancer I had (or didn't have as the case may be), which I was constantly worried about, which of course made my illness all that much worse (and of course, they're still doing it).

So yeah, my summer had a lot of suckage that just kept on pooping down on me, like a way less appetizing fondue fountain at Golden Corral.

But now that I have a computer again, and  the use of a working camera and I feel slightly less like spending every waking moment binge-watching Netflix (almost done with all eight seasons of Dexter) and playing Candy Crush on my tablet to drown my woes, it is my plan to make up for lost time with content galore, which I hope you will come back for and share.

I also have an actual smartphone now (for the time being, seeing how things go for me) so I'm all over social media as "cheeseblarg" and I'm actually posting stuff, so go ahead and follow me!

So what days of the week are you most looking forward to something to laugh at? Let me know so I can get on setting some kind of schedule, please.

My Summer from Hell - Part One: The Surgery

I just got a computer, yesterday, after 5 months of being without so my first task after restoring all my files and programs is posting for you guys. Thank you, Black Friday sales for decent computers cheap enough I can afford. The last time that I was without dedicated computer access for this long was in 1994, my freshman year of college, but most people didn't have computers then, so it wasn't quite as jarring then as it is now, especially when my entire life exists online.

So I wrote on Cheeseblarg's facebook page a while ago that y'all would find it hard to believe all the shit I had been through this summer, for those of you who aren't following along there, and you probably won't, but I assure you, it's all true, and it's absolute bullshit.

My wish for the upcoming year is that I never have to hear the words, "We're afraid it might be cancer," ever a-fucking-gain from a doctor. This summer started with a mysterious mass in my cervix. I went to the doctor in June because I was experiencing this weird feeling of all of my insides dropping when I stood up for more than 15 minutes which in itself is pretty alarming, but it was accompanied with sweating and feeling like I was going to pass out. Once it got to the point that I couldn't stand long enough to shower without feeling like I was dying, I decided I should probably do something about it, so I bucked up and went to have my lady bits probed by a stranger. I mean, she was a professional, not just some random person on the street with a speculum and a hankering for some gynecological exploring.

Since scraping my lady bits turned up nothing, we went to the next step of sonic spelunking. This revealed the aforementioned "mysterious mass" and then we went to the next step of traumatizing me forever and ever, amen.

Frankly, the whole business gives me more ammunition for the idea that there is a grand conspiracy of hatred for women in this world because I cannot believe that any kind of human rights coalition would allow the equivalent to a cervical/uterine biopsy to be done to any man without general anesthetic. And I've heard that testicular biopsies are done under local and still hurt like hell, but I'm arguing that that is not really equivalent, because testes are not muscles that try to slam shut when you drill pieces out of them causing your entire body to try to escape from what's going on in your nether regions. It was really awful.  So awful in fact, that before I even left that appointment, I made plans with my doctor, before the results came back, to have my uterus and accompanying accouterments removed as soon as possible so I would no longer have a cervix so that procedure could never ever happen to me again.

And my uterus was mint, guys, never been used, though it had been remodeled monthly since I was about 10, so I don't know if I could have gotten full price for it. Anyway, it's totally lost its value now because I took it out of the box. At the end of August, I had them remove my reproductive organs (though I kept my ovaries so they can grow cysts and be generally annoying to keep me off of hormone replacement therapy), and I finally finished healing last month after one of the holes popped open in a cinematic fashion when we thought they were all almost closed.
So that's the story of how I spent 3 months worrying that I had cancer before having a hysterectomy. I didn't have uterine or cervical cancer, but my cervix was faulty and if I had kept it, I would have continued to need biopsies regularly and it would have continued to make me feel like I was dying, and frankly, I wasn't planning on using it anyway, and I'm much happier to have it gone.

Spending all the time in a gynecologist's office, of course, led to appointments with mammography. And instead of just being routine, of course, I got my next, "it might be cancer." I was supposed to be going tomorrow, in fact, to have a lumpectomy to ensure that the tumor they found in my breast during the first biopsy is completely non-cancerous, but I got an ear infection, so now I get to add two more weeks to my 3 months of waiting to find out that this one is nothing too.

And I know that countless people who aren't so lucky would love to be told that it is nothing repeatedly, but having six months of your body constantly trolling you that is mutating and is gonna kill you only to have it yell "PSYCH" after you've had surgeries and near constant stress diarrhea, is relieving as hell, but also really fucking annoying that you had to go through all of that in the first place when your body could have just stopped growing benign tumors in the first damned place.

So that's part one of my trauma. I'm thinking I can wrap it up in one other post, hopefully, next week.