I do believe I will have a big long rambling post. It feels like one of those days. Where to start? How about some adorable Neko pictures from this morning?

She loves her toy carrot. I’ve used it as a neck pillow when doing the exercises Sled recommended, too. It’s a little smelly but pretty comfortable.

But apparently not comfortable for too long. She rarely puts her legs all wonky like that; I think she knew I was waiting to take a picture.

She’s not been good today. I think I’ll have to take her back to the vet again soon. She eats well one day, then the next she lies around with her tummy gurgling and growling but won’t eat. She’ll eat a carrot – but if she knows better than to eat her kibble, she shouldn’t be eating a treat either. She doesn’t even nom the whole carrot at once like she does when she feels good. This morning, she had two runny poops, and barfed yellow stomach acid. The vet said she has colitis, but didn’t give us a plan of action. Before I go to the vet I’m trying something that worked for my sister’s first greyhound: a little bit of milk. Not too much or she’ll barf it up (I’m guessing, she does that if we give her a lot of liquid at once, like chicken broth). We gave her some around five, and within an hour she ate her food, yay! It stopped the tummy noises right away, too.

A break here: the Twelve Days of Gay Christmas is playing on SomaFM. “Two stiletto PUMPS!!!” Makes us giggle. we love the Xmas in Frisco station, it is mostly irreverent holiday music and not safe for work! That second link takes you to the live stream, be careful…

We finally have ‘Frisco’ on tonight because we finally have our tree, and it has lights on it. That’s it, just lights. That’s enough for one night. It took nearly two damn hours. I hate putting lights on the tree, but it is my job. I’d love to pass the torch over to iDJ, but he has a touch of OCD and would insist that each light was exactly 4 inches from all the others.

It would take a hell of a lot longer than two hours.

We have some fancy kind of tree this year. We normally get a bog-standard pine for €20 at the local garage (gas station). I just made the mistake of asking iDJ what kind of pine tree we usually get… After being asked to visually confirm what he found on the ‘net, we can say that for the past six years, it has been a lodgepole pine.

Anyhoo, this year neither garage had trees until the 8th, and one still doesn’t have them – and the one that did had four. Four crappy, short, ugly, bald, pine trees. So yesterday we borrowed his work van and drove to Claremorris for a tree. We hit five places – three had nothing, one had pines for €25 and fancy trees for €35 and they were all just six foot – but the last place had every tree €25, no matter what kind it was! We rooted through everything and ended up getting the first tree I looked at. Because I’m ‘particular.’ Heh. Yes, the Yank chooses not to spend €20+ on a Charlie Brown tree, thank you.

It appears, according to the ‘net, that we got what is possibly a Nordman Fir, and it is 7foot 9inches tall in the stand. Whattabargain!

We were a bit concerned about getting a fancy tree, because iDJ had a bad allergic reaction to a Norway Spruce a few years ago. But he poked himself on it intentionally and was fine.

I, however, seem to be having a disagreement with this tree about me not being allergic to anything. I recover pretty quickly if I don’t scratch the places it stabs me… but as you can imagine putting five strings of lights on the damn thing left my hands peppered with itchy spots. Even with gloves. Sigh.

Anyway, it is up, the lights are on it, and the fun part of completely obliterating any hint of greenery with tinsel and forty years worth of baubles and ornaments is still to come.

We also did a shit-ton of grocery shopping today. But that was mostly boring. We were cold and cranky when we got home, so I took a bath and iDJ started a fire for me to sit in front of when I was done. He even came up and scrubbed my back for me – an extreme pleasure. Thanks babe!

Here’s what happened to me once the fire was nice and hot.

My thigh, with Lokii draped across it totally asleep but stretching for the fire. Poor always-cold kitty. Ignore the mess – fires are sloppy, but way cheaper than oil heating…

My view. He’s soooo pathetic.