What can I say? I feel like a fool for getting my (our) hopes up about the cat. Anders is reacting now, after 5 days, and truth be told, so am I, though in a very minor way. I had some correspondence with the breeder and she did make me feel slightly better by telling me that she had some other customers react to Doc as well, who then DIDN’T react to a different Siberian, and that it can be very much the allergens borne by any indivdual cat…but we can’t test every cat in Sweden, especially since it’s hard enough to find this breed to begin with and on top of that to find someone willing to loan a cat for a week to complete strangers. Doc is a total SWEETHEART of a cat and it will not be easy to take him home and turn him over to his owners again on Saturday.
So, yeah, things not going well on the cat front.
The fish with the swim bladder damage is stll hanging in there, though he’s losing ground and looking rather ragged. He can’t get off the bottom of the tank, he’s mostly upside-down which is scraping off his scales and he has damage to the edges of his fins and tail fin. On top of it, he can only manage to wiggle forward, which ends up with him nose first in crevices that he can’t back out of. Maybe it would be kinder to just flush him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. 🙁
So, yeah, things not going well on the fish front.
Edited to add: He gave up the ghost yesterday. 🙁
We managed to salvage our files ourselves onto an external hard disk and the PC is in for repairs. The support team picked it up on Tuesday evening but we haven’t heard a thing yet about what is wrong, or how long it will take or when we can expect it back. I still haven’t been able to finish the directory whose deadline is now a memory. And we discovered that the Bank ID file that drives our internet banking login didn’t make it onto the external hard drive so Anders had to run to the bank today to pick up a temporary code so that we can pay bills and the mortgage this month.
So, yeah, things not going well on the computer front.
This week has been crazy busy, though work was pretty calm up until today. I’m going out for sushi tomorrow sans family since the kids have a disco to attend (disco! in elementary school!) and Saturday after the cat-drop-off, we’re going to dinner with good friends (who, ironically, have a cat that makes BOTH of us react like crazy within 30 minutes…sigh) and at some point during the weekend we must carve pumpkins, deliver trick-or-treating invitations to the neighborhood, and finalize Halloween costumes.
My costume is so simple yet so hilarious that I get the giggles every time I think about it, though only Swedes or people living in Sweden will get the joke, I suspect. Karin wants to be a surfer and has a huge sheet of cardboard to make a surfboard from this weekend. Martin is still undecided but has been given notice that a decision must be made by Sunday and that the costume has to be makeable with material already existing in the house and require no sewing. Anders, I expect, will skip the costume thing entirely this year. There are already 103 people signed up for the AWC Halloween party and huge bags of American Halloween candy have been ported over courtesy of some accommodating traveling colleagues, so we are good to go.