Sniffle

I got a cold. I had thought it was an allergy attack, but no. It's a cold. I hate colds. I have my niece's Bat Mitzvah tomorrow morning. Not looking forward to dressing up and being cheerful when I have a cold. I am woe.

Insulinoma? Grrr!

Koosh had a hypoglycemic attack the other night. Just what I need. Poor guy was not himself at all. He improved greatly with a little Ferretvite and a bowl of chicken baby food. I'm kind of hoping it was a tummy bug and he just didn't eat for several hours, but I know better. So it's off to have a fasting blood glucose done on him and then ... whatever it takes. At least last night he was his bouncy self again.

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The sky is blue today and, despite feeling a little kicked over by this cold, I have energy.

Oh, and my hair has been re-pinked.

--Mary

depressionplace.com

That's my new web site domain. There's nothing there yet, but maybe later today I'll have something up. I was going to use "dysthymia" (dysthymia is chronic depression) in the domain name, but I think a lot of people can't spell it (the spelling is certainly not intuitive). I have a lot of writing to do, and I'm actually looking forward to it. I know, I know: "What about Modern Ferret?!" Right now we need to find "creative" ways to finance it. It's never made us money, though for a while there it paid the bills. Since Direct Sales (our distributor to pet stores) went out of business in 1999, things have been a greater struggle than before. Now the only distributor into pet stores is a division of Fancy Publications, a direct competitor. Can anyone spell m-o-n-o-p-o-l-y? Without pet store distribution we don't really reach very many people, which is a big problem. But I digress.

The new web site will have a lot of information about dysthymia. I've been doing searches on Medline and on Google to find information and links that are useful. The tough part will be putting my own story into words. Tough because I have to think about it and they're not happy thoughts. But the up side is coming up with coping strategies. That's one thing I really haven't seen on other sites that talk about dysthymia. They seem to leave everything to therapists. But there's a lot a dysthymic person can do on his/her own to make living with this illness easier.

Ferrety Stuff

We have yet to finish ferretproofing this place, and the ferrets are getting restless. We've finally settled on ferretproofing only part of the "house" (read: "finished garage"). So a trip to Home Depot is on our to-do list. We'll take pictures and put the info in the newsletter (sign up at www.ferretnews.com) when we're finished.

Signing off.

--Mary

Gray Sunday

From my window up here everything is some shade of gray. The house next door is pale gray, the sky is translucent gray, the leafless trees seem dark gray. The monochrome world.

Sunday can be the most lonesome day (think of Johnny Cash's "Sunday Morning Coming Down": "There's something 'bout a Sunday that makes a body feel alone. ... And there's nothing short of dying/ half as lonesome as the sound/ of a sleeping city sidewalk/ and Sunday morning coming down").

But today I'm sort of up, believe it or not. I'm working on a new web site about dysthymia and major depression. Mostly dysthymia because there's not much out there for the general public. Right now I have a little bit of info in the Musings section of my Topical Tees website, but as soon as I figure out a good URL, I'll have a separate web site for that stuff. I'm having fun designing it.

Trixie

It looks like Trixie's definitely adrenal. *sigh* We'll have to take her to see Dr. Ned. I don't know how he'll feel about surgery, since she's coming up on 8 years old now. She's never been sick in her life, so I don't know how well she'll react to being handled like that. But I think she's healthy enough to have surgery and I'm reasonably sure Dr. Ned will be comfortable with it, so I think surgery is the best option.

That's all for now. I'll let you all know when my new web site is up.

--Mary

I'm Back ... I Hope

Well, I'm going to try to keep up my blog again. Not that I really feel like it, but I need to be writing and I'm not doing it. At least blogging makes me write something.
I've come up with a little feature I'll do from time to time. I'm calling it "What Bugs Me." It'll be about stuff that bugs me. Straightforward.

So here we go.

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What Bugs Me

...Those Hallmark TV ads with the singing/dancing snowmen. All it convinces me of is that people who shop at hallmark are idiots. Does anyone honestly believe a group of grownups is going to laugh at singing/dancing snowmen? I'm sad for the lady who buys the thing and sad that she thinks her friends are so stupid that they'd find the dancing/singing snowmen funny. The real problem here is that it's only November 10th; we're going to see that commercial a lot of times between now and Christmas.

That's it for now. --Mary