a real post

I miss my kitties so much! I woke up this morning and found vomit with undigested red stuff in it in the bathroom, and after a second I figure it might be from the flowers that Cara bought me for V-tines day. So I looked up tiger lilies and found out that they're really dangerous for cats and can cause kidney failure. We had put them up on a high shelf because obviously we don't want the cats getting into any kind of plants, but as they wilted some of the petals and parts fell down on the floor around the bookshelf. So I took Josie and Smokey to the vet where they gave them activated charcoal to absorb the poison in case they hadn't already vomited it all up (to both of them of course because it's impossible to tell if it was one, the other, or both), and then I brought them to the 24 hour clinic for them to be put on IV fluids and watched over the weekends. The vet gave me a choice of keeping them at the regular vet with a pump that would give them their fluids when they need it and someone to check on them twice a day over the weekend, but WTF? That doesn't sound very safe at all. I guess that's the only option for people who can't afford the 24 hour clinic, which costs about twice as much. Luckily I had money in my savings account for spending in France...now I have less but it'll still be ok. I think I'll just sell all the stocks my grandpa bought me and buy them back if I have any leftover money after spring break. I know that doesn't sound like a very sound investment plan at all but I got all high on life when Cara started getting better and bought those tickets to France and now I can't stop spending my money...I can't stop the feeling that I have to make it up to her for not being able to turn off the stupid car alarm when it was going off in a car I was sleeping in because I'm so antisocial and get sapped of energy at parties. And now I feel terrible about letting my cats eat the lilies! :(

Also the class I was supposed to take next week in Cincinnati to get certified as an ESL teacher got canceled due to low enrollment. For awhile I had the crazy idea of roadtripping down to Tampa Florida because I thought they had a class in Tampa every time they had a class in one of the locations around the country (the classes in different cities are spaced out throughout the year). The dropdown list to choose a location said "[city] or Tampa" for each one so I thought it would be the same, a 3 day class from 9-5 each day. Instead, the Tampa classes are over the weekends so it would be two 12 hour days in a row. There's no way I could ever make a 17 hour drive, spend two days taking 12 hour classes, and then make another 17 hour drive back with no time to recover, even if Cara was helping me. So the next one in the near future that's anywhere near Cleveland is in Charleston, South Carolina exactly a month after the one that would've been in Cinci (it would even be on the same days of the week because Feb. and March have the same dates this year...and they both have a Friday the 13th!) That's only an 11 hour drive and the class is spread out over 3 days so with Cara's help driving, I can handle that.

OK HOLY CRAP! In the process of trying to find the SC location on Google Maps, I found they now have the highest quality satellite images of different cities yet. Someone on some message board from like, Australia, mentioned that awhile ago, but at the time I couldn't find any for my city that weren't really blurry and taken from a helicopter. But now they have them in Charleston (so I can see exactly what the place I'm going to looks like) so I had to check and see if they have them in Cleveland Heights, which they do!

The building on the right is where I live! I wonder how often they update these things, and who the random dude standing outside is.

So I moseyed on down the street and found my parents' house....

That one's a little bit harder to see.

There it is from the other angle...the monstrosity in the driveway is my parents' car. That would be so unbelievably weird if one of my family members were in that picture!

One good thing happened today (besides finding freaky deaky dutch pictures of my neighborhood)...I got my new RAM in the mail last night and today I actually managed to install it without breaking anything. Now my piece of shit computer runs pretty much as good as I'd like it to...not as good as Cara's mac of course but well enough that I don't feel like I need to get a new one. I might also buy another RAM chip like the one I got to put in the empty space, but to replace the original RAM chip that came with the computer, so it would run even faster (that sounded really confusing...basically computers come with two spaces for RAM chips, one of them filled, and then you can add another one and/or replace the one you have with a bigger one. I got the bigger one for the empty space but I can still get another bigger one and replace the smaller one that came with the computer, to make it perform even better).